photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

University of Kansas Chancellor Douglas Girod, left, is pictured at a Kansas Board of Regents meeting on Feb. 11, 2026.

Tuition may be frozen and tenure may be broken.

Those are two of the bigger issues that leaders at the University of Kansas and the state’s other universities are watching as the Kansas Legislature enters a critical period for new laws that would impact higher education.

One proposal that is working its way through the Kansas House would cut about $18 million from the operating and student aid budgets of KU and the five other Regents institutions, the Kansas Board of Regents was told on Wednesday.

But that same proposal also would come with a mandate that the universities could not increase tuition rates for the upcoming school year. KU Chancellor Douglas Girod told the Journal-World in a brief interview that the proposal would require significant budget cuts at KU.

“To have a budget reduction and tuition freeze at the same time really doubles the budget reduction because, obviously, inflation continues,” Girod said. “It really compounds the budget reduction pretty dramatically. It would be a dramatic impact for us. There is no other way around that.”

The House proposal, however, isn’t certain to be the plan that comes out of the Legislature. The Kansas Senate is working a proposal that would add some funding to higher education budgets, although it also is too early to say whether that proposal will garner enough votes in the Senate.

Clarity should come within the next week. The Legislature’s “turnaround day” — the date which one chamber is supposed to send its proposals to the other chamber for consideration — is scheduled for Feb. 19.

Budget issues, Girod said, will be the legislative action most likely to have major impacts on KU during the next school year. But there is another issue percolating in the Legislature that may create fundamental, long-term challenges for the university: A change in the state’s tenure law.

Higher education leaders went into the legislative session knowing that lawmakers might want to revamp the process of university tenure, which is an academic rank that faculty members can earn based upon levels of scholarship and academic achievement. Once obtained, it becomes difficult to dismiss a tenured professor. The tenure process has become a point of concern for many Republican lawmakers across the country, as they’ve raised concerns that higher education is faltering and losing the trust of the public.

Kansas lawmakers briefly considered a change in tenure law during last year’s legislative session, and told the Regents that they likely would do so again this year, if the Regents didn’t make changes to the system.

The Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s public universities, did approve significant changes to the tenure system, which added mandated annual reviews, requires department chairs or division leaders to create more specific annual work plans for professors, and shortens by two years the date upon which tenured faculty members must go before a committee of experts to argue that they are still qualified to hold the tenure rank.

The Regents, however, were told that a new bill to make major changes to the tenure system was recently introduced in the Kansas House. The bill — HB 2746, introduced on Friday — would make only one change to the tenure law, but it would be a big one. The law would state that the rank of tenure does not come with any “property right” for the faculty members that have tenure.

That’s an important legal distinction because a property right would mean that tenured faculty members likely would be due monetary compensation if universities stripped them of their tenure status.

University leaders at Wednesday’s Board of Regents meeting expressed concern that the proposed law could spark a number of lawsuits from tenured faculty members who would argue that they must be compensated for losing their property right. Emporia State University, which has been embroiled in a lawsuit regarding the dismissal of more than 20 tenured faculty members as part of a 2022 reorganization, estimated that the proposed bill could have a fiscal impact of up to $4 million for ESU.

At KU — which is about seven times larger than ESU — the potential fiscal impact hasn’t been calculated. Girod said it isn’t certain that Kansas courts would side with tenured faculty members in such a case, but he said there is case law in other states that open the door for such a ruling.

“If that case law were to stand in Kansas, multiplied by the number of people who have tenure, you’ve got a big number,” Girod said of the costs.

But Girod said the reputational costs to KU likely would be much greater, as tenure is seen as a key to recruiting and retaining top level faculty members. Girod, who is the chair of the prestigious Association of American Universities, said he believes such a change in tenure law would make it difficult for KU to remain a member of the AAU, which designates KU as one of the top research universities in North America. Girod said the KU Medical Center’s status as a National Cancer Institute facility, which has led to tens of millions of dollars in new research funds for KU, also would be in peril.

“How do you be an AAU research university without it?” Girod said of the tenure system. “The answer is you probably won’t be. How do you keep an NCI designation? The answer is you probably won’t.

The new tenure bill, which has been assigned to the House Judiciary Committee, hasn’t yet been given a hearing date, but Regents were told that a hearing could still be set within the next week. A similar but slightly broader bill introduced in last year’s session also still could be brought up for consideration, the Regents were told.