Bill to limit faculty roles in university governance moves to Arizona Senate vote

The Republican-backed bill aiming to limit shared governance at public universities is headed to the full Arizona Senate after narrowly passing through a committee Wednesday.

The Senate Education Committee advanced the bill on a vote of 4-3.

According to Rep. Travis Grantham of Gilbert, University of Arizona President Robert C. Robbins, who has not made a public statement about the proposal, said he had “no opposition” to the bill, HB 2735.

The bill, cosponsored by Grantham and David Livingston of Peoria, would require the Arizona Board of Regents and university presidents to “consult” rather than “share responsibility” with faculty regarding educational and personnel matters.

Grantham told the Education Committee that he met with Robbins “in the last couple of weeks” to “let him know this isn’t an attack” on the university or the faculty.

Not everyone sees it that way, however. Proponents of shared governance say it would destroy governing bodies such as the UA’s Faculty Senate.

Mark Stegeman, a professor in the UA Eller College of Management and the parliamentarian for the Faculty Senate, drove two hours to speak to the committee for around 10 minutes.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

“There have been well publicized administrative issues at the UA recently,” he told the senators. “None of them have anything to do with the Faculty Senate.”

Because the Faculty Senate doesn’t make any budgetary decisions — it only discusses and approves academic program changes — it should not be blamed or punished for the university’s financial crisis, Stegeman said.

“The bill would force the (Faculty) Senate to lose those responsibilities and force them to return those to the (UA) administration,” he said. “It removes a tiny amount of authority to the (Faculty) Senate and gives it back to the administration.”

In fact, Stegeman said, the Faculty Senate hasn’t actually blocked a proposed program in the last five years. The ability to block provides “useful public discussion and useful public record,” he said.

He said that is important because “the university administration is a large, substantially unsupervised, bureaucracy.”

Sen. Justine Wadsack, a Tucson-area Republican, asked Stegeman about the political ideology of the Faculty Senate.

He responded that there was “no political litmus test for being in the Faculty Senate” and issues relating to that “rarely come up in the (Faculty) Senate.”