Coordinating Board to Vote Nov. 16 on Curriculum Report Owed to the Legislature

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will meet Nov. 16 at 9 a.m. in Room 2.035 of the Barbara Jordan Building in Austin, with a live broadcast promised on the agency’s website. The board will vote on the report on general education curriculum that a 2025 law requires it to send the Legislature by the end of December.

That law is Senate Bill 37, the higher education governance act passed in 2025 and effective that September. It moved authority over curriculum and faculty toward governing boards, stripped faculty senates of independent standing, and set up a one-time review of what Texas undergraduates are required to study. Under the section creating it, an advisory committee drawn in equal parts from two-year and four-year institutions was to report to the Coordinating Board by Nov. 1 on how general education courses are identified and on methods of reducing how many are required. The board then owes the Legislature its own recommendations by Dec. 31. The committee and the section both expire in September 2027.

The agenda does not publish the report or say what it recommends, and the Dispatch has not seen a draft. What the notice establishes is the timing: the committee’s deadline fell two weeks before this meeting, the board’s falls six weeks after it, and the vote is listed as the day’s major policy discussion rather than a consent item. Separately, each institution’s own governing board must review its curriculum at least every five years under the same act and certify compliance to this board — a step the regents of Texas State Technical College and Texas Woman’s University are both scheduled to take this week.

The consent calendar carries 36 rule actions, most of them housekeeping on advisory-committee charters and financial aid programs. A few are not. The board will take up repeal of the rules on learning outcomes for undergraduate courses and on public access to course information, a rewrite of the dual credit rules governing partnerships between high schools and public colleges, and a new dispute resolution chapter replacing the old one. A second rule block later in the day would replace the entire chapter regulating degree-granting institutions other than Texas public universities.

Also scheduled: five new doctoral programs at Prairie View A&M, Texas Tech, Texas State and West Texas A&M; a resolution authorizing state college student loan bonds; reports on transfers, veterinary medicine workforce and foreign gifts; and, in closed session, the performance evaluations and pay of the commissioner, general counsel and internal auditor. Whether the curriculum report is approved as presented is the thing to watch.

Meeting at a glance

Board members

• Stacy A. Hock — chair; Austin; private investor and philanthropist.
• Welcome W. Wilson Jr. — vice chair; Houston; president and chief executive, Welcome Group.
• S. Javaid Anwar — secretary; Midland; owner and president, Midland Energy.
• Richard L. Clemmer — Austin; semiconductor executive; former NXP Semiconductors chief executive.
• Brian Haley — Austin; co-founder and partner, CB Capital.
• Darryl Heath — Colleyville; retired Accenture executive.
• Colt McCoy — Aledo; partner in tenant advisory, HPI Real Estate.
• Juan J. Nevarez — Dallas; executive vice president, Scout Energy Partners.
• Ashlie A. Thomas — Victoria; vice president, C.L. Thomas Inc.
• Eli Heath — Lubbock; Texas Tech student; non-voting student representative.

All nine voting seats are filled, with a non-voting student representative in the tenth chair. Names and terms are from the board’s roster page, checked November 9; cities and occupations are not on that page and come from the governor’s appointment releases, which match it on every name, on the chairmanship and on each term-expiration date. Hock was named chair and Wilson vice chair in October 2025; Heath, McCoy and Thomas were appointed in January 2026 and Haley in June 2026. Anwar’s title as secretary rests on the agency page alone, officers being elected by the board rather than named by the governor. The roster page also ends with an unexplained line reading “Vacant,” which conflicts with the nine named members; the Dispatch could not establish what it refers to and does not report a vacancy.

Key facts

• Sept. 1, 2025 — Senate Bill 37 took effect, creating the curriculum review and the advisory committee. (enrolled bill text)
• Nov. 1, 2026 — deadline for the advisory committee’s report to the Coordinating Board. (Senate Bill 37)
• Dec. 31, 2026 — deadline for the board’s own recommendations to the Legislature. (Senate Bill 37)
• Sept. 1, 2027 — the advisory committee is abolished and the section expires. (Senate Bill 37)
• Nov. 4, 2026 — the meeting notice, TRD 2026006546, was filed with the secretary of state. (Open Meeting Viewer)