The Governance of Knowledge vs. the Return on Knowing: Project 2025 and the Remaking of Texas Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Governance of Knowledge vs. the Return on Knowing: Project 2025 and the Remaking of Texas Higher Education

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

August 30, 2026

In 2024, the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) published Five Threats to Public Education in Our States and Communities: An Analysis of Project 2025, warning that Project 2025 threatened federal education funding, public schooling, civil-rights enforcement, protections against discriminatory discipline, and educational access for immigrant students (Intercultural Development Research Association [IDRA], 2024). Read two years later, the report appears remarkably prescient. Yet what has transpired in 2025–26 suggests something even larger than the dismantling IDRA anticipated.

What is taking shape is a governance of knowledge.

By this I mean an increasingly coordinated effort to determine not merely how universities are funded or administered, but who possesses authority over knowledge itself: what may be taught, which fields deserve institutional protection, which histories are legitimate, which forms of inequality government is willing to recognize, which programs survive, and who gets to participate in those decisions.

This is why Project 2025 should not be understood simply as an agenda for “smaller government.” Government has not simply retreated from education. In important respects, political authority has been redirected and concentrated.

At the federal level, President Trump's March 2025 executive order directed the secretary of education, to the extent permitted by law, to facilitate the closure of the U.S. Department of Education and return authority to states and localities. Days earlier, the department had announced a reduction in force affecting nearly half of its workforce (White House, 2025; U.S. Department of Education, 2025). By July 2026, the department had also rescinded disparate-impact provisions from its Title VI regulations, narrowing an important means through which structurally unequal outcomes can be recognized as civil-rights problems (U.S. Department of Education, 2026).

Source: Texas Border Business

Yet simultaneously, government has become more—not less—assertive in defining acceptable educational practice, DEI, accreditation, curriculum, and institutional priorities. Project 2025's significance therefore lies not simply in deregulation, but in re-regulation around a different ideological conception of education (Burke, 2023).

Texas provides perhaps the clearest example.

Senate Bill 37, enacted in 2025, fundamentally redefined shared governance at Texas public universities. Governing boards must periodically review general education curricula and may reserve authority to overturn institutional curricular decisions. Faculty senates are explicitly declared “advisory only,” while the law defines shared governance as a structure in which governing boards exercise ultimate authority and faculty participation remains consultative (Texas Legislature, 2025).

This is not a semantic change. It relocates authority.

Shared governance has never meant that faculty alone run universities. Its premise is that universities are knowledge-producing institutions and that academic expertise therefore carries distinctive authority in matters of curriculum, scholarship, academic standards, and faculty status. SB 37 turns that relationship on its head. Expertise advises; politically appointed governing authorities decide.

The consequences are already visible. PEN America has documented widespread review of syllabi and courses across Texas public institutions, accompanied by course cancellations, curricular alterations, and faculty uncertainty about discussions of race, gender, and other politically contested subjects (Carter, 2026). The American Association of University Professors consequently launched a statewide inquiry in June 2026 into what it describes as the dismantling of shared faculty governance and threats to academic freedom across Texas public universities (American Association of University Professors [AAUP], 2026).

At the University of Texas System, the May 2026 revision of Regents' Rule 31003 further consolidated presidential authority over the elimination of occupied academic positions and academic programs. Faculty retain opportunities for input, but the president determines whether programs and positions should be eliminated, subject ultimately to System approval (University of Texas System Board of Regents, 2026).

At UT-Austin, meanwhile, African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies were consolidated into the new Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, affecting programs in which more than 800 students were pursuing degrees or credentials when the restructuring was announced (Dey, 2026). 

Each development can be defended individually as governance, efficiency, accountability, curricular coherence, or institutional restructuring. What matters, however, is the cumulative pattern. As Kamola (2024) demonstrates in Manufacturing Backlash, attacks on DEI, tenure, accreditation, curriculum, and shared governance have not emerged independently. They have been promoted through networks of think tanks and political organizations that have turned dissatisfaction with higher education into a sustained legislative campaign against university autonomy and academic freedom.

The goal of manufactured backlash is therefore larger than winning an argument about DEI or a particular course. Its political power lies in changing the institutional conditions under which knowledge itself is produced, legitimized, circulated, and preserved.

And here lies the extraordinary irony of our historical moment.

As I wrote earlier this year in “Exponential Knowledge, Narrowing Worlds,” Derek J. de Solla Price's classic Little Science, Big Science demonstrated that modern scientific knowledge expands exponentially rather than linearly (Price, 1963; Valenzuela, 2026a). Subsequent bibliometric research has confirmed the extraordinary growth of scientific publication over time (Bornmann & Mutz, 2015).

Humanity is therefore living through an unprecedented expansion of knowledge.

But more knowledge does not automatically produce a more inclusive knowledge order.

As I argued in that essay, the growth curve identified by Price remains compelling, but expansion may simultaneously intensify “asymmetries of recognition, visibility, and institutional power” (Valenzuela, 2026a). An exponentially expanding knowledge system can still privilege some languages, institutions, histories, disciplines, and populations while marginalizing others.

Texas reveals a domestic political version of precisely this paradox.

At the very historical moment when knowledge is multiplying at unprecedented speed, government is becoming increasingly involved in determining which knowledge counts.

We are simultaneously experiencing an expansion of knowing and a narrowing of epistemic authority.

This development stands diametrically opposed to what I have called the Return on Knowing, or ROK (Valenzuela, 2026b).

ROK asks us to move beyond the increasingly dominant language of return on investment, or ROI, in which universities and disciplines are evaluated principally according to earnings, workforce demand, enrollment, efficiency, and immediate economic productivity. It instead asks a deeper question: What becomes possible because people know more—and what does ignorance cost us? (Valenzuela, 2026b).

The distinction is crucial.

A Return on Knowing recognizes historical, cultural, scientific, linguistic, and civic knowledge as public infrastructure. Knowing more about the peoples with whom we live, the institutions that govern us, histories that produced the present, and perspectives unlike our own strengthens judgment, professional competence, democratic literacy, institutional trust, and society's capacity to solve problems.

A governance of knowledge moves in the opposite direction.

ROK asks how we can enlarge society's capacity to know.

The governance of knowledge asks which knowledge authorities will permit institutions to sustain.

ROK treats intellectual plurality as an asset.

The governance of knowledge treats certain forms of plurality as problems requiring oversight.

ROK disperses epistemic capacity.

The governance of knowledge concentrates epistemic authority.

That distinction helps explain why shared governance matters so profoundly. The erosion of faculty authority is not simply an employment issue for professors. It alters the architecture through which societies decide what knowledge will exist.

The chilling effect follows naturally. Faculty need not be formally censored if they begin anticipating what legislators, regents, presidents, donors, or administrators might regard as objectionable. Institutions need not formally abolish fields if those fields can be consolidated, audited, deprived of autonomy, or required repeatedly to justify themselves according to politically defined measures of relevance. The most effective governance of knowledge may ultimately be the system in which universities learn to regulate themselves.

The K–12 implications identified by IDRA remain important as well. Texas enacted its private-school voucher program in 2025, moving public dollars into private educational settings, while federal retrenchment in civil-rights enforcement and the removal of disparate-impact protections potentially weaken safeguards for students experiencing systemic inequities (IDRA, 2024; Office of the Texas Governor, 2025). These developments belong to the same larger struggle over whether education is understood as a democratic public institution carrying obligations to everyone or increasingly as a collection of individual choices governed by markets and political authority.

But higher education adds another dimension because universities are among society's central institutions for producing new knowledge.

This is what makes the current moment so consequential.

The central question before Texas is no longer simply whether DEI programs should exist, whether one course is sufficiently “balanced,” whether a faculty senate should have sixty members, or whether a particular academic department should remain administratively independent.

The question is who gets to govern knowledge.

Who decides what Texans need to know? Who determines which forms of knowledge merit investment? Who decides what constitutes a legitimate discipline? Who determines whether a politically controversial subject is nevertheless academically indispensable? And what institutional protections remain when knowledge produced through scholarly inquiry conflicts with political power? Yes, lots of questions, but important ones.

Price showed us a world in which knowledge expands exponentially.

Our political challenge is to ensure that the institutions responsible for that knowledge do not simultaneously become narrower.

Because a society can possess more information than any civilization in history and still become less capable of knowing itself.

That is the danger of manufactured backlash.

And it is precisely why a Return on Knowing offers a profoundly different vision for the public university: not an institution disciplined into producing only politically approved or immediately monetizable knowledge, but one capable of expanding what society can understand, remember, imagine, and become.

References

American Association of University Professors. (2026, June 24). AAUP launches inquiry into academic freedom in Texas. AAUP inquiry

Bornmann, L., & Mutz, R. (2015). Growth rates of modern science: A bibliometric analysis based on the number of publications and cited references. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(11), 2215–2222. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23329

Burke, L. M. (2023). Department of Education. In P. Dans & S. Groves (Eds.), Mandate for leadership: The conservative promise (pp. 319–362). The Heritage Foundation.

Carter, C. (2026, May 7). Texas universities are taking censorship into their own hands. PEN America. 

Dey, S. (2026, February 12). UT-Austin to consolidate race, ethnic and gender study programs. The Texas Tribune. 

Intercultural Development Research Association. (2024). Five threats to public education in our states and communities: An analysis of Project 2025. https://www.idra.org/resource-center/five-threats-to-public-education-in-our-states-and-communities-an-analysis-of-project-2025/

Kamola, I. (2024). Manufacturing backlash: Right-wing think tanks and legislative attacks on higher education, 2021–2023. American Association of University Professors. https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Manufacturing_Backlash_final_0.pdf

Office of the Texas Governor. (2025, May 3). Governor Abbott signs landmark school choice legislation into law. Governor's announcement

Price, D. J. de S. (1963). Little science, big science. Columbia University Press.

Texas Legislature. (2025). S.B. 37, 89th Legislature, Regular Session. Enrolled Senate Bill 37

U.S. Department of Education. (2025, March 11). U.S. Department of Education initiates reduction in force. Department of Education release

U.S. Department of Education. (2026, July 23). U.S. Department of Education removes disparate-impact from Title VI regulations. Department of Education release

University of Texas System Board of Regents. (2026). Rule 31003: Elimination of faculty positions or academic programs. Regents' Rule 31003

Valenzuela, A. (2026a, April 28). Exponential knowledge, narrowing worlds: Justice in an unequal global order. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/04/exponential-knowledge-narrowing-worlds.html

Valenzuela, A. (2026b, July 14). The return on knowing: Why Mexican American and Latino Studies is an economic investment in our shared future. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-return-on-knowing-why-mexican.html

White House. (2025, March 20). Improving education outcomes by empowering parents, states, and communities. Executive order

New Research Again Debunks the Myth Linking Undocumented Immigrants to Crime, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. August 27, 2026

New Research Again Debunks the Myth Linking Undocumented Immigrants to Crime

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. 

August 29, 2026*

A recent HuffPost article by Ian Kumamoto, published August 19, 2026, highlights new research that complicates one of the most durable claims in contemporary immigration politics: the idea that undocumented immigration is associated with higher crime.

The study, published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, examined roughly 11,500 neighborhoods across 100 U.S. cities representing about 46 million people. Rather than finding that increases in undocumented immigration were followed by increases in violent crime, the researchers found no such relationship. In neighborhoods where the undocumented population grew, property crime actually declined more sharply, and violent crime did not increase.

That finding deserves attention not simply because of what it says about crime, but because of what it reveals about the power of political narratives.

For years, immigrants—especially undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and other parts of Latin America—have been portrayed as threats to public safety. Political speeches routinely connect immigration with criminality, disorder, danger, and invasion. Those associations have helped justify increasingly aggressive enforcement policies and have shaped public attitudes toward people who often possess relatively little political power of their own.

The difficulty is that the evidence repeatedly refuses to cooperate with the stereotype.

The study examined neighborhood change between 2010 and 2018 and adds to a much longer body of scholarship questioning the presumed relationship between immigration and crime. Lead researcher Charis Kubrin summarized the findings plainly: unauthorized immigration does not appear to drive neighborhood crime rates.

What makes this especially revealing is how long the underlying myth has survived.

Researchers have challenged the immigrant-crime association for generations. Even the Wickersham Commission, nearly a century ago, found lower involvement in crime among immigrants than among people born in the United States. Yet the assumption that immigrants bring disorder remains deeply embedded in American political discourse.

That persistence should make us ask a larger question.

What happens when a political narrative survives repeated empirical refutation?

At that point, we are no longer dealing only with an argument about evidence. We are dealing with a story that serves a political function.

Constructing immigrants as dangerous outsiders makes exclusion appear reasonable. It turns enforcement into protection. It transforms communities seeking work, safety, family reunification, or opportunity into objects of suspicion. And because these narratives fall most heavily on racialized populations, they draw upon much older traditions in American history in which entire groups have been portrayed as inherently threatening in order to justify unequal treatment.

This is why the new research matters.

Public policy should be based on credible evidence rather than politically useful fear. When research covering thousands of neighborhoods repeatedly fails to show the crime effects so often invoked in political rhetoric, responsible public debate requires us to acknowledge that fact.

None of this means that immigration policy is simple or that questions concerning borders, legal status, or enforcement do not deserve serious discussion. They do.

But serious discussion should begin with accurate premises.

If undocumented immigration is not producing the increases in violent crime that political rhetoric so frequently attributes to it, then we should stop treating that claim as self-evident truth.

The Kumamoto article and the underlying Journal of Urban Affairs study are therefore valuable not merely because they challenge a stereotype, but because they remind us of something fundamental to democratic policymaking:

Evidence should shape our understanding of social problems. We should not reshape the evidence to preserve a politically convenient story.

References

Kumamoto, I. (2026, August 19). In a plot twist for conservatives, new data finds no link between immigrants and crime. HuffPost.

Kubrin, C. E., Christopher, D., Hodgen, C., Luo, X. I., & Hipp, J. R. (2026). Does unauthorized immigration drive community crime rates? Evidence from 11,500 U.S. neighborhoods. Journal of Urban Affairs. https://doi.org/10.1080/07352166.2026.2699123

*Originally puplished 8.28.26 Updated 8.29.26
In A Plot Twist For Conservatives, New Data Finds No Link Between Immigrants And Crime
Awkward.

Ryan Murphy via Associated Press

By Ian Kumamoto
Aug 19, 2026, 02:18 PM EDT
|Updated Aug 19, 2026

While undocumented immigrants continue to serve as conservatives’ favorite boogiemen, they also conveniently happen to be a demographic with few legal protections. By painting them as dangerous criminals threatening the safety of American citizens, many Republicans have justified violent campaigns that have involved arresting and detaining thousands of innocent people, some of them with legal status, all across the country.

But an affirming new study found no detectable change in violent crime in neighborhoods with increases in undocumented residents. In fact, “neighborhoods where the share of undocumented immigrants actually grew saw greater reductions in property crime,” per the research published in the Journal of Urban Affairs.

The study tracked crime rates across a vast 11,500 neighborhoods and across 100 cities that represented 46 million people. Their findings joyfully and completely fly in the face of all of conservatives’ racist and xenophobic claims about immigrants — especially those who are undocumented — being the scourge of their communities.

In order to come to their conclusions, researchers examined correlations between the number of undocumented immigrants and different types of crimes, such as property crime and aggravated assaults. Although there are several studies published that examine the connections between immigration and crime, few differentiate among immigrants with legal status and undocumented immigrants. One of the most fascinating findings from this particular study was that neighborhoods that saw a growth in the percentage of undocumented immigrants also saw a 2.5% decrease in aggravated assaults and other violent crime.

For those of us who are immigrants or have spent time around undocumented people, this is actually not very surprising. People who leave their home countries often do so out of desperation, often to flee violence, poverty and other factors that dramatically affect their quality of life. The last thing many of them want to do once they reach the U.S. is call attention to themselves by breaking the rules.

One of the most fascinating findings from this particular study was that neighborhoods that saw a growth in the percentage of undocumented immigrants also saw a 2.5% decrease in aggravated assaults and other violent crime.

This fear of being perceived negatively is even more pronounced now that ICE has been unleashed indiscriminately nationwide, which has left many immigrants literally too afraid to even step outside. That fear seems pretty justified, considering several cases of unjustified violence and a new plan to arm ICE officers with electric shock gloves.

The correlation between reduced violent crime in areas with an increasing number of undocumented immigrants is so notable that the researchers even make a spicy suggestion at the end of their study: “All else equal, our findings suggest that law enforcement activity to prevent property crime and violent assaults would be optimally concentrated in neighborhoods where residents are disproportionately U.S. citizens,” they write.

Of course, we’re not really holding our breaths for these very insightful, revealing studies to lead to a change of heart on the part of cowardly bigots. The vitriol against undocumented immigrants is already so widespread and has become more of an emotional reaction than it is a logical or scientifically backed one.

But for everyone else who recognizes data, respects human rights and understands the pitfalls of historical racism, it’s evident that blaming violence on outsiders seeking asylum is ignorant and uninformed.

Stories behind UT’s now-closed ethnic and gender studies departments, by Lily Kepner, Staff WriterAug 24, 2026

Friends:

I want to call readers’ attention to an important and deeply concerning piece by Austin American-Statesman higher education reporter Lily Kepner, published August 24, 2026, documenting the histories—and now the disappearance as independent academic units—of four longstanding fields at the University of Texas at Austin: Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Together, these departments encompassed 62 professors, six undergraduate majors, four graduate programs, and eight minors and certificates.

Kepner’s reporting is especially important because it documents the hugely successful People's Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom reminding us of what can easily be obscured by the bureaucratic language of “consolidation.” These departments did not simply appear on an organizational chart. They grew out of decades of student activism, community struggle, intellectual labor, institution-building, and demands that the university recognize histories and bodies of knowledge long excluded from the academy. As students returned to campus this fall, however, those independent departments ceased to exist, folded into the new Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.

That should concern all of us who care about academic freedom, intellectual diversity, shared governance, and the public mission of the university. Kepner’s piece helps us understand not only what UT has dismantled, but what generations of students, faculty, and community members had fought so hard to build.

-Angela Valenzuela

Stories behind UT’s now-closed ethnic and gender studies departments
By Lily Kepner,Staff WriterAug 24, 2026


Recent University of Texas graduate Dezaree Walker speaks on the second panel of invited speakers at the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman

As Longhorns return to campus Monday, decades-old ethnic and gender studies departments will no longer exist.

Six months ago, University of Texas President Jim Davis announced that the university would consolidate ethnic and gender studies programs in the College of Liberal Arts into the new Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. This summer, the department names were scraped from their glass doors, chairs lost their titles and supporting staff were relocated or let go.

University of Texas professor of educational leadership and policy Angela Valenzuela listens to the first panel of speakers at the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026.

The consolidation angered some faculty and students who believe the shift ignores the decades-long history of the departments and the value they offer students and the city of Austin. Faculty fear it will make it harder to hire, limit courses and resources and restrain the fields of study.

The four closed departments — Mexican American and Latina/o Studies; African and African Diaspora Studies; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and American Studies — encompassed 62 professors, six majors, four graduate programs, and eight minors and certificates. Last year, the departments had a combined 307 students enrolled in undergraduate majors, according to UT data. Dozens more pursued minor, graduate and doctoral programs, according to records used by the consolidation committee.

Davis has said the university is not cutting faculty or resources as part of the consolidation. But he recently announced sweeping changes to strictly define the core curriculum that all UT students have to take. Previously, courses in the closed departments counted toward the core, but under Davis’s changes, social and cultural analysis offerings may no longer be eligible, limiting student enrollment.

The core curriculum changes and the consolidation could affect the future of gender and ethnic studies as the university invests in fields favored by conservatives.

The American-Statesman spent the last several months talking to the consolidated departments’ founders, faculty and students to understand the role they had in teaching and producing knowledge in the state. What emerged was the story of four departments born out of successful student activism and distinguished by a connection to the local community, small class sizes and interdisciplinary work and research.



Martha Cotera, a founder of UT Center For Mexican American Studies, at her home in Austin on Tuesday, March 24, 2026. Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman

Mexican American and Latina/o Studies

During UT’s spring break, Martha Cotera, 88, stacked nonperishable food and old books in a bin by her front door for UT’s Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Department.

She would take those donations to the department’s food pantry at its UT home in the Gordon White Building. There, the department housed a library, research institute and center that worked with community activists like Cotera to study pressing problems affecting the Chicano community in Austin, from a lack of healthcare options to affordability.

Cotera began advocating for the department as an activist and Texas librarian in the 1960s. There hasn’t been a month in the nearly six decades since when she’s lost touch with the field’s advocates on campus.

It grew from an idea that student advocates had in 1968 to become a department, research institute and center offering graduate and undergraduate degrees with 14 professors on staff. As UT folds it into a larger academic unit, Cotera fears all those resources could be at risk.

In the 1960s, without a dedicated center, department or faculty to study Mexican-American life, Latinos were only spoken about at UT in relation to folklore, Cotera said. The history of Mexicans and Latinos was excluded from other fields like history, education and sociology. The lack of research and education affected Mexican Americans in Austin who didn’t have access to in-depth information about the policies and biases that affected their lives, Cotera said.

“We were always going to be stuck in that corner,” Cotera said. “It was very important that we get out of the folklore realm into multi-disciplinary studies in a serious way by looking at our community, by doing research in our community.”

Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, white Texans made up the majority of students at UT. When more Mexican American and Black students enrolled, student activists began pushing for classes and research that reflected their experiences.

In the late 1960s, UT responded by creating an ethnic studies program. By 1970, the university launched centers dedicated to Mexican American Studies and African American Studies.insert Diosa

The Mexican American Studies center had an impact across the university. After the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action at UT in 1996, David Montejano, the center’s former director, advocated for a race-neutral approach to improving student diversity. He and other center faculty met with state senators. Their efforts were key in drafting the top 10% rule, which gave all Texas high schoolers in the top 10% of their class admission to any state university.


Cotera served on the center’s board, which invested in researching Latino communities in Austin, developing a research archive in the Benson Latin American Collection at UT libraries, an archive of Mexican veterans and an annual conference for Latino scholars. Even as research from center-affiliated faculty grew, advocates continued to push for a department, which would allow the university to hire full-time professors and dedicate more funding.

In 2014, Cotera got her wish, and UT launched the Mexican American and Latino/a Studies Department. The new status allowed program offerings to grow with an undergraduate major and doctoral program.

Paul Del Bosque, 44, recalls hearing about the center’s legacy before he joined the department as a student.
“As a child, I remember hearing about the legendary faculty and the scholarship that was coming out of Chicano studies at UT,” said Del Bosque, who later pursued his master’s and doctoral degrees in the department.


Now in his fifth year of his doctorate program, he researches how hurricanes impact high-poverty communities in South Texas and on the border, contributing Texas-focused scholarship to a Latino community. When he finishes his dissertation in 2028, he plans to pursue a tenure-track job teaching Texas history or environmental humanities.

Reflecting on her beloved department closing, Cotera wiped away tears as she thought about students and the ongoing research into policing, the border and history that could be at risk without UT resources.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

Two days after the consolidation was announced, the Civitas Institute, UT’s conservative think tank created by the Texas Legislature in 2021, hosted a symposium titled “America’s Latino Future.” UT’s Mexican American and Latino/a Studies Department, located across the street from where the institute is housed, was not invited to participate, its former chair confirmed.

Cotera attended the event and listened as researchers discussed the economic importance of Latinos and the need for more research into Latino communities.

“I said ‘Thank you very much, you made the case,’” she said.
=
Ever since the department changes were announced, community activists have gathered at Cotera’s house to discuss how to preserve Mexican American history and education in Austin and fight the administration’s “erasure” of the field at UT.


The founders of the Mexican American center have stayed together in an informal coalition for the past five decades to ensure it remains funded and supported by UT and to help students find internships and housing, Cotera said. That work will continue.

“This is a grassroots effort. Cut it off at the top,” Cotera said. “The roots will remain.”

Attendees listen at the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman

UT’s African and African Diaspora Studies Department was the largest Black studies department in the nation.

With 26 faculty, an institute for urban policy research and analysis, a research center, a doctoral program, two majors and art galleries, the department was a national leader.

When it became a department in 2010, it was part of then-President William C. Power’s vision to expand education about diverse topics across campus, grow its enrollment of nonwhite students, meet community demand and elevate the national prominence of the university, said Cherise Smith, a former department chair.

The faculty were successful in living up to that vision: The department is known across the country and world, attracting international students and serving as a model for Stanford University when it built its own department, Smith said. UT’s faculty researched education and the relationship between slavery and capitalism while having a special focus on African American art and performance.

For 50 years the field has grown and blossomed at UT, attracting students who also study fashion, natural sciences, engineering, business and education, Smith said.

“There was always an assumption that we would be training all of the students who came to UT,” Smith said. “Not a particular racial or ethnic group.”

It took a while to get to that point. After a UT student petition advocating for classes that reflected the Black experience attracted more than 1,300 signatures, the first class in Black history was offered in 1968, according to Texas archives. The university launched an ethnic studies program the following year.

In 1970, the university opened the center now known as the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, which pioneered research and new academic avenues for students. In response to student advocacy in 2002, UT began offering a certificate in Yoruba Studies, an indigenous African language that students feared would go extinct without continued education and preservation.

The local community has been central to the center’s mission. Faculty researched why Black Austinites were leaving the city and the impact of historic segregation in Austin, Smith said. They also created public resources like a KUT podcast called “Black Austin Matters” that highlights prominent community members, including Talib Abdullahi, the founder of Black History Bike Ride, and Chi Ndika, founder of Luv Fats Ice Cream.

Faculty have also studied how African heritage intersects with a variety of fields, from art — a particular strength of the department — to sports, incarceration and queer communities and share their results in community talks open to all through the Warfield Center.

“I don’t just research out of intellectual curiosity, I research to change the world,” said Ashanté Reese, a professor of anthropology in the department.

Classes are grounded in faculty expertise and contemporary subjects, such as a course on power and money in U.S. education policy taught by Kevin Foster, a professor who serves as a trustee for the Austin Independent School District.

Though the courses, programs and degrees will remain in the new social analysis department, the decision to consolidate without consulting professors felt like an effort to control “whose history gets told, and how and when,” not an honest reevaluation of resources, Reese said.

“We might be a different name. We might need to reimagine and dream,” Reese said. But it will continue, she said. “Black Studies was never about institutional recognition.”

American Studies




University of Texas Professor Lauren Gutterman, the former chair of UT's American Studies Department, smiles as she greets fellow educators at the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman

UT has offered American Studies courses since 1941, when a founding scholar of the field began teaching at the Forty Acres, said Lauren Gutterman, the former department chair. The field focuses on “cultural, social and intellectual life” in the U.S. through a variety of lenses, including economic, political, historical and environmental research.

American Studies has operated as its own department at UT since 1998, also supporting an Urban Studies major, in which students study the history and creation of urban life. UT’s department — one of 150 in the nation and 28 that offer a doctoral program — is known for having UT’s first Pulitzer Prize-winning history faculty member in 1967.

There were more than 130 undergraduate students and 30 doctoral students in American Studies at UT last spring, Gutterman said. Students take classes on American sports and culture, North American borders, the history of religion and digital cultures.

“What students find in American Studies is an opportunity to think about what the United States is, what it means to be a part of this nation, who we’re taught belongs here, who we’re taught does not belong,” Gutterman said.

Opponents have found flaws with the field for being overly critical of the country. Though not addressing the department by name, UT Provost William Inboden wrote in a 2025 National Affairs essay that American history courses offer an “imbalanced” view of the U.S.

Gutterman said, however, that American Studies serves a crucial role, allowing students to explore any aspect of American history, culture and politics through a wide range of methodologies, from mapping to digital archives.

“Critical engagement with American history and culture actually helps students to become better citizens,” Gutterman said. “You (learn about) contemporary issues that are happening and to take action about the issues.”

Alumni include Pulitzer Prize winner and book critic Gail Caldwell and former Austin Mayor Pro Tem Kathy Tovo, as well as doctors, attorneys, professors and college presidents like Laura Cawley, who leads Bethany College, a liberal arts school in Kansas. Both honors programs in the College of Liberal Arts are led by American Studies professors.

Iván Chaar López, a University of Texas scholar on border surveillance, in his office in Austin, Wednesday, July 15, 2026. Amid concerns UT is quieting controversial fields, Chaar López fears the president violated his academic freedom in denying him tenure.Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman.

Still, as UT reorganizes its core curriculum requirements and pours resources into Western civilization and civic education, department officials say American Studies is being sidelined. The department is already bracing to lose faculty in the coming year.

American Studies professor Iván Chaar López, whose research is critical of U.S. border surveillance, was denied tenure by a presidential committee last year without an explanation. Because of an up-or-out policy that forces professors denied tenure to leave UT, he will depart the Forty Acres in 2027.

No other professor in the four consolidated departments was up for tenure last year, but the denial made Gutterman fearful that the university is overlooking the merits of her field.

This year, faculty will continue teaching courses like Oceanic Histories, Jews of the U.S., Canada and Latin America, Urban Unrest and Asian Americans in the South, she said.

“Even if our department is closed by the university, American Studies as a field, our research, our teaching and the intellectual, personal community that we have built is not going away,” Gutterman said.

Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies


Rep. Lulu Flores, D-Austin, asks questions of the first panel of invited speakers the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman

The newest department of the four consolidated, the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, formed in 2023 after operating as a center since 1979. Its near 50-year history began with students pushing for an education that included all people.

In more than a dozen interviews with alumni, current students, professors and recent staff hires, the women’s and gender studies community defended the program as far-reaching and skills-based, leading students to meaningful careers and lives.

Faculty and courses have focused on preserving untold history and examining how key issues from health to literature and information studies affect people differently based on sexuality, race, disability and gender.

“Gender studies, ethnic studies are actual disciplines born out of the need that wasn’t necessarily being met,” said Nicole Ramsey, a women’s and gender studies professor. “If you are to have knowledge about the world, it doesn’t make sense to only do that through certain frameworks that don’t include everybody. It could just never work.”

Alumni — including a nonprofit founder, therapist, professor and a Rhodes Scholar — said their courses helped them empathetically engage with people with different opinions and personal backgrounds. Department courses on women’s reproductive health, LGBTQ history and literature written by women gave them critical thinking skills and new perspectives that shaped their careers.

“It feels like it’s radical knowledge,” said Neha Yawalkar, who graduated from UT in 2025 with a women’s and gender studies minor.

Yawalkar said her minor taught her how gender affects marketing, engineering and healthcare. A fertility and reproduction course helped her see how she could pursue her passions through healthcare while her South Asian migration course taught her to “critique and read with nuance.” An LGBTQ course showed her how queer people historically struggled to find inclusive care.


University of Texas Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies coordinator Jackie Salcedo, left, department manager Grayson Hunt, freshman student Sofia Gomez and director Lisa Moore in Burdine Hall, Feb. 18, 2026 after UT President Jim Davis announced plans to consolidate ethnic and gender studies into a new department.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman

Isaac James, who graduated in 2022 with a minor in LGBTQ studies and major in government, said the program showed him how he could serve his community beyond politics and taught him about the rights queer people have fought for. He cofounded OutVote in 2024, an organization focused on engaging LGBTQ youth in politics, after seeing his peers feel unrepresented in government.

“I really do think without LGBTQ studies, I would not have been able to obtain the same professional and academic success,” said James, who became a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford after graduation.

Becoming a department gave women’s and gender studies the ability to hire full-time faculty, a chair to speak directly to the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and more money for events, marketing and staff. But three years after the department’s founding, Davis’ consolidation announcement eliminated the department’s standalone status as conservative state lawmakers exerted pressure on university leaders to tamp down on courses focused on gender or LGBTQ topics.

Lisa Moore, a former chair of the department, began her career at UT in the 1990s as an English and women’s and gender studies professor. She fears she will end it labeled as a professor of “social and cultural analysis” — a field she doesn’t think has merit outside of UT.

Moore said Davis has not responded to her messages inviting the UT president to her classes or to meet with her about the department. She knows that the field she’s spent more than 30 years studying has “already transformed” the country’s understanding of itself.

“What happens in our classrooms is something that I would love our harshest critics to be able to witness,” Moore said.


Lily Kepner
Higher Education Reporter

Lily Kepner started at the American-Statesman in October 2023. She has appeared on BBC, NPR and Texas Standard to talk about her coverage, which has spanned the impact of state laws and politics on the University of Texas, pro-Palestinian protests, free speech, the anti-DEI ban, LGBTQ student belonging and more. Kepner graduated with honors from Boston University's College of Communication in 2023, where she received the college's highest awards for writing and journalism leadership and led the award-winning student newspaper as Editor-in-Chief. In her time with the American-Statesman, she contributed to reporting that won an Edward R Murrow Award for breaking news, won the School Bell Award for Outstanding Feature from Texas State Teachers Association, and Critics Choice for Best of Austin in the Austin Chronicle. Previously, she has been published in USA Today, The Boston Globe, The National Catholic Reporter and GBH. Kepner is passionate about accountability and service journalism and encourages anyone to reach out to her to tell their story or share a tip.