The Arizona Board of Regents, the governing body for the state’s three public universities, is expected to hold a vote on a new policy Thursday barring student groups from supporting “foreign terrorist organizations.”
It is also expected to approve the 2025 budget for the deficit-ridden University of Arizona at its Thursday meeting.
All three state universities will present, and ask approval of, their fiscal year 2025 budgets in the public portion of the board’s meeting at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.
The UA started the year in a deficit of $177 million, decreased it to $162 million, and projects it will shrink to $53 million by the end of next year.
The regents will also discuss the “reported progress and next steps related to the university’s efforts to align UA (Global Campus’s) practices with board policy.”
The update on the University of Arizona Global Campus, a formerly private online school that the UA bought in a controversial move, was set to take place earlier this month but was postponed.
Student organizations
The new policy up for final approval is called “Prohibition on Support for Foreign Terrorist Organizations by Student Groups and Organizations.” It was approved by the board’s university governance and operations committee earlier this month.
It is likely to be pushed through its first vote but will not be adopted. The policy will only be adopted after it passes a full board vote at two meetings.
ABOR’s proposed policy states that all students, including those who are “perceived to be Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab or Palestinian, must be provided a school environment free from discrimination based on race, color or national origin, including shared ancestry.”
The policy would prohibit student groups from “knowingly (providing) material support to a designated terrorist organization.” They could not call for violence and/or genocide against any individual group and “engage in or promote in person or in any other medium, including but not limited to social media, threats of genocide or harm against any student based on their race, color, national origin or shared ancestry.”
New UA programs
Additionally, the board is likely to approve the UA’s nine new academic program requests for this fall as well as two new academic programs for fall 2025.
Those are a bachelor of science in real estate, a bachelor of arts in molecular and cellular biology, a bachelor of science in nursing in collaborative nursing education, a master of science and PhD in computer science and engineering, a master of arts in sport and recreation leadership, a bachelor of science in nutrition and dietetics, a bachelor of science in nutrition and wellness, and a bachelor of arts and science in justice and global security.
UA also seeks approval to add master’s of science in marriage family therapy and in midwifery for the fall 2025 semester.
“Each of these new programs has been fully accounted for in the university’s (fiscal year) 2025 budgets,” the UA’s proposal states. “The programs included in this submission make extensive use of existing faculty and courses, and the university is confident they will have strong enrollments.”
The board has also signaled that approval for the UA’s new School of Global Studies is likely to occur.
The new school is within the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. It would include the relocation of the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies, the Centers for Latin American Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, gender and women’s studies, the global studies program, the human rights practice program, Middle Eastern and North African studies and the Southwest Center.
University officials said earlier this month that the school would partially “address the $2.8 million structural year-over-year deficit across these small units.”
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