The Ohio State University Senate voted to close a higher-education policy center last week. Credit: Jack Westerheide | Managing Editor for Design

Ohio State’s Center for Higher Education Enterprise, a higher-education policy center, has been shut down after its own interim director questioned its usefulness.

The closure comes follows a vote by the University Senate last week and the findings in a self-study sent to the Committee on Academic Affairs in April from CHEE’s interim director, Joshua Hawley.

“There is no pressing reason to keep it open from a university perspective,” Hawley wrote in his report. “There are many other university centers that can carry out its functions.”

Hawley said there were other institutions on campus with which CHEE’s mission overlapped and closing CHEE would cause no disruption for its budget had already been cut and no staff were currently employed.

Institutions that will carry on CHEE’s mission cited by Hawley include the University Center for Teaching and Learning, the Kirwan Institute, the Bell National Resource Center on the African Male and, specifically for public policy and education work, Hawley called out his own center, the Ohio Education Research Center.

CHEE was created for former president Gordon Gee shortly before his departure from Ohio State so he’d have a place to stay at the university and Hawley said the work of CHEE had since strayed from its original mission.

“After four years and three different managers, in 2018 the focus of CHEE looked very different. While the initial work was outwardly focused, the last three years of CHEE looked largely internally,” Hawley said. “Moreover, the empirical focus of the work was really quite different, narrowing in on the student affairs piece of CHEE, and incorporating issues of diversity.”

Hawley said the mission of CHEE changed when Terrell Strayhorn was leading the center. Strayhorn led the center from 2014 to 2017. He resigned in Spring 2017 following an investigation that found he misused university resources and accepted as much as $200,000 in speaking fees.

“This orientation in the initial mission is also in direct contrast to the focus student affairs and diversity brought to the center by Dr. Strayhorn,” Hawley wrote. “Dr. Strayhorn merged his center, the Center for IDEAS, with CHEE. In short, there was a fundamental difference between the mission planned by Dr. Gee and the mission enacted by Dr. Strayhorn.”