What the Proposed Texas Middle School TEKS Leave Out About Indigenous Peoples, by The Social Studies Advocate

Friends,

I invite you to read this deeply concerning analysis published in The Social Studies Advocate on what the proposed Texas middle school social studies TEKS leave out about Indigenous peoples.

The piece documents serious omissions, biases, and erasures in the proposed grades 6–8 standards, including the absence of sustained attention to tribal sovereignty, the Doctrine of Discovery, boarding schools, allotment, the Indian Citizenship Act, the Indian Reorganization Act, the Indian Child Welfare Act, and the contemporary presence of Indigenous nations and communities in Texas. These are not minor gaps. They shape how generations of Texas students will understand land, history, law, citizenship, and the peoples who were here long before Texas existed.

The Texas State Board of Education is scheduled to meet June 22–26, 2026, and I understand that Texas Freedom Network and other organizations may be organizing public opposition to these omissions, biases, and erasures. I will keep you posted as the date draws nearer.

In the meantime, please read and share widely. Also consider following The Social Studies Advocate on Instagram. These proposed standards deserve careful public scrutiny before they become the law of Texas classrooms.

In solidarity,

Angela Valenzuela

What the Proposed Texas Middle School TEKS Leave Out About Indigenous Peoples

A review of the proposed grades 6–8 social studies standards reveals systematic gaps in the treatment of American Indian history

The Social Studies Advocate

Apr 20, 2026

When Texas school districts begin implementing the proposed 2026 social studies TEKS in the 2030–2031 school year, students across the state will receive their foundational understanding of Texas and American history in grades 6 through 8. What they learn in those three years, and what they don’t, will shape how they understand the land they live on, the government that serves them, and the people who were here long before the state existed.

The analysis below is based on critiques offered by Dr. Scott Langston, Ph.D., a religion scholar and Native American studies researcher who retired from Texas Christian University, where he served as the inaugural Native American Nations and Communities Liaison, reviewed a draft of the proposed middle school TEKS and produced a detailed written analysis. Langston is the author of Exodus through the Centuries (Wiley/Blackwell, 2006) and co-author of Being in Relation: Indigenous Peoples, the Land, and Texas Christian University, 1873–2023 (TCU Press, 2025). He has been quoted in the Dallas Morning News on the history of Indigenous peoples in North Texas, including on Mirabeau Lamar’s policy of “exterminating war” against Native nations. His analysis of the TEKS draft is thorough, specific, and grounded in Texas-specific historical scholarship.

After much debate at the SBOE meeting from April 7 to 10, and numerous amendments until early in the morning, the version that emerged from the most recent round of Work Group B revisions and SBOE amendments addresses essentially none of the concerns Langston raised. This piece summarizes his critique and compares it against what the current draft actually contains.

Moving Moccasins group brings Native American artists into schools and classrooms, https://austinpowwow.net/great-promise-dancers/

The Structural Problem: American Indians as Historical Rather Than Contemporary

The most fundamental concern is not about any individual omission. It is about the cumulative effect of how American Indian peoples appear, and disappear, across the grades 6–8 curriculum. We are specifically looking at grades 6-8 because this is when students will learn the bulk of U.S. and Texas history, from 1800 to modern day.

In the proposed standards, Indigenous peoples are present in the early grades as part of the westward expansion narrative, appear briefly during the Texas frontier period, and then largely vanish. There is no sustained treatment of American Indians through the 20th century and into the present. This is not a minor gap but a structural failure: it leaves students with the impression that Indigenous peoples belong to the past, frozen somewhere in the 19th century, rather than existing as contemporary peoples with ongoing legal relationships with the state and federal government.

This matters because those relationships did not end in the 1850s. Three federally recognized tribes and several non-recognized tribes reside in Texas today. The period from the late 19th to the early 21st century saw significant developments and shifts in U.S. American Indian policy, including, boarding schools, allotment of reservations (especially the Dawes Act of 1887), Indian Reorganization Act (1934), termination of federal relationships with tribes, federal Relocation program, Indian Adoption project, Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975), Indian Child Welfare Act (1978) and the challenge to it in Haaland v. Brackeen (2023), American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), and McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020). This curriculum removes and excludes American Indians from U.S. history. It is a major gap in the curriculum.

These are not distant historical footnotes. They are active legal and political realities with direct Texas connections, and they appear nowhere in the proposed standards.

The Doctrine of Discovery: The Missing Foundation

The most significant omission is the Doctrine of Discovery, and particularly the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1823 opinion in Johnson v. M’Intosh. The Doctrine of Discovery was set out in a series of declarations by popes in the 15th century. Papal bulls provided religious authority for Christian empires to invade and subjugate non‐Christian lands, and impose Christianity on these populations. These papal bulls provided justification to European empires embarking on widescale colonial expansion.

The proposed standards explicitly emphasize the importance of strong property rights and the free enterprise system as core values. What Johnson v. M’Intosh establishes, however, is the legal foundation upon which American property rights rest, a foundation that, as the Court itself acknowledged, derived from European claims of discovery and explicitly did not recognize Indigenous peoples as owners of the land they had occupied for millennia.

In other words, students are being taught that strong property rights are a cornerstone of the American system, without being taught the legal history that defines whose property rights were recognized and whose were not. Students cannot fully understand American property law, westward expansion, or the free enterprise system without knowing it.

The Doctrine of Discovery does not appear in the current draft. Neither does Johnson v. M’Intosh.

Tribal Sovereignty: A Constitutional Relationship, Unnamed

Closely related is another structural omission: the proposed TEKS never establish that American Indian tribes hold the status of sovereign nations in a government-to-government relationship with the United States, a status grounded in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution and affirmed repeatedly by the Supreme Court.

Throughout the grades 6–8 standards, Indigenous peoples are referred to as “communities” or “tribes,” but never as “nations” with the legal standing that word implies. This has practical consequences for how students understand Texas history. When settlers moved into Mexican Texas, they were entering the territory of American Indian nations. When the Republic of Texas claimed land, it was asserting ownership over territory those nations had occupied for centuries. When Mirabeau Lamar pursued his policy of expulsion and extermination, he was conducting a war against sovereign peoples. None of this context is available to students if they have not been taught that tribes hold recognized national status under U.S. law.

The proposed TEKS do require students to compare the presidencies of Lamar and Sam Houston, “including views on annexation, American Indians, and Mexico.” But Lamar’s own words, “total extinction” and “total expulsion,” are not named. The standard as written does not require students to understand what Lamar’s policy actually entailed.
Major Omissions by Grade

Grade 6 (1800-1900)

The massive disruptions to Indigenous peoples caused by the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act are not connected to their consequences for American Indian nations who were displaced into Texas, which then created the conditions for later conflicts during the Republic period. Students cannot understand why various non-indigenous tribes were present in Texas without this context.

Several experts raised flags over the wording of this SE: “explain how the Trail of Tears impacted tribal relations along the Northern border of Texas.” Despite the numerous amendments raised during the week of April 7, it remains unchanged. This language shifts the impact of Jackson’s policies from the impact of U.S. policies on indigenous nations, to tribal relations. Additionally, it omits the decision in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), which recognized Cherokee sovereignty and the unconstitutionality of state encroachment on tribal territory under federal treaties, a ruling that both Georgia and the Jackson administration refused to enforce, proceeding with removal regardless.

In the Civil War and Reconstruction unit, there is no mention of the participation of Indigenous peoples in the war, or of slavery’s distinct application to Indigenous peoples.

Most significantly, the standards covering the late 19th century, the closing of the frontier, the Gilded Age, contain no mention of boarding schools or forced allotment of reservation lands. This is inconceivable for any credible curriculum. The boarding school system, which operated from the 1870s through the mid-20th century, was one of the most deliberately destructive policies in American history toward Indigenous cultural survival. The Dawes Act of 1887 and the Supreme Court’s 1903 decision in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, which enabled the forced allotment of reservation lands over tribal objection, shaped the lives of Indigenous peoples for generations. The Dawes Act and boarding schools are taught in current U.S. history standards in 11th grade. Neither appears in the proposed standards, and it begs the question, why are these being removed?

Grade 7 (1900-2000)

Grade 7 covers the Progressive Era through the early 21st century. Among the many topics covered across more than a century of American history, there is not a single mention of American Indian peoples in the course introduction. The standards move from the 1890s to the present as though Indigenous peoples ceased to exist at the close of the frontier.

The specific omissions are extensive. The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 is absent. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which restructured the relationship between the federal government and tribal governments and remains foundational to understanding tribal governance today, is absent. The Termination policy of the 1950s, which ended the federal relationship with some tribes and proved devastating, is absent.

The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 is absent, despite the fact that Dallas was designated as a federal relocation center, bringing thousands of American Indians to North Texas over several decades. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 are all absent.

The Grade 7 standards do include the American Indian Movement and the Wounded Knee Occupation in the Civil Rights era section. However, the inclusion is decontextualized without the broader Red Power movement, the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, or the legislative achievements of the 1970s that were the movement’s most significant outcomes.

Grade 8 (Capstone Texas History Course)

In Grade 8 the omissions carry particular weight because this is where students are expected to develop a comprehensive understanding of the state’s past.

The course introduction refers to “the earliest human presence” in Texas without naming American Indians specifically, a terminological choice that obscures the millennia-long Indigenous presence in the region. Similarly, the use of “prehistoric” to describe ancient Indigenous cultures carries connotations of primitiveness that “ancient” would not.

The Gault Site, one of the most significant archaeological sites in North America for understanding early human presence on the continent, is not mentioned. Caddo Mounds State Historical Site, a Texas State Historical Commission site that documents the sophisticated culture of the Caddo people, is not mentioned.

The Grade 8 standards do include coverage of conflicts between the Republic of Texas and American Indian groups, including Fort Parker, the Council House Fight, and the Battle of Neches. But the framing does not require students to understand these events as Indigenous peoples defending their homelands and legal standing as nations.

The standards covering the Civil Rights era in Texas contain no mention of American Indians. The Indian Relocation Act’s connection to Dallas is absent. The contemporary Texas section, which closes the course, does not address the three federally recognized tribes currently residing

in Texas, the ongoing legal and cultural work of non-federally recognized tribes, or the existence of American Indians as contemporary peoples with active civic and economic lives.

Why This Matters Beyond Representation

The proposed TEKS emphasize the free enterprise system, strong property rights, and the foundational importance of constitutional law. Students cannot fully understand any of these things without understanding the Doctrine of Discovery, Johnson v. M’Intosh, the federal Indian trust responsibility, and tribal sovereignty. These are not alternative or oppositional values. They are part of the same legal and constitutional framework the TEKS claim to be teaching.

A curriculum that teaches strong property rights without teaching the legal history of whose property rights were recognized, and whose were not, by design, is an incomplete curriculum. A curriculum that teaches the U.S. Constitution without teaching the government-to-government relationships it established with tribal nations is an incomplete curriculum. These are not ideological claims. They are observations about what the documents say.

What You Can Do

The proposed TEKS are still subject to revision before final adoption. We remain concerned about the undisclosed financial relationship between Content Advisor Don Frazier’s Texas Center at Schreiner University and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, including the $70,000 in TPPF funding to that center, and what it means for the independence of this revision process. The standards as proposed reflect a consistent ideological perspective that raises legitimate questions about whether Texan students are receiving history education or something closer to political formation.

If you want to weigh in on these standards, you can:

Contact the legislature and demand oversight into the process as a whole. It has been rushed and the input of stakeholders, including experts and educators, has been significantly curtailed while politically motivated interest groups have had an outsized influence. Specifically reach out to members of the Senate Education Committee and House Public Education Committee, James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa. Ask them to pause this process and conduct a review of the connection between TPPF and Don Frazier.

Contact all the SBOE representative directly. Write or call with specific concerns about the treatment of American Indian history in the proposed grades 6–8 standards.

The most up-to-date drafts from the April Board meeting will be posted at least 30 days before the next SBOE meeting June 22 (so by mid-May). Submit written public comment to the SBOE ahead of upcoming hearings. Specific, evidence-based comments citing the standards by section number carry the most weight.

Share this analysis with educators, school board members, and community members who may not be following the TEKS revision process closely.

The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills are not just a list of topics. They are a set of decisions about what Texas students are expected to know and be able to do. The decisions embedded in the current draft, including what has been left out, deserve careful public scrutiny before they become the law of Texas classrooms.

Thanks for reading! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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This analysis draws on Dr. Scott Langston’s written review of the proposed middle school TEKS and on the post-April 2026 draft of the proposed standards (Attachment II, Chapter 113, Subchapter B).

UT President Homer Rainey and the Long Memory of Academic Freedom at UT, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

UT President Homer Rainey and the Long Memory of Academic Freedom at UT

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 19, 2026

There are moments in a university’s history when the question becomes larger than any single president, professor, book, department, or policy. The question becomes whether a university will remain a university at all.

The firing of Homer Price Rainey, the twelfth president of The University of Texas at Austin, was one such moment.

Rainey served as UT president from 1939 to 1944. By many measures, his presidency strengthened the institution. He helped open the Latin American Institute, expanded the graduate school, increased the faculty, supported the College of Fine Arts, organized the management of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, and grew the university’s library holdings. In other words, he was building UT into a serious public research university with intellectual breadth, scholarly ambition, and public purpose (University of Texas at Austin Office of the President, n.d.).

But Rainey also believed that a university could not fulfill its mission if political appointees dictated what faculty could teach, which ideas students could encounter, or which scholars should be punished for their views. That conviction brought him into direct conflict with the UT Board of Regents.

Beginning in the early 1940s, regents pressed Rainey to remove faculty whose views they disliked, including economics professors associated with New Deal ideas and faculty who defended federal labor laws. The conflict deepened when regents objected to the teaching of John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy, a work they viewed as politically suspect. Rainey publicly protested this interference. On November 1, 1944, the regents fired him (Green, 1995; The Daily Texan, n.d.).

The response was extraordinary. Some 8,000 students went on strike and marched from the UT campus to the Capitol and Governor’s Mansion. According to historical accounts, mourners carried a casket labeled “academic freedom,” while the Longhorn Band played Chopin’s “Funeral March.” (The Daily Texan, n.d.; Wilder, 2012).

The message was unmistakable: when political power suppresses teaching and scholarship, something vital in public education dies.

Source: UT History: The President Rainey Controversy

That warning matters today.

Rainey was not reinstated. But history vindicated him. He became a national symbol of academic freedom, and the episode remains one of the clearest warnings in UT’s history about what happens when governing boards confuse stewardship with ideological control (Green, 1995; Wilder, 2012).

That warning matters today.

Universities are not fragile because faculty disagree, students protest, or controversial books are taught. They are fragile when fear replaces inquiry; when political pressure determines curriculum; when administrators anticipate punishment; when faculty governance is weakened; when entire fields of study are treated as suspect because they examine race, gender, labor, colonialism, inequality, or power.

The Rainey story reminds us that academic freedom is not an abstraction. It is the condition that allows a public university to serve the public honestly. Without it, universities become instruments of power rather than spaces of knowledge.

In 1944, students understood this clearly enough to march behind a coffin marked “academic freedom.” Eighty years later, the question is whether we understand it clearly enough to prevent history from happening again.

***

If you are able, consider marching with our funeral procession from the UT Tower to the UT System Board of Regents tomorrow. We'll be at the UT Tower at 11:00 AM and are expected to reach the BOR office at 12:30 PM located at 210 West 7th Street, Austin, Texas 78701.

Reference

Green, G. N. (1995). Homer Price Rainey: Life and legacy of a university president. Texas State Historical Association Online. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/rainey-homer-price

The Daily Texan. (n.d.). UT History: The President Rainey controversy [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUTGmWD8clo

University of Texas at Austin Office of the President. (n.d.). Homer Price Rainey. https://president.utexas.edu/past-presidents/homer-price-rainey/

Wilder, F. (2012, June 13). The war on public universities, Texas Observer. https://www.texasobserver.org/the-war-on-public-universities/

Protect Mexican American and Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Gender Studies at UT Austin, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. May 19, 2026

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Friends:

Below is the letter I just sent to the UT System Board of Regents that is scheduled to meet tomorrow and Thursday with a few concerning items. You have until 1 PM today to submit your own letter to bor@utsystem.edu. Also consider attending tomorrow's "Rest in Peace UT" funeral procession/demonstration happening tomorrow per yesterday's blog post.

Here is the link to tomorrow's BOR meeting if you're unable to make it: https://www.utsystem.edu/board-of-regents/meetings/board-meeting-2026-05-20

Best,

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Subject: Protect Mexican American and Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Gender Studies at UT Austin

Dear Members of the University of Texas System Board of Regents:

I write to express my profound concern regarding the reported plans to consolidate Mexican American and Latino Studies (MALS) and related Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies programs into a broader Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at The University of Texas at Austin.

Let me be direct: these units should not be consolidated. They should be restored, protected, and strengthened.

I respectfully urge the Board of Regents to:

1. Reinstate the Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies units immediately;
2. Preserve the majors and minors in these fields; and
3. Preserve the graduate programs in these fields.

This proposal should not be understood as a simple administrative restructuring. It represents the dismantling of intellectual, historical, and community-based projects that generations of students, scholars, organizers, and families fought to establish at this university. Programs like Mexican American and Latino Studies did not emerge by administrative convenience. 

They were built through decades of struggle to ensure that the histories, cultures, intellectual traditions, and lived realities of Mexican-origin, Black, Indigenous, Asian American, and other historically marginalized communities—as well as Gender and Sexuality Studies perspectives—would finally be recognized as legitimate and necessary fields of inquiry within public higher education. To learn more about this history, visit this timely and authoritative blog by Dr. Christopher Carmona titled, “We Bled for This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies.”

At a flagship public university in a state where a very diverse Latino community constitutes nearly 40 percent of the population—and where Mexican-origin communities are foundational to Texas history, culture, labor, economy, and civic life—the weakening of Mexican American and Latino Studies sends a troubling message. It suggests that these histories and perspectives are peripheral rather than central to the mission of the university.

Absorbing these programs into a generalized framework of “Social and Cultural Analysis” risks stripping them of the institutional autonomy necessary to sustain intellectual coherence, curricular direction, faculty development, student mentorship, and long-term viability. Once fields lose departmental status, they inevitably lose decision-making authority, hiring capacity, budgetary leverage, and symbolic recognition. History shows that such consolidations are rarely neutral. They often function as forms of institutional neutralization that gradually erode the visibility and sustainability of historically marginalized fields.

This proposal must also be understood within the broader political climate currently shaping higher education in Texas and nationally. In recent years, we have witnessed escalating attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; increased regulation of curriculum related to race, gender, and systemic inequality; and growing political intervention into university governance. Against this backdrop, the consolidation of Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies raises serious concerns about academic freedom, institutional integrity, and the future of critical inquiry within public higher education.

The irony is difficult to ignore. At precisely the moment when Texas faces profound demographic, cultural, educational, and political transformations, the state’s flagship university appears poised to weaken some of the very academic fields best equipped to help society understand and navigate these realities. These programs have made extraordinary contributions to scholarship, teacher preparation, public policy, educational equity, immigration studies, history, literature, public health, and community-engaged research. They have also provided intellectual affirmation and opportunity to generations of students, many of whom are first-generation college students seeking to see their communities reflected within the university curriculum.

Interdisciplinarity has never been absent from these fields. Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies are already deeply interdisciplinary. The issue before the Board is not whether collaboration across disciplines should occur. The issue is whether these programs retain the institutional capacity to define their own scholarly agendas, hire faculty grounded in their traditions, mentor students effectively, and sustain vibrant intellectual communities with autonomy and integrity.

Public universities should not retreat from difficult histories or politically contested knowledge. They should cultivate rigorous inquiry, democratic engagement, and historical understanding. Universities strengthen themselves not by dissolving critical fields of study, but by supporting them.

I respectfully urge the Board of Regents to reject any effort that would diminish the institutional standing, autonomy, visibility, majors, minors, or graduate programs of Mexican American and Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Women and Gender Studies at UT Austin.

The future of the university should not be built through the weakening of the very fields that have helped democratize it.

Respectfully,

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., Professor
Educational Leadership and Policy
The University of Texas at Austin

PRESS RELEASE: RIP UT: Donors Strike, Students to Stage Funeral for Academic Freedom at Regents Meeting—Wednesday, May 20, 2026

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 15, 2026

Contact: Cameron Samuels

press@studentsengaged.org

RIP UT: Donors Strike, Students to Stage Funeral

for Academic Freedom at Regents Meeting

AUSTIN, TX — On Wednesday, May 20 at the University of Texas System Board of Regents meeting, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) and partners will stage a funeral, marking what organizers describe as the "death by a thousand cuts" to academic freedom and higher education in Texas.

Simultaneously, major donors have begun pledging to withdraw individual giving and decline future monetary contributions until the university takes significant steps to protect academic freedom and the rights of all students, faculty, and staff. Initial pledge-takers include alumni in business, real estate, film, education, and elected office.

Next week’s funeral follows a similar demonstration by SEAT at Texas Tech University in Lubbock earlier this month, which featured a memorial wake, eulogy remarks, and a procession across campus. Visual elements included funeral attire and a horse-drawn carriage carrying an urn and books, photographs, and other markers of academic life.

Academic freedom, long considered a cornerstone of higher education, has succumbed after what can only be described as a slow and deliberate erosion. Its decline was not sudden. There was no single moment of collapse, no dramatic final breath. Instead, it endured a death by increments — policy by policy, decision by decision — until the thing itself became unrecognizable.

"Proclaiming the death of UT and its spirit of academic freedom is serious and not taken lightly. But 150 years after our university was chartered, the time has come. For the world’s second wealthiest university, the decisions made by regents and administrators have grave consequences that echo far beyond Texas. They have brought this upon us recklessly and without regard for our dignity and humanity," said Cameron Samuels (they/them), SEAT executive director and student at UT’s School of Law and LBJ School of Public Affairs. "Students are mourning the loss of a university once considered a beacon of truth, opportunity, and a guardian genius of democracy. What’s gone is not forgotten."

The University of Texas fell to a death by a thousand cuts:

• anti-DEI layoffs and grant abandonment (2024)

• state-sanctioned violence against students (2024) 

• ban on campus drag performances (2025)

• the elimination of ethnic and gender studies (2026)

• suspensions against student expression (2026)

• prohibition of controversial topics (2026)

• unprecedented administrative turnover (2026)

• and that's just to name a few...

WHEN & WHERE:

• Wednesday, May 20, 2026

• 11 AM - Memorial Wake (110 Inner Campus Dr, Austin)

• 11:30 AM - Funeral Procession (via Guadalupe, 11th, and Congress)

• 12:30 PM - Eulogy Remarks (210 W 7th St, Austin)

• 1 PM - Testimony at the Regents Meeting (210 W 7th St, Austin)

• 4:45 PM - Regents Meeting Recesses

WHO:

• Cameron Samuels (they/them), SEAT executive director and UT graduate student

• Adrian Lara (he/him), UTSA freshman in the REGSS department

• Daniel Ramirez, UT sophomore wrongfully suspended for free expression

• Karma Chavez (she/her), president of AAUP at UT Austin

• And more

The university and its spirit of academic freedom is survived by those who still insist on asking difficult questions — and by those who believe universities should remain places where such questions are not only allowed, but exalted. May she rest in peace.

###

About Students Engaged in Advancing Texas

SEAT is a movement of young people developing transferable skills and demonstrating youth visibility in policymaking. Advocating for a seat at the table, SEAT is normalizing the presence of students in educational policymaking – nothing about us, without us.

When Billionaires Stop Living in the Same Reality as Everyone Else by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. May 17, 2026

When Billionaires Stop Living in the Same Reality as 

Everyone Else

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 17, 2026

Noah Hawley’s essay in The Atlantic, “What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat,” begins as a story about an invitation most people would never receive: a weekend at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara. In 2018, Hawley joined more than 80 celebrities, writers, intellectuals, artists, and powerful people at a private resort where the setting itself became part of the lesson. Private jets carried guests in. 

Bezos, now one of the world's  "centibillionaires"—a word I just learned—had bought out the Biltmore resort and the beach club across the street. There were elite lectures, curated conversations, luxury gifts, security, and the strange intimacy of being temporarily absorbed into the orbit of immense wealth (Hawley, 2026).

But Hawley’s essay is not really about luxury. It is about what extreme wealth does to a person’s relationship to consequence. At a certain level of wealth, money no longer simply buys comfort; it buys insulation. It removes friction. It softens every edge of ordinary life. Hawley’s insight is that billionaires do not merely own more than everyone else. They may come to inhabit a world in which failure, criticism, inconvenience, and even other people’s pain no longer press against them in the same way they do for most of the planet's inhabitants (Hawley, 2026).

The emotional center of the essay comes after Hawley’s wife breaks her wrist during the retreat. The staff responds quickly and efficiently, getting her medical care. Later, Hawley mentions the accident to Bezos, not as a complaint but as a human moment between host and guest. According to Hawley, Bezos does not respond with sympathy or concern. Instead, he appears uncomfortable and is quickly pulled away. For Hawley, that brief exchange becomes a symbol of something larger: when wealth is vast enough, even empathy can begin to feel optional.

Hawley’s argument is unsettling because it moves beyond one billionaire or one awkward encounter. He suggests that extreme wealth can create a “consequence-free” reality, a world where the richest people are surrounded by admirers, employees, lawyers, consultants, security teams, public-relations experts, and political allies whose job is to make difficulty disappear. 

In that environment, the ordinary moral education most people receive from limits, mistakes, embarrassment, dependency, and accountability begins to break down. As Hawley puts it, the danger is not simply that the wealthy become greedy; it is that extreme wealth can build a world so insulated from ordinary consequence that other people’s lives begin to feel abstract—if not invisible altogether.

That is why Diane Ravitch’s recent post, “Trump Sued IRS for $10 Billion. How Much Will He Pay Himself?,” belongs in the same conversation. Ravitch is not writing about a private retreat or a billionaire’s social awkwardness. She is writing about power, public money, and a permission structure that allows the government itself to morph into an instrument of personal enrichment. Her question—how much will he pay himself?—is not just a jab. It is a moral diagnosis (Ravitch, 2026).

We are living in a country where the billionaire class plays by one set of rules while everyone else is told to tighten their belts, pay their taxes, obey the law, and accept austerity as inevitable. At the end of 2025, 935 U.S. billionaires held a combined $8.1 trillion in wealth, up from $6.7 trillion just one year earlier (Collins & Ocampo, 2026). Meanwhile, Federal Reserve data show that the top 1% held 31.7% of total U.S. net worth in the third quarter of 2025, compared with only 2.5% held by the bottom half of households (Cunningham, 2026; also see Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2026a and 2026b).

Against this backdrop, Ravitch’s post captures the grotesque moral divide of our time: Donald Trump, already one of the most powerful people in the country, is pursuing a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury over the leak of his tax records, even as he now oversees the very federal agencies involved in the dispute (Ravitch, 2026). The Associated Press reports that Trump’s lawyers have been in talks with the IRS to resolve the case, raising serious legal and ethical questions about a president suing the government he controls (Hussein, 2026).

The Tax Law Center has similarly warned that any settlement enriching Trump—or shielding him, his family, or his businesses from audits—would raise deeply troubling concerns about political interference in tax administration (DeBot & Hubbert, 2026). The Center notes that discussions about dropping audits of Trump, his family members, or his businesses would implicate legal safeguards designed to prevent political interference with the IRS.

This is not just another Trump scandal. It is a window into a political and economic order in which billionaires and the ultra-rich increasingly treat the state as their private instrument, while public schools, working families, immigrants, students, and everyday people are asked to live with less. Hawley shows us the private psychology of extreme wealth: a world where inconvenience disappears and empathy can be evaded. Ravitch shows us the public danger of that same condition: a politics where the most powerful person in government may seek a massive personal benefit from the government he controls.

The connection matters. Billionaire impunity is not just a lifestyle problem. It is not just about yachts, private jets, elite retreats, or grotesque displays of consumption. It becomes a democratic problem when the richest people are able to bend institutions around themselves. It becomes a civic emergency when accountability is treated as something for ordinary people only.

Most Americans live in a world of consequences. Miss a rent payment, and there are consequences. Fall behind on taxes, and there are consequences. Lose a job, get sick, or make one mistake in a bureaucratic system, and the consequences can be immediate and life-altering. But for the ultra-rich, consequences increasingly appear negotiable. They can be delayed, litigated, spun, purchased, settled, or shifted onto someone else.

That is the country Hawley and Ravitch, in very different ways, are asking us to see. One essay begins at a billionaire’s private retreat. The other begins with a president suing the IRS. Both point to the same question: What happens to democracy when the most powerful people no longer believe the rules apply to them?

Ravitch’s question—how much will he pay himself?—is really a question about the country we have become. And Hawley’s warning helps us understand why the answer matters. When extreme wealth becomes freedom from consequence, democracy itself becomes the thing left holding the bill.

References

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2026a). Share of net worth held by the top 1% (99th to 100th wealth percentiles) [WFRBST01134]. FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBST01134

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2026b). Share of net worth held by the bottom 50% (1st to 50th wealth percentiles) [WFRBSB50215]. FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBSB50215

Collins, C., & Ocampo, O. (2026, January 2). Richest 15 centi-billionaires see wealth surge 33 percent over 2025, double S&P 500 rate. Institute for Policy Studies. https://ips-dc.org/release-richest-15-centi-billionaires-see-wealth-surge-33-percent-over-2025-double-sp-500-rate/

Cunningham, M. (2026, January 21). Wealth inequality in America just hit its widest gap in more than 3 decades. CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-decades-federal-reserve/

DeBot, B., & Hubbert, D. (2026, May 13). Statement on Trump lawsuit and potential settlement. The Tax Law Center. https://taxlawcenter.org/blog/statement-on-trump-lawsuit-and-potential-settlement

Hawley, N. (2026, April 20). What I learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/billionaire-consequence-free-reality/686588/

Hussein, F. (2026, April 17). Trump’s lawyers are in talks with the IRS to resolve president’s $10B lawsuit. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/trump-treasury-irs-lawsuit-tax-whistleblower-c710244db618b066f3070a65e75820a5

Ravitch, D. (2026, May 13). Trump sued IRS for $10 billion. How much will he pay himself? Diane Ravitch’s blog. https://dianeravitch.net/2026/05/13/trump-sued-irs-for-10-billion-how-much-will-he-pay-himself/

As Ethnic Studies Comes Under Attack, UCSB’s ÉXITO Program Builds the Teachers We Need, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Tomorrow, I’ll have the privilege of speaking with an extraordinary group of students affiliated with the University of California Santa Barbara ÉXITO Program—many of whom, upon graduation, are heading directly into a Master of Arts in Teaching and credential programs to become the next generation of Ethnic Studies educators. At a time when Ethnic Studies faces escalating political attacks across the country, these students represent something profoundly important: a refusal to surrender the struggle over history, identity, democracy, and belonging in our schools.

The following piece from The Current at UCSB highlights the remarkable work of the ÉXITO Program, a groundbreaking initiative designed to build pathways into Ethnic Studies teaching. What stands out most is not only the students’ academic accomplishments, but their deep commitments to community, justice, cultural knowledge, and transformative education. These are future educators who understand that teaching is not simply the transmission of information, but a profoundly relational and ethical practice rooted in care, history, and collective possibility.

As attacks on Ethnic Studies intensify nationally, programs like ÉXITO remind us why this work matters so deeply. The future of public education will depend, in no small part, on courageous teachers willing to create classrooms where students can see themselves, their communities, and their histories reflected with dignity and truth. I look forward to learning alongside these students tomorrow and to witnessing the important work they will undoubtedly carry forward into California classrooms and beyond.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

UCSB’s ÉXITO Program graduates third cohort of future ethnic studies teachers amidst rising attacks on ethnic studies

Debra Herrick June 11, 2024 | The Current at UC Santa Barbara

Michelle Ramos Ramirez ’24

In Spanish, “éxito” means success. At UC Santa Barbara, ÉXITO stands for Educational eXcellence and Inclusion Training Opportunities, a first of its kind program in the UC system that provides students with a clearly structured pathway to becoming K-12 Ethnic Studies teachers. Funded by a $3 million U.S. Department of Education Title V grant, the program’s third cohort is now graduating.

Their commencement comes at a crucial moment, said Ingrid Banks, an associate professor of Black studies and a member of the program’s core faculty.

“The ÉXITO program at UCSB is exponentially important today as the attacks on ethnic studies escalate,” said Banks. “In training future ethnic studies teachers and current teachers invested in centering ethnic studies in their curriculum, the ÉXITO program provides a necessary social justice intervention within primary schooling.”

Designed for highly motivated students, the undergraduate program serves as a pipeline to earning a bachelor’s degree in one of the UCSB’s ethnic studies departments or in feminist studies and to applying to a master’s degree in education and a teaching credential program.

The program’s core faculty hail from the departments of Asian American studies, Black studies, Chicana and Chicano studies, and the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education. They work with the ÉXITO team, led by co-directors Professor Rebeca Mireles-Rios and Professor Lisa Sun-Hee Park, associate director Adanari Zarate Ph.D. ‘20 and graduate student researchers.

“On behalf of the ÉXITO team, congratulations to our graduating scholars,” said Zarate. “Thank you for the contributions you have made to our program and campus. We look forward to the amazing things you will do for the field of education and student communities. Always remember your ‘why.’"

Clockwise from top left: Cailey Angeles Larmore ’24; Eduardo “Eddie” Vázquez ’24;
Michelle Ramos Ramirez ’24 and Juan Rivera Garnica ’24

A “proud product” of unincorporated East Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District, Ramos Ramirez is earning her B.A. in Chicanx studies with a minor in educational studies. She will continue her research and training in ethnic studies education in UCLA’s master’s and teacher education program. Despite the challenges of transitioning to UCSB as a first generation college student, she said, she “found solace and inspiration within her ÉXITO cohort — a community of resistance that fuels her transformative vision for the future.”

Cailey Angeles Larmore ’24

Larmore, who uses they/them pronouns, is graduating with a B.A. in Asian American studies with distinction in the major, and a B.S. in psychological and brain sciences. During their time at UCSB, they were active in FIERCE Outreach, Kapatirang Pilipino and the Asian American Studies Department. Larmore will pursue their dual teaching credential and master’s degree in education at UC Berkeley.

Among the highlights of Larmore’s experience at UCSB were: “being part of the executive board for FIERCE Outreach, meeting my now partner through a creative writing class in Asian American Studies, my partner and I independently deciding to become part of ÉXITO at the same time, getting to do research under my favorite professor in Asian American studies, attending the drag shows put on by TQComm, and playing mahjong with my friends.”

Eduardo “Eddie” Vázquez ’24

A double major in Chicanx studies and sociology from North East Los Angeles, Vázquez, who uses they/them pronouns, served on the outreach board of UCSB’s SexInfo OnCampus; served on the Students for Reproductive Justice board and as a grader for SOC 152A (Human Sexuality). Additionally, they have worked with Orientation Programs during summer and as the resident assistant for the undergraduate apartments queer community, Lavender Living. After graduation, Vazquez will return to Los Angeles for UCLA’s Teacher Education Program and to pursue a master’s degree in education with a specialization in ethnic studies.

Juan Rivera Garnica ’24

Rivera Garnica is graduating as a double major in Chicana/o studies and film and media studies. He is originally from Mexico but was raised in Los Angeles after moving to the U.S. He will pursue his master’s degree and credential in the Teacher Education Program at UCLA this fall, hoping to become a high school social studies teacher with a focus on ethnic studies.

ÉXITO participants Amelie Calderon, Stephanie Pantoja, Riechal “Riqui” Martínez and Evelyn Giraldo also completed the program and will be taking a gap year before continuing towards their teaching degrees.
Media Contact


Debra Herrick

Associate Editorial Director

(805) 893-2191

debraherrick@ucsb.edu


About UC Santa Barbara

The University of California, Santa Barbara is a leading research institution that also provides a comprehensive liberal arts learning experience. Our academic community of faculty, students, and staff is characterized by a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration that is responsive to the needs of our multicultural and global society. All of this takes place within a living and learning environment like no other, as we draw inspiration from the beauty and resources of our extraordinary location at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies by Christopher Carmona, Ph.D. Our Lady of the Lake University May, 2026

Friends, I’m honored to share this powerful guest column by Dr. Christopher Carmona on the history, sacrifice, and continued struggle behind Mexican American and Ethnic Studies in Texas, as well as nationally. —Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

We Bled For This: The Ongoing Assault on Mexican American and Ethnic Studies

by 

Christopher Carmona, Ph.D.

Our Lady of the Lake University

San Antonio

May, 2026

Can you imagine what it was like to stand up for what you believed was right? To be taught that your people were important enough to be taught? Can you imagine men with badges and guns and tear gas ready to hurt you? To be beaten with batons, to starve yourself so that maybe the university will sit down and listen to you? Can you imagine that you fought so hard to be seen in the history of these United States only to have your children and grandchildren stripped of that knowledge?

You are lucky enough to be in this college, don’t rock the boat. Just keep your head down, go to class, and get your degree. It doesn’t matter that your people are being shot down in the streets, too poor to buy new shoes, or too scared to walk on the same sidewalk as a white man. 

Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies programs are unique in American higher education in one undeniable way: they are the only academic disciplines whose very existence was extracted through sacrifice. These programs were not invited into the academy. They were demanded into it, and the demanding came at a cost measured in arrests, hunger strikes, and blood.

It is long past time for universities and policymakers to reckon with that history, and with the continuing failure to fund what communities bled to build.

Born of Struggle, Not Invitation

The founding of Centers for Mexican American Studies across the nation is not a footnote in higher education history. It is a chronicle of sustained resistance against institutions that consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of the discipline until students and communities forced their hand.

It began in 1968. Throughout the country, racial justice and student activism were front and center, leading to a cascade of activism for ethnic studies programs, including Chicano studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, and American Indian studies. Building from this work, Chicana/o/x activists came together at the University of California, Santa Barbara and published El Plan de Santa Barbara, a document that united diverse activists from around the state and laid out a roadmap for Chicana/Chicano studies (Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education, 1969). In response, UCSB created the first Chicano Studies Department in the UC system in 1970. California State University, Los Angeles had established a Mexican American studies program two years earlier, in 1968.

At California State University, Northridge, the price was higher. From 1967 to 1971, Los Angeles police arrested 400 students and faculty members across six major demonstrations. Eventually chaos ensued, fights erupted, and arrests were made, yet this didn’t stop students from being heard. The following morning, 2,000 students gathered in front of the Administration Building, causing the university president to declare a state of emergency. The activism ultimately established the creation of both the Afro-American and Chicano Studies departments (Acuña, 2011).

At UT Austin, Mexican American student activists in the 1960s agitated for the creation of an academic program that reflected their lives, experiences, and ways of knowing. From their efforts, in 1970, UT created the Center for Mexican American Studies, with Américo Paredes named its first director. Yet it would take 44 more years, until 2014, for the university to grant it an independent undergraduate major (University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, 2024).

Perhaps the most dramatic confrontation came at UCLA. UCLA first established an interdisciplinary Chicano studies program in 1973. But the retrenchment in California’s social and budget policies during the 1980s and the recession of the early 1990s took a toll. By 1989, funding had dwindled significantly, and UCLA suspended new admissions to the program. On April 28, 1993, the chancellor announced the program would not receive departmental status. What followed was a sit-in, mass arrests, and ultimately a hunger strike. 

On May 25, a small group declared a water-only fast. A village of tents sprang up outside Murphy Hall. Four days in, one protestor collapsed requiring medical attention. The group persevered, and on June 7, more than 400 students, faculty, and community supporters celebrated the creation of the César E. Chávez Center for Interdisciplinary Instruction in Chicana and Chicano Studies. The strike drew the support of state senators, state representatives, city officials, and the Mothers of East L.A., resulting in one of the largest student and community mobilizations in UCLA’s history. Even then, full departmental status was not granted until 2005 (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 1993; UCLA Newsroom, 2021).

source: UCLA Magazine

In Arizona, a thriving program was simply legislated out of existence. The Tucson school district’s Mexican American studies program grew to 48 course offerings and became the largest ethnic studies program in any school district in the nation, directly increasing graduation rates and grades across all classes (Cabrera et al., 2014). In 2010, state lawmakers passed a law that dismantled the program and banned a range of related books from classes statewide.

The pattern is consistent across decades and geography: communities bleed to establish these programs, and institutions continuously find ways to cut, consolidate, or erase them.

Community Anchors Running on Empty

These Centers are not simply academic units; they are community infrastructure, and they function as such every single day. The Center for Mexican American Studies at UT Austin was intended toconnect students to the Austin community through outreach and public events, building on its legacy of collective action. At UT Arlington, CMAS was established by the Texas Legislature as the university's focal point for interdisciplinary education, research, publication, and public outreach relating to Mexican Americans, and serves as a bridge between UTA and the Latino community in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. 

Before it was shut down, Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, CMAS collaborated with faculty, student affiliates, and community organizations to produce events, training, and programs that promote a deeper understanding of Mexican American culture and supported the K-12 to higher education pipeline and first-generation college student success. The University of Arizona's MAS department works collaboratively with community organizations to address issues and produce knowledge benefiting historically marginalized communities, and engages public policy on criminal justice, immigration, and systemic inequity.

These Centers do more community work per dollar than nearly any other academic unit on campus. Yet they have operated for decades on the edge of survival.

A UT Austin graduate described his undergraduate experience as "frustrating," noting that there "seemed to be such battles for funding for the Center for Mexican American Studies, and that was disillusioning." That battle never ended. In early 2026, UT Austin announced the consolidation of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, along with African and African Diaspora Studies, Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies, into a single new department. "It's important to realize that in joining these communities together, especially by force, you're creating a system in which they have to fight, sometimes with each other, for funding, and that is ridiculous and unfair," said one scholar at the national rally held in protest on UT's own campus. At the University of North Texas, facing a $45 million budget shortfall, the university cut its Mexican American Studies minor, along with Africana Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Asian Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.

The fallback position of college and university administrations has always been the same: Chicano/a Studies simply isn't needed, and there is simply no funding. It has been a struggle and a test of wills for Chicano/a Studies to survive.

The Students Are There. The Resources Are Not.

What makes this institutional abandonment most indefensible is that student demand is not in question. The data are unambiguous.

Research shows that Ethnic Studies coursework benefits students through better school attendance, higher standardized test scores, higher GPAs, higher graduation rates, and even a reduction in interpersonal prejudice. A peer-reviewed study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that assignment to Ethnic Studies substantially increased high school graduation, attendance, and the probability of enrolling in college (Dee & Penner, 2017). A longitudinal University of Michigan study involving 459 ninth-grade students, the majority Mexican or Mexican American, attending high-poverty schools, found that students enrolled in Ethnic Studies experience significant growth in critical reflection, which is linked to academic success, civic engagement, improved well-being, and support for equity-promoting policies (Cabrera et al., 2014).

In Texas, a 2024 youth-led research project found that students not enrolled in MAS courses wanted to learn more and enroll, but because school districts aren’t required to offer them, students may miss out on all the benefits (Valenzuela, 2023). In El Paso, only five schools across the two largest districts offer MAS, and teachers are sounding alarms that students are being cut off from their own history. Surveys of schools offering the MAS course found that a significant number could not run the class because no teacher could be found to teach it, or because students didn’t enroll due to lack of awareness or scheduling conflicts. Educators piece together curriculum without textbooks, relying on crowdsourced materials and digital resources.

Meanwhile, the majority of Mexican American and Ethnic Studies programs, most established after the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s, are dramatically underfunded and understaffed, with many having one or no core tenure-track faculty. Nationally, only 5% of four-year institutions offer an Ethnic Studies major, figures researchers have called alarming given decades of Latino enrollment growth and demographic change across the Southwest.

A Choice, Not a Coincidence

Centers for Mexican American Studies were built on sacrifice: walkouts, riots, arrests, hunger strikes, and decades of community organizing. They were won fight by fight, campus by campus. Today they serve as the connective tissue between universities and the communities that bled to create them, preserving oral histories, training educators, conducting policy research, mentoring first-generation students, and anchoring cultural identity for millions of Americans.

The question is not whether students want this education. They do, and the research proves it. The question is not whether these Centers serve communities. They do, visibly and measurably. The question is whether the institutions entrusted with public education will finally make the choice to fund what has always been funded last, if at all.

Fifty years of hunger strikes, arrests, and advocacy should be enough to earn more than a footnote in a budget that gets cut the moment the economy tightens. The discipline that required the most sacrifice to establish has received the least institutional investment to sustain.

The Pattern Repeats: What Is Happening at UC Berkeley

The story of Ethnic Studies under siege is not only a Texas story or a historical one. It is unfolding right now on one of the most storied campuses in the country. In September 2025, UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons disclosed the personal information of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to the Trump administration as part of a federal investigation into alleged antisemitism on campus, without notifying those affected until weeks after the disclosure had already occurred. Among those named was renowned Jewish feminist scholar Judith Butler, whose family lost members in the Holocaust. As Dr. César A. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a first-year student there, has written: the university that birthed the Free Speech Movement chose federal favor over the safety of its own community (Cruz, 2026).

That same year, Berkeley indefinitely closed the Multicultural Community Center, a student-built, student-run hub of multiracial organizing located in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union building, won by students in 1999 after a hunger strike. When the administration eventually announced it would reopen the center, political art reflecting the movements that created it had been stripped from the walls. Administrators justified the erasure by saying they wanted to make the space “more welcoming,” using the same language used to neutralize Ethnic Studies programs across the country. As doctoral student Sarah Halabe noted plainly: “The administration is saying, ‘Oh no, you’re not being inclusive,’ when the Multicultural Community Center was founded to be inclusive of marginalized students” (Cruz, 2026).

Then, in April 2026, Berkeley’s Ethnic Studies department announced it would not renew two lecturer positions for the coming academic year, citing “financial deficits,” eliminating ten percent of courses taught by lecturers in the department. Lecturer Diana Negrín discovered her fall course had been dropped when she checked the course catalog herself; neither the department nor the dean’s office had told her. Lecturer Jesus Barraza, who teaches more than 250 students a year, put it starkly: “The University treats Ethnic Studies as an academic ghetto. From the Department’s inception, the University has looked for ways to starve the Department” (Cruz, 2026). Meanwhile, construction workers building a new beach volleyball complex on campus unearthed the skeletal remains of at least one Native American person, on the ancestral land of the Ohlone people, the Confederated Villages of Lisjan. The university had funding for a five-court sand facility, but not for the lecturers who teach the history of the very communities whose bones were found in the ground beneath it.

Source: Department of Mexican American and 
Latino Studies

Berkeley is not an outlier. It is a mirror. What is happening there: the disclosure of student names to federal investigators, the gutting of a student-won multicultural center, the defunding of Ethnic Studies under cover of budget language. It is the same pattern this op-ed traces across decades of Texas and national history. 

The tactics change; the goal does not. Continuing lecturer Pablo Gonzalez, despite 14 years at Berkeley and a Distinguished Teaching Award, says his “suitcase is always packed” (Cruz, 2026). That sentence could have been spoken by a lecturer at UT Austin, Cal State Northridge, or UCLA in any decade since 1968. When the institutions that claim to champion free inquiry are the first to comply with repression, it is community, not administration, that must hold the line.

That is not a coincidence. It is a policy. And it is one we have the power to change.

Christopher Carmona focuses on government affairs, nonprofit strategy, and education policy. He has consulted on Texas ethnic studies legislation, co-authored official Texas State Board of Education reports on Mexican American Studies implementation and served as Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and Research at Our Lady of the Lake University. 

References

Cruz, César A. “What Cal Is This? A Year of Repression at UC Berkeley, and the Call to Take It Back.” Medium.com, May 1, 2026. Republished by Angela Valenzuela, Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas, May 5, 2026. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/05/what-cal-is-this-year-of-repression-at.html

Dr. Cruz, a Cal alum and parent of a UC Berkeley first-year student, chronicles a pattern of institutional capitulation at UC Berkeley during the 2025–26 academic year: the university’s disclosure of roughly 160 students, faculty, and staff to federal investigators; the indefinite closure and subsequent depoliticization of the student-built Multicultural Community Center; the nonrenewal of two Ethnic Studies lecturers citing budget deficits; and the discovery of Ohlone ancestral remains beneath a construction site for a new beach volleyball facility. Cruz frames these events as interconnected signs of a university abandoning its legacy of free speech, ethnic studies, public accountability, and resistance to state repression. The essay calls on students, faculty, alumni, and community members to organize collectively in defense of Ethnic Studies and the democratic mission of public higher education. Published on the blog of Dr. Angela Valenzuela, Professor of Education at UT Austin and a leading scholar of Mexican American education and equity policy.

Chicano Coordinating Council on Higher Education. El Plan de Santa Bárbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education. La Causa Publications, 1969.

Dee, Thomas S., and Emily K. Penner. "The causal effects of cultural relevance: Evidence from an ethnic studies curriculum." American Educational Research Journal 54.1 (2017): 127-166 [pdf].

Cabrera, Nolan L., Jeffrey F. Milem, Oiyan Pong, and Ronald W. Marx. “Missing the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson.” American Educational Research Journal 51, no. 6 (2014): 1084–1118. (University of Michigan longitudinal study referenced in op-ed.)

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. State University of New York Press, 1999.

Valenzuela, Angela. “Struggles For/With/Through Ethnic Studies in Texas: Third Spaces as Anchors for Collective Action.” Teachers College Record 125, no. 3 (2023). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01614681231181793

Acuña, Rodolfo. The Making of Chicana/o Studies: In the Trenches of Academe. Rutgers University Press, 2011. (Source for CSUN founding history and 1967–1971 campus activism.)

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. Hunger Strike for Chicano Studies Department Collection, 1993. UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt0b69p9s1

UCLA Newsroom. “Hail to the Hills: Starving for Justice.” UCLA Magazine, March 28, 2021. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/hunger-strike-chicana-chicano-studies

University of Texas at Austin, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “About: History of MALS.” Liberal Arts, UT Austin, 2024. https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mals/about/