After Senate Bill 37’s passage, the University of Texas System Board of Regents authorized campus presidents to dissolve university faculty senates and replace them with less independent bodies.
Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 37, which gave university presidents the power to appoint half of the faculty senate and mandated these governing bodies cap their faculty senate members to 60, into law on June 22, 2025. Universities’ governing bodies were required to decide by Sept. 1, 2025, on whether to dissolve or keep campus faculty senates.
The bill also ordered that the UT System Board of Regents conduct a comprehensive review of the general education curriculum at least once every five years. Additionally, the bill creates the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Office of the Ombudsman to investigate complaints about universities’ noncompliance with state laws.
The Paisano reached out to three former UT San Antonio Faculty Senate members for more information on the senate’s function, but only one former member agreed to be interviewed anonymously.
The former senate member clarified the extent to which the senate could shape decisions and how its dissolution harms departments.
“At best, we can just write a memo and send it to the provost or president or both, and hope that they listen or take our concerns seriously,” the former senate member noted. “The loss of [the] faculty senate has put a damper on that interdepartmental communication, in ways that make it harder to run the university just on a day-to-day basis.”
SB 37 expands university presidential power by allowing the president to appoint one member from the department and having the faculty of that department elect another. This appointment method differed from how the faculty senate attained its members before its dissolution.
“You were elected by your department, and your job was to represent your department’s interests to the university as a whole,” the former faculty senate member explained. “[A faculty senate member] is somebody who is not administrative in any way. So in that sense, it was a real voice coming from [the] sort of rank and file faculty.”
The faculty senate was an advisory body composed of professors across UT San Antonio. It approved hiring and evaluation of faculty, curriculum design and academic policies. The UT System Board of Regents and administration considered the senate’s advice when making decisions. Now, UT System presidents have the power of appointment.
“If you have a president choosing an advisory board nowadays, they’re probably going to pick from leadership already. They’re not going to necessarily pick from a newly minted associate professor who’s just doing their job in the corner of whatever little department, who’s willing to serve,” the former faculty senate member said.
Under the board’s mandate and SB 37, the university established three advisory boards to continue advising on curricular formulation: the Faculty Advisory Council, the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee and the Graduate Faculty Committee.
Additionally, The Paisano sat down with former UT San Antonio mathematics professor Sandy Norman, whose views are independent of UT San Antonio.
“Those advisory groups are appointed by the president, controlled by the president and, in some respects, I’m sure, expected to do the president’s bidding, or at least provide advice that mirrors what the president wants to hear,” Norman stated. “Simply turning a faculty senate into a bunch of people appointed by the president to give him advice that he wants to hear is not good for the [university], not good for the community. It’s not good for the faculty or the students.”
When asked about the creation of the new advisory boards, the former faculty senate member was critical of the makeup and representation of these advisory boards.
“No one asked our department to provide anyone for any of these committees, so where is our voice?” the former faculty senate member questioned. “If [the advisory boards] are scaling back what they need from our departments, at the end of the day, we start firing people because we cannot afford to employ everybody that we have employed.
“This means our students, and not just our department students, but all students who have to take any classes with us have a much lower quality of instruction as a result.”
Norman explained his worries regarding the implementation of SB 37 creating an advisory with limited diversity in thought. He also emphasized the impact of the makeup of academics at UT San Antonio.
“[SB 37] is disenfranchising those people who would question,” Norman stated. “It’s trying to build a monoculture. A monoculture is only going to be as successful or as good as those people in it. You learn from getting pushback, from having other perspectives to look at, from having to question your own.”
