A GOP-sponsored bill that strips language in a current statute to weaken the governing power of faculty representatives at Arizona’s public universities moved out of the House Appropriations Committee Wednesday with 10 state lawmakers voting in favor and five against the proposal.
The changes would diminish the longstanding shared governance role of faculty at the three state universities — University of Arizona, Northern Arizona University and Arizona State University — from participants to consultants in governance, personnel and education matters, centralizing power with the university president and the Arizona Board of Regents.
Republican State Rep. Travis Grantham, representing District 14, proposed House Bill 2735 with Republican State Rep. David Livingston, representing District 28, as a co-sponsor. The political actions come amid widespread outrage and response — from taxpayers and college stakeholders to Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs — as the University of Arizona faces a fiscal scandal.
Theodore Downing, a UA faculty senate member and professor of social development, said he helped write the bill’s original language that Grantham is attempting to overhaul. He thinks that Grantham’s proposal 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 proposed bill 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 “shall actively participate in” the development of university policy.
The bill’s timing may draw concern from faculty, staff and students who have called for UA President Robert Robbins to resign, as well as for greater oversight of UA’s executive administration and the Board of Regents for mismanaging the university’s finances. The governor recently joined the call for independent oversight “to restore faith and trust in the university.” Hobbs set deadlines for regents to answer to the public.
“This is no longer just about finances, this is about a lack of accountability, transparency, and at the end of the day, leadership,” Hobbs wrote. Regents have responded, saying they are hiring an independent consultant for a third-party forensic analysis.
If approved, the bill would pave the way for decisions at Arizona’s public universities to be made without faculty workers having a voice for checks and balances.
“It says the president is the only person with power and he cannot delegate authority,” Downing said. “It ends administrative bloat because there’s only one administrator — the president.”
At the legislative committee hearing, Grantham argued that the change is a mere formality and said that current law is partially to blame for the UA’s current situation. He said it’s crucial that faculty and universities understand the president is the ultimate decision maker at the university.
“We really need to make sure it’s clearer, apparently, in the law that this is the function of the president,” he said at the hearing. “Part of the reason the UA is in the position they’re in is because this wasn’t clear enough.”
The UA is currently on track to overspend by $177 million, $37 million more than last year’s deficit of $140 million, according to a financial report by the UA and the Board of Regents that was produced at the request of Gov. Hobbs. Faculty Senate leaders have stated that the shortfalls are due to misspending by UA’s top leadership, including Robbins, that was approved by regents. Robbins has said that the university miscalculated its investments, including in campus sports.
The bill also requires each university to provide the Board of Regents with “access to the university’s accounting and reporting system for oversight and monitoring purposes,” according to the summary.
Democratic State Rep. Nancy Gutierrez, representing District 18, was one of the few legislators who spoke against the bill Wednesday.
“Yes, clearly, there needs to be a central governance because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t do that,” Gutierrez said. “But I don’t think that that’s necessarily the issue and the faculty of UA is coming to me saying they’re not the ones that created that problem and they don’t want to be cut out of the process.”
Grantham shot back, saying that he’d already told Gutierrez what UA President Robbins wants.
“But I don’t think we’re here to do his bidding,” Gutierrez responded. “I’m representing, also, the people of Tucson that work for him. They’re saying they don’t want him to have that ultimate responsibility without sharing governance with them. Because look at what the situation is.”
Ten people signed up to speak against the bill Wednesday, while the Arizona Board of Regents stood neutral. Regent Thomas Adkins signed up to speak “as needed” on behalf of the board, however, he never took the podium, despite Gutierrez’s concerns.
The bill is still moving through the Republican-led House. And has come to UA stakeholders’ attention as university faculty, staff and students face layoffs and cuts due to what many say was mismanagement of public university funds at the hands of administrators like President Robbins and former Chief Financial Officer Lisa Rulney.
Rulney resigned amid pressure. However, the campus community was further flabbergasted when they discovered UA executive leaders allowed Rulney to stay on in a business operations advisory role and maintain her full salary.
Since the financial problems were exposed in November 2023, faculty representatives have been advocating for more say in how the university operates — expressing distrust in the school’s current administrators.
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