Don Killingsworth, president of Jacksonville State University, speaks at a campus event in 2022. The Jacksonville State University Board of Trustees last week voted to dissolve the university's faculty senate and staff council to be in compliance with HB 580, sponsored by Rep. Troy Stubbs, R-Wetumpka, and signed by Gov. Kay Ivey in April. (Anna Barrett/Alabama Reflector)
The Jacksonville State University Board of Trustees voted Tuesday to dissolve its faculty senate and staff council, the latest school to do so after passage of a state law this spring.
In a statement Tuesday, Randall Jones, the chair of the board, said it had “a responsibility to ensure Jacksonville State University complies with Alabama law while providing sound governance, accountability, and responsible stewardship of the public resources entrusted to the university.”
“Today’s action fulfills that responsibility while beginning the important work of developing board-approved policies that reflect the requirements of the law and support the University’s long-term success,” the statement said. “We have every confidence in President (Don) Killingsworth’s leadership as he works with University leadership to develop recommendations for the Board’s consideration.”
HB 580, sponsored by Rep. Troy Stubbs, R-Wetumpka and signed by Gov. Kay Ivey in April, limits faculty senate bodies to advisory roles; requires periodic reviews for tenured professors and give boards of trustees at colleges and universities the final say in developing curriculum. It was passed in April and is set to go into effect Oct. 1.
Auburn University’s Board of Trustees voted in June to abolish its faculty senate and take direct control of curricula, even though the law had provisions for Auburn and the University of Alabama, both established under the state Constitution, that the law would not be construed to impede the authority “to manage its respective campuses.”
David Dempsey, a JSU mathematics professor and the president of the now-dissolved faculty senate, said in an interview Friday that while he’s disappointed in the decision, he looks forward to working with university officials to come up with a replacement board.
“I’m of course disappointed in that outcome, but I can say, in all honesty, that I am happy to report that the board members individually talked to me, the president, the provost, all of them are very supportive of having a mechanism for faculty voice and are eager to see what we come up with. They assured me that there would be a mechanism for faculty voice moving forward. They’re just having to comply with state law,” he said.
Dempsey said he would work with the university president and provost to propose an alternate board to represent faculty members and present it to the board of trustees in October.
Lance Ingwersen, chair of the United Campus Workers of Alabama’s Legislative and Political Action Team Committee and history professor at JSU, said in an interview Friday the vote to dissolve the faculty senate didn’t shock him.
“It wasn’t totally unexpected based on what happened at Auburn earlier in the summer,” he said. “But still, I was holding out hope that our board would make a different choice than what Auburn’s board decided to do, and at the end of the day, they didn’t.”
Ingwersen said the vote was part of a “coordinated attack that’s happening at the state level, and in some ways at the regional level” and that “state legislatures are trying to dictate a lot more about how universities operate.”
“This has been sort of a central component of the culture war, if you want to sort of think about it that way. That’s been stoked at a partisan level, and higher ed has been the crosshairs,” he said. “First, it was the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), and in our case, SB 129 two years ago, and now it is the perception among our state Legislature that students in our public universities are being indoctrinated.”
The JSU Board of Trustees also dissolved the university’s staff council. The council had been created two years ago to serve as a way for staff members to communicate with JSU’s upper administration. Ingwersen said dissolving the council “felt like overcompliance.”
“It really kind of got cut off before it ever had a chance to take off, and I think the other thing that was confusing was that it’s very clear from the legislation that it is really only in reference to faculty senates, so I’m not sure why we decided to dissolve the staff council,” he said.
JSU President Don C. Killingsworth, Jr. said in the statement that the board’s vote “begins the work of thoughtfully developing policies that comply with state law while supporting the mission of Jacksonville State University.”
“Everything we do as a University should ultimately support student success. As we move through this transition, that guiding principle will not change. I look forward to working with University leadership, our faculty, and our staff to develop policies that reflect the requirements of the law while continuing to strengthen Jax State and the opportunities we provide our students,” he said.
Ingwersen said moves like dissolving the faculty senate and the staff council could foster distrust.
“When decisions like this are made, it erodes trust, it erodes or diminishes worker morale, and ultimately that’s going to negatively impact students’ experiences at these universities,” he said. “It’s going to be harder to recruit and retain excellent faculty, and so it’s hard to deny the sort of downstream effects there. And I’m not fully understanding how our legislators don’t understand that, and how our Board of Trustees don’t understand that as well.”
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Author: Andrea Tinker