Arizona President Refuses to Sign Shared Governance Memo

University of Arizona president Suresh Garimella has refused to sign a memorandum of understanding that details shared governance standards and processes at the university. Faculty records show he is the first president to do so, according to Leila Hudson, an associate professor of Middle East and North African studies at the university and chair of the faculty.

Garimella assumed the presidency in October 2024 after a tumultuous exit by former president Robert Robbins, who served for nine years before leaving the post amid a $177 million budget shortfall. Robbins had signed the memorandum, and it was shared governance that helped illuminate the administrative mismanagement that led to the budget crisis, Hudson said.

She calls shared governance a “feature, not a bug” of higher education management. But as American colleges and universities “corporatize” their leadership, shared governance is being treated as a burden, she said.

“[The board] selected our current president in a process which did not include the elected representatives of the faculty,” Hudson said. “I couldn’t help but notice that part of his first assignment was to restructure governance, which may well have been a euphemism for putting the faculty in their place.”

An updated copy of the memorandum from 2022 defines shared governance at the university as “meaningful participation in institutional governance, emphasizing the importance of faculty involvement in selecting, hiring and reviewing faculty and academic administrators, informing budgetary policy and strategy, and establishing academic and curricular policies.” It outlines processes for appointing search committees, undertaking administrative reviews and negotiating disagreements between faculty and administrators, Hudson said. It also dictates that budgetary issues, academic concerns and structural and policy changes be discussed at Faculty Senate meetings.

Garimella and his administration have repeatedly told faculty that he will not sign the document, but he has not provided a clear reason as to why, Hudson said. Spokespeople for the University of Arizona did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Shared governance at Arizona universities is written into state law. A state statute, first implemented in 1992, says that elected faculty representatives “shall participate in the governance of their respective universities and shall actively participate in the development of University policy.” It also states that faculty “shall share responsibility for academic and educational activities and matters related to faculty personnel.”

Since then, shared governance has remained relatively strong in the state, according to Eduardo Obregón Pagán, a history professor at Arizona State University who has long been involved in the practice.

“There certainly are ongoing conversations about how much faculty can or should be involved in university affairs, and perhaps those conversations will always be ongoing since relationships are dynamic. But in my 22 years in Arizona, with many of them in the University Senate at ASU, I’ve never known of an Arizona university that was hostile to faculty governance,” he wrote in an email.

The University of Arizona is unique in asking its presidents to sign a memorandum, Pagán said. Other Arizona universities have shared governance documents but don’t regularly ask relevant parties to sign them.

Republican legislators Travis Grantham and David Livingston have sought to scale back the state’s shared governance protections. In 2024, they introduced a bill to amend the statute to ask the Board of Regents and university presidents to “consult with” faculty members on institutional decision-making, rather than share decision-making power. The legislation never gained traction.

Theodore Downing, a professor of social development who helped write the original 1992 statute, told the Arizona Luminaria in 2024 that “consultation is a meaningless term” and that the bill allots too much power to the university president.