When this year’s legislative session began, Gov. Sarah Sanders said her top priority would be a multi-pronged higher education package, dubbed “Arkansas ACCESS,” that would stop “indoctrination” at Arkansas colleges and universities, ease the admission process for up-to-date students and transform the state’s funding model, among other changes.
That invited comparisons to Arkansas LEARNS, the massive K-12 education overhaul bill championed by Sanders and rushed through the 2023 session with minimal debate. LEARNS bundled together positive reforms gigantic and miniature with an enormously controversial school voucher program that will send almost $100 million in taxpayer funds to private school and homeschool families this year. Would her higher ed reform be similarly ambitious?
ACCESS was filed Monday by Sen. Jonathan Dismang (R-Beebe) and Rep. Matthew Shepherd (R-El Dorado). At 122 pages, it’s almost as long as LEARNS, and some provisions clearly resemble the 2023 bill. ACCESS would erode labor protections for college professors just as LEARNS did for teachers. The anti-indoctrination language resembles a similar section in LEARNS, though it incorporates lessons drawn from Arkansas’s embarrassing loss in federal court on that provision.
But most of ACCESS appears to tinker around the edges of the higher ed system, not overhaul it. There is no obvious parallel to the voucher program or the boost in minimum teacher salaries mandated by LEARNS. Even more so than LEARNS, it’s a grab bag of changes, many of which would need to be fleshed out in the rulemaking process.
There’s also a surprising amount about K-12. Though it’s pitched as a higher ed bill, the first 47 pages — more than a third of the total — affect public schools, not colleges and universities. Some of those changes have a higher ed angle, such as concurrent credit or AP courses; others do not. Here’s what we know so far.
Culture war on campus
ACCESS takes aim at student activism, both in K-12 schools and at state-supported colleges and universities. It would ban public and charter schools from granting excused absences to students for “political protest, social or public policy advocacy, or attempts to influence legislation or other governmental policymaking at the local, state, or federal level.” Schools also couldn’t condone student walkouts — perhaps a shot at progressive actions at Little Rock’s Central High or a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Fayetteville High School last year.
The bill applies the same language to college students: No walkouts and no excused absences for protest or advocacy or civic participation. It also says students could be held liable for “negligently or intentionally” causing property damage to a college campus while engaging in protest or “public policy advocacy.” If students didn’t pay up, they would be ineligible for a degree or any transfer credit from the institution.
ACCESS would create a up-to-date subchapter banning “discrimination and indoctrination” in higher education, though the word “indoctrination” is not defined and never again appears in the bill after the subchapter’s title.
That vagueness may be due to the legal difficulties encountered by a similar section of LEARNS banning indoctrination and “critical race theory” in K-12 classrooms, which was cited by state officials when they rescinded state credit for a pilot AP African American Studies class in 2023. (They’ve since changed course.) What’s indoctrination and what’s teaching? When pressed on this point in court, lawyers for the state said it depends on whether a student is “compelled” to embrace a particular viewpoint.
Thus, ACCESS prohibits college faculty, staff and administrators from compelling students (or other employees) “to personally affirm, adopt or adhere to ideas or beliefs in violation of …. the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” That includes the idea that a person “should be adversely or advantageously treated on the basis of his or her race, ethnicity, sex, color, or national origin” or the idea that a group of students may “bear collective guilt” by virtue of such attributes.
It’s a clever bit of ideological jiu-jitsu on the part of conservatives to cite federal civil rights law in pushing policies that are intended to make it harder to critically discuss racial injustice. But such a colorblind approach is ascendent in Arkansas and nationally; anything reminiscent of diversity, equity and inclusion must be purged.
Still, the ACCESS bill walks a fine line, if not an incoherent one, between requiring schools to reject “DEI” and requiring them to embrace free speech. Its prohibition on “indoctrination” shouldn’t be construed to prohibit a college employee from “discussing the ideas and history” of discrimination for “legitimate educational” purposes, it says. And the bill “does not prohibit officers, agents, administrators, employees, teachers, contractors, or students of a state-supported institution of higher education from discussing public policy issues or ideas that individuals may find unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive.”
A different section appears intended to mop up remnants of equity-oriented policy in K-12 education. It would repeal language requiring the state’s school rating system to consider the progress of “English learners” when assessing schools.
It also excludes the following metrics from the state’s report cards on school performance: “closing the achievement gap,” “equity in resource allocation” and “academic growth of student subgroups, including … economically disadvantaged students, students from major racial and ethnic groups, English learners and students with disabilities.”
Firing professors
ACCESS would make it easier to fire tenured professors. It would repeal language in current law that says a school’s faculty performance review process can’t “be used to demote a tenured facility member to a nontenured status.”
ACCESS would allow colleges to strip professors of tenure as part of the faculty performance review process, something that’s not allowed under current law. A school could also require “an immediate for cause review” of any faculty member at any time, tenured or not, if they exhibited “professional incompetence,” failed to perform their job duties or committed other violations. The list includes a catchall category: “Met any other for cause justification as defined in the state-supported institution of higher education’s review policy.”
For what it’s worth, the section of the bill on tenure and faculty review contains no mention of “indoctrination,” “DEI” or other ideological buzzwords. It doesn’t explicitly say a professor could be fired or stripped of tenure for teaching subjects that offend the sensibilities of Gov. Sanders or legislative Republicans.
But the two parts of the bill could work in tandem. A professor accused of “indoctrinating” students — or, say, excusing them from class to participate in the political process — might run afoul of their university’s review policy. And as with K-12, the real goal may be to simply chill speech and scare faculty into toning down potentially sensitive topics.
No clarity on funding
For state institutions, the biggest question about ACCESS is what it will do to their budgets. But the bill itself contains few answers, instead punting responsibility to the rulemaking process.
ACCESS requires the state to incorporate a “return on investment metric” into its current funding model, which is to be “defined by rule of the Division of Higher Education.” That ROI metric must be “aligned with state economic and workforce needs,” it says, but gives few other details. The bill removes existing language that says higher ed funding should prioritize “science, technology, engineering, mathematics and high demand fields,” presumably leaving it up to the division to set those specific priorities in the future.
The same section also authorizes the Division of Higher Ed to create a up-to-date funding formula for “noncredit programs” at state schools — that is, workforce development or other courses that don’t lead to a degree. The funding would come from the state’s Educational Excellence Trust Fund or general revenue (though the Legislature would likely need to appropriate those funds explicitly in a future budget bill).
Sanders promised earlier this session to put “state dollars behind all types of degrees: bachelor’s, associate’s, and non-degree credentials.” She also had unfriendly words for time-honored academic programs: “For far too long, students were told the lie that the only way to be successful in life is to get a four-year college degree right after high school,” Sanders said at her state of the state address. Skeptics worried that that might mean any funding boost for two-year or noncredit programs would come at the expense of four-year degree programs. Until the formula is spelled out and appropriations are made, though, we just don’t know.
Scholarships, streamlined admissions and other provisions
ACCESS would make a variety of small-to-middling changes directly affecting up-to-date college students, from scholarships to admissions.
Most prominently, it would establish a “direct admissions program” at state schools that would include a common application and provisional admissions criteria. The goal seems to be to streamline the admissions process so that a graduating senior could apply to (for example) the University of Arkansas, Arkansas State University and their local community college all through a single portal. The bill sponsors have also said there would be a single application fee.
The bill seems to expand the state’s common course numbering system, presumably making it easier to transfer credits. Four-year schools would be required to set up a “reverse transfer agreement” for a student who transferred from a two-year school, allowing them to receive their associate’s degree if they complete the necessary coursework.
The bill would also change how college-equivalent credits are handled by high schools. References to Advanced Placement (AP) courses in state law are replaced with “accelerated learning,” a category that includes AP, the International Baccalaureate program, the Cambridge Advanced International Certificate of Education program, concurrent college credit courses, or other courses or programs approved by the state Education Department. The bill seems to give schools more latitude in awarding weighted credits for honors classes, not just AP-equivalent classes. It also sets discounted rates for the cost of concurrent credit classes and would exploit K-12 school funds to pay for them.
ACCESS would boost the first-year award for the Academic Challenge Scholarship — which is funded through the state lottery — from $1,000 to $2,000. (The Challenge scholarship amount increases yearly as a student progresses through college, but ACCESS would only boost the award for a student’s freshman year, not subsequent years, as the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette has pointed out.) It creates an “Arkansas Heroes Scholarship” for children of disabled veterans, POWs, Purple Heart recipients, and people missing in action or killed in action. And it makes changes to several other scholarship and grant programs as well.
These mostly seem like positive changes. But they’re also relatively modest, especially compared with the LEARNS voucher program or its boost in starting- teacher salaries. There is no marquee program to make higher education affordable for all, for example. Considering Sanders’ hype surrounding the bill, and the record-setting budget surpluses Arkansas has racked up in recent years, the question now is: Why not do more?
