The Kentucky General Assembly has overridden Governor Andy Beshear's veto of a bill that will make it easier to fire tenured faculty at its state universities.gettyKentucky lawmakers have overridden Governor Andy Beshear’s veto of a bill that will permit Kentucky’s public universities and community colleges to fire faculty, including those with tenure, for a list of what it terms “bona fide financial reasons.” House Bill 490 passed by wide margins in both chambers of the Kentucky General Assembly earlier in this legislative session. The vote in the Kentucky House was 75-18; the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 80-19.Under the terms of the bill, faculty at the state’s public institutions can lose their jobs for "bona fide financial reasons, including but not limited to:Financial exigency;Low enrollment in a particular program or major; orMisalignment of revenue and costs in a particular college, department, program, or major."The bill gives the governing boards of the institutions until October 1 to establish a process by which the removal of faculty under those terms will be conducted. It also specifies that affected faculty members are to be given 30 days’ written notice stating the reason for removal and giving them an opportunity to respond.The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Rep. Aaron Thompson, of Russell, described his bill as a “fiscal responsibility” measure, claiming that it would make firing policies consistent across all Kentucky’s public colleges and universities. “House Bill 490 gives these boards an additional tool in their toolbox to be a good steward for each institution’s future, their students and for the taxpayer,” he said. However, the bill met swift condemnation from a host of faculty and other groups. The American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers issued a joint statement arguing that the bill posed “a direct threat to students, faculty, high quality college education, and the prosperity of the people of Kentucky, and criticizing the “bill’s vagueness,” which “leaves the door open for pretextual terminations that would shut down departments and majors, closing doors for students and eliminating their opportunities to learn about a wide variety of topics.”MORE FOR YOU“HB 490 could be weaponized for purposes that have nothing to do with genuine fiscal emergencies,” wrote AAUP president Todd Wolfson and AFT president Randi Weingarten. “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.”In his veto message, Beshear, who is considered a possible Democrat candidate in the next presidential election, echoed those concerns. He wrote that, if the bill were to become law, it would create an “ambiguous and vague” new standard for firing faculty members, adding that the bill does not properly define “bona fide financial reasons,” opening the door for people, programs and research to be targeted for termination “under the guise of economic necessity.” Kentucky’s Republican controlled legislature made quick work of ignoring those concerns, voting to override Beshear’s veto, 80 to 19 in the House and 32 to 6 in the Senate.House Bill 490 exemplifies an emerging strategy by conservative state legislators of weakening faculty tenure not through outright prohibitions, but through an expansion of the conditions under which it can be removed. Like many other universities, those in Kentucky already permitted the termination of faculty because of severe financial problems subsequent to a declaration of financial exigency. But now such a formal declaration will not be necessary. Vague assertions about misalignment between revenue and costs will do the trick.