After the passage of the Texas Senate Bill 37 — a bill requiring a 5-year annual review of degrees and curriculum, limiting the power of faculty senates and downsizing faculty senates to 60 — the University of Texas Board of Regents ordered university presidents to eliminate their faculty senate and replace it with less independent groups, making them now accountable to the regents.
In January, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Office of the Ombudsman — created by SB 37 — launched a website for students to report any activity by university faculty or professors that violates Texas’ policies over curriculum and diversity, equity and inclusion.
The office divided complaints into two subsets: statutory complaints and nonstatutory complaints. The first is the statutory complaint section, which is any complaint that signals a university is directly violating state law, such as the SB 17 prohibition of any DEI practice. The second are responses “outside of the statutory complaint process.” Here, the office will contact universities to delve deeper into them and offer feedback. The website also stipulates that any false complaint made will subject the individual to costs incurred in investigating the report.
The website’s launch comes after Texas A&M University fired Melissa McCoul for discussing gender identity and UT San Antonio lost its $8 million research grant for violating DEI policies.
With the major surge in the restructuring of faculty senates and increased oversight over university curriculum, SB 17 sparked outrage from professors and education advocates who worry about the independence of these faculty bodies that have been key to their function as advisory boards. In addition to the faculty senates’ remodeling, SB 17 raises concerns about the autonomy and new restrictions placed on professors.
Dr. Marissa Munoz, an assistant professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Learning at Teaching at UT San Antonio , stressed the role of SB 37 in harming scholarship in universities.
“[SB 37] breeds a culture of fear,” Munoz explained. “I can’t even talk about current events because that might be offensive.”
Texas has “had several major institutions collapse what used to be an entire department of race, ethnicity, gender studies,” Munoz explained regarding the passage of SB 37. “Part of what makes that complicated is that information becomes harder to access.”
Over the course of recent months, universities, including Texas A&M University, have eliminated their women’s and gender studies degree programs. Munoz worries this act will only make educational accessibility even harder to attain.
“We’re erasing the history of how people have thought [and] how that information is accessible to the next generation,” Munoz commented.
