In recent years, state legislatures have increased their scrutiny of higher education, resulting in substantial legislation that impacts institutional policy. Depending on the length of the legislative session in your state and the deadlines legislators set for laws and required policies to go into effect, this can inflict quite a time crunch on staff in the Office of General Counsel and policy offices. (In Utah, the legislative session lasts 45 days, from January through early March.) In this article, I will discuss the process we set up at Utah Valley University (UVU) to track legislation that would affect policy, to organize policy revisions, and to assign appropriate changes to policy owners and attorneys who have the applicable subject matter expertise. I will also discuss a policy process we implemented four years ago called the compliance policy process, which is reserved for policy actions required by changes to state and federal law.

Policy Development Process

In Utah, the Utah System of Higher Education’s (USHE) General Counsel conducts a monthly meeting with policy office managers across our system and a separate meeting with attorneys across the USHE system. In these meetings, USHE General Counsel shares any upcoming changes to federal regulations and state code that could impact USHE and institutional policy. During the legislative season, USHE maintains a list of bills going through the state legislature and flags whether they are significant to higher ed or related to campus law enforcement and notes who the stakeholders throughout the system are.

Throughout the legislative season, our General Counsel works proactively with their counterparts across the USHE system to help institution leadership provide input into bills that will impact our institutions. In turn, our General Counsel keeps the Policy Office updated on bills making their way through the legislative process.

UVU’s General Counsel and the Policy Office then determine which bills apply to areas of our institution and which may require us to create new policies or revise existing ones. We then map the legislation to the applicable university policy and the attorney with appropriate subject matter expertise. We contact the policy owners to alert them to the upcoming policy action because they will need to approve any revisions and note the date by which policies must go into effect.

Our policy office has two full time editors and an editorial intern, who split responsibility for editing the necessary policy changes. Through our project tracking system, we document the progress of policy drafts in the review process and ensure Policy Office editors, policy owners, and assigned attorneys have all reviewed and approved the policy drafts.

We then submit the drafts through our compliance policy process to President’s Council and the Board of Trustees.

Compliance Change

Before we developed the compliance change policy process, we relied on our temporary emergency process to implement policies by the dates set by new laws. Per our Policy 101 Policy Governing Policies, we were obligated to submit the temporary emergency policy through the regular policy process and obtain university community commentary. Four years ago, when revising Policy 101, we determined that we needed a policy process to accommodate policy actions mandated by changes to state and federal law that often have tight compliance deadlines. We also reasoned that these mandated policy actions were not subject to the full notice and comment stages because we are required to comply with federal and state legislation.

In the compliance change process, the policy draft goes to President’s Council for approval and goes into effect upon that approval. The Board of Trustees may later ratify or disapprove the policy.

Even though the university community does not have a formal commentary period in this particular process, the UVU Policy Office is still tasked with making policy decisions transparent. So, with each compliance change, we work with the Office of General Counsel and the policy owners to craft an executive summary that explains the legal requirements for a compliance change. We provide this document on our news blog. This assures the university community that university leadership has adhered to our shared governance model and formal policy process.

When first implemented, our compliance change process applied only to limited scope revisions to passages of existing policy or deletions of a policy. But as legislation mandating deep changes to higher education began sweeping across the country, we realized we had to expand the compliance change process to the creation of new policies.

Getting Ahead of the Game

Proactively monitoring legislation and planning for policy changes mandated by legislation helps us avoid a huge rush that can occur at the end of a legislative session—especially when deadlines to place policies into effect can be very tight. This process helps us identify appropriate policy owners and attorneys and adjust workloads as best as possible. In the current environment in which higher education leaders and policy managers find themselves, staying organized and planning proactively can help us better deal with the changes sweeping across our industry.