Academic excellence suffers when Alabama college leaders shrink from fights

The official reason Auburn’s Board of Trustees dissolved its faculty senate and took power over curricula?

To “advance academic quality, transparency, consistency and institutional alignment while preserving meaningful faculty participation.”

Needless to say, the board last month provided no examples of the school falling short in these areas.

Auburn remains an accredited institution of higher education. And whether you put a lot of weight into U.S. News and World Report rankings, the school did pretty well on its most recent listing of public universities. It hit No. 49, tying with schools like Temple University, the University of Iowa and the University of Tennessee.

There’s no evidence of a problem. But even if there was, I’m not certain the board has the skills needed to address it.  The 16 trustees come from business and the law. None, as far as I can tell, have significant experience working in higher education. Or the expertise to judge the course design of Auburn’s educators.

The right way to protect academic integrity at Auburn is the traditional one. Trust your professors to educate your students.

But this isn’t about academics, really. This is about Alabama’s politicians and their ongoing meltdown over college students becoming critical thinkers.

The Alabama Legislature this spring voted to give universities wide scope to dissolve faculty senates and impose new requirements on tenured professors. This followed a 2024 law forcing universities to shut down programs intended to create welcoming environments for minority students.

It also banned the teaching of “divisive concepts,” an idea so hazily defined that it’s better viewed as giving schools and political activists broad powers to punish educators for perceived slights or nonconformity.

Alabama isn’t alone in this. Conservatives are attacking universities around the country. The faculty senate legislation passed earlier this year was modeled on similar laws in Florida and Texas.

But as in other states, higher education leaders in Alabama badly fumbled their responses to these difficult but not insurmountable offensives. At a time when a united front might have slowed or even stopped the assaults, leaders caved.

Auburn and the University of Alabama’s failures were particularly striking. With the anti-DEI bills, the schools could have invoked their particular constitutional protections to stop legislative interference with their efforts to create welcoming environments for all students.

Their lobbyists could have rallied legislators from the Tuscaloosa and Auburn areas to stymie any efforts by our social media-addled Legislature to punish them through the budget. That would have provided a critical shield for other state schools with less ability to defend themselves.

Instead, both UA and Auburn repurposed or closed their minority-outreach offices with hardly a word of protest. The University of Alabama shut down spaces for Black and LGBTQ+ students. Later, UA closed two student magazines, claiming that writing stories of interest to women and Black students could potentially violate a Department of Justice order.

You can only speculate about why the leaders of our flagship universities took this path. It’s possible they agree with the attacks. The Auburn Board of Trustees includes Great Southern Wood Preserving owner Jimmy Rane. Rane gave $150,000 in February to Republican gubernatorial nominee and current U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who calls diversity, equity and inclusion programs a poisonous ideology. University of Alabama Trustee Angus Cooper III gave Tuberville $50,000 in January.

Perhaps university leaders thought giving ground on minority students — a particularly terrible concession — would forestall future attacks on their schools.

But whatever the motives, the results are not in dispute. University leadership in Alabama has replaced advocacy for students with appeasement to politicians. That’s forced students out of public spaces and subjected educators to pointless, ideologically driven oversight.

It’s likely to get worse. Tuberville is the odds-on favorite to become governor next year. The Legislature will almost certainly remain in GOP hands for the next four years, all but guaranteeing more attacks on the independence of our colleges and universities.

And by suggesting their professors need monitoring, the Auburn trustees are validating these attacks, intentionally or not. They’re laying the groundwork for the school, its professors and its board to surrender more power to people who see education as propaganda and who think a university must instill their favored propaganda in their students.

What becomes of a school where indoctrination replaces free inquiry? It stops being a school and becomes another tiring extension of politics. It stops offering researchers a place to learn and students a place to grow. Insight and innovation get replaced by mandatory worship of an ossified status quo.

Auburn’s trustees may not care about that result. They may even welcome it. But it’s a surefire way to destroy the academic quality of the school. And make the trustees irrelevant.

So good luck to Auburn’s trustees on their curriculum patrols. And be careful. Your rounds might take you a classroom where a professor will encourage students to think for themselves. The trustees who hear that lesson might realize the politicians are using them.