Kentucky GOP Overrides Beshear’s Veto of Faculty Firing Bill

A new law says Kentucky public college and university boards can lay off even tenured faculty for “bona fide financial reasons” including, but not limited to, low enrollment in a major or “misalignment of revenue and costs.” The legislation requires 30 days’ notice to the affected professor, giving them only a month to defend their job to board members.

It’s another example of a Republican-controlled state legislature passing laws that could weaken tenure protections and eliminate small degree programs.

The Kentucky General Assembly finished passing House Bill 490 on April 1. Democratic governor Andy Beshear vetoed it April 13, writing in his official veto message that the legislation would let boards fire tenured faculty “for an ambiguous and vague new standard of ‘bona fide financial reasons.’”

“House 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,” Beshear wrote. “This would likely violate contractual agreements that institutions have made to attract and retain talented educators.”

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.

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 “be 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.”

But state Rep. Aaron Thompson, a Republican and a sponsor of the legislation, said its “language is already being used at some of our universities” and it “makes it consistent across all of our universities.”