Three years ago, I warned that Ohio lawmakers were trying to cure perceived ideological bias in higher education by handing government greater authority over universities. I argued that even well-intentioned attempts to regulate speech could create a chilling effect.
I knew something about that risk.
Before Ohio’s universities were navigating Senate Bill 1, I spent eight years fighting the federal government over my band’s name. The issue was never whether officials liked the name. It was whether the government had the authority to decide what our words meant. In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that it did not.
Now, with S.B. 1 in effect, Ohio offers a real-world test of that same question — and the early results are telling.
Start with the sheer machinery.
Across the state, public universities have stood up implementation committees, compliance websites, complaint portals, and reporting forms to interpret a single statute.
Kent State estimates compliance will cost it between $1.5 and $2 million every year.
The University of Toledo created forms for reporting “intellectual diversity” complaints.
Bowling Green opened a new compliance office.
Before anyone asks whether a professor has crossed a line, universities first have to spend enormous energy (and real money) determining where the line even is.
This is the pattern emerging from Ohio’s early implementation of the law.
When the government claims the authority to decide what speech means — what it intends, what it implies — it doesn’t need to punish anyone. The uncertainty does the work.
The evidence is already visible in how faculty behave.
This spring, a Kent State journalism class surveyed 38 faculty members about the new law.
More than a third said they had already changed how they teach in order to comply. A quarter said they worried a student might report them for something said in class. One professor described taking long pauses mid-lecture and second-guessing his words.
At the University of Cincinnati, the faculty union has said some professors are now reluctant to teach courses like African American history, for fear the subject is too controversial to risk.
No one banned those lectures. No one had to. The law produced the result that censorship usually requires a prosecutor to achieve — and it did so without charging anyone at all.
This is the part we consistently misunderstand about free speech.
We imagine its violations as dramatic: a banned book, a fired professor, a courtroom. But the most durable restrictions on speech are quieter.
They show up as a syllabus revised out of caution, a topic skipped rather than defended, a sentence rephrased so it can’t be misread.
As one Cincinnati faculty leader put it, professors are now spending their time figuring out how to comply with state mandates rather than teaching and doing research.
The First Amendment isn’t tested only when someone is punished for speaking.
It’s tested when institutions grow so busy interpreting government language that the operative question in every classroom shifts from “Is this true?” or “Is this worth teaching?” to “Will this get me in trouble?”
Supporters of S.B. 1 say it protects open inquiry. But you cannot foster free expression by making educators afraid of their own words.
Ohio has created a system in which professors must constantly consider how the state may interpret the meaning of their teaching — and, understandably, many are flinching.
Legislatures across the country are watching Ohio, weighing versions of the same law. So this is worth stating plainly, before it spreads: a free society does not lose its liberties only when the government forbids speech outright.
Sometimes it loses them when the rules become so uncertain that people begin censoring themselves before anyone asks them to.
The question is not whether Ohio’s professors are still allowed to speak. The question is how many ideas disappear — not because someone banned them, but because no one wanted to be the person who tested the boundary.
Simon Tam is the founder of The Slants and the central figure in Matal v. Tam (2017), the unanimous Supreme Court decision addressing viewpoint discrimination in trademark law. He speaks nationally on First Amendment issues.
This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.
