POV shares insights from the Kent State University community on important topics. In this essay for Kent State Today, Kent State University President Todd Diacon offers insight into the ongoing discussions over the future of public higher education in Ohio. In his POV essay, Diacon shares his thoughts on “centers of excellence” and how they’re rooted in Kent State’s history.
The idea of “centers of excellence” has entered Ohio's higher education conversation, and I welcome it. Not as a provocation, but as an opportunity. Because if we’re going to talk about which Ohio universities represent genuine centers of excellence, I’d like to start that conversation, and I’d like to start it with Kent State University, by adding some context that the current debate is missing.
The public university system in Ohio wasn’t assembled carelessly. It was built by elected leaders responding to real public demand. Republican Gov. James Rhodes came to office in 1963 on a campaign promise to place a public university within 30 miles of every Ohio citizen. What followed was one of the most consequential public investments in our state's history. At Kent State alone, enrollment grew from roughly 7,000 students to more than 30,000 in just 15 years. In the decade of the 1960s, we built 60 new buildings. Those buildings were filled with the sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation, ready to build Ohio’s future.
This was not a waste. This was Ohio investing in itself.
The world has shifted since then, and universities must shift with it. The demographic cliff is real – in Northeast Ohio alone, the number of traditional college-age students has declined 10% in just five years.
And yet total enrollment at Ohio’s public universities today is roughly the same as it was in 2005, which is important as state support adjusted for inflation is 27% lower today than it was in that same year.
At Kent State, state appropriations now account for roughly 22% of our operating budget. In the Rhodes era, that figure was closer to 75%. The universities didn’t drift into this moment. Even though public investment was quietly withdrawn over decades, our institutions have continued to deliver ever-improving results.
Our universities are adapting. At Kent State, our Transformation 2028 plan has restructured colleges, streamlined administration and eliminated redundancies. Because of these efforts, in Fiscal Year 2027, we will reduce our expenditures by $4 million, and in Fiscal Year 2028 by $8 million.
We are not waiting for someone to tell us to change. We’ve reduced our budget, and balanced it, every year save one during the past 30 years, and we did so without drawing on reserves to cover revenue shortfalls.
Now, back to “centers of excellence.” I’d invite anyone who holds that view to look more closely at what we already have.
Every time you use a digital tablet, you are experiencing the product of research that originated at Kent State. Our scientists pioneered the liquid crystal technology that made flat panel displays possible, and that work continues today in labs that keep Northeast Ohio at the frontier of materials science and engineering.
Pass through any commercial airport in Ohio and there’s a good chance the pilot in the cockpit earned their wings in our nationally recognized flight program. Our College of Aeronautics and Engineering is a national leader, not only in preparing the next generation of aviators, but in the research and responsible development of drone technology and its peaceful civilian applications – work with profound implications as Ohio positions itself in the industries of tomorrow.
In creativity and design, Kent State stands among the best in America. Our School of Fashion is the top-rated university-based program of its kind in the nation. Our architecture graduates design buildings that expand Cleveland’s and Cincinnati’s skylines and trauma centers, improving patient outcomes in hospitals across the country and around the world. Our arts programs are not amenities; they are anchors of cultural life across Northeast Ohio, enriching communities in ways that attract residents, support local economies and make our region a place people choose to call home.
In healthcare, our contribution is irreplaceable. Kent State is the largest supplier of health professionals to one of America’s premier medical regions. Shut down Kent State and you might as well shut down the world-renowned healthcare that is a calling card of Northeast Ohio. Ninety-nine percent of our nursing students are employed before or shortly after graduation, and the majority right here in our region. We are home to Ohio’s only college of podiatric medicine, a program that serves patients and communities that would otherwise go without that crucial specialty.
From our college of education, our institutional roots, more than 3,300 alumni are currently teaching Ohio’s next generation in K-12 systems across the state.
In business, generation after generation of leaders have launched careers on a Kent State education, contributing to companies, nonprofits and public institutions across Ohio and beyond. It was shortly after his introduction to Kent State that former U.S. Ambassador Edward F. Crawford, a prominent Ohio entrepreneur and CEO, made the largest single gift in Kent State’s history in support of our excellent Ambassador Crawford College of Business and Entrepreneurship.
And undergirding all of this: As the only public Research 1 university in Northeast Ohio, we conduct the kind of scholarship that produces economic development, attracts investment and generates solutions to problems that haven’t yet been fully named.
There is also a community argument that deserves to be made. What happens to Salem without its Kent State campus? To Ashtabula, to Geauga, to Tuscarawas County and all the other communities in which Kent State maintains a vital presence? The campuses Gov. Rhodes envisioned aren’t redundancies. 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. To abandon our regional campuses would be to abandon our state’s small-town heartbeat.
Kent State Works. Visit our website by that name and you will find story after story of how this excellence lives in outcomes – in the careers and contributions of more than 280,000 living alumni and in the $5 billion in economic impact our university generates for Ohio each year. Excellence at Kent State is not a marketing claim. It is specific, credentialed, rated, ranked and documented – across engineering and aeronautics, creativity and design, the sciences and humanities, and business and healthcare.
To anyone raising questions about Ohio’s public universities, I extend a genuine invitation. Come visit. Spend a day on a Kent State campus or at any campus within the footprint Gov. Rhodes designed. See what the work looks like. Talk to the students doing it.
As Ohio’s fourth-longest-serving public university president, I offer these words not to protect turf, but because the conversation Ohio deserves is grounded in facts. Indeed, my colleagues at the other public universities have equally powerful, distinctive stories of success to share, and together, Ohio’s public universities advance the future of all Ohioans. The transformation of our institutions is already well underway. Come see it.