An Arizona Board of Regents committee pushed through a controversial policy proposal Thursday regarding “support for foreign terrorist organizations” by student groups and organizations.
Next the proposed policy needs two additional levels of approval by the full board to be adopted. The proposal is expected to be read and advanced again at the next regents meeting, June 19-21 at Northern Arizona University. That meeting will be livestreamed and the public can comment in person or by filling out a form online.
In meetings Thursday, three regents committees met and discussed the policy proposal, financial updates and more.
The proposal follows months of pro-Palestinian protests at universities across the country that have spurred heated discourse over freedom of expression.
During the meeting, Thomas Adkins, the board’s vice president of government affairs and community relations, described the policy as establishing “prohibitions on student groups and organizations from knowingly providing material support for foreign terrorist organizations calling for violence and or engaging in threats of harm or against students based on race, color, national origin or shared ancestry.”
Leila Hudson, the University of Arizona’s Faculty Senate chair and associate professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, sent a memo to the board the day of the meeting expressing concern.
“University of Arizona faculty are anxious that the rule seems hastily constructed,” Hudson wrote, adding that it “seeks to impose asymmetrical and chilling effects on constitutionally protected rights to free speech and assembly.”
The proposal enumerates a series of banned activities such as “knowingly providing support to a designated foreign terrorist organization.” It explicitly prohibits “knowingly providing support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” calling for violence or engaging in threats of genocide or harm against individuals or groups based on race, color, national origin or shared ancestry, or engaging in other conduct that interferes with maintaining a school environment free from discrimination based on the same criteria.
Hudson called the measure “selective, subjective, and poorly contextualized,” highlighting that it doesn’t include other protected categories such as sex, gender or sexual orientation.
The policy mirrors House Bill 2759, proposed during this year’s legislative session. The Arizona chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called the bill “a threat to freedom of speech and for unfairly singling out pro-Palestinian student groups” in a March press release.
The bill made it through the state House of Representatives but not the Senate and is unlikely to pass.
University of Arizona financial updates
University representatives also presented updates at the committee meeting. John Arnold, the UA’s interim chief financial officer, and Garth Perry, the university’s budget officer, gave an update on the school’s budget planning.
“What we prepared today is really a discussion of the assumptions that are going into our budget modeling,” Arnold said at the meeting, explaining that the presentation would focus on the conditions under which they’re creating the budget and not the budget itself. The final budget presentation will happen at the next board of regents meeting on June 20, 2024.
They’re projecting “moderate enrollment growth” with the school’s campus and University of Arizona online seeing a slight increase while the school’s online campus, the University of Arizona Global Campus, seeing no growth.
Arnold said this is an improvement. Though the global campus’ enrollment has continued to decline this year, they’re hoping it’ll hold steady in the upcoming year.
Perry presented the university’s projected cash-on-hand, a metric for the school’s cash reserves and one indicator of its financial health. The school’s cash-on-hand shortage in November of last year revealed the university’s financial crisis, which was caused by a significant budget deficit.
The board of regents requires schools to have at least 140 days of cash on hand. The UA officials’ presentation shows they estimate the school will have only 73 days of cash on hand by the end of this fiscal year. Arizona State University projects 163 days of cash on hand and Northern Arizona University projects 170.
Perry said the shortage will grow as leaders fix the school’s budget deficit by cutting costs and changing their processes. Once this work is done, he said, the school will start replenishing its reserves.
“We do expect fiscal [year] ’25 to be the end of the decline, and the path forward will begin to increase our reserves again, starting in fiscal [year] ’26,” Perry said.
Statewide budget reductions also pose a challenge, especially for the UA. Perry said cuts to the state budget means cuts to school programs.
“We are prepared for potential impacts and reductions,” he said, noting that the most challenging programs to cut would be the Arizona Teachers Academy and Arizona Promise Program, which gives qualifying students free tuition and is mandated by the state.
Regent Lyndel Manson expressed disdain at the prospect of state funding cuts and impacts on students.
“I’m disappointed that [the promise program] is even a conversation for the chopping block,” she said. “I think support of higher education and making our programs nearly free as possible, in a tuition sense, is the state’s obligation and responsibility.”
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