Gutting faculty senates’ independence. Increasing secrecy in university presidential searches. Banning faculty input on whether their colleagues should be fired for misconduct.
These are some laws aimed at higher education that passed this year in the many states where the regular legislative session has already ended. Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said red states are apparently trying to outdo one another on “who can create the most undemocratic, antifaculty legislation.”
“Tenure, shared governance and academic freedom make up a very important infrastructure,” Wolfson said, “and if you look at the bills that have come out in the last three months, what you see is an attack on each one of those three pillars.”
Republicans have offered assorted justifications for their legislation, such as appropriately shifting more authority over universities into the hands of their governing boards, making faculty senates and faculty themselves more accountable, and encouraging candidates to apply for president positions by easing fears that their current employers will find out.
Laura Benitez, senior manager of state policy and government affairs at PEN America, a free speech advocacy group, said 2026 has continued a trend of legislators using “more subtle ways to get at achieving education censorship.” And while she said conservatives may have started out targeting critical race theory in education—PEN has tracked higher ed censorship bills as far back as 2021—their current use of “more indirect tactics to subject universities and faculty to government control shows that there’s a much more broad targeting of what is acceptable discourse.”
But this year’s legislation hasn’t just been about targeting faculty protections and governance. In general, “states are getting much more assertive in higher education policy and more aggressive in some areas where, historically, that had been left to university governing boards,” said Tom Harnisch, vice president for government relations for the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.
Here is some noteworthy legislation—on tenure, shared governance, unionization and more—passed in nine states: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Tennessee and Utah. This list isn’t exhaustive.
Alabama
Alabama lawmakers adopted part of the Texas playbook to upend the higher ed tradition of faculty and administrators exercising shared governance over universities. House Bill 580, which Republican governor Kay Ivey signed into law this month, allows public university presidents to take over faculty governance bodies.
Alabama’s law—which doesn’t apply to the University of Alabama or Auburn University; both are protected by the state Constitution—says only the governing boards of four-year public universities can create faculty senates, which the law stresses shall be “advisory only.” Existing faculty senates will end Oct. 1 unless they are established according to the new law.
HB 580 requires governing boards to determine the conditions for senate membership, and university presidents must appoint the senate leaders unless their boards decide otherwise. Each college or school within a university will have two senate representatives, but the university president will appoint one of each pair. The rest will be elected by fellow faculty.
Boards can also add nonfaculty to these faculty senates. And all senate members can be removed by recommendation of the university provost with approval by the president, with no cause given.
The University of Alabama is not subject to the new state law abolishing faculty senates in their current form.
Carmen K. Sisson/iStock/Getty Images
The law further says boards “have control over any course or subject taught.”
It also requires universities to pass post-tenure review policies that can lead to firings. But tenured faculty can also be fired outside of post-tenure review for broad reasons, including failure to “meet professional responsibilities,” behavior that “adversely affects” a university, “policy violations deemed to be terminable offenses,” program cuts or “other good cause” as a university defines it.
The law also says no university “may use an accrediting standard as justification to violate” the law, nor can accreditors compel universities to violate it.
Florida
Under House Bill 757, which awaits Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s signature or veto, public college and university presidents could allow faculty and other nonstudent employees to carry guns on campus if they go through a training program.
Lawmakers named the program after three coaches killed in the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting: athletic director Chris Hixon, coach Aaron Feis and coach Scott Beigel. The program was already allowed in K–12 schools.
HB 757 would also require, among other things, that public colleges and universities conduct annual “security risk assessments,” adopt “active assailant response plans” and train all employees and students in “active assailant preparedness.”
Idaho
Public college and university president searches will be more secret after Republican governor Brad Little signed into law Senate Bill 1225 in February.
The law requires the Idaho State Board of Education to use search committees, which must “protect candidate confidentiality” and recommend a single presidential finalist to the board in closed session.
The board can keep rejecting these secret finalist recommendations from the committee. But, at least 10 days before the board’s final decision, the sole finalist’s name must be revealed.
SB 1225 also cuts from state law a requirement to reveal the names of the final five applicants, shrinking that allowance to just the sole finalist.
Indiana
Republican governor Mike Braun signed Senate Bill 199 into law last month. It could end academic programs at the state’s public universities and at Ivy Tech Community College that fail a new federal graduate earnings test.
The federal government’s punishment for programs failing its Do No Harm test—which Congress created last summer but that has yet to take effect—is that students enrolled in them will no longer be able to receive federal student loans. Indiana’s law goes further, ordering programs that fail the test to close unless the state Commission for Higher Education, a group of gubernatorial appointees, exempts them.
The federal Do No Harm test will generally require programs to show their graduates earn more on average than high school diploma earners (just over $35,000 in Indiana). Graduate and professional program earnings would further have to exceed bachelor’s degree earnings.
Gov. Mike Braun
Anna Moneymaker/Staff/Getty Images North America
Braun also signed into law Senate Bill 88, which requires public colleges and universities to accept the Classic Learning Test in admissions “to the same extent” they accept the ACT or SAT. It also specifically adds the “ACT, SAT, or Classic Learning Test” as examples of “nationally recognized college entrance exams” that high schoolers must take.
The Classic Learning Test is favored by the right, and multiple other red states have promoted its use in public institution admissions and merit scholarship applications.
Kansas
The Republican-controlled Kansas Legislature overrode Democratic governor Laura Kelly’s veto this month to pass House Bill 2333. The law—dubbed the Kansas Intellectual Rights and Knowledge (KIRK) Act—is named in honor of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was shot to death in September while speaking at Utah Valley University.
The law bans public colleges and universities from, among other things, creating “free speech zones” or other designated areas “outside of which expressive activities are prohibited.” They also can’t charge security fees for events “based on the content of the expressive activity of the student, student association, an invited guest or anticipated reaction.” Fee amounts can only be based on criteria such as location and anticipated audience size.
Further, the law lets individuals and the state attorney general sue over violations of the law, and extends some protections religious student groups receive to political and ideological student organizations.
Also, through House Bill 2513, a budget law, Republicans passed a provision banning public colleges from requiring students to take “DEI-CRT courses.” The legislation doesn’t define that, but it requires the state board of higher ed to do so by the end of July. Then, by July 31, 2028, public colleges will have to certify that they don’t “require or constrain students to enroll in a DEI-CRT course in order to satisfy the requirements of any academic program.”
Kentucky
Kentucky Republicans also overrode Democratic governor Andy Beshear’s veto this month to pass House Bill 490, which allows public college and university boards to lay off even tenured faculty for “bona fide financial reasons” including, but not limited to, low enrollment in a major or “misalignment of revenue and costs.”
It requires at least 30 days’ notice to the affected professor, giving them only a month to defend their job to board members.
State Rep. Aaron Thompson, a Republican and a sponsor of the legislation, said its “language is already being used at some of our universities” and it “makes it consistent across all of our universities.”
But Wolfson at AAUP and Randi Weingarten, president of the affiliated American Federation of Teachers union, said in a joint statement that HB 490 could “be invoked to shut down research programs whose findings go against the financial interests of board members, to eliminate academic departments that have become easy ideological targets nationwide, and to silence faculty members whose speech board members dislike.”
AAUP president Todd Wolfson has been a critic of Republican-led legislation to overhaul higher education.
Maryland
Senate Bill 6 is awaiting Democratic governor Wes Moore’s signature or veto. It would allow public university non-tenure-track faculty whose primary duties include instruction to unionize. Maryland community college faculty already have that right.
United Academics of Maryland at the University of Maryland said in a statement that this “massive victory is the result of years of lobbying by faculty organized under” its umbrella. The group says it will now seek official recognition as a union.
Karin Rosemblatt, president of United Academics of Maryland at the University of Maryland at College Park, said in the statement that “collective bargaining will help faculty fight back” against shared governance circumvention, Trump administration attacks on academic freedom and long-“stagnant” higher ed funding.
Tennessee
Tenured faculty in Tennessee will have fewer protections after Republican governor Bill Lee signed House Bill 2194 into law this month. The law says university presidents and provosts, when deciding whether to suspend or fire faculty based on “misconduct” allegations, can’t take into account recommendations from other faculty. It’s a strike against the tradition of faculty getting a hearing before their peers in discipline cases.
“A tenured or non-tenured faculty member is only entitled to a written notice of the grounds for termination or suspension and an opportunity to be heard by the institution’s chief academic officer or chief executive officer,” the law says. “All terminations and suspensions based on an allegation of misconduct by the tenured or non-tenured faculty must be made by the institution’s chief executive officer or chief academic officer without any recommendation or vote by another faculty member.”
The law also says “disciplinary procedures” must be “the same for tenured and non-tenured faculty for a faculty member’s misconduct.” The law doesn’t define what constitutes misconduct.
Benitez, of PEN America, said tenure “is one of those established structures that help insulate faculty from political interference and political pressure from external sources,” and part of that insulation comes from faculty peers weighing in on whether discipline should occur. Top administrators, she said, are “extremely susceptible” to political interference.
HB 2194 also requires public colleges and universities to adopt policies “to preserve the essential principles of institutional neutrality, free expression, and civil discourse, and to preserve a campus climate that allows for the free expression of all viewpoints with respect.”
Lee also signed into law Monday Senate Bill 1741/House Bill 1476, the Charlie Kirk Act, which forbids public colleges and universities and their faculty from disinviting speakers invited by other faculty or student groups “in response to threatened protests or opposition from students or faculty or because of the [speaker’s] viewpoints.”
Numerous states considered legislation proposed in honor of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA who was killed in September 2025.
It also protects invited speakers from being shouted down and from having their view of the audience—and the audience’s view of them—blocked by protesters’ bodies, signs or other objects. The law also prohibits protesters from “staging walk-outs during an event or in the middle of an invited speaker’s remarks” that intentionally cause “material and substantial disruption.”
The act further requires public higher ed institutions to adopt free expression and—in an echo of the other Tennessee law—“institutional neutrality” policies that are “identical or substantially similar to” the Chicago principles on campus free expression and the Kalven report.
Utah
In Utah, students in graduation- or major-required courses at Utah’s public colleges and universities will be able to request, in advance, exemptions from exams and assignments based on “sincerely held religious or conscience belief,” after Republican governor Spencer Cox signed House Bill 204 into law last month.
The student’s request must “not create a fundamental alteration” of the exam or assignment. But the course’s instructor—if they deny the exemption—isn’t the one who ultimately determines whether it would be a fundamental change. That decision is up to university-selected “neutral arbiters with the academic and subject matter expertise necessary to review a denial,” the law says.
Benitez, of PEN America, said this is “one example of eroding faculty control over what can be in their classroom.”
HB 204 further says instructors can’t “compel a student to publicly take or communicate a specified position on a matter of public concern as the student’s own,” such as by making the student write letters to the editor or lawmakers.
