Editor’s note: All faculty are speaking for themselves and not on behalf of the University of Texas at Austin. Some professors asked to remain anonymous in fear of retaliation.
Gordon Novak and his colleagues knew their time on the University’s faculty council would end soon when Texas Senate Bill 37 went into effect.
He said council members felt like their meetings lost their purpose in the months after the law’s approval. Their final meetings were filled with confusion and yielded limited answers from the University about the council’s future.
A few days after Novak went to what would be the last council meeting, the UT System abolished the University’s elected faculty council on Aug. 21. The system was complying with SB 37, which directed universities to restructure their faculty councils to curb their “unchecked authority,” wrote former state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who authored the bill.
Out of 422 faculty who answered a Daily Texan survey question, almost 5% said they felt the faculty council had a large impact on decision-making at UT, but of the 143 who answered a question about the council allowing for faculty input, 39% thought it did.
The Texan sent a survey to all faculty members listed on their school’s websites to gauge their thoughts on SB 37 and received 551 responses — 16% of all UT faculty not in the Dell Medical School, School of Law and the College of Pharmacy. The initial survey was not sent to the Dell Medical School. Therefore, the final analysis does not include responses from the School of Law and College of Pharmacy because they only offer graduate degree programs, and the survey primarily focused on undergraduate schools.
“SB 37 is a sledgehammer solution to a non-problem,” Novak said. “(The faculty council) had no actual power to do anything. It could only advise the president, and the president might or might not take the advice.”
Novak said the new two-part faculty advisory structure is not a good replacement because President Jim Davis and Provost William Inboden select the members instead of faculty electing them. The new structures, announced in September, are the President’s Faculty Advisory Board, which will meet once a month with Davis, and a Faculty Advisory Cohort with at least one representative from each college or school.
The Texan created its survey before the new faculty advisory structure was announced, so the survey does not reflect faculty attitudes towards this new structure. The University declined to comment.
However, some professors felt like the old structures did not have a lot of power. Of the respondents who have served in the faculty council, 87% said it did not have an outsized impact on decision-making at UT.
Journalism professor Renita Coleman said she felt far removed from the faculty council. However, Coleman said she mainly participates in hiring committees. In the normal hiring process, a handful of professors process dozens of applications and make hiring recommendations to the dean and provost. She is mainly concerned that politics could influence the hiring and tenure process.
“The faculty council is there and doing important work, but it doesn’t touch me,” Coleman said. “When (UT) said they were disbanding it, I thought, ‘Well, maybe, I feel like I should not approve of that, but I’m not really sure what they do.’”
Mathematics professor Bernd Siebert said he is concerned the new faculty advisory structure under SB 37 creates a top-down power structure where lower-level faculty have limited input, which he said can become more sensitive to political influence.
“The governing body is a difficult question,” Siebert said. “What is the correct governing body? The faculty council … was at least some means of communication between the Tower and ordinary faculty like me.”
Out of the 385 faculty who responded to the survey question, 72% said they felt SB 37 impacted their sense of belonging and professional autonomy.
Education professor David DeMatthews, who previously served on the faculty council, said he and other faculty are unsure of how to feel about the council’s future. Despite this, he said this could be an opportunity for the University to foster dialogue about the council’s direction.
“There’s the question of what are the leadership styles of the individuals at the head of the institution,” DeMatthews said. “Do they want feedback and input, do they even think some resistance is a healthy part of an organization, or do they not want that? … That will just play out over time.”
Data Designer Yash Gupta and Data Analyst Alisha Wille contributed to the reporting of this story, as well as the analysis and creation of charts.
