For months, Vivek Ramaswamy told Ohioans he wanted to shut down or defund some of the state's public universities. He named names. He said the money saved could help wipe out Ohio's income tax. He said it again and again.

Then people got angry — including members of his own party. So now he says he never meant it.

That's not a plan. That's a candidate getting caught.

What he actually said

This wasn't a one-time slip. Ramaswamy pushed the idea over and over across the spring:

• In a March video on his Threads account, he said Ohio has too many universities: "We have too many of them. They need to be consolidated."
• In an opinion piece for the Columbus Dispatch, he encouraged shutting down what he called struggling universities — and specifically pointed to Cleveland State, the University of Akron, Kent State, and Central State University.
• At a Turning Point USA event in April, a student asked him about it and he doubled down: "I don't think you should be funding subpar universities," he said.

And the reason he gave for the cuts? To help pay for eliminating Ohio's income tax. In other words: take away colleges that working families depend on, and hand the savings to a tax cut that helps the people at the top the most.

Even Republicans said no

Here's how out of touch the idea was: the loudest pushback came from Ramaswamy's own party.

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and state Senate Finance Chair Jerry Cirino — a GOP leader on higher education — both objected. Cirino, who actually works on Ohio college policy, didn't hold back when asked about Ramaswamy's plan:

"I don't know how much he knows about how higher ed works in the state of Ohio."

University leaders were just as blunt. Cleveland State President Laura Bloomberg said the state's public universities "were formed for specific purposes to meet the needs of their region." Kent State President Todd Diacon wrote a long defense of Ohio's public colleges, reminding people that building them was "Ohio investing in itself" — not a waste.

David Pepper, running mate to Democratic candidate Amy Acton, put the human cost plainly. Ramaswamy's plan, he said, tells students in poor communities: "Get in the car, go pay room and board hundreds of miles away, because I'm gonna deprive you of the local opportunity you have to get a degree."

That's the whole point of having public universities across the state — so a kid in Akron or Cleveland or Wilberforce can get a quality degree close to home without going broke.

The backtrack

At a town hall in Strongsville last Friday, Ramaswamy suddenly changed his story. Now he says he never wanted to close any colleges at all — just "duplicative programs" inside them.

When an attendee asked him point-blank whether it was true he wanted to "shut some schools," he called that "incorrect." He said the four universities he'd named in his own op-ed were merely "examples of where tuition was going up."

But that's not what he said in March. It's not what he wrote in the Dispatch. And it's not what he told that student in April. He spent months calling for defunding "subpar universities," and only walked it back once it became clear the idea was deeply unpopular — with Republicans and Democrats alike.

A pattern of looking down on Ohio

This fits a bigger picture. Ramaswamy has a habit of insulting the very people he wants to govern, then cleaning it up later.

He once wrote that "American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long" — a swipe at American workers. He helped build DOGE, the cost-cutting effort that canceled $29 million in Ohio State University grants and closed federal offices across Ohio, then quit to run for governor. Now he wanted to defund Ohio's own public colleges — until the backlash forced a retreat.

Ohio families deserve a governor who wants to strengthen their kids' schools, not shut them down and then deny he ever said so.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Morgan Trau for News 5 Cleveland, published in the Ohio Capital Journal. Photo by WEWS.