\n<\/p>\n
Republican lawmakers overrode Kentucky governor Andy Beshear\u2019s veto of House Bill 490.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Paul Morigi\/Contributor\/Getty Images North America<\/p>\n
A new law says Kentucky public college and university boards can lay off even tenured faculty for \u201cbona fide financial reasons\u201d including, but not limited to, low enrollment in a major or \u201cmisalignment of revenue and costs.\u201d The legislation requires 30 days\u2019 notice to the affected professor, giving them only a month to defend their job to board members.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s another example of a Republican-controlled state legislature passing laws that could weaken tenure protections and eliminate small degree programs.<\/p>\n
The Kentucky General Assembly finished passing House Bill 490 on April\u00a01. Democratic governor Andy Beshear vetoed it April\u00a013, writing in his official veto message that the legislation would let boards fire tenured faculty \u201cfor an ambiguous and vague new standard of \u2018bona fide financial reasons.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cHouse Bill 490 may be misused to target people, programs and research based purely on subject, politics, or many other unconstitutional grounds, under the guise of economic necessity,\u201d Beshear wrote. \u201cThis would likely violate contractual agreements that institutions have made to attract and retain talented educators.\u201d <\/p>\n
But, on Tuesday, Republican legislators overrode the veto. The final votes were 80 to 19 in the House and 32 to 6 in the Senate. <\/p>\n
The national presidents of the American Association of University Professors and the affiliated American Federation of Teachers union had spoken out against the legislation on the verge of its passage, warning in a joint statement that it could \u201cbe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
But state Rep. Aaron Thompson, a Republican and a sponsor of the legislation, said its \u201clanguage is already being used at some of our universities\u201d and it \u201cmakes it consistent across all of our universities.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Republican lawmakers overrode Kentucky governor Andy Beshear\u2019s veto of House Bill 490.\u00a0 Paul Morigi\/Contributor\/Getty Images North America A new law says Kentucky public college and university boards can lay off even tenured faculty for \u201cbona fide financial reasons\u201d including, but not limited to, low enrollment in a major or \u201cmisalignment of revenue and costs.\u201d The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48482,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[24264,142,3350,1873,7962,4451,8708,12950],"class_list":{"0":"post-48481","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-beshears","9":"tag-bill","10":"tag-faculty","11":"tag-firing","12":"tag-gop","13":"tag-kentucky","14":"tag-overrides","15":"tag-veto"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/48482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}