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“A spate of issues and initiatives on the part of the administration, rather predictably, took place as soon as commencement had happened and as soon as many of the faculty, including myself, were off the clock,â€� Hudson told the ÃÛÌÒÓ°ÏñAV in an interview. “Our predecessors in faculty governance have warned explicitly about doing that sort of thing — ‘don’t do summer initiatives, don’t make these changes.’â€�

Her reaction came after the UA this summer:

• Dismantled its Health Sciences enterprise, dispersing its various functions from under one roof into different parts of the larger university;

• °Õ°ù²¹²Ô²õ´Ú±ð°ù°ù±ð»åÌý$70 million in endowment interest payouts from the UA Foundation to its own legal ownership to help reach the UA’s cash-on-hand targets;

• And its travel and expenses reimbursement policy so that UA employees must directly submit travel and expense requests instead of having the assistance of staff members.

“We need to keep surviving as the most vocal and privileged democratically-elected representatives of the university community,� Hudson said of the Faculty Senate and its shared governance role with the administration. According to  faculty members at public universities, through elected representatives, must for “academic and education activities and matters related to faculty personnel.�

“We have this obligation to keep on doing governance as actively as we possibly can, (though) this administration has made it very clear that they do not value our input in that way,� Hudson said. “So, we fall back to our default of serving as a watchdog and a custodian of the checks and balances, in so far as we can, within the system.�

UA spokesperson Mitch Zak, representing the UA administration, did not specifically respond to Hudson’s comments, or to the Star’s other questions about shared university governance.

However, he did share links to websites on the UA’s newly instituted , and pointed to UA President Suresh Garimella’s to the campus community, titled “Bear Down Momentum: U of A 2025-26.�

In his letter, Garimella said the UA’s of the health sciences functions into the overall university operation created “a unified academic and research enterprise that elevates health as a university-wide priority.�

Hudson said faculty members will weigh in on the summer initiatives once they’re back for the fall semester. She said she’ll put out faculty surveys to get their input on the travel policy change, the Health Sciences dispersal and the endowment payouts change.

Hudson called the travel policy change “quite dramatic.�

The websites Zak pointed to show that starting July 1, all UA employees directly have access to the university’s “expanded� , where the university keeps track of all of reimbursement requests. Employees will now have to submit their requests with required documentation directly into this system, and can’t make any travel-related purchases, including flight or hotel reservations, until the request is fully approved.

Among many changes, the policy change also: introduces three new cards that employees must use for purchasing and travel activities; limits travel reimbursements of out-of-pocket expenses to “qualified and approved� university-related expenditures when university payment couldn’t be done; requires approval for travel requests that are farther than 35 miles of the employees’ usual workspace, even when it’s same day travel.

While that looks like a good thing on the surface, Hudson said, she has heard concerns from faculty that it has shifted this part of the workload from support staff to active faculty members.

Hudson said travel is an important part of the job for many, if not most, faculty and researchers, and that this policy change means they have to go through a lot of training and do a lot of work that would previously have been done by support staff in the colleges. 

She also said the deadlines to complete the training for the new system were extremely tight and in the summer, when a lot of faculty are off. She said faculty needed to finish the training by July 5 and apply for the new university expense cards by July 22, and if not, they’d have to wait until next summer to enroll in the new system and plan their travel.

Health sciences, endowments

University officials have said the distribution of Health Sciences functions was “to streamline the administrative structure and create a more cohesive organization in support of our mission.�

For the endowment payouts change, Zak said previously that it “provides the university with more direct visibility into endowment payout funds, helping ensure donor resources are used in a timely manner and in accordance with the terms of each endowment agreement.� “This allows the university to more efficiently put philanthropic support to work for students, research and other donor-specified priorities,� he said.

'Without appropriate consultation'

With the start of the new academic year this fall, Hudson said an important initiative faculty leaders are interested in, in their “defensive� and “reactive� position, is to look more deeply into the UA’s “cost-and-risk analysis� for big initiatives and changes that come from the administration.

“As we look at the new policies that are being imposed without appropriate consultation on the front end, it’s becoming increasingly clear that our administration is not doing sufficient cost-and-risk analyses on them, and I’ve been persuaded that that component is absolutely missing,� Hudson said.

She cited examples of Garimella cutting off Faculty Senate participation from the UA’s process of awarding honorary degrees, shutting UA's micro-campuses in China in September 2025, and the university’s move to centralize its information technology or IT processes in 2024. Hudson said the university needs to look more closely into how much these decisions are costing and what risks are involved.

“One of the things you’re going to see is an attempt to advocate more systematically and more broadly for faculty when they need adjudication of their role and their rights, obligations and responsibilities within the university,� she said.