For more than 30 years, shared governance — the collaboration in decision making between faculty, staff and students with highest level university leaders — was anchored by existing Arizona state laws dictating faculty’s role in helping guide the university.
Now, a GOP-sponsored bill, House Bill 2735, that strips language in the current statutes to weaken the governing power of faculty representatives at Arizona’s public universities, has been transmitted to the state Senate after passing its third reading 31-28 in the House of Representatives Wednesday.
The bill has to pass in the Senate in order for Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs to consider signing it into law.
Republican State Rep. Travis Grantham, representing District 14 in Maricopa County, is HB 2735’s primary sponsor. Grantham has a background as a military pilot and businessman. He framed the proposal as a response to the University of Arizona’s financial crisis when it was first introduced to the House Appropriations Committee.
“What was going on at UA was more of a holistic approach where they kind of had this model taking place that was shared governance and shared governance is not how the universities are supposed to operate,” Grantham said at the hearing, pointing to departmental overspending as a substantial contributor to the university’s shortfall.
All three universities have shared-governance policies. Not all states have shared governance embedded into statute like Arizona, but it has been a mainstay of higher education since the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges adopted the “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities” in 1966.
“I don’t think that Mr. Grantham had a full perspective of this. It seemed like he was only talking about this in terms of the money,” Democratic State Rep. Nancy Gutierrez, representing District 18 in Tucson, told Arizona Luminaria following the first hearing. Gutierrez has a background in education and has taught at multiple schools in the state.
While the bill also aims to guarantee the board of regents has “access to the university’s accounting and reporting systems for oversight and monitoring purposes” Gutierrez said its other provisions are not about human resources or accounting, they’re about faculty input in academic and educational matters.
“The board of regents shouldn’t have control over academics and what’s taught at the university,” she said.
Budgetary matters and financial infrastructure are under the purview of the university’s administration and the board of regents.
Jonathan Becker is an associate professor specializing in university leadership and an expert in school law and the politics of education at Virginia Commonwealth University. He disagrees with Grantham’s proposal. He said input from faculty in the school’s decision making process, specifically in the realm of education and academics, is vital to a school’s success.
“For a university to work well, there has to be a robust feedback loop,” he said.
HB 2735 swaps the faculty, administration and regents’ current shared participation in governance for a vague “consult” role by faculty. Specifically, revisions strike language from Arizona laws that empower faculty members of each university through their “elected faculty representatives” to “participate in” the governance of their respective universities.
The measure also would strike current legal standards requiring that such faculty representatives “actively participate in” the development of university policy.
Becker said this conflicts with how shared governance should operate.
“At least one of the changes in the proposed bills inserts the word consult into state statute and to me that’s problematic,” Becker said. “Consultation feels more one-sided, more top-down, it doesn’t feel in the spirit of shared governance.”
Grantham and Republicans who voted for the bill disagree, insisting the changes are a clarification measure. At the same time, Grantham along with university leaders like UA President Robert Robbins and interim UA Chief Financial Officer, John Arnold, continue attributing part of the university’s financial shortfall to departmental deficits.
“This is a good bill. It does not shut faculty out of the decision making process,” said Republican State Rep. Selina Bliss, representing District 1 in Yavapai County, at the hearing. “It just says the president may not delegate their authority to approve academic degrees or organizational units.”
But Becker said this is part of the problem.
“In this bill, for the board to say approval of programs is sort of in the jurisdiction of the president only raises the kinds of concerns that you see in other places where a president can be in place that works at the behest of the governor. And faculty are cut out of a process that shouldn’t be political,” he said.
Many of the investments that led to the school’s financial troubles were made despite faculty members’ protests and many at UA have lost faith in the institution’s administration.
“They did not embrace shared governance and faculty legislation has always asked for it,” said Steve Kozachik, Ward 6 council member and former UA Associate Director of Athletics. He added that he thinks the bill is designed to absolve the president from having to engage with faculty in the decision-making process.
“I think that this is a ruse, it’s giving Bobby Robbins an out so he doesn’t have to sit down with the faculty senate,” Kozachik said. He stopped working at the UA in 2020 after the university eliminated his position during the pandemic.
Becker points to the school’s acquisition of Ashford University as a prime example of the breakdown of shared governance at the UA. The university acquired the troubled for-profit school despite ardent opposition from various faculty and staff, including the Faculty Senate and the UA’s Eller College of Management.
“For a university to take on a for-profit entity without full engagement of the faculty, to me, violates, certainly the spirit of shared governance, and certainly the language of how the university defines and enacts shared governance,” Becker said.
The financial situation has highlighted a long-standing point of contention at the UA — the meaning of shared governance.
Although Becker believes the bill infringes on shared governance, he added that the term can be nebulous and subject to interpretation.
“Shared governance is more of an unwritten rule,” he said. “It is naturally a fuzzy concept and hard to define.”
In early 2023, just months before former UA CFO Lisa Rulney announced the school’s financial woes, elected Faculty Senate Chair Leila Hudson wrote a letter to the president of the school’s accreditation organization, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.
In the letter, Hudson wrote, “Over the past several years, the shared governance mandate has been ignored in major academic, educational, and faculty personnel decisions.”
But not all faculty members share Hudson’s perspective. In 2023, Tessa Dysart, an assistant director and professor in the law school and elected secretary of the Faculty Senate at the time, wrote to the accreditation association in opposition of Hudson’s letter, stating that “shared governance primarily involves consultation, not express approval, although the Memorandum sets out a process to be followed in cases of disagreement. To put it simply, shared governance in most instances involves dialogue but not approval of outcome.”
Hudson is concerned about HB 2735.
“To give these people more power and to try to constrain and remove the only functioning source of checks and balances on their otherwise out of control spending and poor decision making is simply hastening the collapse of a great university,” she told Arizona Luminaria on Feb. 15.
Former Arizona Board of Regents Chair, Fred Duval, recently served Hudson a cease and desist letter after she raised concerns over his former position as a managing director of investment firm Amicus Investors, which invests “in universities, partnering with them to help realize their master plans,” according to the website.
DuVal said the positions did not overlap but stepped down from his leadership role as chair Thursday following a letter from Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs calling him out for “litigating personal grudges.” He remains on the board.
During the meeting in which DuVal announced he was taking legal action against Hudson, Regent Lyndel Manson blasted members of the Faculty Senate, calling them embarrassingly dysfunctional and encouraging President Robbins to establish new faculty leadership at the university.
“At some point, enough needs to be enough. And that time is now,” Manson said at the meeting. “We’re frankly unsure of how representative this body is of the greater faculty at UA. With few exceptions, productive and positive-minded faculty have declined to serve in the senate because of its negative and aggressive nature and its lack of focus on what’s truly best for the university.”
Manson’s suggestion to establish new faculty leadership would involve replacing 56 faculty-elected positions, including Hudson. She won reelection for faculty chair in mid-February with 750 votes — almost two-thirds of the 1,201 cast for the position, according to a press release from the UA’s Committee on Elections. In total, 1,258 voters, or 33% of eligible faculty participated in the election.
This isn’t the first time Manson called out the UA’s Faculty Senate for not being cooperative and overstepping their roles in shared governance.
Manson addressed the governing body at a board of regents meeting on April 21, 2023, she was board chair at the time. She said senate members were misconstruing the meaning of shared governance and emphasized that their input should be only taken into consideration.
“The board is currently considering taking further action to clarify these principles,” she said at the meeting.
Megan Gilbertson, a spokesperson for the board of regents, said the board “signed in as neutral on this bill” but Hudson thinks stomping out shared governance has long been on the board’s agenda.
“You could see ABOR was losing patience with the faculty senate and shared governance,” she said, referring to Manson’s 2023 comments. “They were just about done with us.”
Despite falling under the same laws, Arizona universities’ policies can differ. Sherman Dorn, an Arizona State University professor specializing in the history of education policy in the U.S., said shared governance works well at ASU and he’s not too worried about the bill.
“The limits on delegation seem appropriate,” he said. But there could be snags. “I think where it would matter is in the difference between participation in the development of university policy and consultation about university policy”
Dorn said he understands why it concerns faculty at the UA.
“Thinking about my colleagues that work at UA, during the pandemic they were the only university that had a furlough. Right now, they’re seeing a freeze and a turmoil so I can understand why they’re really sensitive,” he said.
Faculty and students from UA and ASU spoke against House Bill 2735 during the public comment section of the latest board of regents meeting.
Evan Berry, faculty head and associate professor of religious studies at ASU, said the bill is “a serious threat to academic freedom and will have a chilling effect on free speech.” He spoke during the call to the audience, adding that removing faculty governance will weaken academic freedom.
Tension and loss of trust between UA faculty staff and students is testing the bounds of shared governance as legislators attempt to change it at a state level here.
“What’s happening to Arizona is easily viewed in a larger, more political context,” Becker, the expert in school law and the politics of education said.
In 1992, Senate Bill 1202 created the framework for shared governance among Arizona’s public universities. Three Democrats and one Republican sponsored the bill that was signed into law.
Theodore Downing, a UA faculty senate member and professor of social development, said he helped write the current law’s original language. He thinks HB 2735 allots too much power to a single individual — the president of a public university. Downing is a former lawmaker elected two terms to the Arizona House of Representatives.
Downing also said that relegating faculty governance to consultants would strip them of any say to mitigate power imbalances on behalf of a public university.
“Consultation is a meaningless term,” he told Arizona Luminaria.
The vote for the current bill on shared governance in both committee and the final house vote, aligned strictly along party lines with Republican members voting in favor of the bill and Democrats against.
Becker said this exemplifies a greater trend in the U.S. of Republican politicians trying to exert more power over higher education institutions.
“The sense that I have and the sentiments others have shared is there’s an effort in states with more conservative legislators to tear down, at best, higher education and instead of more fully funding programs to figure out how to scale down and cut certain programs from higher education,” he said. “That comes in many different forms but certainly in forms that strike at academic freedom.”
Becker cited New College of Florida as an example of the government taking over a university’s academic freedom. Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed a new board of trustees who quickly made changes to “eliminate indoctrination” at the university. This included replacing “far-left faculty with new professors aligned with the university’s mission,” a decision which DeSantis commended in a news release.
The American Association of University Professors voted to sanction the college. The association said the takeover was “marked by a complete departure from shared governance,” according to the announcement.
The association also helped craft the language for Arizona’s 1992 shared governance statutes which HB 2735 seeks to change. However, the organization has not commented on the bill.
Robbins announced a new layer of shared governance called the University Advisory Council in an email Wednesday, Feb. 28. Unlike the Faculty Senate where a majority of members are elected, Robbins will choose advisory council members with input from university leadership, including deans, according to an email.
HB 2735 still has to pass through the Republican-controlled Senate before Gov. Hobbs considers whether to veto or sign the bill into law. Gov. Hobbs’ office has not responded to multiple requests for comment from Arizona Luminaria on HB 2735 and whether she plans to veto the bill if it reaches her desk. However, Hobbs said “it sounds exactly like what I’m already calling for,” in a Feb. 23 interview with KJZZ.
From an outside perspective, Becker said it seems legislators are trying to overcorrect for one university’s mistakes in a way that could be detrimental across Arizona’s public university system.
“Shared governance doesn’t have to be contentious, it doesn’t have to be antagonistic, when done well it’s really a win-win for everybody,” Becker said. “We shouldn’t shy away from it and we shouldn’t move to a system that disproportionately goes to one of the gears in the system.”
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