On Thursday, the Senate Education K-16 Committee heard its first higher education bills of the session, including Senate Bill 37, Sen. Brandon Creighton’s omnibus bill.
Imagine the worst, most destabilizing threats to higher education wrapped into one piece of legislation – that’s SB 37.
One of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s top priorities, SB 37 grants Boards of Trustees for community college districts and Boards of Regents for university systems unilateral authority over curriculum, academic policies, hiring decisions, tenure evaluations, and more.
The bill would also establish the “Office of Excellence in Higher Education” of governor appointees within the Higher Education Coordinating Board. Its sole purpose would be investigating colleges to ensure curriculum, hiring practices, and faculty senate activity remain “neutral” while implementing public policies like the ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and hiring practices passed in 2023.
Under SB 37, Texans would have governor-appointed watchdogs monitoring our community colleges and universities to make sure everything is aligned with their political agenda. And if colleges are determined to be out of compliance? They could lose all state funding for the year.
In a joint statement, Texas AFT President Zeph Capo and Texas AAUP-AFT President Brian Evans warned of the damage this bill would wreak across our state’s highly competitive colleges and universities.
“If this bill is truly intended to ‘safeguard taxpayer investments,’ I would ask why it implements an unaccountable, unelected bureaucracy to micromanage universities and meddle in curriculum,” Capo said. “If implemented, SB 37 would drive more of our esteemed faculty away from Texas universities, make it near impossible to recruit top talent, and diminish the learning opportunities for our students. In this way, it’s a true successor to last session’s SB 17.”
Evans warned that SB 37 would “de-professionalize” Texas higher education institutions and, in many ways, radicalize how this state handles education decisions.
“If anything is radical here, it is SB 37, which would take curriculum out of the hands of the subject matter experts. Instead, decisions about what we teach in the fields we have spent our lives studying would be left to unelected bureaucrats, who would have the power to apply their own ideological litmus tests to what is considered appropriate curricula,” Evans said. “That is indoctrination, not education, and it would be a death knell for Texas’ standing as a top-tier education and research destination.”
During Thursday’s hearing, Sen. Mayes Middleton described SB 37 as “just more oversight.” But as Texas AAUP-AFT leaders and members have dissected the legislation, it has become clear the bounds of this proposal stretch far beyond oversight; this bill amounts to a government-mandated takeover of public higher education.
Our higher education members turned out to testify against the bill, showing once again who the real experts on higher education are: faculty members who have dedicated their lives and careers to studying their fields and educational best practices.
Texas AAUP-AFT member Dr. Andrea Gore, professor of pharmacy at UT-Austin and a former faculty senate president, said it best during her testimony:
“Faculty senates ensure our students have a strong curriculum and offerings. They provide a formal mechanism for open communication among faculty, students, and administrators. This requires academic freedom and allowing faculty to do exactly what they were hired to do: use our expertise to help build the best possible teaching and research universities.”
At the end of Thursday’s hearing, SB 37 was left pending.