On June 20, 2025, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a bill that strengthens the authority of university governing boards over curriculum and hiring decisions and weakens faculty governance at the state’s public universities.
Texas’s “Act relating to the governance of public institutions of higher education” creates a statewide committee – including three members appointed by the governor, two by the lieutenant governor, and two by the speaker of the House of Representatives – to evaluate the curriculum and recommend course requirements for graduation at the state’s public institutions. The law also reduces the size of faculty senates, capping them at 60 members and requiring that half of the members of the faculty senate be appointed by the university’s president. The law sets different term limits for faculty senate members who are presidentially appointed (six consecutive years) or elected (two years before taking a two-year break). The law also requires university presidents to hire for leadership positions without delegating that responsibility to anyone else, diverging from the standard practice of having candidates vetted by search committees made up of faculty, staff, and students. Moreover, the board of regents can overrule the president’s hiring decisions. The law creates a new ombudsperson within the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, a state agency that oversees public higher education in the state, to ensure that the state’s public universities comply with the new law, as well as other laws regulating higher education, for example, those related to free speech activities on campus or immigration enforcement. If the ombudsperson determines that a university is not complying with the law, they can refer the case to the state’s Attorney General’s Office, which can either sue the university or recommend that the state legislature withhold funds.
The law fits into a pattern of legislative actions across the country eroding institutional autonomy. At least 29 states have since 2023 considered at least 135 bills that weaken university autonomy, including reducing faculty tenure protections, enabling increased state interference in academic decisions, and by restricting research, teaching or expression on a range of issues, such as diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice, gender, gender identity, and other disfavored topics. At least 27 have become law.
Scholars at Risk is concerned about state interference in higher education governance and operations, including measures that significantly erode shared governance and the role of faculty, staff, and students in institutional policy and operations. State authorities have a responsibility to refrain from encroaching on university autonomy and should not play a central role in making universities’ academic decisions. As with the new Texas law, the act of elevating the number of political appointees involved in decisions about curriculum and hiring, reducing the tenure of campus representatives, and formalizing new layers of external oversight staff by political appointees creates new new avenues for political interference in research, teaching, hiring, and admissions, severely undermining academic freedom and free expression.
Sources:
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/04/10/texas-senate-bill-37-governing-boards-faculty-senates/
https://www.newsweek.com/university-texas-has-power-stripped-bill-passes-2061145
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/05/24/texas-governing-boards-regents-senate-bill-37/
https://aaup-texas.org/blog/f/sb-37-threatens-higher-ed-public-health-innovation
https://www.texasaft.org/membership/higher-ed/this-week-in-higher-education-educators-students-community-members-tell-legislators-hands-off-our-colleges-universities/
https://legiscan.com/TX/bill/SB37/2025