The president of Ohio State University has resigned over an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with a woman seeking public resources for her private business.
Walter ‘Ted’ Carter Jr., who was a driving force in the recent success of the Ohio State Buckeyes football program, said in a statement that he had resigned voluntarily after informing the university’s board of trustees of his error.
The 66-year-old did not elaborate on the nature of the relationship and said he was leaving with his wife, Lynda.
‘For personal reasons, I have made the difficult decision to resign from my role as president of The Ohio State University,’ he said. ‘I disclosed to the board of trustees that I made a mistake in allowing inappropriate access to Ohio State leadership.’
Ohio State is the nation’s sixth-largest university, with more than 60,000 students, over 600,000 living alumni and a highly-ranked football team and medical center.
Carter oversaw a fiscal year 2026 budget totaling $11.5billion in revenues and $10.9billion in expenditures.
Ohio State president Ted Carter has resigned over an ‘inappropriate relationship’ with a woman
During Carter’s tenure, the Buckeyes football team won the national title under Ryan Day (left)
Since his arrival in 2023, the Buckeyes football team has picked up a national title while amassing a formidable 37-6 record.
Along with Harvard, Ohio State’s football program is also one of only two Division I teams with a perfect Academic Progress Rate, which tracks student athletes’ academic eligibility, retention and graduate rates.
During Carter’s two-year tenure the school’s athletics program generated $336m in revenue, with football accounting for $161m of it and the men’s and women’s college basketball teams bringing in an estimated $24m.
The university brought Carter on board from the University of Nebraska system. He is also a former superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy and holds the national record for carrier-arrested landings with over 2,000 mishap-free touchdowns.
He filled a vacancy at Ohio State left by the mid-contract resignation of President Kristina Johnson, which went largely unexplained.
The engineer and former undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Energy had been chancellor of New York´s public university system before she joined the Buckeyes as president in 2020.