My Google search failed to find anything about this (although I didn't try very hard). I did find an interesting item in the February 1, 2004 Decatur Daily newspaper:

In Alabama the situation is even worse, reflecting a long pattern of meddling going back at least to George Wallace's administration where faculties were considered adolescent mill hands who should be kept quiet and do what they were told . . . . . Open meetings became little more than occasions to announce policies already hammered out in secret. Faculty was excluded from even token participation . . . . . . the state's universities are mostly governed by politically motivated trustee systems more worthy of third-world banana republics than a state desperately trying to marshal inadequate resources in order to modernize its economy and improve its public life.

There is much more to the article that this brief excerpt. It is evidently inspired in part from a forthcoming (2004) book.