Utah Legislative Audit Suggests Reducing Tenure Protections

Utah’s legislative auditor general has released a report recommending the Legislature consider “streamlining” the process to fire tenured faculty under state law, and to further consider banning public colleges and universities from providing more tenure protections than that law does.

“We recommend that the Legislature consider whether the minimum due process for removing tenured faculty as specified in Utah Code is excessive,” the auditor’s office wrote in “A Performance Audit of Tenured Faculty in Higher Education: A Case for Improved Accountability.”

The report then recommends the Legislature and the state Board of Higher Education, which oversees the state’s 16 public institutions, “consider requiring institutions’ due process standards not exceed those specified in Utah Code.” The auditor general’s office argued in the report that limiting tenure protections to what the law says would make it easier to discipline “chronically underperforming faculty.”

“It’s become clear that institutions sometimes struggle to hold faculty accountable who are persistently low-performing or who violate university policy,” said Nick Varney, senior audit and operations supervisor at the auditor’s office.

The report includes an example in which Weber State University, rather than discipline an unnamed faculty member who racked up thousands of dollars in personal expenses on a university purchasing card, gave the professor a separation agreement. The university agreed to pay them $175,000, provide a reference letter from the provost and enter into a nondisclosure agreement preventing the institution from discussing the situation.

Varney stressed that the report’s recommendation for streamlining firing of tenured faculty regards termination “for cause.” He said, “This isn’t because they engaged in particular research that someone found didn’t align with their particular perspective.” Over all, he said, the state’s higher ed system is “fantastic” and noted the audit includes examples of great teaching.

In 2024, Utah’s Republican-dominated Legislature passed a law (House Bill 438) mandating post-tenure reviews that can lead to faculty firings. The audit, released Tuesday, analyzed, among other things, whether the state’s higher ed institutions implemented the law. The auditor’s office says it interviewed more than 120 administrators, deans and department chairs and it reviewed 666 performance reviews of tenured professors.

“Only eight reviews concluded that teaching performance needed improvement (excluding [Utah State University] due to non-compliance with HB438),” the report says. But it noted that in at least 40 cases, “teaching was rated satisfactory despite evidence of poor teaching, indicating that performance reviews either ignored or did not detect many instances of poor teaching.”

In a letter to the auditor general, Utah State President Brad L. Mortensen said the university updated its faculty code as of Aug. 7, 2026, “to establish a post-tenure review process consistent with Utah Code.”

The report also recommends that department chairs be appointed by and be accountable to university leadership for their departments’ performance.

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Kendall Gerdes, president of the University of Utah chapter of the American Association of University Professors and part of the United Campus Workers of Utah Faculty Organizing Committee, said all of the report’s major recommendations seek “to expand administrative hierarchies at the expense of the democratic process of shared governance.”

“Enacting these recommendations would essentially create a new administrative layer of management, and would discourage experienced faculty from becoming leaders by forcing them to set aside their research—and that will discourage highly qualified faculty from accepting roles in our state,” Gerdes wrote.

Geoffrey Landward, commissioner of the Utah System of Higher Education, said state law and Board of Higher Education policy both contain the due process elements he sees as mandatory for tenure. He said he wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to a law or board policy requiring institutions to not go above the law, but added he’d have to discuss the issue with lawmakers and see the exact language.

Landward noted that the audit recognizes that tenure supports academic freedom.

“We want to protect due process so we don’t have arbitrary and capricious decisions around tenure and retaining our faculty,” he said.