AAUP at UT Austin Expresses Concerns about UT’s “Statement on Academic Integrity”
The Executive Committee of the American Association of University Professors chapter at the University of Texas at Austin (AAUP @UT Austin) is pleased to see the University reaffirming its commitment to academic freedom, but finds certain aspects of the new “Texas Statement on Academic Integrity: Academic Freedom and Its Responsibilities” concerning. For example:
(1) The statement repeats unproven allegations that faculty are responsible for a public loss of trust in the University. We strongly object to this misrepresentation of the dedicated faculty at the University of Texas. We are committed to teaching in a way that respects our subject matter and our students alike. Faculty and courses are regularly evaluated by students, and student criticisms are taken seriously by our colleagues.
(2) The statement creates a false distinction between the classroom and the world that is out of step with best teaching practices. Faculty and students frequently apply course materials to “real world” situations. The University is a forum for discussing the most important issues of the day in a context that values evidence-based argumentation. Limiting the ability of faculty and students to apply course material to the world is not the path to excellence.
(3) It is not clear how this statement will be used or who will be responsible for interpreting it. Our concern is that it could be used to sanction faculty because they have different views about what is balanced instruction on “disputed matters” and “unsettled issues,” or what content is “germane” to a course. According to AAUP principles, faculty should make these determinations. However, in the absence of an elected Faculty Council, we have no assurance that a faculty member, if accused of violating the statement, will receive due process. The statement contributes to a climate of fear that is not conducive to high quality education.
“I am glad to see that the President’s appointed committee is invested in the freedom to teach and learn,” noted Chapter President, Karma Chávez. “But since UT has already affirmed this commitment for decades, I worry that this statement serves to target faculty who teach in the most ‘controversial’ fields, such as ethnic and gender studies.”
“Although higher education nationwide is under political attack, UT’s reputation is strong, as evidenced by another year of record applications and our continued rise in national and international rankings,” commented Chapter Past President, Polly Strong. “That is because our faculty already have integrity and have responsibly employed academic freedom to teach students to understand their fields in a current and sophisticated manner. This statement is a solution in search of a problem.”
We urge the University of Texas to affirm confidence in our world-class faculty’s excellent teaching and to reaffirm the right of faculty to determine what is relevant to leading-edge teaching in their areas of expertise. This is at the heart of the AAUP’s concept of academic freedom.
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Founded in 1915, the American Association of University Professors has helped to shape American higher education by developing the standards and procedures that maintain quality in education and academic freedom in this country’s colleges and universities. The AAUP chapter at UT Austin works to advance this mission through advocacy, organizing, and education. Officers speak for themselves as private individuals.
Contact: Pauline Strong, PhD, President of the AAUP Chapter at UT Austin, strongpolly@gmail.com
Austin, Texas, September 27, 2025– On September 25, 2025, University of Texas President Jim Davis communicated to faculty his plan for complying with SB 37, the new law that places restrictions on Faculty Senates in public institutions in the state of Texas. Our chapter, together with other chapters in the Texas AAUP Conference, strongly opposed this law, and we now strongly oppose the extremely undemocratic form in which the University of Texas has chosen to implement it.
Since 1920, the American Association of University Professors has promoted shared governance as the best means to ensure meaningful faculty participation in the governance of institutions of higher education. The AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Governance of Colleges and Universities was jointly developed with the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and worked into the governing policies of universities across the country, including the University of Texas at Austin. Since even earlier–1945–the University of Texas Faculty Council has served as an essential mechanism for assuring academic freedom, due process, and faculty participation in university deliberations and decision-making.
Although SB 37 puts severe limits on the representativeness of Faculty Senates, it does allow for half of the members of a Faculty Senate to be elected by the faculty. Instead, President Davis has chosen to institute a President’s Faculty Advisory Board and a Faculty Advisory Council in which every single member is recommended by Deans and appointed by the President.
President Davis’s message to the faculty is that he values our guidance, advice, and collaboration. Yet his actions say otherwise. He is replacing an elected Faculty Council with a highly authoritarian, centralized system that will seriously limit the advice that he receives from our highly distinguished faculty. Our chapter President, Pauline Strong, says, “At a time when the University is promoting civics education, it is shocking that the University is instituting such an undemocratic form of governance. What message does this give our students? We strongly urge President Davis to reconsider this decision so that he will receive a wide range of advice from the faculty as a whole, not just those whom Deans and the President deem worthy of being heard.”
Every other public university system in the state has reinstated representative Faculty Senates that conform to SB 37. While these are a pale shadow of our former systems of shared governance, they are still far superior to the system instituted by the University of Texas. We call on President Davis to modify his plan to include elective faculty representatives to the extent allowed by SB 37. We also call on President Davis and Provost Inboden to communicate directly with the faculty–and not only with Deans–with further details about the new faculty advisory structure and how it will affect our crucial rights to academic freedom, due process, and participation in university deliberations–particularly deliberations in those areas in which faculty have particular investment and expertise: the curriculum, hiring, promotion, tenure, faculty grievances, and academic freedom. ###
Since 1915, the American Association of University Professors has helped to shape American higher education by developing the standards and procedures that maintain quality in education and academic freedom in this country’s colleges and universities. AAUP chapters at campuses across the country work to advance the mission of AAUP.
Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024, 10:00-11:30am CT, on Zoom.
Officers: Karma Chavez, Brian Evans, Andrea Gore, Lauren Gutterman, Steven Seegel, and Polly Strong (President) strongpolly@gmail.com.
Free inquiry, free expression, intellectual exploration, and open dissent are critical for student learning and the advancement of knowledge. Academic freedom is the freedom from institutional censorship of the instructional staff ‘s teaching, research, and expression. Academic freedom allows instructional staff to develop and disseminate new knowledge from all viewpoints, including conservative, moderate, liberal, and apolitical. Safeguards include shared governance, tenure and due process.
About AAUP
We champion academic freedom, advance shared governance, and organize all faculty to promote economic security and quality education. If you’re not already a member, please join AAUP – here are several reasons. Please follow us on X @aaup_utAustin and @TexasAaup.
Announcements
Join us for our Austin-area AAUP-AFT social gathering of academic freedom enthusiasts on the third Thursday of the month at 5pm at Tweedy’s Bar at 2908 Fruth St. near the UT campus. Bring a colleague.
The Texas AAUP-AFT Conference Spring 2025 Meeting will be Saturday, Feb. 22, 2025, 9am to 1pm in Austin, Texas, and on Zoom.
Monitored implementation of SB 17 & SB 18. Met with Provost & VP for Legal Affairs to express concerns about over-implementation. Publicized carve-outs for teaching & research.
Educated administrators & faculty on academic freedom & shared governance, including at Dean’s Council meeting (slides).
Advocated for academic freedom & due process for students.
Deeper attacks on academic freedom and its safeguards of tenure, due process, and shared governance than the last session.
Bills expected to censor certain course topics and content, strip faculty oversight of curriculum, and regulate faculty senates into irrelevance
Bills expected to empower Boards of Regents to directly appoint all department chairs and remove shared governance and academic freedom as criteria for university and college accreditation
Bills expected to remove or defund cultural, ethnic, and gender studies across a wide variety of disciplines including Liberal Arts, Social Work, Business, and Medicine.
State conferences bring together members of AAUP campus chapters, along with AAUP members working to form chapters on their campuses. As vehicles for collective action—within, and sometimes beyond, state boundaries—conferences connect faculty members with colleagues from other colleges and universities to advance AAUP principles and goals. Increasingly, they also provide members with a means of fighting back against legislative efforts to target higher education, often in collaboration with other local, regional, or national organizations.
AAUP members from seventeen chapters in Texas first formed a state AAUP conference in 1964. The conference currently represents twenty-eight AAUP advocacy chapters, including twelve new AAUP chapters certified at the June AAUP Council meeting. With AAUP members on seventy-five Texas campuses, the conference is also encouraging the formation of other new chapters in the state. In recent years, the Texas AAUP conference has developed strong relationships with allies such as the Texas Association of College Teachers, the Texas Faculty Association (the state-level affiliate of the National Education Association), the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Texas Students for DEI, and the Texas State Employees Union. While the conference has a long history of engaging with lawmakers on issues relevant to higher education, it has been particularly active in doing so since February 2022, when Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick vowed to end tenure in public colleges and universities and when the Texas legislature began to propose dozens of bills hostile to education. After the national AAUP affiliated with the AFT in summer 2022, the Texas AAUP conference began to coordinate with the AFT’s state federation on legislative advocacy, and it voted in March 2024 to affiliate with Texas AFT. As the first AAUP conference to formalize such a state-level affiliation, the newly named Texas AAUP-AFT offers a model for other AAUP conferences that have the opportunity to affiliate with AFT state federations.
We learned more about Texas AAUP-AFT from conference leaders.
What have the purpose, focus, and activities of the conference been over the years?
Because collective bargaining is not allowed for public employees in Texas, the focus of the state AAUP conference has traditionally centered on advocacy for academic freedom and shared governance and not on contract negotiation. This advocacy has been carried out both in individual institutions of higher learning and, increasingly, in relation to the Texas legislature.
How has the conference involved members in legislative advocacy? Which advocacy strategies have been most effective?
Texas AAUP-AFT members actively advocate for higher education in the state and at national legislative offices. The Texas legislature, which leans hard right, has eroded cornerstones of modern higher education: academic freedom; tenure; and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts. Through it all, Texas AAUP-AFT members have formed relationships with legislators on both sides of the aisle and have been able to temper some language in bills that would have harmed the academic profession even more severely.
The Texas legislature convenes every other January for 140 days. During the 2023 legislative session, our members focused on three anti–higher education bills: SB 16, designed to ban certain types of teaching on race and gender; SB 17, to ban DEI offices and practices; and SB 18, to abolish tenure. In fall 2022 and throughout the session, our members drafted white papers that explained the harms of the bills; visited with legislators and their staffers to explain the value of academic freedom, equity, and tenure to a thriving university; and stayed up until all hours of the night to testify against these bills at hearings. Moreover, our members developed a robust media strategy to publicize our viewpoints widely. We also worked closely with allied groups across the state and nation including Texas AFT, Texas Students for DEI, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and several faculty organizations.
These efforts resulted in some significant wins and disappointing losses. SB 16, 17, and 18 all passed the Texas senate. SB 16, however, never made it out of the House Committee on Higher Education— a big win for academic freedom. The Texas House of Representatives passed its own version of SB 18 that didn’t eliminate tenure but significantly diminished tenure protections, and that version became law. SB 17 became law in a form that is wreaking havoc across Texas campuses as administrators appear to have interpreted it in the most extreme ways possible: closing whole academic units, dismissing hundreds of staff members primarily in student services, and preventing faculty members from applying for grants for research, training, programming, or clinical trials that have an equity component.
Nationally, our success has been more evident. We find that sometimes legislators just need to hear from faculty members. A case in point was when Texas AAUP members visited the state’s members of US Congress on the 2016 AAUP Capitol Hill Day and asked for reinstatement of summer Pell Grants. Representative Bill Flores was receptive and pushed it through Congress. We also worked with Senator John Cornyn’s office on several issues, even getting him to cosponsor a bill that the AAUP endorsed.
Why did the conference decide to affiliate with Texas AFT? What are the benefits of state-level affiliation for Texas AAUP-AFT members?
At first, Texas AAUP members were skeptical about the national AFT affiliation. The issues are different for unions in right-to-work states like Texas, and the Texas delegation, along with some delegates from other states without collective bargaining rights, were opposed to the 2022 affiliation vote. That has changed in Texas because of the AFT’s investment in the state. We’ve found that the coordination in legislative advocacy with the AFT has worked to our advantage. Texas AFT already had connections at the legislature that the conference lacked, allowing us to temper, if not stop, some of the worst bills, including the one targeting faculty tenure. Having access to staff is new to us. We have been volunteer-driven in the past. Now we see support from the two new full-time organizers that Texas AFT hired for higher education and from the well-organized and well-seasoned team of forty Texas AFT staff members in government relations, policy analysis, labor law, media relations, IT, and lobbying, who have taken our organizing and training capabilities to the next level. The Texas AFT member benefits of professional liability coverage and legal aid for criminal cases provide peace of mind. We are building our legal defense fund. Probably most important, membership in the AAUP has doubled in the last year in Texas! Faculty are meeting more frequently, and there is a sense that we are not in it alone.
How did the conference go about the process of affiliation? What advice would you offer to other state AAUP conferences pursuing affiliation with AFT federations in their states?
The statewide affiliation with the AFT resulted from the hard work of Texas conference President Brian Evans and Texas AFT President Zeph Capo. Through many meetings with their executive committees, Texas AFT and Texas AAUP were able to find a way to bring the strengths of both organizations to the table. The professional liability coverage benefit was attractive to faculty who are finding themselves in the crosshairs of attacks from various directions. Training opportunities have dramatically increased. Texas faculty members now find themselves part of a larger organization that includes educators from across the K–12 and higher education spectrum.
What are the priorities for Texas AAUP-AFT in the new academic year and beyond?
Texas AAUP-AFT will continue to develop the new relationship with Texas AFT and grow the organization. In April, Lieutenant Governor Patrick issued study items for the January 2025 legislative session that once again target faculty tenure, DEI, free speech, shared governance, and accreditation. Texas faculty members are under no illusion that the attacks will stop. Through our stronger statewide organization, we will have a bigger voice at the legislature.
Texas AAUP-AFT is also training members of its new Office of Faculty Representation to assist individual faculty members in trouble on their campuses. Finally, Texas AAUP-AFT hopes to extend our reach through increased membership. Our expanded access to liability insurance, legal aid, training, and support will all be attractive to faculty in the state.
Trinity Valley Community College (TVCC) was sued in Federal Court on October 18, 2024, by former full-time instructor of Anatomy and Physiology, Michael Harman. The suit alleges that Harman was targeted and retaliated against by the college for being a “gadfly” in raising concerns to administrators of violating his Academic Freedom, not following their own procedures with regards to certification of an Open Educational Resource course, underpayments of overload wages to himself and other faculty, and filing open records requests. According to the lawsuit, as a result of his protected activities, TVCC ultimately ended Harman’s employment and threatened to arrest him should he enter college property within the next two years. Harman is suing TVCC for violating his Constitutional rights under the 1st, 4th, and 14th amendments, breaching his contract, and violating his rights under the Texas Public Information Act.
According to the suit, after 12 years of employment with the college and always having excellent evaluations, Professor Harman was non-renewed on May 31, 2024, and initially not given a reason for the non-renewal. However, the non-renewal came just 8 business days after Harman filed a formal grievance to the TVCC Board of Trustees, alleging the college had violated his Academic Freedom by refusing to honor his syllabus policy of failing a cheating student. The suit alleges that the college eventually cited that TVCC non-renewed him because he had violated a 2022 “Memo of Counseling.” According to the suit, that memo was made in retaliation for Harman exercising his protected rights in speaking-out about college administrators not following their own policies, underpaying him and other faculty, because he filed grievances, and because he requested open records requests to the college under the Texas Public Information Act (TPIA).
The suit cites that through open records requests, Harman was able to obtain communications among TVCC administrators that showed they were attempting to establish a legal file against him to end his employment for making his open records requests, inquiring into potential pay issues, and for advancing “conspiracy theories” surrounding actions by the administration. The suit exhibits multiple emails Harman discovered through open records requests, including one email in which a supervisor wrote to other administrators “He’s a lunatic!”, and “Have a Harman-free weekend.” One email among administrators cited in the suit had a subject line of “The Harman Effect.”
According to the lawsuit, on the day Harman was non-renewed, he was given a criminal no trespass warming by the campus police chief, declaring that if he remained on or returned to TVCC property without permission within the next two years, he could be arrested and charged with criminal trespass. Harman’s suit alleges that in issuing him the criminal no trespass warming, the college violated his 4th amendment right under the Constitution because it deprived him, without due process, from being able to engage in activities on campus he enjoyed as a private citizen, such as attending sporting events and the Farmer’s Market.
The lawsuit is entitled Harman v. Trinity Valley Community College. Michael Harman is being represented by Hill Gilstrap, PC.
Our faculty working conditions are our students’ learning environment, and the need to advocate for better faculty working conditions to improve the quality of education is greater than ever.
In our August survey, faculty revealed deep dissatisfaction with the state of higher ed in Texas, highlighting the negative impacts of political interference and deteriorating working conditions on faculty morale and retention [1]. The top concern was the state’s political climate followed by anxieties about academic freedom, salary, and diversity, equity, and inclusion issues.
We’re much stronger together when championing free inquiry, free expression, and open dissent, which are critical for student learning and the advancement of knowledge. Our collective voice is stronger when advocating against infringement on academic freedom and its safeguards of due process and shared governance. We can push for transparency and participation in budget decisions, and call out administrations when they cut teaching budgets while bloating their own administrative budgets. [2]
Since 1915, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has been the central organizing force in higher ed due to its widely adopted principles on academic freedom [3] and shared goverance [4]. In Texas, the advocacy by AAUP members is amplified by the 66,000 members and 40 staff of Texas American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Texas AAUP is affiliated with Texas AFT.
Texas AAUP-AFT provides training for advocacy on campus as AAUP members and with your elected officials as private individuals using your First Amendment Rights. Here’s the link to join. Membership benefits include liability insurance and legal aid. Monthly dues are on a sliding scale, and membership is kept confidential. Here are several reasons to join AAUP. Please provide a nonwork email address on the registration form to allow us the widest possibility latitude in discussing issues and action to take.
[2] Faculty Compensation Survey. AAUP has been conducting this survey since 1972. The data are drawn from a national database to which colleges and universities report salary data. The survey has shown that faculty salaries have been flat since 1972; i.e., they have not increased after adjusting for inflation. The survey also tracks administrative bloat, which draws significant resources away from the hiring of more faculty, multi-year employment contracts and tenure, staff compensation, and student support.
[3] Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom & Tenure, jointly formulated by American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) representing college and university administrations and AAUP representing professors. Adopted by more than 85% of public and non-profit four-year universities in the US.
[4] Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, jointly formulated by the AAUP, American Council on Education, and Association of Governing Boards of Universities & Colleges. The AAUP represents faculty, ACE represents college and university administrations, and AGB represents University Systems, Boards of Regents, and Boards of Trustees. ACE has more than 1500 college and university members and AGB has more than 1300 college, university, and system members.
AAUP@UT 