Two recent adjudications have put campus decision-making under scrutiny: an arbitrator ordered Portland State University to reinstate 10 nontenure-track faculty and provide back pay after finding administrators excluded faculty from budget-cut deliberations. Separately, a faculty panel unanimously concluded Texas A&M erred in firing a professor over a classroom gender-identity lesson. The rulings name specific governance failures: Portland State’s layoffs violated contractual shared-governance procedures and the university must re-engage faculty in retrenchment decisions, while Texas A&M’s termination raised questions about due process and academic freedom amid politically fraught classroom content. Those decisions are resonating beyond the campuses involved. Faculty unions and academic associations are citing the rulings as enforceable precedents; administrators are reassessing retrenchment protocols, shared-governance timelines, and documentation standards. Clarification: shared governance refers to institutional processes that require faculty consultation on curricular and academic program changes. Legal exposure for universities increases when those processes are bypassed.