Gov. Mike DeWine is publicly rejecting Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal to consolidate or shut down Ohio public universities, putting the Republican governor at odds with the candidate he endorsed to replace him.

Speaking Wednesday before public-university and community-college leaders at Ohio State University, DeWine called university consolidation “not a good idea” and said it “can’t and won’t happen” while he is governor.

“The idea that we would get rid of any of our state universities, I think, would infringe upon our efforts to continue to broaden our access,” DeWine said, according to News 5 Cleveland.

DeWine’s declaration drew applause from the university leaders in the room.

Ramaswamy has spent months changing how he describes the proposal.

In March, he said Ohio simply has too many public universities.

“We have too many of them,” Ramaswamy said in a campaign video. “They need to be consolidated.”

He was still defending the idea in April.

“I don’t think you should be funding subpar universities,” Ramaswamy said when questioned by a student during a Turning Point USA event at Ohio State, according to News 5.

Ramaswamy said universities should stop duplicating programs and allow their strongest programs to survive.

“Let them excel in a couple of areas and really bring tuition down in the process,” he said.

Ramaswamy had also written about shutting down struggling universities while discussing his plan to eliminate Ohio’s state income tax. In that discussion, he pointed to Cleveland State University, the University of Akron, Kent State University and Central State University as institutions that had faced problems.

He did not explicitly say those four universities should be closed.

Then, in July, Ramaswamy said reports that he wanted to shut down universities were “incorrect.”

Instead, he said he wanted to eliminate or consolidate programs inside them.

“I think that we have too many duplicative programs in our universities,” Ramaswamy said at a Strongsville town hall, according to News 5. “I want every region to have the best higher education institutions available for people in that region. But not every university needs to offer every program.”

“They just don’t have to be under the same exact roof in the same college,” he added.

That was not what Ramaswamy said in March, when he said Ohio had too many universities and “they need to be consolidated.” Nor was it how he framed the issue in April, when he said taxpayers should not be “funding subpar universities.”

Ramaswamy has not released a list of universities he would consolidate or close. He has not identified which academic programs he would eliminate. And he has not laid out a public standard for deciding which Ohio universities qualify as “subpar.”

DeWine rejected the university-closure version outright Wednesday.

“Can’t and won’t happen,” he said.

DeWine, however, leaves office in January and cannot bind the next governor or General Assembly.

News 5 Statehouse reporter Morgan Trau asked him what would happen if the next governor and lawmakers embraced Ramaswamy’s proposal.

“Well, that’s the speculation,” DeWine said. “We don’t know, first of all, who’s going to be elected governor.”

He also questioned whether lawmakers would go along with it.

“Second, we don’t know if they will embrace that at all,” DeWine said. “I think that it’s unlikely that anyone would really make that proposal.”

University leaders push back

Ohio university leaders have been pushing back on Ramaswamy’s proposal for months.

Kent State University President Todd Diacon defended the state’s regional-campus system in an April essay.

“The campuses Gov. Rhodes envisioned aren’t redundancies,” Diacon wrote. “They are lifelines — for the students, for local employers, for the civic identities of communities that have built themselves, in part, around the presence of a university in their midst.”

Diacon was in the room for DeWine’s remarks Wednesday.

Afterward, he told News 5 that universities and their regional campuses are tied directly to the communities around them.

“They are important members of their communities, and it’s not just in terms of ‘We employ people in those communities,’ but the tax bases of those communities,” Diacon said.

Ramaswamy still hasn’t said what would go

Northwest Ohio has several public universities and regional campuses, including Bowling Green State University, the University of Toledo and BGSU Firelands.

Ramaswamy has not said any of them would be closed, consolidated or stripped of programs.

He also hasn’t said they wouldn’t be.

Nearly six months after saying Ohio has “too many” universities, Ramaswamy has yet to publicly spell out which universities or programs Ohio has too many of.

DeWine, the Republican governor who endorsed him, made his position clear Wednesday.

Getting rid of Ohio’s state universities, DeWine said, is “not a good idea.”