Former Emporia State President Ken Hush will consult with the Kansas Legislature on higher education spending budgets for a portion of the 2026 session, a move that was approved down party lines 5-2 on Jan. 8 by Republican members of the Legislative Coordinating Council. 

It comes as the legislature aims to cut state spending again this session after a $210.5 million spending cut to the state’s general fund for fiscal year 2026. The general fund is the state’s main revenue source from income and sales taxes that it uses to fund state agencies and operations.

In March, the legislature passed Senate Bill 125, an appropriations bill that set the state’s budget for fiscal year 2026 and modified the budget for fiscal year 2025, which wasn’t set to end until June 30. The bill increased total expenditures for 2025 by $1.73 billion from the previous budget, including a $320.7 million increase in expenditures from the state’s general fund.

House Speaker Dan Hawkins is looking to cut another $200 million from the Kansas budget for fiscal year 2027. That includes whittling down spending on higher education, which Hush, who retired from ESU in December, has been tasked with. 

Lawmakers approved a no-bid contract for Hush to the tune of $50,000 that will be paid over five months. A no-bid contract is a contract given to a single source without a bidding process, generally because the source has specific expertise or immediate attention is required.

At the January hearing, Hawkins said Hush will help find “efficiencies” and “waste” in higher education and framed Hush’s involvement as a way to gain insight into the “higher ed budget arena.” 

Hawkins did not respond to The Bulletin’s multiple attempts to contact him.

What exactly has Hush been tasked with? 

The scope of what Hush will do for the Kansas Legislature is unclear and hasn’t exactly been fleshed out. As of Feb. 1, a contract between the state and Hush has yet to be finalized. 

Tom Day, director of Legislative Administrative Services, said in a statement that Hush will advise on “efficiency strategies” for the Kansas higher education system by “consult(ing) on topics such as revenue and expenditure analysis, budgeting practices and performance metrics.” 

When asked how his role will differ from that of the legislature’s in-house budget analysts, Hush told The Bulletin they will compare their knowledge, with his own coming from the perspective of a former university president and someone with a business background. 

“Budget analysts look at certain things … I could not do what the budget analysts do,” he said.

Part of Hush’s role entails helping analyze efficiencies and captures at a “high” and “statewide” level and then “looking at every expense line give or take” at those levels to better understand how funds are being used in higher education, including with grants and scholarships. He said it could also involve analyzing financial statements for not only the six Regent universities, but also community colleges, technical colleges, and other institutions that receive money from the Kansas Board of Regents. Looking at space and asset utilization in campus buildings is also possible.

This will inform decisions on “how we can improve (and) be efficient in (the state’s) spending” in an effort to make education more affordable for students and reinvest in them, he said. 

“The legislature’s asking a lot of questions, good questions and trying to understand it … so they can make better funding decisions,” said Hush, who called the legislature’s actions a “normal segway.”

Lawmakers, others skeptical 

Not everyone is pleased with Republicans’ decision to bring Hush on. Sen. Dinah Sykes, a Lenexa Democrat, expressed concern over Hush’s ability to adequately address budget issues. 

“If Hush can’t even create a proper plan for the ‘realignment’ of a single university, how could he ever properly identify areas of all of the state’s universities’ budgets to be cut?” she said in a statement. 

Sykes is referring to Hush’s controversial implementation of the KBOR-approved Workforce Management Framework during the fall 2022 semester. 33 faculty members, including tenured and tenure-track faculty, were fired, several academic programs were eliminated and ESU faced a complete academic restructuring as a result of the move. The university said its actions were necessary due to budget constraints and enrollment declines exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We always followed KBOR policy,” Hush said of the measures.

Several former faculty filed lawsuits against the university after they were fired. In December 2024, a federal judge allowed claims of constitutional violation of due process, among others, to proceed in a federal lawsuit filed by 11 fired tenured professors, who hold that their termination from ESU violated the U.S. Constitution. 

Lawmakers aren’t the only ones skeptical about Hush’s role in Topeka. Matthew Boedy, president of the Georgia Conference of the American Association of University Professors, expressed his disdain for the decision to Inside Higher Ed, a publication that covers news in higher education across the United States.

In October 2022, the AAUP went on to investigate the process that led to the mass firings of tenured faculty at ESU. They later published a report in May 2023 saying that the university’s actions “constituted a direct assault on tenure and, by extension, academic freedom” and disregarded academic due process and shared governance. Boedy is an author of that report. 

“If the Kansas Republican lawmakers want to cut spending and gut higher education, they found their man in Ken Hush,” he told Inside Higher Ed. 

“An elite leader listens to all opinions, as many as possible … there’s gonna be naysayers to everything,” Hush said. He went on to say, “You have to make tough choices (and if you don’t) universities and state agencies can be shut down. … It’s about doing the right thing and keeping costs down for students … and Kansas families.”