Storm Watch: April 2026

For those who might have held out hopes that the assaults on higher education from state and federal government were going to diminish in the coming year—and I count myself among their naive number—it is not yet time to abandon your storm shelter. Here is some of what is hitting select states, which means, in the age of copy-and-paste legislation, they are likely coming in one form or another to a red or purple state near you.

Louisiana HB 1063, sponsored by Representative Owen, titled the "Higher Education Accountability and Governance Act" has four major provisions that are looking increasingly familiar:

1. Core Curriculum Each public board must annually review all courses in every degree program's core curriculum and certify that they are 1) foundational to a sound education, 2) necessary for civic or professional life, and 3) reflective of "historic liberal arts and preprofessional disciplines." Boards must vote each year to reauthorize or revise core curricula, with review materials posted publicly 30 days in advance. Full compliance is required by the end of the 2027–28 academic year.
2. Hiring and Employment Every tenure-track faculty job posting must be approved by the board at a public meeting, and posted online 30 days prior. All senior administrative hires (chancellor, president, provost, dean, and equivalents) also require board approval, with CVs posted publicly beforehand. Presidential and provost search committees must have at least 60% management board members, who are the only voting members. The board cannot delegate any of these duties.
3. Faculty Senates Faculty senates and equivalent bodies are explicitly reduced to a strictly advisory, non-binding role. In addition, the university president will appoint the head of faculty governance bodies; membership would be limited to tenured full professors who will serve one-year terms with a four-year cooling-off period before re-eligibility; no dedicated staff can be funded for the senate; and attendance must be recorded at meetings involving no-confidence votes or curriculum decisions.
4. Nonacademic Disciplinary Proceedings Following any "major campus disruption," the university must submit quarterly, anonymized disciplinary reports to the board for 18 months, including data on sanctions and the names of admissions officers who reviewed the applications of sanctioned students.

Beginning in FY 2027–28, institutions cannot spend any appropriated funds until their management board certifies compliance with the entire act. This is the enforcement teeth.

This bill fits squarely within the current wave of model legislation—traceable to the Manhattan Institute, Goldwater Institute, and similar sources—aimed at shifting control of university governance from faculty to politically appointed boards. The faculty senate provisions in particular are a direct assault on shared governance as defined by the 1966 AAUP Statement: the bill explicitly subordinates faculty bodies to an advisory role, strips them of independent leadership, and narrows membership in ways that would gut their representativeness—especially at a time when full professors make up an ever-shrinking proportion of the overall faculty at many institutions. The hiring provisions essentially make every tenure-line search a board-level event. The compliance/funding mechanism is the same blunt instrument Ohio's HB 598 (currently in legislative limbo, but hovering in the background): defund first, ask questions later.

Alabama's HB 580 passed the House 82-18 on March 31 and is now in the Senate. It amends Title 16 of the Alabama Code to add three new articles covering faculty senates, tenure, and curriculum control:

• Faculty Senates (Article 2) Only the board may establish a faculty senate—and any senate in existence before October 1, 2026 is automatically abolished unless the board formally ratifies its continuation and certifies it meets the new requirements. Membership is capped at 60, with two representatives per college or school: one elected by faculty, one appointed by the university president. The president also appoints senate leadership. Faculty senators can be removed immediately by the president for "failing to conduct responsibilities in good faith" or "other misconduct." As with the bill in Louisiana, faculty senates are stripped of any decision-making authority and reduced to being advisory only, and may not issue public statements on behalf of the institution. They can only offer confidential recommendations to leadership.
• Tenure (Article 3) Each governing board must adopt a tenure policy that includes post-tenure review no less than every six years and no more than annually, with standards including peer review and professional development. The grounds for dismissal of tenured faculty are broad and loosely defined, including "behavior that adversely affects the institution," "unprofessional conduct," and, broader still, "other good cause as defined in the institution's policies." Due process is required before dismissal but is defined minimally: written notice and a hearing before a designated administrator— notably not a faculty committee or peer body.
• Curriculum Control All courses and curricula required for a degree must be approved by the governing board. Boards have explicit control over "any course or subject taught" at the institution, though they may delegate approval to a designated administrator.
• Accreditors All three articles contain identical language barring accrediting agencies from compelling compliance violations or taking adverse action against institutions for following this law. Institutions are also prohibited from using accreditation standards as justification for non-compliance. (Louisiana's bill has similar language.)

Alabama's bill is structurally similar to Louisiana's but a bit more direct. Both effectively neuter meaningful faculty governance, but Alabama goes further by abolishing existing senates and prohibiting them from making public statements. Louisiana's approach is more procedurally elaborate (30-day public posting, annual certification reports, board-level hiring approvals for every tenure-track line), while Alabama concentrates power more directly in the university president and governing board with fewer procedural guardrails. The tenure provisions in Alabama are also notably more expansive than anything in Louisiana's bill, essentially giving boards a menu of loosely-worded grounds to dismiss tenured faculty while keeping due process requirements thin.

It is also worth pausing over the language in Alabama's bill that prohibits shared governance bodies from issuing public statements on behalf of the institution. §16-5A-23(b) reads: "A faculty senate may not issue public statements on behalf of the institution or otherwise represent institutional positions." As is often the case, this is poorly written legislation. Such vague prose is most often by design, to make it easier for more moderate legislatures to miss the true intent which will become clear only after passage. 

At first read, one could reasonably read the language as suggesting merely that a senate body may not claim to speak for the university. This is already the case at all institutions, and so it would seem unnecessary but ultimately innocuous. But the sentence continues: "or otherwise represent institutional positions." Here it gets murkier implies that "the institution" is not—as the term is commonly deployed in higher education, the university as a whole—but the senate itself as an organized body. If this is the intent (and I am 99.7% certain it is) then no official resolution, public statement, or no-confidence vote issued in the senate's name could be made public. 

Tipping my sense of the intent here from 99.7 to 100% is the clarifying sentence that follows: "Nothing in this section may be construed to limit the ability of a faculty senate to provide confidential advisory recommendations." The word "confidential" implies that the only permissible mode of senate communication is explicitly non-public. So, sure, senate can pass a resolution, but they cannot tell anyone about it except the president or board. 

As discussed in an earlier post, all of this is part of a wave of legislation which is increasingly targeting shared governance in state higher education institutions. These include Texas SB 37 (signed June 2025), which made all senate and other shared governance bodies strictly advisory and which assigns to the president of the university power to select leaders and remove members of any such body. SB 37's success in quickly dismantling the Texas system's shared governance bodies has made it the template for this latest wave.

The effort's roots go back to 2015, when Wisconsin Republicans approved a bill that relegated faculty senates to an advisory-only position. What's changed is the pace, coordination, and breadth of the provisions being bundled together as part of the broader attack on higher education, significantly weakened since 2015 by a systematic program of demonization and propaganda.

It has become a common practice to smuggle provisions placing limits on tenure, academic freedom, and shared governance into state budgets. Such is the case in South Carolina's  FY 2026-2027 budget proposal (H. 5126), which the S.C. House passed just days ago (it now moves to the Senate Finance Subcommittee, which begins deliberations this week).

The House budget proposes allocations of $53 million to reduce tuition costs at the state's public colleges, but with strict new requirements attached. Universities accepting these funds must prioritize STEM programs and suspend new admissions to any academic major that has lost money for four consecutive years. 

The STEM-only investment requirement means universities cannot use the tuition-mitigation money to shore up humanities or social science programs. And the "lost money for four consecutive years" trigger for suspending admissions is doing a lot of work in making humanities programs especially vulnerable to being shuttered. Without ever having to explicitly name the target, a bright target is placed on a range of programs the legislators distrust for ideological and fiscal reasons.

As the Senate Finance Subcommittee begins deliberations this coming week, it will be important to see whether the South Carolina Senate snips the strings attached in the House version. It is not uncommon for state senates to be the moderating force in these processes. 

Regardless of its short-term fate, as a storm watcher this one is worth some grim attention. This is a notably different mechanism from other higher ed bills I have been tracking. It's not restructuring who runs the university or directly targeting curriculum or its oversight. Instead, it uses tuition-relief funding to starve specific academic areas without directly acknowledging this as the goal. This makes it harder to oppose directly and potentially harder to uproot down the road. 

Much of what we are seeing here finds its origins in various well-resourced "policy shops." I will discuss the growing influence and hubris of these legislative drafting organizations and the think tanks and funding streams that support them in an upcoming post.