Texas Legislature proposes $400 million cut to higher ed as Dan Patrick threatens university budgets over DEI

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Days before the start of the legislative session, Texas A&M University administrators were already bracing for a hit to their budget.

“The rumor is the [lieutenant] governor will cut everyone’s institutional enhancement money to try to get higher ed’s attention,” Julie Kopycinski, a top government relations staffer, wrote to her boss Texas A&M President Mark Welsh.

“What part of our ‘attention’ is he trying to get,” Welsh responded, according to an email exchange obtained in an open records request.

“That we have collectively lost our core mission and are still too [DEI] and leftist focused,” Kopycinski responded.

Nine days later, Kopycinski’s warning proved true. The House and the Senate unveiled their state budget proposals, with both versions eliminating the institutional enhancement fund, a line item dedicated to higher education that provided $423 million to Texas universities in the last budget cycle.

If passed, Texas A&M University would be shorted $52 million for the next two-year budget period. The University of Texas at Austin would lose close to $40 million. Texas Tech University and the University of Houston would both be down around $50 million. Budget writers kept the funding for health science centers and technical colleges.

Kopycinski said through a university spokesperson that her comments were speculation “based on public statements, interim charges and prior hearings,” adding that she said it was a “rumor and not confirmed.” Welsh declined an interview.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick did not respond to requests for comment. But at a public speaking event last week he made clear he intended to leverage the budget to notch another victory in the campus culture wars.

“If they don’t kick DEI out of their schools, they’re going to get a lot less,” Patrick said to applause at the Texas Public Policy Foundation Summit.

The threat to public university funding comes as the state is enjoying a $24 billion surplus. It’s the latest example of Patrick’s heavy hand as he tries to eradicate progressive policies at Texas’ colleges and universities.

The move immediately put leaders on their heels, redirecting their efforts this session to restoring the money, which many schools use to fund student services and academic programs at a time when they are unable to increase tuition revenues. Last year, Gov. Greg Abbott said he would not support any undergraduate tuition increase for the next biennium, continuing a two-year freeze enacted in 2023.

It’s a familiar playbook used by budget writers during the 2023 legislative session, when lawmakers specified in the budget that public universities were set to receive an extra $700 million in state funds — but there was a catch. That money would evaporate if the Legislature failed to pass two GOP-backed bills that weakened faculty tenure and eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion offices on university campuses.

The message to university leaders was clear: fighting their legislation would be to their own financial peril.

“It will have a heck of an impact”

A $52 million cut to Texas A&M’s budget would result in a reduction of 775 course sections, higher student-teacher ratios, and more difficulty recruiting high quality professors, according to The Association of Former Students, a prominent Aggie alumni group who listed restoring the funding as one of its legislative priorities.

Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp told senators earlier this month that the money that comes to the school via the institutional enhancement fund is operational funding.

“Our universities use that mostly for faculty and to teach our students and eliminating it will have a heck of an impact,” he said at Senate Finance committee earlier this month where university officials presented their budget requests and urged lawmakers to restore their funding.

Most higher education funding is determined by formulas based on semester credit hours and other factors. The institutional enhancement funding is general fund money that the Legislature has given to schools outside of those formulas. It makes up 3% of all higher education funding and is typically dedicated to specific projects.

“It has become de facto part of baseline budgeting,” Texas Tech University System Chancellor Tedd Mitchell told the Senate Finance committee last month as he and other university leaders asked lawmakers to restore the funding. Without it, presidents and chancellors told lawmakers they would need increased funds elsewhere or would have to cut their budgets significantly.

The amount that each university receives varies widely. While some of the state’s largest schools receive nearly $50 million per biennium, other schools receive smaller amounts. The majority of schools receive between $1 and $7 million per year.

On Wednesday, Rep. Carl Tepper, R-Lubbock, called it a “slush fund” during a House committee, saying he would prefer more specificity from universities.

Sen. Joan Huffman, R-Houston, the chief budget writer in the upper chamber, told university leaders in committee that they wanted to better understand how schools use this money before they consider adding it back in.

“We want more transparency in this money,” Huffman said at the Senate Finance. “It has kind of grown over the years and no one can really articulate why one university got one thing, you know, because that institutional knowledge, if it was ever there, is long gone.”

She did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Texas Tech University President Lawrence Schovanec told senators almost all of the money it receives goes to initiatives to improve academic outcomes for students.

“We created what was called the Raider Success Hub, hired more faculty to offer smaller classes and more advisers, and you saw the benefits of that in our improved graduation rates,” he said, noting the rate of students graduating within four years has increased from 38% in 2020 to 51% today.

Former University of Texas at Austin President Jay Hartzell told the committee the nearly $40 million in institutional enhancement funding “not only sustains current academic offerings, but allows us to launch new programs and bolster existing ones in key areas such as robotics, aerospace engineering, energy entrepreneurship and health related disciplines.”

Patrick’s crosshairs

Patrick has a history of entanglements in higher education.

Nearly a decade ago, Patrick proposed eliminating “special items” from university budgets, line items that paid for individual programs or centers at a university outside of the normal funding formulas that provide the bulk of higher education funding to public universities. At the time, Patrick was angry at universities for raising tuition.

"People did not send us here to Austin to allow universities to raise tuition five times their salaries," Patrick said. But the threats never materialized, and special items remained.

In more recent years, Patrick has activated around the wave of conservative discontent in higher education, accusing universities of indoctrinating students with leftist beliefs.

That wave crested in 2023 with a broad attack against diversity, equity and inclusion programs and policies, which were largely created to help underrepresented groups on college campuses to graduate college. Conservative lawmakers and activists across the country argued these programs were ineffective and discriminatory, and have been used to censor students and faculty on campus who disagree with the progressive ideas those programs espouse.

By the end of session in June, Texas was leading the nation as one of the first states to ban DEI offices and programs in public universities — bills championed by Patrick. It’s unclear what kind of demands the Legislature might make to higher education around DEI moving forward. But Patrick has signaled he’s prioritizing legislation to overhaul the role of faculty senates on campuses and shift more authority into governance boards in university decisions. Both would drastically shift the long-standing voice given to faculty on campus.

“There's this attempt to demonize the entire university system, and just really capitalize on this anti-university, anti-professor sentiment,” said Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity at Every Texan, a left-leaning policy think tank. “And use that as a way to withhold funds, to exact concessions from university officials to really restructure and reorganize how we do public higher education in Texas.”

Jessica Priest contributed to this report.

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: Every Texan, Texas A&M University, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Texas Tech University, Texas Tech University System, Texas A&M University System, University of Texas at Austin and University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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