COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio State President Walter “Ted” Carter Jr. resigned on Monday after disclosing “an inappropriate relationship” with a woman seeking public resources for her private business.
Carter, 66, said in a statement that he had resigned voluntarily after informing the university’s board of trustees of his error. He 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. He oversaw a fiscal year 2026 budget totaling $11.5 billion in revenues and $10.9 billion in expenditures.
The university brought Carter on board in 2023 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.
