Gov. Kevin Stitt’s decree ending faculty tenure is already costing regional universities top-choice hires and other applicants, making it harder for schools in remote locations to attract academic talent.
State and local leaders grappling with the issue said they hope the new rule sunsets along with Stitt’s time in office.
At East Central University in Ada, two of four vacated positions – in history and criminal justice – remain unfilled after lower than normal application rates and numerous candidate withdrawals. A second-choice candidate was hired in the computer science department after the most qualified said “no” to a job offer, all owing to the college’s inability to offer a tenure track.
“The governor, in messages he has delivered to us, says he disagrees with academic freedom and thinks professors at the end of their careers aren’t doing much,” said ECU President Wendell Godwin. “But we have a process for getting rid of professors who are not effective, whether they are tenured or not.”
Following in the footsteps of President Donald Trump’s second-term shakeup of higher education through funding cuts, bans on diversity programs and litigation, Gov Kevin Stitt issued his own crackdown on Oklahoma colleges in February.
One executive order forbids publicly funded regional universities and community colleges statewide from granting tenure to new hires, while sparing the state’s flagship research institutions, the University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University.
The other ordered a “better return-on-investment analysis,” as Stitt said universities need to be more accountable to tuition payers and taxpayers.
University leaders and state lawmakers from these rural Oklahoma are perplexed to find themselves in the crosshairs of this culture war issue.
“You hear about the `woke agenda’ on Fox and CNN news today,” Godwin said. “I recently had a parent ask if we were going to indoctrinate their student. On a woke meter from 1-10, we’re probably not even a 1. It’s not really an issue in rural Oklahoma.”
Oklahoma State Senate Bill 1782 would have expanded the tenure ban to all public universities statewide, but after passing the Senate Education Committee in March, it languished.
Similar bills targeting tenure at public colleges have been introduced this year by Republican lawmakers in about a half dozen other states, including Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Texas.
While no state has fully eliminated it, Stitt’s executive order is the most wide-ranging assault on tenure to date.
The six Regional University System of Oklahoma schools — East Central, Northeastern State, Northwestern Oklahoma State, Southeastern Oklahoma State, Southwestern Oklahoma State, and University of Central Oklahoma — are the higher education anchors for their communities and hubs for most of rural Oklahoma.
State funding allocations inherently favor OU and OSU, the state’s top-tier research universities, which charge significantly higher tuition and leverage out-of-state enrollment to boost revenue, whereas RUSO schools operate under strict affordability mandates.
If the new ban drives away top-notch faculty from already under-resourced regional campuses, Oklahoma could be left with a higher education system of haves and have-nots.
“Oklahoma presents a really interesting case study,” said Deepa Das Acevedo, an assistant professor of law at Emory University and author of the 2025 book called ‘The War on Tenure.’
“At some point, the institutions that are affected are the ones that will tend to struggle to recruit more than others. This also signals to potential recruits to these regional colleges that your state’s leaders want to keep you insecure and don’t value your institutions enough – unlike the research universities – to rein themselves in.”
One national education researcher sees the limited application of Stitt’s executive order as yet another blow to RUSO schools.
“It is a continuation, in my view, of the disregard or the permanent, second-class citizen status that regional universities have in their states,” said Cecilia Orphan, associate professor of higher education at the University of Denver and founding co-director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges. “This is a new way of saying these institutions are not real universities and their students are not worthy of a real university education.”
Why It Matters
It takes a 6- to 7-year trial period and passage of strict peer review to earn tenure, which shields academics from retaliation for controversial ideas and research.
But Stitt’s rule now limits regional and community colleges to hiring faculty only under fixed-term, renewable contracts dependent on performance and “alignment with workforce and Oklahoma economic needs.”
The RUSO Board of Regents had already been pushing university presidents to better align their faculties to currently enrolled students and workforce needs.
In some instances, the creation of brand-new degree programs designed to address cutting-edge industry needs requires hiring entirely new faculty amid a highly competitive landscape.
“It hurts us, it does,” said Regent Amy Anne Ford, who served as the board’s point person on compliance with the governor’s executive order. “You’re going to miss out on the best of the best. When you’re looking at some of these smaller communities, like Alva or Ada, that already have a difficult time recruiting because they’re not major metropolitan areas, then you add this barrier, it makes it that much more difficult.”
Across this regional college system, 51%, or 661 of the 1,287 full-time faculty are tenured, with another 269 on a tenure track, according to the RUSO Board of Regents.
Ford said the RUSO Board of Regents adopted a rule that took the terms of Stitt’s executive order to its limits by committing to grant tenure to all those already hired on a tenure track to avoid lawsuits.
But the Stitt order is already significantly shifting the terms of employment for new hires.
As of July 24, the six RUSO universities had hired 44 faculty members who would have been on a tenure track if not for Stitt’s executive order, according to data collected by its Board of Regents.
Regional universities have a distinct institutional mission to provide easy access to college degree programs and to drive regional economic development.
“We call this `stewardship of place,’” said Orphan, a national education researcher. “Student-centered, focused on workforce development.
They develop the business leaders, school teachers, nurses, elected officials. This will automatically affect the quality of the faculty that those students have access to.”
Affordability is a key priority.
For in-state residents, the cost of college for RUSO students, on average, was $17,557 per year in 2025-26, compared to $27,293 at the state’s two research universities.
And many RUSO students avoid about $7,700 of that cost for on-campus housing and food by remaining at home.
“Oklahoma has a system of regional publics that it should be very proud of and work very hard to protect, and not hurt or erode,” said Orphan.
Competing Without Tenure
Higher education in the U.S. has seen a dramatic shift away from tenure over the last 40 years, with 75%-80% of all faculty on contingent, non-tenure-track appointments due to gradual funding reductions and declines in student enrollment.
The notion that tenured faculty can’t be fired is demonstrably untrue.
Acevedo, the national tenure expert who studied 20 years of all publicly available data, found most terminations occur at public institutions, undermining political claims that tenure hampers these institutions’ ability to fire bad actors.
She argues that it’s critical, just-cause protection from the instability of at-will employment laws for those in a unique profession.
“What tenure is doing, fundamentally, is providing job security for individuals who face high barriers to entry,” Acevedo said. “It takes years of work and expensive degrees to get into this work.”
As an alternative, colleges and universities can develop long-term employment contracts with salaries, strong benefits and professional development opportunities.
“One of the few things higher education has to offer is unusually heightened job security,” Acevedo said. “That is the thing that might make it all make sense.”
The chairman of the RUSO Board of Regents is bullish on the future.
“I don’t think anyone could say what the long-term impacts will be,” Lake Carpenter said. “I think this will take some adjusting, but we have to comply.”
He cited some of the regional college’s most well-known programs – pharmacy at Southwestern, optometry at Northeastern, aviation at Southeastern, forensics at UCO – that have long attracted top-notch faculty, as reasons why he believes the system can continue to compete.
“Just because there is no tenure track, there are other ways to recruit,” said Carpenter. “Here’s an opportunity to show this can be done, to set the example for others to follow.”
‘Perhaps This Won’t Be Permanent’
At East Central, faculty members are reviewed annually, and tenure-track faculty are up for renewal every three years. Problems with classroom management or inefficiencies are frequently brought to light by East Central students, who review every teacher in every class they take.
Godwin, ECU’s president, said those practices should make the institution a paragon for accountability, not the target of suspicion or state intervention.
“The irony is it’s the tenured faculty who will be the loudest in saying someone is not meeting the standard,” he said. “`A’ players want to be surrounded by other `A’ players. A department may be made up of 20-30 professors and they want everyone to be performing well, because if your reputation sucks, everyone is going to be dealing with that.”
ECU Vice President and Provost Jeff Gibson said Stitt’s executive order has him on pins and needles about how many of their 26 tenure-track faculty members they will be able to retain.
“We are trying to settle the nerves of those folks,” said Gibson. “They may have a year or more to complete requirements. Once they start looking, maybe they’ll see something that looks more attractive or more certain.”
At least a couple of ECU’s new hires decided to come to Ada despite the crackdown on tenure, in hopes that the opportunity will be restored, Gibson said.
“We are pretty hopeful that perhaps this won’t be permanent,” he said.
Across the RUSO system, there is lingering uncertainty about the terms of new employment contracts that will be offered.
Trevor Ellis was recently involved in the hiring of a new faculty member at Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford. That individual had questions about the new executive order, but even those doing the hiring were unsure about how to explain its full implications.
“They did end up committing and coming to campus to teach,” said Ellis, professor and chemistry and physics department chair. “I think there are concerns. Obviously, this is a new era, so we don’t have enough evidence to say what’s going to happen one way or another. We don’t exactly understand what the process will be moving forward.”
In the wake of the governor’s edict on tenure, state lawmakers are organizing around shared concerns for RUSO campuses in their districts.
RUSO Caucus Co-chair State Sen. Kelly Hines, R-Oklahoma City, retired as a highly decorated U.S. Army colonel. His ticket to becoming a commissioned military officer came through a program at East Central University.
“My high school class at Whitesboro was 18 kids, so it was daunting to go to OU or OSU,” said Hines. “It’s rural Oklahoma kids who really go to most of these RUSO schools. They provide people an opportunity to better themselves.”
Whether or not public universities grant tenure should be a matter of local control, Hines said.
“A lot of people are scared of what they see on TV, like are professors out there doing whackadoodle things?” he said. “I’ve been to Ada and Durant. They are still the rural, country schools, and guess who’s not woke? I think it’s making it really hard on the RUSO schools. Now the teachers are going to OU or OSU or Texas or somewhere else.”
Because Gov. Stitt will term out of office in January, his executive orders are set to expire 90 days later – unless his successor chooses to renew them.
The new RUSO Caucus will be advocating for an immediate end to this particular Stitt rule.
“From what I see, the RUSO schools have a really good review process to get rid of bad apples,” said State Rep. Ronny Johns, R-Ada, caucus co-chair. “My question is, if it’s good for our RUSO schools, why wasn’t it good for OU and OSU?”
With nearly 90% of graduates remaining in Oklahoma, creating an untold economic impact, Johns said it’s past time for RUSO schools to get their due.
“You hear all of us say we want our kids and grandkids to be able to stay in the state and work here,” said Johns. “That should motivate all of us — the governor, Senate, House — to do all we can to promote those schools and support those schools.”
