Sept. 20, 2024: The Right to Academic Freedom

The same is true in higher education, where protecting tenure and shared governance ensures Texas colleges and universities can recruit and retainthe best and brightest academic minds to open the world to our students. This right will be up for debate in the Texas Senate next week as the Senate Higher Education Subcommitteemeets to discuss its interim charges.

Among those interim charges is the state's ban on Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, programs, and policies in higher education, and we fear some these politicians aren'tsatisfied with the already calamitous consequences of Senate Bill 17and will try to take even more aggressive and harmful action in the next legislative session.

Texas AAUP-AFT members will be at the Capitol on Tuesday, ready to testify. If you can, we invite you to join us. If you can'tbe there, we invite you to submitwritten testimony via this formfrom our allies with Texas Students for DEI.

In this week's Hotline:

• This was a busy week in the Legislature, with interim hearings on school safety, educator retirement, and more.
• Let'sunpack last week's wild State Board of Education meeting.
• A new poll shows higher education employees have had it with the state's continued attacks.
• Looking for a great read? Join AFT's book club session next week.

This week the LegislatureTexas AFT was monitoringand providing testimony in the following committees:

• House Select Committee on Youth Health & Safety
• Senate Education Committee
• House Pensions, Investments & Financial Services Committee

Read our take about what happened in our full recap.

Tarrant County GOP sought an election advantage with failed effort to shutter college voting locations. Earlier this month, Tarrant County Judge Tim O'Hare proposed eliminatingvoting locations at some colleges. Critics pointed to the thousands of students who used the locations in the past - many of whom favored liberal-leaning candidates - and accused O'Hare of wanting to suppress votes for his party's benefit. O'Hare denied it. But in a rebuke condemning Republicans who helped block themeasure, the county's party leaders unanimously signed a resolution noting officials believed O'Hare's proposal would'veimprovedRepublicans' odds in the upcoming elections.(The Texas Tribune, Sept. 18)

In an Unprecedented Move, Ohio Is Funding the Construction of Private Religious Schools. The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private, religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand their campuses, which is nearly unprecedentedin modern U.S. history. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state is now providing millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more. (ProPublica, Sept. 17)

How this one climate fix means a school nurse sees fewer students sick from the heat.When students would come to the nurse's office at Johnson Senior High School in St. Paul, Minnesota, complaining of headaches and feeling too hot, Rebecca Randall was always ready. She would hand out water bottles, apply ice packs and ask the students to remove their extra layers. Even the nurse's office sometimes reached85 degrees. But last fall the school installed a heat pump cooling system, a type that makes use of the cooler temperatures underground. Now the school is no longer counted among the roughly 36,000in the U.S. that the Government Accountability Office said need their heating and cooling systems updated.(Associated Press, Sept. 13)