AAUP Investigating Academic Freedom, Shared Governance in Texas

An American Association of University Professors committee is investigating academic freedom and shared governance violations across Texas, where public university leaders have restricted what faculty can teach, and where Republican lawmakers have put faculty governing bodies under university presidents’ control.

“The issues in Texas have been piling up over the last number of years, but they’ve accelerated in the last, I’d say, nine months,” AAUP national president Todd Wolfson said at a news conference Tuesday. He added that “because of that rapid acceleration, and because we’re looking at extreme distress among our members and other faculty and staff and students across the state, we felt like we had to act.”

AAUP investigations can lead to public censure of university administrations and bring attention to restrictions on faculty freedoms. Wolfson said “the investigation will examine the implementation of Senate Bill 37 and related state actions, growing political control over curriculum and teaching, restrictions on faculty governance, the closure of academic programs, increasing governing board intervention into academic affairs, limitations on protest and campus speech, and other state and institutional policies that affect the freedom to teach, learn, research and govern our higher education institutions democratically.”

Rana Jaleel, chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, said that “in Texas, the publicly available record thus far suggests systematic statewide levels of political interference into higher education that can’t be adequately addressed on a case-by-case basis.”

Last June, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed into law SB 37, which overhauled faculty councils and senates. Among other things, it says that only an institution’s governing board can create a faculty council or senate, and the college or university president gets to pick the top officers and prescribe how it conducts meetings. Barring an exemption by the institution’s board, it also allows presidents to choose half the members, and says these presidential appointees can serve six consecutive years before having to take two years off, while members elected by faculty can only serve two years before the two-year break.

SB 37 also says the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board must establish a committee to consider how to condense general education course requirements statewide, and requires institutions’ governing boards to review their own universities’ gen ed curricula every five years. The law also ordered institutions to review minors and certificate programs every five years “to identify programs with low enrollment that may require consolidation or elimination.”

More recently, two large university systems, Texas A&M and Texas Tech, passed comprehensive restrictions on how faculty can teach about gender, sexuality and race. Texas Tech’s plan to close all programs “centered on” sexual orientation and gender identity further bans students from creating “degree-culminating” research or theses on such topics, according to a memo from university leaders. Wolfson also mentioned multiple faculty firings and the University of Texas at Austin combining four of its area studies departments into one department. In addition, Texas A&M leaders asked a philosophy professor to remove passages from Plato from his syllabus.

Wolfson said he believes the investigation’s findings “will serve as a warning to the nation.”

“What happens in Texas does not stay in Texas,” he said. “The policies being implemented there are increasingly being proposed and replicated elsewhere.”