Ohio State Faces Leadership Turmoil, Program Cuts, and Scandal Fallout

Ohio State’s governing crisis has become impossible to separate from its public mission. A lawmaker called the school “a national embarrassment” as the flagship university confronted a forced presidential exit, state-mandated program cuts, and the continuing fallout from one of the worst sexual-abuse scandals in college sports.

President Walter “Ted” Carter Jr. resigned on March 9 after telling trustees he had an inappropriate relationship with someone seeking public resources for her personal business. The board moved quickly to install Ravi V. Bellamkonda as Ohio State’s 18th president on March 12. Bellamkonda had been serving as executive vice president and provost since January 14, 2025, and his reported base salary is $1.4 million under a contract that runs through June 30, 2031. For a university already trying to steady itself after Kristina Johnson resigned after two years in office, the rapid turnover has underscored how fragile the leadership bench has become.

The leadership shake-up is unfolding alongside Ohio’s Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, or SB 1, which Gov. Mike DeWine signed on March 28, 2025, and which took effect June 27, 2025. To comply, Ohio State has moved to end eight academic programs and combine others. Across Ohio’s public universities, nearly 90 degree programs have been identified for elimination under the new law. At a time when universities are being pressed to defend their academic value, those cuts raise a sharper question at Ohio State: who is making the strategic case for the institution, and how much confidence can faculty and students have in the people making those decisions?

The university is also still paying for the Richard Strauss scandal. In May 2020, Ohio State said it had settled with 162 survivors for $40.9 million. By April 2026, the university said it had settled with more than half of the 317 survivors for more than $61 million. Those numbers reflect more than legal exposure; they mark years of failure to protect students and athletes from abuse by a former team doctor whose conduct still defines the university’s national reputation.

That reputation is under pressure from another direction as well. In 2024, StandWithUs, the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law filed a Title VI complaint alleging antisemitic harassment of Jewish and Israeli students. In September 2025, the ACLU of Ohio filed a federal lawsuit claiming Ohio State expelled student Guy Christensen over protected political speech tied to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Together, the complaints suggest a campus struggling to balance safety, speech, and due process while under outside scrutiny.

Taken together, the resignation, the cuts, the settlements, and the federal litigation point to one central problem: Ohio State is no longer being tested by a single scandal, but by whether its leadership can rebuild credibility before distrust becomes the institution’s defining condition.