Hale Hall, located on the South Oval, houses the Frank W. Hale, Jr. Black Cultural Center and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Credit: Phoebe Helms | Lantern File Photo
Ohio State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion was founded in 1970, following more than a year of protests against racial discrimination on the university’s campus.
Nearly 55 years later, it was shut down.
Along with the Office of Student Life’s Center for Belonging and Social Change, the university discontinued ODI, a department dedicated to promoting on-campus diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, Feb. 27.
The decision came in light of several federal and statewide legislative decisions — particularly Ohio Senate Bill 1, which aims to ban DEI programs in higher education — university President Ted Carter Jr. said in an email Feb. 27.
“Here in Ohio, a bill barring DEI is also making its way through the legislature, and the Attorney General of Ohio – our statutory counsel – has advised us that his office concurs with the federal government’s position regarding the use of race in educational activities,” Carter said.
Carter said sunsetting the offices was necessary so Ohio State could proactively “manage this new landscape in ways that best uphold the values of excellence, access and opportunity that [it holds] dear.”
In the aftermath of the decision, students, faculty and staff voiced their dissent around campus, reminding students of the origins of the university’s DEI initiatives and how they believe they’ve historically benefited students across campus.
Reflecting on ODI’s five decades at Ohio State, The Lantern has analyzed the office’s beginnings, legacy and what ultimately led to its termination.
Activist roots
ODI’s beginnings can be traced back to April 24, 1968, when four Black female students were ordered off a bus by the white driver, identified as Howard E. Johnson in a May 15, 1968 issue of The Lantern. The four girls were discussing the latest Black Student Union meeting but were told to quiet down and eventually exit the vehicle, according to an April 29, 1968, Lantern article.
Protests ensued, with students occupying the university police station the day after. By April 26, 1968, 34 students — known as “the OSU 34” — were arrested after occupying the university’s main administrative building, now known as Bricker Hall, according to ODI’s website.
“These folks were from the Black Student Union,” said Aaron Marshall, executive communications specialist for ODI. “They were quickly joined by white students who were involved in protesting the Vietnam War to form kind of a multi-ethnic group that day; that spring day, the Black students [were] joined by the white students.”
When the Black Student Union entered Bricker Hall, Marshall said they called for more equitable representation on campus.
“Their demands were pretty simple: They wanted more Black faculty, more Black students, in a better climate that would be conducive for students from all backgrounds,” Marshall said.
Throughout 1969, student groups and faculty offered support from the Black Studies Department — now known as the Department of African American and African Studies — creating momentum that would eventually help open the Office of Minority Affairs, also known as OMA, during the 1970 autumn semester.
William Jay Holloway was the OMA’s first vice provost and helped boost recruitment of Black students to Ohio State during his tenure, according to Marshall and an archived ODI brief.
The new office undertook Project 100, an aptly named plan to recruit 100 lower-income Black students, which the brief states laid the foundation for the Freshman Foundation Program — an undergraduate grant “determined by demonstrated financial need, diversity, academics, and Ohio county of residence,” according to ODI’s website — in 1971.
Annual career fairs, graduate initiatives and advisory committees would help the OMA expand until Frank W. Hale Jr. replaced Holloway as vice provost in 1978, according to the ODI brief.
Credit: Brie Blevins | Senior Lantern Reporter
Hale’s contributions
Marshall said Hale made considerable progress through OMA from 1978-88, establishing the Young Scholars Program — a pre-collegiate program that recruits low-income, first-generation students from public schools across Ohio.
“It started in 1989, and it supports first-generation students who come from our largest cities in Ohio, [including] Columbus, Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, Toledo,” Marshall said. “I think really, when you talk about the Young Scholars Program, those are first-generation students whose parents have never been able to go to college, and they come from Ohio’s largest school districts and biggest cities, and so it’s really a reflection, I think, of the land grant DNA of Ohio State.”
Hale also created the Minority — now known as Morrill — Scholarship Program, which Marshall said was originally intended to increase the diversity of Ohio State’s campus.
“It was just for academically talented students engaged in diversity-based leadership, service and social justice activities,” Marshall said. “Obviously, the program was changed a little bit because at one point it was, you know, minority students [who] got it. That was changed a number of years ago so that it’s open to all students, as all of our programs are open to all students.”
These two programs still exist today, and despite the university’s DEI programming cuts, scholarships will be “maintained with modified eligibility criteria going forward,” according to Carter’s Feb. 27 statement.
Hale was also responsible for establishing the Black Cultural Center, which was opened and dedicated under his name Oct. 11, 1989, after the idea was advocated for by students, faculty and staff, Marshall said.
“The Hale Center opened in 1989 and it was a result of — just kind of like ODI — student activism in the 1970s and 1980s,” Marshall said. “There was a number of Black student organizations that kept up the pressure for the center to be created. And then it opens in 1989, of course, named after Dr. Hale.”
Today, the center serves as a community hub and houses one of the country’s largest collections of Black art, Marshall said.
“Larry Williamson was the longtime director of the Hale Black Cultural Center,” Marshall said. “He was director for about 30 years, until just a few years ago. [Williamson] was really the one that was responsible for building the Hale Center’s art collection. There’s about [600] or 700 pieces. Many people consider it to be one of the finest collections of African American art in the world.”
The Hale Center, along with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, are currently under Carter’s review at the time of publication, per prior Lantern reporting.
Also in 1989, the ACCESS Collaborative Program — which has been housed in Buckeye Village since 2005 — was established within the OMA, Marshall said.
“It’s for single parents with low incomes that attend Ohio State,” Marshall said. “It takes a two-generation approach, so the students and their children live together at Scholars House on the east side of Columbus. They take a number of different programs there in terms of parenting kind of skills.”
The program has been nationally recognized for its innovative ways of aiding student parents — including art therapy, housing assistance and scholarships — and currently services around 40 to 50 students, Marshall said.
“Really, they’re raising the next generation of Buckeyes over there, and you really get to see Ohio State at its best, I think, in the work that’s done over there with the ACCESS Collaborative,” Marshall said.
From OMA to ODI
On its 40th anniversary in 2010, OMA was renamed ODI to better reflect the various students who used the department’s services, Marshall said.
“You know, we serve students from every background and walk of life in our programs,” Marshall said. “So, I think it was just supposed to more accurately reflect that we’re a place that seeks to be inclusive, and we certainly are diverse, but that we’re not necessarily just serving the minority student population.”
Following the change, ODI also consolidated several departments — which Marshall said were previously “scattered across campus” — into one building at Hale Hall following 2013 renovations. This is where the office remained, prior to its closure Feb. 28.
In 2014, ODI received the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation Grant, which was applied to mentor and create a community for STEM students at Ohio State, Marshall said.
In 2015, ODI expanded with the additions of the Kirwan Institute and the Women’s Place, the latter of which Marshall said is intended to provide better working conditions for women. According to ODI’s website, this includes funding research related to women and gender, as well as updated reports on the university’s progress in gender equity.
“The bottom line is that we do the things that we do because they increase retention and graduation rates among our students that are in these programs,” Marshall said. “We do those through best practices that have come over the years that show an ability to get more students retained and more students graduated.”
Additionally, Marshall said ODI has focused on providing career services for the last two decades, offering resume and headshot services, career fairs and networking opportunities.
“That’s something that’s really come out in the last few years that ODI was starting to do, that certainly was well received by the business community and something that we were proud of in terms of getting students to start thinking about their time after they graduate,” Marshall said.
Sunset
When President Donald Trump began his second term Jan. 21, he took swift actions to eliminate DEI in America’s public education system.
On his first day in office, Trump signed Executive Order 14173, titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit Based Opportunity,” which orders all agencies to “combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities,” according to the White House’s website.
Later, a Feb. 14 letter from the Department of Education and the Department of Government Efficiency threatened to pull federal funding from public educational institutions if their DEI initiatives remained by the end of the month, per prior Lantern reporting.
DEI also became the source of concern in state legislation, as Senate Bill 1 passed through the Ohio Senate Feb. 12 and awaits formal deliberation from the House.
In response to these changes, ODI was shut down Feb. 28, only two months before its 55th anniversary.
Ohio Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland), primary sponsor of SB 1, said DEI has created its own form of inequities on Ohio State’s campus.
“I think perhaps at the very beginning, that some people had their hearts in the right place and were looking to accomplish some good things, but I think it’s taken a severe turn in the progressive direction, where it has actually become institutionalized discrimination, whether it’s from college admissions to litmus testing and hiring at our institutions, whether it’s faculty or staff and whether it’s providing certain things for some students and not for others. That’s discriminatory, and that’s what DEI has become,” Cirino said.
Cirino said should the bill pass in the House — which he believes is a likely outcome — public Ohio universities will be run “in the right way that [they] should have in the first place.”
“That is, not distinguishing people on the basis of their race or their gender, but making services available to everybody,” Cirino said. “Providing opportunities for everybody to access higher education, and not picking winners and losers and not to get back to the meritocracy that we should have in making decisions on hiring people, for example, not on the basis of their race or their gender.”
Though protests opposing the bill and ODI’s closure were conducted both on campus and at the Ohio Statehouse, Cirino said many demonstrators do not accurately comprehend its content.
“These students, apparently, many of whom have never read the bill — or I could tell by the questions and some of the protesting that we’ve seen and heard, they haven’t read the bill — they don’t understand the bill,” Cirino said. “I think they’re being told by the professors who don’t like the bill what they should think about it, which really makes my case for diversity of thought and not indoctrinating students. That’s exactly what’s going on. More importantly, what I would say to these students is, ‘Are you okay with discrimination?’”
Ohio State is not the only university to take preemptive steps to eliminate DEI. University of Cincinnati President Neville G. Pinto said the college is preparing to remove DEI references on the university’s assorted websites and reexamine DEI-related jobs and initiatives to ensure they are fully compliant with federal and state law, according to a Feb. 21 news release.
“I applaud those decisions,” Cirino said. “Yes, they’re a little bit preemptive, but I think they’re seeing the likelihood of Senate Bill 1 passing, becoming law, but they’re also getting a lot of signals and messaging from Washington, D.C. and the Department of Education that they’re trying to get ahead of in terms of, you know, risking the loss of federal funding.”
Cirino also said these precautionary measures are financially proactive.
“I applaud President Carter and President Pinto in Cincinnati for looking out for the best fiscal interests of their institutions,” Cirino said. “And I applaud their boards and trustees also who clearly supported their decision.”
Though ODI has been sunset, Marshall said its lasting impact lies in its roots and programming at Ohio State.
“ODI’s enduring legacy wilI be one of activism, excellence and community,” Marshall said. “It was a special place where access and services were made available to generations of students from all walks of life who were reaching for their educational dreams.”
