Boys Deserve Better Than the Command to 'Be a Man,' by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Boys Deserve Better Than the Command to 'Be a Man'

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 9, 2026

Adam Stanaland’s (2025) Scientific American essay, “Our Narrow View of Masculinity Is Hurting Boys,” offers an important intervention in a moment when masculinity is being weaponized in our politics, schools, media, and homes.

His argument is both simple and profound: masculinity itself is not “toxic.” What harms boys is the pressure to perform a narrow, rigid, emotionally constricted version of masculinity—one that tells them not to cry, not to appear vulnerable, not to be “feminine,” not to ask for help, and not to become anything less than dominant.

This matters deeply for educators and parents. Thankfully, research offers helpful evidence-based insights into how gender norms, social pressure, and rigid expectations shape boys’ development, identity, and behavior (Orenstein, 2020; Rudman & Glick, 2021; Stanaland et al., 2021; Stanaland et al., 2024).

In schools, boys are often socialized into silence long before they are invited into self-knowledge. They learn that tenderness is weakness, that anger is more acceptable than grief, and that care work is somehow beneath them. They absorb lessons about manhood not only from parents and peers, but from classrooms, sports culture, social media, churches, political leaders, and the larger society.

Stanaland’s point is that these pressures do not produce strong boys. They produce fragile ones—boys who may feel compelled to prove their manhood through aggression, domination, homophobia, sexism, emotional withdrawal, or contempt for anything coded as feminine. His research with colleagues similarly finds that adolescent boys can respond aggressively when their masculinity feels threatened, especially when they already feel pressure to be conventionally “manly.”

This is not just a family issue. It is a public issue.

When boys are taught that power matters more than connection, that dominance matters more than empathy, and that vulnerability is shameful, democracy itself suffers. A democratic society requires people who can listen, reflect, collaborate, repair harm, and care for others. These are not “soft” skills. They are civic capacities.

This is why the current political attack on so-called “gender ideology” is so harmful—and, frankly, so nonsensical. The phrase itself is vague by design. It turns serious scholarship, honest classroom discussion, and students’ lived experiences into a caricature. It suggests that talking about gender somehow imposes an ideology, when in fact silence about gender is itself ideological. 

The command to “be a man” is gender ideology. 

The shaming of boys for crying is gender ideology. 

The insistence that girls be compliant and boys be dominant is gender ideology. 

The erasure of LGBTQ+ students and families is gender ideology. 

What opponents call “gender ideology” is often simply the attempt to give young people language for understanding themselves, one another, and the unequal world they are inheriting.

The irony is that our society has rightly encouraged girls to enter domains historically coded as masculine—science, leadership, politics, law, medicine, business, athletics. But we have done far less to encourage boys to enter domains coded as feminine: teaching, nursing, caregiving, early childhood education, social work, emotional labor, and peacemaking. We tell girls they can be anything, but too often tell boys they must be one thing.

That is not liberation. It is another cage.

For communities of color, this conversation is especially layered. Black and Brown boys are already too often read through racist lenses of threat, discipline, criminality, and deficit. They do not need more pressure to perform hardness in order to survive. They need schools and communities that recognize their full humanity—their brilliance, tenderness, humor, creativity, grief, anger, cultural knowledge, and capacity for care.

This is where culturally sustaining education matters. Ethnic Studies, gender studies, restorative practices, critical pedagogy, and social-emotional learning do not “weaken” young people. They give them language for their lives. They help students understand how power works, how identities are formed, how harm is reproduced, and how people can choose otherwise.

In today’s culture wars, however, these very forms of education are under attack. The same politics that censor race, gender, sexuality, and history also narrows the emotional and moral vocabulary available to young people. It tells boys that strength means control, that freedom means domination, and that care is weakness. It calls this “tradition,” but it is really a refusal to let children become fully human.

We should reject this.

Boys deserve a wider horizon. They deserve to know that courage can look like telling the truth. Strength can look like asking for help. Leadership can look like listening. Manhood can include tenderness. And masculinity, when freely chosen and rooted in care, responsibility, humility, and justice, need not be toxic at all.

Stanaland’s essay reminds us that the work before us is not to shame boys or men. It is to free them—and all of us—from scripts that are too small for the lives our children deserve.

The question for parents, educators, and policymakers is not simply, “What kind of men are we raising?”

The deeper question is: “What kind of human beings are we allowing boys to become?”

References

Stanaland, A. (2025, March 10). Our narrow view of masculinity is hurting boys. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-narrow-view-of-masculinity-is-hurting-boys/

Stanaland, A., Gaither, S. E., Gassman-Pines, A., Galvez-Cepeda, D., & Cimpian, A. (2024). Adolescent boys’ aggressive responses to perceived threats to their gender typicality. Developmental Science. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39007941/

Stanaland, A., Gaither, S. E., & Gassman-Pines, A. (2021). The role of social pressure in eliciting men’s aggressive cognition. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33504285/

Rudman, L. A., & Glick, P. (2021). The social psychology of gender: How power and intimacy shape gender relations (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Orenstein, P. (2020). Boys & sex: Young men on hookups, love, porn, consent, and navigating the new masculinity. Harper.

Our Narrow View of Masculinity Is Hurting Boys

Masculinity isn’t “toxic” by itself, but the strain boys feel from society and parents to meet unrealistic expectations is

By Adam Stanaland edited by Megha Satyanarayana | Scientific American | March 10, 2025

Matt Porteous/Getty Images

Each semester, I ask my psychology students to imagine how people would grow up, think and act in a world without societal rules and expectations. This may seem like an easy task, but their initial answers are similar to what you’d expect a fish to say if asked what it’s like to live in water. “What norms?” they ask. This is especially the case for the young men who, like me, had never explicitly questioned messages like, “Boys don’t cry” and “Be a man” before going to college. Amid a resurgence of rigid masculinity—and as a psychologist who studies these issues—I’ve grown increasingly concerned with these unacknowledged pressures that can thwart the healthy development of boys and young men.

This question I pose to my students is based on research I and others did a couple of years ago, looking at how pervasive social norms, especially current views of masculinity, can shape people often in unideal ways. As I’ve noted before in Scientific American, many boys and men report feeling pressured to be stereotypically masculine. This means, for example, pressure to be tough (physical and emotionally), able to fix things and in positions of power – what we call “hegemonic masculinity.” These pressure are often rooted in fundamentally human needs, such as men’s desire to provide for their families, or simply to belong and accepted by others.

Importantly, we’ve found that pressure to be a certain kind of masculine leads to aggressive thoughts and feelings, especially among adolescent boys and young adult men who are in throes of forming an identity. To me, it’s not masculinity that is inherently bad or toxic. Rather, problems arise when rigid masculinity is pressured onto boys and men.

In psychology, pressure is the antithesis of autonomy—or the basic human need to act in line with one’s true self. This is why acting out manliness for pressured reasons leads to “fragile” masculine identities. Instead of a healthy identity rooted in authenticity and autonomy, fragility stems from an insecure need for external validation. As a result, these boys and men feel compelled to prove their manhood to others through stereotypically masculine means. We see the results in the disproportionate rates of men’s gun violence, homophobia, sexual aggression, political bigotry and even anti-environmental behavior, compared to women.

Against this, parents are a critical part of how boys see themselves, and how they understand masculinity. With the rise of a “masculinity” that is increasingly pressuring, parents can help boys develop more expansive identities. This is not about demonizing one idea of masculinity, or boys and men as group, but reducing the pressure to be a narrowly defined man. Genuine and compassionate versions of masculinity exist, and it’s okay for boys to take those paths. Getting there means conversation, modeling desired behavior, and reckoning with our own definitions of what a man is. But it matters, because this pressure to conform to narrow norms is hurting boys.

While we were collecting data on boys’ aggression, we also surveyed their parents, asking them to agree or disagree with statements relating to current beliefs about masculinity. Some of these items had to do with relatively benign beliefs—like, whether men should be handy—and some were more consequential, such as beliefs about homophobia and gender inequality.

We found that parents’ beliefs about hegemonic masculinity related to pressure their sons reported to be stereotypically masculine; that is, parents who simply believed that men should have status and power over others had sons (some as young as 10) who reported feeling pressured to be manly. It’s no surprise, then, that these were the boys who responded aggressively when we challenged their manhood, especially when they were already in the throes of puberty.

These results tell us there is a consequence to raising boys in a man’s world: living up to these expectations is stressing them out. We know this because they report being bullied, or shut out of peer groups. They tell us they have low self-esteem. In their book on the psychology of gender relations between women and men, Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick propose that we are powerfully shaped by how societies are structured—with men most often at the top and women (and people of other genders) situated below them. For proof, look no further than government and business in the U.S. where only 27 percent of federal lawmakers, 10 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs and 0 percent of presidents are women.

Immediately, we think about what these disparities mean for girls, and we should, but to the extent that girls receive messages that they can’t get to the top, many boys are hearing that they must get to the top. It’s certainly a double-edged sword. Boys and men are afforded power and privilege, yet many are also pressured to earn and maintain it.


AleksandarNakic/Getty Images

We’ve made great strides in inspiring girls to achieve just as well as boys (and even better)—though there is still much work to do here—yet we’ve so far failed to encourage boys to aspire toward culturally feminized work and communal careers in fields such as nursing, child care and early-childhood education. Instead, in many capitalist cultures across the world, we continue to push and pressure our boys away from anything remotely feminine—away from the innate nurturing and caring tendencies that they demonstrate in childhood—and toward the pinnacles of what we (as societies) have defined as success.

Redefining masculinity starts with you. Not every expression or experiment in masculinity will be safe for your child to pursue, especially in certain areas of the world. (For example, we found that parents in conservative parts of the U.S. put significant pressure on their sons to be masculine, which may be rooted in a fear of openly challenging masculinity norms.) But, as psychologist Onnie Rogers notes, we can encourage boys to “run with intentionality in the opposite direction, against the grain, and more importantly, toward [their] full humanity,” and this means that ideas around masculinity are worth talking about.

As you talk to, play with, observe and guide your sons along their paths, here are some ideas to consider, what I think of as “four Rs” to get you started:

Realize that you can have these hard conversations; that you can intervene and guide. Although you might feel like your sons will develop in ways beyond your control, you do have a significant effect on your children’s core beliefs, values and worldviews. Psychologist Sylvia Perry recently wrote in this very column about how children and young adults can handle hard conversations about race. They can understand complex ideas, histories and perspectives about gender, too.

Reconsider the messages boys are sent (and not sent), both explicitly and implicitly. Children learn about gender through many pathways—summed up as direct teaching, experiencing and modeling. You might try to directly teach your boys to combat gender stereotypes and even explicitly encourage them to take part in “feminine” activities; but arguably more important is what they learn by watching you and what they experience in their own worlds. What’s vital is that boys be given the space to develop apart from pressures to be masculine or feminine—nothing is inherently wrong with boys liking to play with trucks, and pressuring boys to do more “girly” things against their inclinations defeats the purpose.

Resist in the sense of equipping boys to resist messages about who they should and shouldn’t be. Even the best schoolteachers sometimes fall back on antiquated tropes like gendering pink versus blue pencils. If your son wants to use the pink pencil, why the hell shouldn’t he? A new and exciting area of research is looking at how easy it is for boys to actively resist masculinity norms and what benefits they may get from this.

Recognize that the way that society is right now isn’t how it has to be. You could, for instance, tell boys that even though there has never been a woman U.S. president, anyone can be president, regardless of their gender. Highlight women who are leading companies and, possibly more importantly, men who excel in HEED occupations (health care, early education and domestic roles).

These won’t be easy. It won’t be a onetime thing. But the sooner we can start dismantling gender gaps at all levels of society, the sooner we’ll see boys (and girls) less pressured to meet outdated expectations—and more fulfilled in finding authenticity.

Adam Stanaland is an assistant professor of social psychology at the University of Richmond. He received a joint Ph.D. in psychology and public policy from Duke University, after which he completed postdoctoral training at New York University. Broadly, his research explores the interplay between societal structures and social norms, such as how political and economic systems influence norms, as well as how norms and beliefs shape group-level behavior.More by Adam Stanaland

Texas Cannot Survive on Culture Wars Alone: What Should Haunt All Texans of Good Conscience, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Texas Cannot Survive on Culture Wars Alone: What Should Haunt All Texans of Good Conscience

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 8, 2026

Jorge Meave’s powerful Substack essay in The Credential, “Hitza Hitz: A Humanist Sermon,” does something urgently needed in Texas politics: it connects the dots.

He begins with the New World screwworm, confirmed in Texas on June 3, 2026—the first U.S. animal case in the current outbreak, according to the CDC. The USDA has described the screwworm as a serious pest of livestock and wildlife, and Texas officials have imposed movement restrictions across affected counties. This is not metaphor. It is living tissue, animal suffering, ranching vulnerability, and state capacity all converging in real time (see Center for Disease Control).

But Meave’s deeper point is that the screwworm is not alone. It is part of a larger story of abandonment—and Mother Earth herself is reflecting it back to us. Across Texas, the signs are everywhere: water disappearing, farmers leaving, schools closing, aquifers threatened, and the ground itself shaking under the pressures of extractive industries. Research from UT Austin and SMU has linked significant seismic activity in the Permian Basin to wastewater injection associated with oil and gas production (UT Austin News). 

Meave is right: the ground is telling us what is happening.

And now, to this already stressed landscape, we must add the rapid expansion of data centers.

Texans across the state are beginning to ask urgent questions about who benefits and who pays when massive data centers arrive requiring enormous amounts of electricity, water, land, and infrastructure. The Texas Tribune reports that Texas is experiencing an AI-driven data center boom, with at least 248 projects planned statewide. Experts warn that these facilities could intensify pressure on Texas’ already fragile water supplies, especially in arid regions and communities already facing drought, population growth, and climate stress.

A 2026 UT Austin report similarly warns that data center growth could significantly increase water demand in Texas by 2040 and calls for greater transparency, shared standards, and integrated planning. HARC Research estimates that Texas data centers already consume roughly 25 billion gallons of water per year and that this figure could rise dramatically by 2030. Meanwhile, ERCOT and energy analysts are grappling with the electricity demand created by data centers, AI technologies, fossil fuel production, and other energy-intensive industries.

This is where Meave’s essay becomes even more important. The issues facing ranchers, farmers, schoolchildren, rural communities, Black and Brown communities, immigrant families, LGBTQ+ Texans, women, teachers, and working people are not separate. They are connected by the same politics of extraction, deregulation, privatization, and neglect.

For too long, Texans have been told to see the culture wars as separate from material survival. But they are not separate. The same political forces that scapegoat immigrants, attack LGBTQ+ communities, restrict women’s autonomy, dismantle DEI, and censor honest teaching about race and history are also too often the forces that look away when aquifers are drained, schools are underfunded, rural hospitals disappear, ranchers lack veterinary access, and communities are asked to absorb the costs of corporate expansion.

This means that “regular Texans” and Black and Brown communities are increasingly in the same boat. The culture wars may target Black, Brown, immigrant, Indigenous, LGBTQ+, and women’s communities first and most visibly. But the broader policy regime harms far more people than it claims to represent. It leaves rural Texans without infrastructure. It leaves working families with higher costs. It leaves communities fighting over water. It leaves schools struggling. It leaves the land exhausted.

That is the heart of Meave’s piece.

Immigrant families, LGBTQ+ Texans, women, students, teachers, ranchers, farmers, rural communities, and working families are not competing constituencies. They are all living inside the same state policy regime—one that protects wealth, extraction, and ideological theater while ordinary people are left to absorb the damage.

This is what is at stake in the coming election. Not simply party control. Not simply personalities. Not even simply corruption, though that matters, too. The deeper question is whether Texas will continue to be governed through distraction, scapegoating, deregulation, privatization, and neglect—or whether candidates for public office will be expected to see the whole state and tell the truth about what is happening.

Meave’s invocation of the Basque phrase Hitza Hitz—when you give your word, it is what you are—lands with particular force. In politics, words are cheap unless they become policy, budgets, protections, regulation, and repair.

If leaders give their word on rural Texas, they must show up for ranchers facing animal disease and veterinary deserts.

If they give their word on water, they must protect aquifers and communities before private interests drain them.

If they give their word on data centers, they must demand transparency about water use, electricity demand, tax abatements, environmental impacts, and who ultimately pays.

If they give their word on schools, they must fund them and oppose privatization efforts—urban, suburban, and rural alike.

If they give their word on Black and Brown communities, they must defend truthful curriculum, Ethnic Studies, voting rights, language rights, and the public institutions that make democracy possible.

If they give their word on the land itself, they must listen when the ground shakes.

Meave’s essay is a sermon and a warning. Texas cannot survive on culture war politics while its water disappears, its schools are weakened, its communities are divided, and its land is treated as disposable.

The ground is telling us what is happening.

So are the ranchers. So are the teachers. So are the students. So are the farmers. So are the communities watching data centers, pipelines, private water deals, and extractive industries arrive without adequate public accountability.

The question now is whether Texas politics will listen.

Cases of the New World screwworm fly infecting animals are on the rise, with the U.S. 

Department of Agriculture documenting 32 cases since June 3. More than 93% of those are 

based in Texas. U.S. Department of Agriculture

Hitza Hitz: A Humanist Sermon

Saturday, July 4, 2026

Friends,

On June 3, 2026, the New World screwworm was confirmed in a calf in Zavala County, Texas. The first case in sixty years. By now, twenty-five confirmed cases. Twenty-one Texas counties under quarantine. The animal lies infested with larvae burrowing through living flesh. A rancher has to move that animal 50 miles to find a veterinarian. Maybe. If there is one.

This is not drought. This is not abstract. This is a living animal, dying.

And I need to tell you something else about this moment. Because the screwworm is not alone.

It happens across Texas.

South Texas: a calf is infested. A rancher cannot move the animal without breaking quarantine. A veterinarian is 50 miles away, or does not exist.

West Texas: The Pecos Valley melon farmers are gone. A state agriculture official said it plainly: "There's no water. They had to leave." That is a brand. That is a name people know. It is gone.

North Texas: In the Permian Basin, nineteen earthquakes recorded in 2009. Sixteen hundred by 2017. Southern Methodist University and UT Austin confirmed this year what was happening: wastewater injection from oil production reactivates pre-existing faults. The ground fractures. Magnitudes as high as 5.4. When the state reduced injection rates in late 2021, the earthquakes declined. The science is clear. The ground is telling you what is happening.

Central Texas: Schools are closing. Local control is being stripped. Families are watching groceries climb. Traffic clogs the cities and the country roads both. This is survival.

East Texas: A hedge fund manager wants 15 billion gallons of water from the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer. The property rights doctrine that says "what you pump is yours" — that rule — is being used to drain the wells of people who have lived on that land for generations. Look it up. The details will astound you.

So we have a living animal infested with larvae. We have farmers gone. We have the ground shaking. We have schools closing. We have property rights being stripped. We have water vanishing.

That is Texas. All of it. Right now.

And I want to ask you something.

There is a woman named Gina Hinojosa who was born in McAllen, Texas. She is running to be governor. The crowds chant in Spanish: No te dejes. Don't let them. Hold your ground. Fight back.

I know that the people fighting the culture wars — the ones defending immigrant families being scapegoated, defending LGBTQ+ people being attacked, defending women being stripped of bodily autonomy — I know those are survival fights. They are real. Those are real people trying to live with dignity and safety. That fight matters.

But here is what haunts me.

While that fight has been happening, other survival issues have been put on hold. And the people affected by those issues — rural Texans, working people in suburbs and small towns — have watched that happen and moved away. Thirty-two years ago, Democrats won rural and suburban Texas. Then they stopped. Not because they got lazy. But because they focused on one fight and put another one on hold.

Democrats have not won a statewide office in Texas since Ann Richards in 1994. Thirty-two years. No Democrat has cleared 45 percent in a governor's race since Richards lost to George W. Bush. They have not cracked 46 percent once in thirty-two years.

The research is clear on why. Rural Texas and suburban Texas realigned to the Republican Party starting in 1994. They did not move left. They moved right. And once they moved, they stayed.

But here is what the research also shows.

Democrats could hold both fights at once. They could defend the people being attacked in the culture wars AND address the screwworm, the water, the schools, the property rights, the ground itself.

If Hinojosa ran on this. If she said: I see you. The people you're defending in the culture wars — I see them. But I also see the rancher in South Texas who cannot move livestock because the state was not prepared. I see the farmer in Pecos who is gone because water policy failed him. I see the family in North Texas living above fracturing ground because wastewater injection was not regulated. I see Central Texas closing schools instead of funding them. I see East Texas property rights being stripped in the name of profit.

If Democrats made that their case. If they said: we will fight the culture wars and we will fight for survival. We will not pick one and abandon the other.

The research says that would work. That would move votes. That would change things.

But it would require one thing.

It would require Democrats to stop choosing between the fights. And start leading on all of them.



Quisiera escribir con amor y la pluma se me torna látigo.

I would like to write with love, but the pen turns into a whip.

An ancestor wrote that in exile, more than a century ago. Because he saw the machine crushing people and could not stay silent.

I am not in exile. But I see the same machine. The same extraction. The same silence from the people who might fight it.

I want to speak two words this morning. From the Basque Country.

Hitza Hitz.

When you give your word, it is what you are.

Not what you say. Not what you promise. What you do. What you actually do. What you fight for when the cameras are gone and the money is cut and the polls move against you.

If you give your word on screwworm ranchers, you act. You deploy. You show up.

If you give your word on water, you regulate. You mandate transparency. You protect property rights before they are stolen.

If you give your word on schools, you fund them. All of them. Even in rural Texas. Even in the Panhandle. Even in the counties that vote for the other party.

If you give your word on the ground itself, you tell the truth about what is happening to it. You do not look away.

A hitza hitz is not noise. It is substance.

Go see the ground. All of it. From Zavala County to the Pecos Valley. From the Permian Basin to Central Texas to East Texas.

See what is there. See what is not there.

Tell what you see.

And if you are a politician — if you are running to serve these people — give them your word on this: that you will see them. That you will see their screwworm ranchers, their water, their schools, their ground. That you will not look away.

Because the ground is telling you what is happening.

The only question is whether you are listening.

Quisiera escribir con amor y la pluma se me torna látigo.



“Ann Richards, Texas Governor 1991-1995. The last Democrat to win statewide.”

"America’s entrepreneurial boom begins long before venture capital," by Anthony Hernandez, Ph.D.

Friends,

Dr. Anthony Hernandez’ just-published piece in Fortune, “America’s Entrepreneurial Boom Begins Long Before Venture Capital,” makes a powerful and necessary point: entrepreneurship does not begin in boardrooms or venture-capital meetings. It begins in classrooms, community colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, HBCUs, Tribal Colleges, and other Minority-Serving Institutions that cultivate the talent, confidence, and opportunity on which our economy depends.

His argument matters because it reframes education policy as economic policy. At a time when Latino entrepreneurs are helping drive business formation, job creation, and revenue growth across the United States, disinvesting in the institutions that prepare these future innovators is not only unjust—it is economically shortsighted.

Dr. Hernandez reminds us that America’s competitiveness depends on whether we are willing to invest in the students, workers, and communities already shaping the nation’s future. This is an important essay for educators, policymakers, business leaders, and anyone concerned about inclusive opportunity and shared prosperity.

I encourage you to read and share it: https://lnkd.in/gcsSzf2k

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.


America’s entrepreneurial boom begins long before venture capital

by Anthony Hernandez, Ph.D. July 5, 2026

Dr. Anthony Hernandez is a faculty member in the Department of Educational 

Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.©courtesy of Anthony Hernandez


The United States has spent years worrying about slowing business creation. But one group of entrepreneurs has quietly prevented that decline. According to a new report out of Stanford, between 2017 and 2023, Latino-owned businesses added 180,000 new firms while white-owned businesses lost roughly 140,000. Put differently, without Latino entrepreneurs, America would have ended the period with fewer businesses than it started with.

Latino entrepreneurs weren’t simply contributing to America’s business growth. They were preventing its decline.

Yet this remarkable economic story has received surprisingly little attention. At a moment when business leaders are searching for new engines of economic growth, one of the country’s fastest-growing entrepreneurial forces has been hiding in plain sight.

Latino-owned businesses added nearly one million jobs during those six years, compared with roughly 658,000 among white-owned firms. Revenue climbed from $495 billion to more than $832 billion, a 68 percent increase compared with 45 percent growth among white-owned firms. Latino-owned businesses generated more net new firms and jobs than businesses owned by any other major racial or ethnic group.

But this isn’t simply a story about one community. The broader Latino economy now approaches $4 trillion in annual economic output, making it one of the world’s largest economies if it stood alone. It is growing more than twice as fast as the overall U.S. economy.

These entrepreneurs did not simply appear. Every founder begins somewhere. Behind every successful entrepreneur is a talent-development system that helped prepare them. We often celebrate entrepreneurs after they build successful companies but spend far less time thinking about the institutions that helped prepare them.

Colleges and universities, particularly Minority-Serving Institutions, are part of America’s economic infrastructure. They produce workers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. If policymakers and business leaders want more business creation, they cannot afford to weaken one of the country’s most productive talent pipelines.

As a former Title V administrator at a Hispanic-Serving Institution, I have spent years studying how colleges create pathways into economic mobility. Research consistently shows that these institutions produce strong workforce, degree completion, and economic mobility outcomes despite serving students with fewer resources.

The story is visible at Compton College, a Minority-Serving Institution in California. Over the past decade, the college has invested in the supports that help students complete college and enter the workforce like dual-enrollment programs, workforce advising, childcare, healthcare access, basic-needs supports, and transfer pathways. These are often described as “student services.” Business leaders should recognize them as investments in future workers and entrepreneurs.

Corporate America spends billions searching for talent. Yet one of the country’s fastest-growing entrepreneurial pipelines already exists. Partnerships with these institutions offer companies access to future founders, engineers, healthcare workers, technology professionals, and business leaders. Supporting these institutions is not charity. It is a long-term talent strategy.

IPEDS data show that Compton College outperforms many peer institutions in completion and transfer despite serving large numbers of Pell-eligible students. Those outcomes strengthen local labor markets and expand the nation’s talent pipeline.

But federal support for Minority-Serving Institutions has become increasingly uncertain.

This debate comes at a pivotal moment. Even as new research documents the rapid growth of Black and Latino entrepreneurship, policymakers are reducing or redirecting investments in higher education, including programs that support many Minority-Serving Institutions. America cannot expect to produce more entrepreneurs while investing less in the institutions that educate them.

Policymakers should strengthen these institutions through investments tied to workforce development, entrepreneurship education, and student success. Business leaders should do the same. Rather than viewing partnerships with Minority-Serving Institutions as philanthropy, companies should view them as long-term talent investments through internships, workforce partnerships, entrepreneurship centers, and research collaborations.

Returns on educational investment also extend well beyond the individual student. They benefit their families, neighborhoods, employers, and regional economies. A healthy workforce pipeline is not a social luxury. It is fundamental to doing business.

The future of American entrepreneurship will not be determined solely by venture-capital or startup investment. We can invest in the institutions preparing tomorrow’s entrepreneurs or continue treating them as expendable.

America cannot celebrate record entrepreneurial growth while underinvesting in the institutions producing tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. America’s next generation of entrepreneurs is already in our classrooms. The question is whether we will invest in them before our competitors do. Strengthening those institutions is not simply education policy. It is economic policy.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Birthright Citizenship and the Constitutional Rejection of Caste: A Searing Defense by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

I recently heard on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s powerful concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship case in Trump v. Barbara may be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of American History by the Organization of American Historians. If so, that would be more than fitting.

Justice Jackson’s opinion is not only legally rigorous; it is historically grounded. In defending what birthright citizenship means under the Fourteenth Amendment, she draws from a deep well of historical scholarship, including Isabel Wilkerson’s extraordinary book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. 

Justice Jackson’s analysis reminds us that birthright citizenship was never a technicality. It was, and remains, a constitutional repudiation of hereditary caste, racial exclusion, and the denial of full personhood.

If you have not read Wilkerson’s Caste, I highly recommend it. The audiobook is excellent, too.

And yes, Justice Jackson’s opinion is also a searing response to Justice Clarence Thomas. Where Thomas narrows the meaning of citizenship, Jackson restores its Reconstruction-era moral and democratic purpose: to ensure that no child born on U.S. soil is rendered stateless, casteless, or less than fully human under law.

This is a deeply-researched constitutional interpretation anchored in universalist principles and moral clarity.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

#HistoryMatters

https://tinyurl.com/yu4sj777

Listen to Lawrence O'Donnell, The Last Word here.

No Secret Settlement or Appeasement with Trump's DOJ: Yale Must Defend Academic Freedom, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

No Secret Settlement or Appeasement with Trump's DOJ: Yale Must Defend Academic Freedom

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 6, 2026

Bravo to the Yale College Council for speaking with moral clarity at a moment when it is so urgently needed. President Maurie McInnis and Yale University should not capitulate to the Trump administration through a closed-door settlement with the Department of Justice (Nyberg & Lynn-Skov, 2026). To do so would not merely be a legal or administrative decision. It would be an act of appeasement with national consequences.

Yale need only look to Harvard to understand what is at stake. Harvard’s situation shows that resistance and capitulation can coexist uneasily within the same institution: even as Harvard sued the Trump administration and won important legal victories, it also renamed its Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging as federal officials demanded the dismantling of DEI programs (Giordano & Patel, 2025). 

That concession did not end the pressure. Soon after, Harvard College and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences replaced several diversity offices, a move The Harvard Crimson described as a “major concession” to a central demand of the Trump administration (Scharf & Patel, 2025). Reports also followed that Harvard and the Trump administration were nearing a settlement framework involving a $500 million payment to restore access to federal funding and end investigations (Binkley, 2025; also see Berbenes, 2025). 

Students, faculty, alumni, and public officials warned that such a settlement would not protect Harvard’s independence; it would teach the Trump administration that intimidation works. Yale must not repeat that mistake. A university cannot bargain away lawful holistic admissions, diversity commitments, faculty governance, student rights, or institutional autonomy and still claim to be defending academic freedom. If Harvard’s experience teaches us anything, it is that appeasement does not satisfy authoritarian power. It feeds it.

Harvard students, faculty, and alumni have repeatedly warned that so-called “settlements” with the Trump administration are not neutral acts of institutional pragmatism. They are forms of political surrender that invite more demands, not fewer. As Harvard student writers argued in The Harvard Crimson, a bad deal with the Trump administration would not protect students, faculty, or the university. It would hand the administration a political victory and encourage the same strategy against other institutions (Gerdén, Kaplan & Molden, 2025).

Their critique is devastating because it comes from those most vulnerable to institutional compromise: international students, students of color, Jewish students, pro-Palestine students, researchers dependent on federal funding, and students whose speech, safety, and belonging have been placed in the crosshairs of federal power. 

Harvard students have rightly understood that capitulation does not end the assault. It widens it. It teaches the federal government that threats work. It tells other universities that the path of least resistance is to trade away institutional autonomy, student rights, faculty governance, and academic freedom for temporary relief.

This is precisely what Yale must refuse. The Trump administration’s pressure campaign against elite universities has not been limited to one issue or one campus. At Harvard, federal demands reportedly reached into hiring, admissions, student discipline, protest restrictions, international student scrutiny, and oversight of academic programs. 

The Harvard Crimson’s reporting described demands that would have disempowered faculty leaders, punished student groups, imposed ideological screening, and subjected academic units to external review (Mao & Paulus, 2025). These are not ordinary compliance matters. They are efforts to make universities govern themselves according to the political preferences of the state.

Harvard students and faculty have also named the deeper danger: appeasement does not work. As Harvard professors Ryan Enos and Steven Levitsky (2025) argued, the reward for capitulation is more extortion. Universities that concede do not buy peace; they make themselves and others more vulnerable (Enos & Levitsky, 2025). 

That lesson should be etched into Yale’s decision-making. Any settlement that restricts lawful holistic admissions, compromises institutional independence, chills political speech, weakens faculty governance, or allows federal officials to dictate university policy would not protect Yale. It would implicate Yale in the broader dismantling of higher education as a democratic institution.

Nor can Yale claim neutrality by calling such a deal “prudent” or “strategic.” There are moments when caution becomes complicity. There are moments when institutional self-protection becomes betrayal. A university cannot teach students to pursue truth, defend democracy, and act with courage while its own leadership quietly bargains away the conditions that make those commitments possible.

Yale’s students understand this. So do many faculty and alumni. They know that the issue is not whether universities are above criticism or beyond reform. They are not. Universities must confront antisemitism, racism, Islamophobia, anti-Blackness, anti-Latinx exclusion, anti-Asian racism, attacks on Indigenous sovereignty, anti-immigrant hostility, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all forms of discrimination with seriousness and integrity. But that work must be done through democratic, educational, legally sound, and community-accountable processes—not through coercive settlements designed to place university life under partisan control.

President McInnis should listen to the students. The Yale College Council’s statement reflects precisely what democratic education is supposed to cultivate: young people who can recognize authoritarian overreach, name the stakes, and call institutions back to their highest principles (Yale College Council, 2026). Yale should be proud of them. More importantly, Yale should heed their moral and ethical clarity as you can hear for yourself in this video and follow their lead.

Yale has the resources, stature, alumni base, faculty strength, legal capacity, and moral obligation to resist. If Yale bends, less-resourced institutions will be placed in an even more precarious position. If Yale concedes behind closed doors, the consequences will reverberate across public and private higher education alike.

But if Yale refuses to capitulate, it can help establish a different precedent: that universities are not instruments of the state, that students are not bargaining chips, that admissions cannot be dictated by political intimidation, and that academic freedom—meaning the right to teach and learn—is not for sale.

This is also a test of President McInnis herself. Before leading Yale, Maurie McInnis served as executive vice president and provost at The University of Texas at Austin, beginning July 1, 2016, and remaining in that role until May 2020, when she left to become president of Stony Brook University (Canizales, 2020). President McInnis should not meet this moment with managerial caution or elite institutional self-protection. 

Courtesy of UT Austin

She should meet it with courage. No secret settlement. No abandonment of lawful holistic admissions. No surrender of institutional independence. No chilling of student speech. No weakening of faculty governance. No appeasement of authoritarian power.

Yale must not do what Harvard students have warned against. It must not mistake capitulation for peace. It must not confuse compliance with leadership. It must not teach the next generation that even the most powerful universities fold when democracy needs them to stand.

References

Berbenes, M. (2025, May 2). Tracking Trump’s war on elite universities: Which schools have lost funding and what they're doing about it, Yahoo News. https://www.yahoo.com/news/tracking-trumps-war-on-elite-universities-which-schools-have-lost-funding-and-what-theyre-doing-about-it-200621655.html

Binkley, C. (2025, August 13). Harvard and the Trump administration are nearing a settlement including a $500 million payment, Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/harvard-trump-agreement-antisemitism-ivy-a84b88a8136a852aa305e508d012afb6

Canizales, A. (2020, March 26). Executive Vice President and Provost Maurie McInnis leaving UT-Austin, The Daily Texan. https://thedailytexan.com/2020/03/26/executive-vice-president-and-provost-maurie-mcinnis-leaving-ut-austin/

Enos, R. D., & Levitsky, S. (2025, June 26). This isn’t negotiation. It’s authoritarian extortion, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/6/26/enos-levitsky-harvard-trump-negotiation-extortion/

Gerdén, L. Kaplan, T. L. & Molden, K. N. (2025, July 2). President Garber, a bad deal with Trump will not protect us, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/7/2/harvard-negotiation-trump-garber/

Giordano, J. J., & Patel, D. T. (2025, April 29). Harvard renames diversity office as Trump demands dismantling of DEI, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/29/harvard-oedib-renamed/

Mao, W. C. & Paulus, V. H. (2025, April 15). Trump’s demands to Harvard, analyzed, The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/15/trump-demands-analysis/

Nyberg, L., & Lynn-Skov, A. (2026, June 28). Yale seeks Trump deal as admissions inquiry reaches College, NYT reports. Yale Daily News. https://yaledailynews.com/articles/yale-seeks-trump-deal-as-admissions-inquiry-reaches-college-nyt-reports 

Scharf, A., & Patel, D. T. (2025, July 10). Harvard College, Faculty of Arts and Sciences replace diversity offices. The Harvard Crimson. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/7/10/college-fas-end-diversity-offices/

Yale College Council. (2026, July 4). Public statement on behalf of the Yale undergraduate student body regarding Yale’s ongoing settlement negotiations with the Trump administration [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwX1FqqaqjY

Organizing as If Social Relations Matter: Cindy Milstein, SEAT, and Youth Leadership in Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. July 3, 2026

Organizing as If Social Relations Matter: Cindy Milstein, SEAT, and Youth Leadership in Texas

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 3, 2026

Cindy Milstein’s essay, “Organizing Social Spaces as If Social Relations Matter,” deserves to become a classic. It is a must-read because it gives language to something I have been privileged to witness firsthand: young people organizing not only for change, but through relationships of care, trust, joy, and shared responsibility—especially within Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, or SEAT, as well as in LULAC and other community-based youth spaces where I work.

Milstein’s central insight is deceptively simple and deeply profound:

Movements cannot be built only around strategy, demands, protest, or opposition. They must also cultivate new social relations—new ways of being with one another—if they are to prefigure the more democratic and caring world they seek.

I, in fact, first learned of Milstein's essay from youth in SEAT.

She describes resistance, rebellion, and revolution as incomplete without a fourth “R”: reorganization. By this she means not simply reorganizing institutions, but reorganizing how people relate to one another. 

Without that relational transformation, movements risk reproducing the very hierarchies, exclusions, and harms they oppose. This is one of the essay’s most important contributions: it reminds us that social justice work is not only about what we are against, but also about how we practice what we are for. It is as much or more about beingness as about doingness—who we are and how we show up in our social movements.

This is precisely what I see in SEAT’s leadership. These young people are not simply organizing around issues that matter to them; they are building a culture of care, trust, shared responsibility, and collective courage. Their work is strategic, yes. It is political, yes. But it is also deeply relational. They listen to one another. They make room for vulnerability. They show up for each other. They understand that leadership is not domination, performance, or individual charisma, but a shared practice of building capacity, confidence, and belonging. It's about fun and enjoying the process.

Milstein’s essay helps us see why this matters so much. She cautions that movements often fail not only because of external repression, but because we fail each other. We carry into our organizing spaces the wounds and habits of the very society we are trying to transform—individualism, hierarchy, competition, shame, exclusion, and the temptation to retreat when conflict arises. 

Milstein asks us instead to, in effect, “fail well,” by making "better mistakes" and to treat these and the discomfort that comes along with them not as reasons to abandon one another, but as opportunities to grow in honesty, humility, compassion, and repair. These are tall orders, no doubt, but they are achievable when we commit to practicing them together.

That lesson is especially important for youth organizing. Young people are often expected to perform courage in public while receiving too little care behind the scenes. They are asked to testify, march, mobilize, speak truth to power, and defend democracy, all while coming of age in a world marked by political hostility, ecological crisis, racial injustice, economic precarity, and attacks on education itself. SEAT’s work matters not only because of the policies it contests, but because of the human and democratic relationships it nurtures along the way.

In this regard, SEAT embodies Milstein’s thesis. Its leadership practices suggest that organizing is not merely about occupying public space, but about transforming social space. It is about creating conditions where young people feel seen, heard, trusted, and capable of acting together. It is about learning how to disagree without dehumanizing, how to lead without dominating, how to struggle without losing tenderness, and how to build power without sacrificing care.

For those of us in education, this is a profound lesson. Democracy is not learned only through textbooks, civics lessons, or formal institutions. It is learned in the lived experience of collective work. It is learned when young people discover that their voices matter, that others have their backs, and that public life can be organized around dignity, mutuality, and shared purpose rather than fear or one-upmanship. SEAT’s leadership offers a glimpse of this kind of democratic formation in action.

Milstein gives us language for recognizing what is easy to overlook: the greeting, the check-in, the shared meal, the patient conversation, the willingness to stay present through discomfort, the refusal to reduce one another to mistakes, and the commitment to keep building together. These are not soft additions to the “real” work of organizing. They are the work. They are the ethical infrastructure that makes sustained movement possible.

In a Texas political climate where young people are too often treated as problems to be managed rather than democratic actors to be respected, SEAT offers a different vision. Its members remind us that youth leadership is not future leadership. It is leadership now. And when that leadership is grounded in care, courage, and collective responsibility, it does more than resist the present. It rehearses a freer and more humane future.

That is why Milstein’s essay matters to me. It helps me name what I see in SEAT and other youth organizing: young people organizing as if social relations matter—because they do. We have much to learn from them.

Reference

Milstein, C. (2014, June 14). Organizing social spaces as if social relations matter. Outside the Circle. Originally published in shorter form in ROAR Magazine. https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/organizing-social-spaces-as-if-social-relations-matter/

Organizing Social Spaces as If Social Relations Matter




by Cindy Milstein | June 14, 2014 | Outside the Circle

This essay was originally published, as a shorter version, in ROAR Magazine, “an online journal of the radical imagination providing grassroots perspectives from the front-lines of the global struggle for real democracy,” at http://roarmag.org/2014/06/milstein-social-spaces-relations/.

The Four Rs

Throughout the history of resistance, rebellion, and revolution—the three Rs that should be taught alongside the traditional ones of reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic—there has always been a fourth R, consciously or not: reorganization. Such reorganization has sought to establish not simply new social structures but also, critically, new social relations.

That has not always ended well. In fact, it has frequently ended badly, with different forms of social organization, to be sure, but ones that ultimately—or too quickly—entailed new forms of domination and terror. If we humans have learned anything from these moments, it’s that the reconstitution of people up to the challenge of enacting goodness in the good society that they are trying to create takes time and practice. Moreover, the time and practices needed far exceed the duration and acts of toppling a king, despot, or dictator, overthrowing colonial, military, or statist rule, or overcoming internecine struggles among radicals.

Various “horizontal” or “from below” experiments, as they’ve been called, have struggled openly during the past two decades in particular with this problematic. They’ve humbly aspired to focus on the social relations side of the puzzle versus—and also within—those exhilarating, necessary instances of popular uprisings.

Some appear to have done it better than others, such as the Zapatistas (recently celebrating twenty years since their first public entrance on the world stage) and Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (which became a national movement thirty years ago), at least according to the stories told by some of those born into these autonomous communities, and thus who’ve never known another world and have been socialized by other ways of attempting to live together.

Most of the shorter-lived recent occupations of squares, plazas, and parks, too, quickly set about this task, reveling—at least initially—in the transformed ways people began relating to each other within the myriad of self-organized structures intended to meet everyone’s needs as well as desires.

The same could easily be said of the power of contemporary social movements such as the massive, relatively long-lasting student strike in Quebec in 2012. In that case, months of blockades and nightly illegal street demonstrations, coupled with a plethora of assemblies and collective culture-making, wove a magical fabric of hitherto-unimaginable social interactions across generations and at least two languages.

Here in the United States, the Occupy uprising, in its heady beginnings, created spaces where social-media-isolated people could suddenly “find each other” and (re)discover human(e) connections (see, relatedly, my essay “Occupy Anarchism,” https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/occupy-anarchism-musings-on-prehistories-present-imperfects-future-imperfects/). But also here in the United States, where looking through the lens of “I” first and then “we” down the road is so deeply ingrained in us, it too quickly became clear that the ties that bound us Occupiers were spider-web fragile. We torn each other apart in so many varied ways, along so many lines of hurt already scribed into our bodies by white supremacy, heteronormativity, patriarchy, ableism, settler colonialism, classism, overdetermined identity politics, and a long lineage of other violences.

The conundrum of remaking ourselves as we attempt to remake society appears to stymie us here so much faster than in places with greater vestiges of communal lifeways.

It also erects an extra-high hurdle for US social struggles and movements: Can we rise above the learned behaviors inculcated by the mythical origin story and its related American dream of the lone individual making it against all odds, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, as entrepreneurial pioneer? Can we surmount the way we tend to instrumentalize each other, “valuing” other people as mere things in relation to our cost-benefit analysis and accountability ledger sheet of strategic organizing and movement needs—relations that have been naturalized in us, made subtle and almost invisible, by capitalism? Can we avoid brushing off the ways that we lack empathy for each other, as ourselves “products” of this damaging society too, with uncompassionate phrases such as “We need to focus on the real enemy”?

It’s too easy to blame the police or state repression alone for why our projects, much less movements, fail. They fail us, and we fail them.

We’ll always fail in ways, of course. But if we don’t allow others—and ourselves—to make mistakes; if we see mishaps as aberrations or, worse, a condemnation of the whole of someone’s being; if we believe that failure and success are separate, stable moments; and if we think that being human, being imperfect, is in itself wrong, then we’ve already lost. We’re already lost.

There are many forces that can be blamed for making most of us, and indeed most of humanity, feel lost at this time in history, from the new layers of alienation heaped on us by high-tech innovations to the palpable sense of “no future” that military-industrial ecological devastation instills. This list, like all the painful -isms, unfurls too far. We don’t just feel lost, though. More to the point, we are tangibly experiencing much loss, and at faster and faster rates, ranging from communities to climates, from homes to loved ones.

This is all the more reason that it’s imperative to rediscover each other, yet in the fullness and complexity of our imperfections, and recognize that such imperfection will be inherent in the revolutionary transformation of present-day society—made up not merely of hierarchical institutions and systemic exploitation but also damaged social relations. It is, then, our perspective on failure that matters.

To conjure up the insight of a teacher-artist friend, Arthur, during a history-oriented study group recently, the point of revolutions is not to achieve some permanently perfect world, or a utopia in the most caricatured of definitions. It is to find ourselves having different, less horrendous conflicts—say, why the delegation of tasks related to community health care isn’t working in an autonomous, directly democratic region as opposed to when and where to go to war as a nation-state. It is to be better equipped to walk toward and through those conflicts in increasingly egalitarian, compassionate ways.

In short, it’s about making better mistakes, and utilizing our better failures as moments of transformation in pursuit of an ever-freer society, filled with ever more dignity and freedom, among other lovely practices.

Another teacher-artist friend, Carla, observed that her goal is, in fact, to have projects fail. That is, she remains open to the likelihood of failure and hence how we might do that well. Her clear-eyed notion grasps the generative attributes of missing the intended mark. Carla’s failures-in-action are amazing to behold, drawing out the best in people, for themselves and toward others. She creates spaces of collaborative empowerment with others, without knowing what will emerge, and strives to curate various contexts in which people can discover the potential of those spaces and themselves together.