The University of Texas System Board of Regents meets by telephone Aug. 28 to award tenure to 27 professors at the University of Texas at Dallas — the same 27 names the board already had in front of it two weeks earlier. The open session is scheduled to run half an hour.
The notice, filed Aug. 24, says the board is meeting by telephone conference call because the business before it is urgent enough to be taken up before the next regular meeting on Nov. 18 and 19. The tenure list is the only item of public business.
It is identical to Item 28 on the consent agenda for the board’s Aug. 12 and 13 regular meeting — the same 27 faculty, the same schools, the same ranks, eight of them new hires and four moving to full professor. What changed is the framing. In August the awards reached the board as a budget change, with a note that they had been built into the fiscal 2027 operating budget. On Aug. 28 they arrive simply as tenure appointments, and the budget language is gone.
At that same August meeting, regents were asked to rewrite the fiscal 2027 budget rules to drop tenure awards from budget-change reporting, because the system’s academic and health affairs offices had built a separate approval process. The two documents fit together, but no UT System record says they do, and none explains the special meeting. Minutes for the August meeting have not been posted, so whether the board adopted, pulled or tabled the item is not established by anything the Dispatch could find.
Tenure at a Texas public university can be granted only by the governing board, on the recommendation of the campus president and the chancellor, a requirement the Legislature wrote into state law in 2023 and the regents carry in their own rules. The board may also recess to discuss personnel matters covering campus presidents, system officers and the chancellor, proposed gifts and naming rights, and pending legal issues; any action has to be voted in the open. Watch whether the tenure item clears without discussion, and whether the board says anything on the way out.
Meeting at a glance
- When
- 10:30 a.m. CT Friday, August 28, 2026, adjourning at approximately 11 a.m. The notice was filed August 24 at 3 p.m.
- Where
- Telephone conference call. Board Room and Executive Session Room, second floor, University of Texas System Building, 210 W. Seventh St., Austin.
- Governing body & chair
- University of Texas System Board of Regents — nine members appointed by the governor to staggered six-year terms, plus a nonvoting student regent. Kevin P. Eltife is chairman.
- Format
- Special called meeting by telephone conference call. One open-session item; the board may recess to closed session on personnel, gifts and legal matters, then reconvene to act in the open.
- Live video
- Open-session webcast on UT System Mediasite
- Full agenda
- Secretary of State Open Meeting Viewer · board meeting page and agenda book
Board members
- Kevin P. Eltife — chairman; Tyler; property owner and former state senator.
- Janiece Longoria — vice chairman; Houston; retired attorney.
- James C. “Rad” Weaver — vice chairman; San Antonio; heads CW Interests.
- Christina Melton Crain — Dallas; attorney and nonprofit chief executive.
- Robert P. Gauntt — Austin; co-founder of an investment firm.
- Jodie Lee Jiles — Houston; business development director, Transwestern.
- Nolan Perez — Harlingen; gastroenterologist.
- Stuart W. Stedman — Houston; president, Stedman West Interests.
- Kelcy L. Warren — Dallas; executive chairman, Energy Transfer.
- Jeremiah Shelby Clarke — student regent, nonvoting; San Antonio; UT Austin undergraduate.
Roster from the board’s current regents page, cross-checked name by name against the attendance roll in the board’s April 20, 2026 minutes and against the governor’s March 28, 2025 reappointment release, the most recent appointments to the board. Meeting contact: Karen Rabon, senior associate general counsel to the board, (512) 499-4402.