The AAUP announced the formation of a Committee of Inquiry tasked with examining the multiple serious violations of academic freedom and the dismantling of shared faculty governance across Texas public universities. The Committee of Inquiry will gather and analyze public data on the compounding systemic crises facing Texas public higher education and conduct direct interviews with affected campus members to assess the erosion of faculty rights and institutional autonomy. The inquiry will place special, critical focus on how these policy developments disproportionately impact the state's public HBCUs.
The investigation targets the destructive fallout of Senate Bill 37 (SB 37), which has systematically dismantled independent campus governance and academic freedom across Texas public universities. The committee will expose how this law centralizes partisan political control over university curricula, weaponizes state-mandated audits to censor classroom teaching, and forces the politicized closure of academic programs. Crucially, the inquiry will document the total erasure of shared governance, focusing on institutional moves to disband faculty senates and strip educators of their structural authority.