Gov. Cox chose to not veto any bills from this year’s legislative session, so the hundreds of bills passed will go into effect. As an employee at a public institution of higher education, some of these bills affected my workplace, causing angst among colleagues. Honestly, not a lot of the faculty were happy about much of the legislation passed.

First of all, few are ever happy when new laws are passed. There’s a reason why legislatures generally have low approval ratings, in the same way that there’s a reason parents aren’t often in good standing with their teenagers. When you’re making rules, you’re going to annoy people, especially the people who are most affected by those rules.

Second of all, legislators run bills as a result of people in their districts complaining about something. Let us be clear, if you have a complaint and you let a legislator know, they’re going to think about it. And if enough of you complain, there’s going to be a bill run. It’s not always the case that the bills turn out good — even good legislation can be problematic as a result of unintended consequences — but it’s always the case that legislators are going to respond to their constituents.

Which takes me to the point I want to make in this piece: Bills that gave my colleagues heartburn were run because, in general, people who work in higher education have not been sensitive to what the world around us needs. We’ve given cause for complaint with our seriously path-dependent need to do things as they have always been done.

Here’s one case in point: H.B. 335 has to do with concurrent enrollment. Let me be clear: I think there’s so much value in taking your time with your education. I don’t think there’s an expiration date on when you can earn a college degree; my grandmother earned hers in her 60s. My children are not taking concurrent enrollment courses and they’ll head into college with me strongly recommending they do not even use their AP course credit. I’m going to say, “Go take four years, learn all the things, even if you’re learning them again, and figure out what problems you want to solve.”

But I’m a fourth-generation college student — and how I did college is not necessarily the way everyone can do college or, quite frankly, should. Many parents find that concurrent enrollment is a way to guarantee their child gets a college degree. It’s affordable; the child is taking the class while in the care of the parent, so the parent can be helpful; it lets people try out college, which may not have seemed like a possible path; and it can make college less scary. While none of that is what works for me, I completely understand why it makes sense for many others.

H.B. 335 was run by legislators up in our area, and I’m sure they ran it because people at my university have been less than helpful in having conversations about how to manage concurrent enrollment. We have strict rules about who gets to teach, and we control the supply of courses. This is because faculty want to ensure rigor in the courses in their disciplines, and we’re pretty sure having a Ph.D. is the way to do it because we know how much it takes to get one, so we want people teaching in our areas to have the same terminal degree we do.

H.B. 335 makes it so that some courses can be taught by people with a high pass rate of AP exams, so we no longer have control over the credentials of who gets to teach. H.B. 335 also says that if our course supply is low, students in high school can seek courses at another institution rather than taking the course in their local college, which has cut us off from recruiting some of the best students in our area.

Given our strict position, that I’m not sure I disagree with, we may have set up obstacles to students in schools that don’t have the resources to hire teachers with higher-level degrees and, as a result, parents wanting to make sure their kids have the same opportunities as other students asked for legislation.

There was a better way of doing this. We in higher education absolutely could have come to the table in a reasonable way and talked about our concerns while helping to address the complaint. But now it has been taken out of our hands. Being agile, recognizing demands for what they are — not some crazy person’s half-baked idea, but legitimate concerns from parents about their children’s education — would have gone a long way to rebuilding the trust higher education has lost over the years.

Leah Murray is a Brady Distinguished Presidential Professor of Political Science and the academic director of the Olene S. Walker Institute of Politics & Public Service at Weber State University.

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