Higher Education Institution

Ohio State University

Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society

In 2023, the Republican-controlled Ohio General Assembly mandated the creation of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State as part of a package of five state-funded, independent academic centers. The initiative grew out of SB 117, sponsored by Republican state Sens. Jerry Cirino and Rob McColley, which initially proposed centers at Ohio State and the University of Toledo; its provisions were subsequently incorporated into the state budget, HB 33, which added centers at Miami University, Cleveland State University, and the University of Cincinnati. The enacted budget appropriated $24 million over FY2024 and FY2025 for the five centers, including $10 million for the Chase Center. The legislation directs the center to offer university-wide programming on “free speech and civil discourse” and to expand the “intellectual diversity” of the university’s academic community.

The Hechinger Report describes Sen. Cirino’s 2023 civic center legislation as part of his broader effort, during that same time, to reform public higher education. According to Hechinger, Cirino was simultaneously pursuing legislation to eliminate mandatory DEI training, ban faculty strikes, and weaken tenure protections. Hechinger also reported that Cirino worked closely with Lee Strang—a former fellow at Princeton’s conservative James Madison Program—to structure the centers for maximum independence from their host universities, including greater autonomy over faculty hiring.

During legislative hearings in June 2023, Ohio State professors objected that SB 117 represented state interference in university teaching and governance. Those objections persisted after the Center was mandated by law. In January 2025, AAUP-OSU urged the University Senate to reject the Center’s formal establishment, citing its “highly partisan origins,” the legislature’s intrusion into shared governance, the Center director’s unusual control over hiring and curriculum, duplication of existing programs, and potential long-term costs to the university. On January 23, 2025, the University Senate voted 64–57 against the proposal, with four abstentions. Lee Strang was hired to lead the new center at Ohio State.

The following month, the Ohio State Board of Trustees nevertheless established the Chase Center as a tenure-initiating unit, stating that although the University Senate had not advanced the proposal, state law required Ohio State to establish the Center and that the Board “fully supports” it.

Notable People

Lee J. Strang

Inaugural executive director of the Chase Center

Strang is a member of the Jack Miller Center’s academic council and was a 2018-19 fellow at Princeton’s conservative James Madison Program. He is an anti-abortion scholar who testified in favor of Ohio’s “heartbeat bill” in 2011 and 2019, and authored a 2021 amicus brief in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision. In 2023, he helped Ohio legislators argue for an increased voting threshold to pass ballot initiatives, as part of an effort to preempt ballot initiatives that protect access to abortion (after the Dobbs ruling). Since 2012 Strang has taught constitutional interpretation summer lectures for the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Blackstone Fellowship program. According to the Center for Media and Democracy’s SourceWatch, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is a conservative Christian law firm that pursues anti-abortion and anti-LGTBQ litigation. (ADF was an advisory board member to the far-right “Project 2025.”) Strang is also board president of Northwest Ohio Classical Academy, a controversial charter school that is explicitly tied to Hillsdale College; Hillsdale produced the revisionist, Trump-linked 1776 curriculum, which historians say distorts American history in order to advance a particular ideology.

See also: Jack Miller Center; Princeton University.

Notable Funders

Ohio Legislature

$10 million appropriation (2024-2025)

The legislation establishing the Chase Center originated with SB 117, sponsored by Republican state Sens. Jerry Cirino and Rob McColley (both members of the American Legislative Exchange Council); the Chase Center provisions were ultimately enacted and funded through HB 33. Cirino and McColley have been prominent opponents of DEI and LGBTQ rights. For example, in January 2024, Cirino and McColley were co-sponsors of HB 68, a bill aimed at banning gender-affirming medical care for minors and restricting transgender girls/women in sports. In addition, in January 2025, Cirino sponsored SB 1, an anti-DEI and higher-education overhaul bill, which was strongly backed by McColley. Both HB 68 and SB 1‍ were strongly criticized by ACLU Ohio. Cirino discussed SB 1 in a September 2026 interview with Inside Higher Ed:

So in Senate Bill 1, I got a no-strike provision. We also took [away] some other things called retrenchment [rights], which gives the university presidents the ability to eliminate courses or eliminate majors and so on, without having to go through this shared governance garbage where the faculty gets to decide whether they’re going to eliminate faculty.

U.S. Department of Education

$3 million from the U.S. Department of Education (2025); $5 million from The National Endowment for the Humanities (2026)

Center for Ethics and Human Values – Civil Discourse for Citizenship

In January 2021, OSU’s Center for Ethics and Human Values (CEHV) launched an initiative called “Civil Discourse for Citizenship,” with funding from the Barbara W. and Philip R. Derrow Family Foundation. According to its website, the Civil Discourse for Citizenship is “dedicated to promoting respectful debate across differences on campus and beyond.”

Notable Funders

Barbara W. and Philip R. Derrow Family Foundation

Founding donors, amount not identified; funding relationship documented here

Foundation co-founder Philip Derrow is a retired businessman and conservative opinion columnist for the Columbus Dispatch. He has written several articles that sharply criticize progressive activism. In May 2024, he wrote a column entitled, “Don’t Be Fooled: Ohio State campus protests not about suffering in Gaza,” in which he linked OSU protests to “Jew hatred.” In June 2025, Derrow grouped “riots associated with the Black Lives Matter movement” with “anti-Israel and pro-Islamist protests on college campuses” as examples of “political violence and lawlessness.” In September 2025, he described Ohio colleges as “cloistered venues of dogmatic progressive activism” and praised state higher education reforms framed around “intellectual diversity, informed citizenship, free speech and civil discourse.” In May 2026, he characterized pro-Palestinian protests as inescapably pro-Hamas and declared that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”

Campus Policy Context

In August 2024, Ohio State adopted a university speech policy that Heterodox Academy categorizes as “institutional neutrality.” Such policies are favored by groups like ACTA, FIRE, Heterodox Academy, and Manhattan Institute, but strongly opposed by the AAUP and many scholars. An October 2025 research paper by Curtis Brewer and Michelle D. Young found that institutional neutrality had been deployed to normalize institutional silence, marginalize dissent, and constrain forms of political expression. Similarly, a spring 2026 Inside Higher Ed investigation found that college administrators have increasingly used institutional neutrality policies to justify censoring students’ political speech.

In 2022, Ohio State adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism—a definition that is promoted by some pro-Israel and right-wing groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and The Heritage Foundation, but which has been criticized by human rights groups and scholars for the risk that its Israel-related examples can be used to suppress criticism of Israel.

In early 2024, OSU Divest organized a student ballot initiative calling on Ohio State to divest from companies accused of profiting from human rights violations. After supporters submitted 1,247 signatures, the Undergraduate Student Government Judicial Panel initially invalidated enough of them to keep the measure off the ballot. OSU Divest appealed, and on March 3, 2024 the panel reversed its decision and restored the initiative, allowing voting to begin at noon on March 4, 2024. About 12 hours later, Ohio State administrators paused the vote and removed the initiative from the ballot. On March 6, 2024, Ohio’s attorney general interpreted Ohio Rev. Code § 9.76 (an anti-BDS law amended in 2022 to expressly cover state universities) as prohibiting Ohio State from divesting from Israeli assets—thereby excluding the students’ divestment initiative from consideration.

On April 23, 2024, Ohio State police arrested two students at a divestment protest outside Meiling Hall. On April 25, 2024, police arrested three more people during an attempted pro-Palestinian encampment on OSU’s South Oval. That evening, President Ted Carter requested assistance from the Ohio State Highway Patrol, and police arrested another 36 people, including 16 Ohio State students, after moving in on what WOSU described as a peaceful demonstration. According to WOSU, officers pulled protesters individually from the crowd and transported them to jail on sheriff’s buses. An OSU spokesperson confirmed to The Lantern that, during the protest, state troopers were stationed on the roof of the student union with long-range firearms (described by WOSU as “sniper rifles”).

President Carter defended the arrests four days later, saying they were prompted by violations of university space rules rather than protesters’ speech and declaring that “Ohio State’s campus will not be overtaken in this manner.” Three weeks after the arrests, he told the Board of Trustees that people exercising their First Amendment rights should do so in ways that “promote dialogue rather than deepen division,” adding that “respect, civility, and compassion” should remain “at the forefront.”

In August 2024, President Carter was interviewed by WOSU’s All Sides and spoke about expected protests in the fall; according to a later WOSU report, Carter said that he hoped for “a good bit of civil obedience.”