US campuses largely escape partisan hits on tenure and teaching

US states are wrapping up their annual legislative sessions, with higher education seeing itself as doing somewhat better than expected on threatened academic restrictions, but worse than hoped on funding.

While some states still have not finished their legislative sessions and some meet year-round, the emerging nationwide picture suggests that they largely backed away from some of the more extreme ideas they considered for weakening tenure or imposing curriculum limits.

On the financial front, however, higher education advocates counted numerous instances of lawmakers refusing to invest surpluses from pandemic-driven federal aid on public colleges and universities, and sometimes weakening their future flexibility by instead granting tax cuts.

“Honestly, I had expected better, given the historic budget surpluses in states around the country,” said Thomas Harnisch, vice-president for government relations at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO).

On the policy front, the year was dominated by conservative threats to impose partisan agendas on campus life and classroom activities. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, led that charge with actions that included appointing a partisan board for the New College of Florida and converting it from a progressive liberal arts campus to a home for ideological crusading.

In Florida and elsewhere, said Jeremy Young, a programme director at PEN America, a writers’ group concerned with issues of free expression, the most problematic new statewide higher education measures put restrictions on activities known as DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion.

Many of the new state laws aimed to limit institutional investments and staffing related to DEI, while a few of them addressed classroom discussions of the topic, Dr Young said. Florida did both, he noted, writing new laws that restrict the teaching of courses that aim to explain the nation’s history of racial oppression and give political appointees control over the content of general education programmes.

Yet only one state, North Dakota, managed to enact what Dr Young’s group regards as a “gag order” that explicitly bans certain types of educational speech in classroom environments at the postsecondary level.

On balance around the US, he said, “this year we have seen very little success” in campaigns by social conservatives to wage cultural battles against colleges and universities.

Lawmakers in Wisconsin have been trying to combine the financial with the political, passing a bill that would cut $32 million (£25 million) from the University of Wisconsin system’s annual budget, in what Republicans described as an amount equal to what the UW system spends on DEI administrators. The state’s Democratic governor refused to sign the provision into law.

“One thing I’ve seen that is pretty heartening is that, in places like Texas, there has been a lot of faculty standing up for their colleagues in DEI – which was certainly not a guarantee,” Dr Young said.

The tenure situation represents another positive development, Dr Young said. Several states confronted some “really draconian tenure restrictions”, including a proposal in Texas that would have banned the protection altogether. But only a few proposals bringing “minor erosions” in tenure rights managed to win passage around the country.

The nationwide funding situation among the states was more mixed, Dr Harnisch said. States with Democratic control – such as Illinois and Minnesota – made “strong new investments in higher education”, while places with Republican or mixed-party control, such as Iowa and Wisconsin, did not, he said.

Several states used their federal Covid aid surpluses to pass large tax cuts, at great risk to their colleges and universities, Dr Harnisch said. “Some states are being very aggressive on the tax-cutting front,” he said. “And that could be problematic for higher education in a few years.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com