The Rot We Refuse to Name: Montgomery, Alabama, and the Living Legacy of Racial Terror, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., August 3, 2026

The Rot We Refuse to Name: Montgomery, Alabama, and the Living Legacy of Racial Terror

by

Angela Valenzuela

August 3, 2026

Legacy Museum link

Last week, during a weeklong stay in Montgomery, Alabama as part of the Legacy Summit hosted by the the African American Policy Forum (AAPF), I visited the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum—an experience that unsettled me in ways I am still trying to process. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw and for everyone at the AAPF—as well as to American Association of University Professors and the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, for making the visit possible for me and so many others.

Inside the museum, the history of racial terror ceased to feel like a distant past. It became immediate and embodied: a history carried in names, voices, stories, images, places, and lives, and one whose consequences remain painfully present. I encourage all to consider this opportunity next Summer or alternatively, to take some time off yourself to visit the various sites in Montgomery to get a complete experience.

While there, you must also visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Freedom Monument and Sculpture Park, and Montgomery Square. Together, these places illuminate the extraordinary decade of struggle that helped transform the United States and, without exaggeration, changed the world. They also remind us that the rights secured through that struggle are neither permanent nor self-sustaining. They are now being challenged by forces of religious nationalism that seek to reverse many of the democratic gains for which earlier generations sacrificed so much.

The museum itself stands on the sacred grounds of a former cotton warehouse where enslaved Black people were once held and forced to labor. From that location, it traces a historical continuum linking the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement to the violent overthrow of Reconstruction, racial terror lynching, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the contemporary criminal legal system. Personal testimony, archival evidence, art, and data reveal not a succession of unrelated injustices, but the recurring adaptation of racial domination as older systems were challenged and new ones took their place.

What struck me most forcefully was the depth and pervasiveness of the terror that Black people throughout the South endured. Terror was not limited to the moment when a person was seized, tortured, or killed. It was directed at entire communities. It instructed Black parents about what could happen to their children. It warned Black veterans against wearing their uniforms with pride. It threatened Black citizens who attempted to vote, acquire land, build businesses, organize workers, attend better schools, or insist upon being addressed with dignity.

Lynching was not simply spontaneous mob violence committed by a few extremists. It was a system of public terrorism intended to restore white supremacy after emancipation and suppress Black civil and political rights. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented at least 2,000 Black women, men, and children killed in racial terror lynchings during Reconstruction and more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950. These acts were often committed publicly and with impunity, sometimes before crowds that included community leaders, elected officials, and children.

#JusticeForJamesCooper

I pause here to acknowledge James Cooper, whose body was found hanging from a utility pole in Metcalfe, Mississippi. Jay Fletcher first reported on the unresolved questions surrounding Cooper’s death in 2024 with the Delta Democrat-Times revisiting the case two years later (Fletcher, 2024, 2026). Kim Dockery (2026) has also drawn renewed attention to the case and the family’s continuing demand for answers. Although local authorities ruled Cooper’s death a suicide, his family and members of the community dispute that conclusion and are calling for a federal investigation.

Cooper’s story reminds us why the thousands documented by the Equal Justice Initiative cannot remain an abstraction. Each number represents a person with a name, a life, relationships, aspirations, and a community forced to live with the terror and injustice surrounding that person’s death. Naming him here is one small act of refusing the erasure upon which racial terror has long depended.

The museum makes clear that the targets of this violence were not only the people who were murdered. Terror entered homes, churches, schools, workplaces, and everyday relationships. It constrained movement, speech, aspiration, and political participation. It produced forced migration as Black families fled communities where the threat of violence had become unbearable. It also taught white communities that violence against Black people would be tolerated, celebrated, or ignored. Geez, isn't this what's getting "taught" anew with each unresolved case today like James Cooper's?

This is what makes the history so difficult to absorb. The cruelty was not incidental to the social order. It helped create and maintain that order.

Emancipation formally ended enslavement, but it did not eliminate the ideology that had justified it. The mythology of Black inferiority was transformed into new presumptions: that Black people were dangerous, criminal, incapable of citizenship, or naturally suited for subordination. During Reconstruction, violence sought to destroy emerging Black political power. After Reconstruction, lynching and Jim Crow enforced segregation and racial hierarchy. As the museum demonstrates, these narratives did not disappear with the end of legally mandated segregation. They became embedded in policing, prosecution, sentencing, imprisonment, and capital punishment.

After getting back to the hotel, I reached out to my husband, Emilio Zamora, professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas at Austin, to share the anger and sorrow I felt as I confronted this sustained history of racial terror and injustice. His response was that it represents the “rot” of this country. 

The word stayed with me.

By “rot,” he did not mean only a shameful chapter in an otherwise unblemished national history. He meant something deeper: a foundational moral and institutional decay that has been repeatedly covered over without being removed. The legal forms have changed, but the underlying presumption of Black guilt, dangerousness, and disposability has remained disturbingly resilient. 

Although this system is rooted most fundamentally in anti-Blackness, its logics have extended outward, shaping the criminalization and punishment of Latino men, immigrants, Indigenous people, and other racialized communities. Through policing, immigration enforcement, detention, incarceration, and unequal sentencing, these groups have also been cast as dangerous, foreign, or undeserving of full protection under the law. Recognizing these connections should not blur the distinct history of Black oppression; rather, it reveals how institutions built through anti-Black racial domination have generated broader systems of surveillance, exclusion, and punishment.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, at year-end in 2023, 1,862 Black males per 100,000 Black male U.S. residents were serving sentences of more than one year under state or federal correctional jurisdiction—more than five times the corresponding rate for white males, 341 per 100,000 (Mueller & Kluckow, 2025). 

See Table 13 in Mueller & Kluckow (2025).

The Equal Justice Initiative aptly describes the modern death penalty as a direct descendant of racial terror lynching and links the terror era to racially biased capital punishment, excessive sentencing, wrongful convictions, and the continuing presumption of Black criminality.

This does not mean that lynching and imprisonment are identical. It means that institutions of punishment developed within a society that had never fully repudiated the racial assumptions underlying enslavement and racial terror. Black men who were once portrayed as threats requiring mob violence have continued to be treated as presumptively dangerous within schools, courts, prisons, and systems of capital punishment. The rope, the electric chair, the execution chamber, and the prison cell belong to different historical moments, but the Legacy Museum compels us to examine the ideas about race, guilt, innocence, and human worth that connect them.

Montgomery also reminded us that terror and resistance have always existed alongside one another. Black people did not merely endure this history. They built families, churches, schools, businesses, civic organizations, freedom movements, and cultures of extraordinary beauty and intellectual depth. They organized against slavery, challenged lynching, fought segregation, registered voters, contested wrongful convictions, and continued to demand that the nation honor principles it repeatedly denied them.

That resistance, however, should never be used to soften our understanding of the terror they endured and endure. Celebrating Black resilience without confronting the conditions that made such resilience necessary can become another way of avoiding the truth. The moral burden belongs not to those who survived oppression, but to the institutions and communities that produced it, benefited from it, tolerated it, or refused to remember it.

I left the Legacy Museum with a clearer understanding that racial injustice cannot be overcome through commemoration alone. Museums and memorials matter because they interrupt national amnesia. They restore names, lives, and histories that official narratives have—have long suppressed—and, in many cases, continue to suppress. So remembrance must also change how we understand contemporary policy and practice. It must shape how we approach policing, incarceration, sentencing, voting rights, education, housing, and the death penalty.

The rot persists whenever racial inequality is treated as accidental, whenever Black suffering is explained without reference to history, and whenever institutions celebrate true heroes like the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King or civil rights victories while continuously, if hypocritically, reproducing the conditions those movements opposed.

Our week in Montgomery left me grieving, but it also left me more convinced of the necessity of truth-telling. We cannot repair what we refuse to name. We cannot understand mass incarceration without understanding enslavement, Reconstruction, lynching, and Jim Crow. And we cannot claim to oppose racial terror while accepting institutions that continue to treat Black lives, and especially the lives of Black men, as inherently suspect or expendable.

The Legacy Museum asks the nation to do more than remember. It asks us to confront the rot—to expose it, remove it, and build institutions no longer dependent upon the degradation, terror, and punishment of Black people. To this, I will only add that it was a validating experience in terms of the policy battles we are fighting and have fought in coalition as Latinas and Latinos with the Black community.

Reference

Dockery, K. [@thicknpretty215]. (2026, August 3). James Cooper’s family continues to seek answers concerning his death in Metcalfe, Mississippi, and is calling for a federal investigation [Video]. Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/p/DbeCtzFB1nA/

Fletcher, J. (2024, May 8). Update on the James Cooper case. Delta Democrat-Times. https://www.ddtonline.com/crime-communities-local-content/update-james-cooper-case

Fletcher, J. (2026, August 3). One year later seeking justice for James. Delta Democrat-Times. https://www.ddtonline.com/communities-crime-local-content/one-year-later-seeking-justice-james

Mueller, D., & Kluckow, R. (2025). Prisoners in 2023—Statistical tables (NCJ 310197). U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/p23st.pdf

Black Male Lives Are Not Disposable: Confronting Gun Violence and Anti-Blackness, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Black Male Lives Are Not Disposable: Confronting Gun Violence & Anti-Blackness

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

August 3, 2026

Gun violence is a national public health crisis, but its burden is not shared equally. Black communities—and Black boys and men, in particular—experience a profoundly disproportionate share of the deaths, injuries, trauma, and grief.

A recent report from the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence
documents the scale of this emergency. In 2024, one in every 143 Black men ages 18 to 24 in Philadelphia was killed or injured in a gun homicide or shooting. In Rochester, New York, the figure was one in 85. In Cincinnati, it was one in 81. Although most shootings are committed by a relatively small number of people, the consequences reverberate across entire families, schools, neighborhoods, and generations.

Black Americans die from gun violence at 2.6 times the rate of white Americans. Nearly 13,600 Black people die from gun violence each year, on average. Most strikingly, although Black boys and men constitute only about 6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than half of all U.S. gun-homicide victims.

Among Black men ages 15 to 44, homicide has been the leading cause of death for more than half a century. In the nation’s 20 largest counties, Black males ages 15 to 24 die from gun homicide at nearly 23 times the rate of white males of the same age. In 2024, more Black men ages 15 to 24 died from gun homicides than from unintentional injuries, suicide, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, police shootings, HIV, and numerous other leading causes combined.

These statistics require us to say something plainly: Black male life continues to be treated as disposable.

Gun violence Is also structural violence.

We must reject explanations that portray gun violence as evidence of a defect within Black culture. Violence does not develop in a historical vacuum. It is closely connected to racial segregation, economic abandonment, underfunded schools, limited health care, housing instability, unemployment, and the withdrawal of public and private investment.

Shockingly, according to the Giffords Center report, "One study showed that Black Americans are just as likely to be shot and killed by law enforcement if they are unarmed as white Americans who are armed. 39

Disinvestment is itself a form of symbolic violence. 

Disinvestment helps produce violence, and violence is then used to justify further disinvestment, surveillance, policing, and incarceration. Communities are denied resources, blamed for the consequences, and punished rather than supported.

Anti-Blackness operates through these institutional choices. It shapes whose neighborhoods receive investment, whose trauma receives treatment, whose children are protected, and whose deaths generate sustained public urgency.

The trauma extends beyond those who are shot.

Black boys and men are not only the people most likely to be killed or injured; they are also among those most likely to witness gun violence or live near it. More than half of Black youth in one study lived within a mile of a gun homicide. Children living within several blocks of a shooting were nearly 50 percent more likely to seek emergency mental health care.

Every death affects parents, children, partners, siblings, classmates, and neighbors. Black women and girls frequently carry much of the caregiving and emotional labor that follows, holding families and communities together while managing their own grief.

The rising rate of firearm suicide among Black youth is also alarming. Between 2020 and 2024, firearm-suicide rates increased by 26 percent among Black Americans and by 22 percent among Black people ages 10 to 24.

These figures remind us that Black boys and men must be recognized not only as resilient, but also as vulnerable human beings deserving care, protection, tenderness, and mental health support.

Fighting anti-Blackness across aur communities.

This is not a crisis that Black communities should be expected to solve alone. Anti-Blackness exists across institutions and across racial and ethnic communities, including communities that have themselves experienced racism.

It appears when Black masculinity is equated with criminality, when Black neighborhoods are treated as dangerous and disposable, when racial slurs and stereotypes go unchallenged, and when communities pursue their own advancement by distancing themselves from Black people.

Meaningful Black-Brown and multiracial solidarity requires more than symbolic declarations. It requires confronting anti-Blackness in our homes, organizations, schools, universities, churches, movements, and public policies.

Black boys and men should not have to be perfect, respectable, middle class, academically successful, compliant, or unarmed for their lives to matter. Their humanity is not conditional.

From punishment to prevention and healing.

Evidence-based gun-safety laws—including firearm licensing, waiting periods, and strong public-carry laws—can reduce homicides. These policies must be combined with sustained investments in community-led violence-intervention programs, mental health care, youth employment, quality education, stable housing, mediation, mentorship, and trauma recovery.

We must choose prevention over abandonment, healing over punishment, investment over criminalization, and solidarity over racial division.

Black boys and men deserve to grow older. They deserve safety, opportunity, joy, dignity, and belonging.

Black male lives are not disposable. Our policies, institutions, communities, and collective actions must finally demonstrate that truth.

Reference

https://www.ddtonline.com/communities-crime-local-content/one-year-later-seeking-justice-james

REPORT

Gun Violence in Black Communities
by ALEX NGUYEN & KELLY DRANE 

Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence | APRIL 14, 2026

Introduction
For decades, gun violence has taken a disproportionate and grueling toll on Black communities—leading to tens of thousands of gun deaths and hundreds of thousands of gun injuries. The impact of gun violence on this community is particularly devastating for young Black men. In 2024, one in every 143 Black men ages 18 to 24 in Philadelphia were killed or injured in gun homicides or shootings.1 In Rochester, New York, it was one in 85 young Black men.2 In Cincinnati, it was one in 81 young Black men.3

The vast majority of shootings in these cities—and in similar communities across the country—are perpetrated by a very small number of people.4 But the impacts of this violence are felt across entire communities, contributing to generations of trauma and collective grief that have disproportionately affected Black people.

Importantly, gun violence in Black communities is a direct cause and consequence of systematic, structural disadvantages. Research shows that high rates of gun violence seen today have been forged by past and present racial discrimination, including historic racial segregation and disinvestment.5 As gun violence plagues these communities, it leads to diminished economic opportunities and a lack of investment, creating a vicious cycle.6 This reality provides not only a strong impetus for action, but also a reminder that solutions to this problem must address the underlying inequalities driving gun violence in Black communities.

Trends in Gun Violence

Gun violence touches every community and every racial group in the United States, but none more so than Black communities. In fact, Black Americans die from gun violence at 2.6 times the rate of white Americans.7 On average, nearly 13,600 Black people die from gun violence each year.8

The total gun death rate among Black Americans declined 20% from 2020 to 2024.9 Yet, in recent years, different types of gun deaths among Black Americans have seen different dynamics. For example, the firearm suicide rate for Black people rose 26% between 2020 and 2024.10 However, both the Black firearm homicide rate and the Black unintentional firearm death rate fell over the same time period (28% and 12%, respectively).11 Additionally, police shooting deaths among Black Americans have remained at high levels over the time period.12

Firearm Homicide

The vast majority of gun deaths among Black Americans are gun homicides, and Black Americans make up the majority of gun homicide victims in the US. In fact, 81% of all Black Americans who die from gun violence die by gun homicide.13 Despite the fact that Black boys and men account for just 6% of the total population, they comprise more than half of all gun homicide victims.14

Recently, gun homicide rates across the country have fallen. Between 2020 and 2024, the gun homicide rate among Black people decreased nearly 28%—the second fastest decline among racial and ethnic groups.15 However, gun homicide rates for this population remain higher than rates seen in 2019, before the pandemic, and Black Americans still die from gun homicide at higher rates than any other group.16 Black women also experience higher rates of gun violence than any other group of women. In 2024 alone, the gun homicide rate among Black women was 5.3 times higher than the gun homicide rate among white women.17

The disparities in Black and white homicide rates are particularly stark in large cities and counties. Research suggests that roughly half of all gun homicides take place in just 127 cities,18 driving the elevated rates of homicides in these geographies. In the nation’s 20 largest counties, Black men ages 15 to 24 die from gun homicides at a rate nearly 23 times that of white residents of the same age.19 This disparity means that while roughly five out of every 100,000 young white men in these counties die from gun homicides, nearly eleven in every 10,000 young Black men are killed in such incidents.16

Homicide has been the leading cause of death for Black men ages 15 to 44 for more than half a century.20 More than 87% of homicides in Black communities involve firearms.21 These disparities are even more striking for young Black men: gun homicides are the leading cause of death and more than outstrip deaths from other leading causes of death combined.16 In other words, in 2024, more Black men ages 15 to 24 died in gun homicides than from unintentional injuries, suicide, heart disease, cancer, nonfirearm homicides, diabetes, congenital abnormalities, chronic respiratory diseases, police shootings, cerebrovascular diseases, anemias, sepsis, influenza and pneumonia, and HIV combined.16

Gun violence is also the leading cause of death for Black children, in large part because of the severe burden of gun homicides on this population. In fact, while gun violence only recently became the leading cause of death for all children in 2020, gun violence has been the leading cause of death for Black children since 2006.22 Eighty-four percent of gun deaths among Black children are gun homicides, and, in 2024, Black children were 16 times more likely to be killed in a gun homicide than white children.23

The toll of our nation’s gun violence epidemic, however, extends beyond gun deaths and injuries. The high rates of gun violence in Black communities lead to more exposure to gun violence. In fact, Black boys and men not only are the most likely victims of gun violence but also are exposed to gun violence most often.24 For example, more than half of all Black youth in one study lived less than a mile away from a gun homicide.25 These exposures traumatize communities, leading to and exacerbating mental health problems like elevated levels of psychological distress, depression, and suicidal ideation.26 In one study, researchers found that children who lived within a few blocks of a shooting were nearly 50% more likely to seek mental health care at an emergency department.27

While Black male youth are the most likely to experience gun violence and particularly gun homicides, entire communities grieve and mourn losses inflicted by firearm homicide. Black girls and women are often tasked with providing care in the aftermath of loss.28 One scholar describes this as a “living death” or a “…‘second killing’ of Black women and girls who are forced to relive the trauma of vicarious, violent loss at the hands of others.”16

Firearm Suicide

In the US, the vast majority of gun suicide deaths have involved white people: over the last 20 years, in fact, white people have comprised 81% of all suicide deaths.29 However, more recent data suggests a worrying trend. Suicide and gun suicide rates have risen for every racial and ethnic group in recent years, with Black people seeing a more rapid increase in such rates compared to white people. From 2020 to 2024, gun suicide rates increased just 9% for white people, but 26% for Black people.30

Gun suicide increases—and the racial disparities in these increases—are particularly pronounced for Black youth. From 2020 to 2024, the firearm suicide rate for Black people ages 10 to 24 rose 22%.31 During the same period, the firearm suicide rate decreased 2% for 10-to-24-year-olds overall.32 For white youth in this age range during this time, the firearm suicide rate decreased 7%.33

From 2020 to 2024, gun suicide rates increased just nine percent for white people, but 26% for Black people.

On average, more than 3,700 Black Americans die by suicide each year.16 Nearly 3 in 5 (59%) involve firearms.16 However, scholarship suggests that these numbers likely undercount the burden of suicide in this community. Black Americans face numerous barriers to accessing mental health care,34 meaning that medical examiners are less likely to have sufficient data to accurately determine and classify deaths in these communities as suicides.35

Police Shootings

The sharp disparities in gun violence impacting Black Americans also extend to police shootings. One in four fatal police shootings involves a Black victim, though Black Americans make up just 14% of the US population.(In 2024, there were 49,207,745 Black Americans in the US and a total population of 340,110,990. From 2020 to 2024, there were 5,766 fatal police shootings. During that same time period, there were 1,437 Black victims. 36 When compared to all other racial and ethnic groups, Black Americans experience the highest rate of fatal police shootings.37 Police fatally shoot Black Americans at three times the rate they fatally shoot white Americans.38 One study showed that Black Americans are just as likely to be shot and killed by law enforcement if they are unarmed as white Americans who are armed.39

Recent research also suggests that Black–white disparities in police shootings were even more pronounced for nonfatal police shooting injuries.40 For example, researchers found that in Florida, Black people were approximately three times as likely as white people to be fatally shot by police, yet more than five times as likely as white people to be nonfatally shot by police.16

Risk of fatal police shooting if Black

Unarmed black civilians are three times more likely to be shot and killed by police than unarmed white civilians. Importantly, research is clear that these disparities in police shootings are not simply a product of more police contact between Black Americans and police or a product of increased crime in communities of color.41 Rather, police shooting disparities are amplified by residential segregation and the resulting racial biases.42

Police shootings have broad impacts on entire communities, leading to trauma and worsening mental health. One study, in fact, found that a police killing of an unarmed Black person led to a significant increase in the number of poor mental health days for Black people living in proximity to the shooting in the following three months.43 The mental health burden of police shootings in Black communities is estimated to be nearly as large as the mental health burden associated with diabetes in these communities.16

The consequences of police violence, however, extend beyond the shooting itself and its traumatic impact. Research is clear that shootings by police can erode community trust in law enforcement.44 Fractures in police-community trust, in turn, can fuel cycles of community gun homicides and shootings that disproportionately impact Black people.16

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Gun violence is a complex problem, and while there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, we must act. Our reports bring you the latest cutting-edge research and analysis about strategies to end our country’s gun violence crisis at every level. Learn More

Conclusion

The statistics on gun deaths among Black Americans paint a grim picture, but we should not be resigned that this toll and these disparities are inevitable.

Evidence-based gun safety laws can help address the epidemic of gun violence in Black communities. Recent research has found that specific policies, like waiting periods,45 firearm licensing laws,46 and strong public carry laws16 all reduce homicides in Black communities. Importantly, many of these policies enjoy strong support from Black Americans. A poll of Black Americans and Black gun owners found that these groups support a number of gun safety laws, in many cases at higher rates than white Americans and white gun owners.47

These policy reforms must also be coupled with direct investments in community-led violence intervention programs. Community violence intervention programs engage individuals at highest risk of being victims or perpetrators—or both—of violence through a variety of strategies including building relationships and providing supportive social services, addressing conflict through nonviolent means like de-escalation and mediation, and working to support community healing from violence. At their core, these programs ​​directly invest in communities and the people in them, with many programs helping to address systemic inequalities by meeting the economic, educational, health, and social needs of the participants and their families. Many communities have been employing these strategies for years, but dedicated, stable investments are needed to scale and sustain these programs.

Black communities have disproportionately shouldered our nation’s gun violence epidemic for decades, and will continue to do so unless we take concerted, community-driven steps to address this public health crisis. It is imperative—from an equity perspective, a moral perspective, and a human perspective—that we support these communities in reducing gun violence.

Draining the Ogallala Aquifer for AI? Project Matador and the myth of limitless growth, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. & Luke Metzger, Exec. Dir., Environment Texas Research & Policy Center

Friends,

I’m pleased to share a newly-published article co-authored with Luke Metzger, executive director of the Environment Texas Research & Policy Center, and published on the Center’s website.

Project Matador, a massive artificial-intelligence and energy campus under construction near Amarillo, raises urgent questions about water, natural gas, public land, corporate accountability, and the proper role of a public university in facilitating private development. At the center of our concern is the already-declining Ogallala Aquifer, upon which agriculture, communities, and future generations throughout the Texas Panhandle—and seven other states—depend.

AI is often presented as an immaterial technology existing somewhere in “the cloud,” but its infrastructure is being built on Texas soil—and it requires enormous quantities of water, electricity, land, and other public resources. Decisions of this magnitude should not proceed without transparency, independent environmental analysis, enforceable protections, and meaningful public participation.

I am grateful to Luke Metzger for this collaboration and to the Environment Texas Research & Policy Center for publishing our analysis. I also appreciate the work of the Panhandle 1^st Coalition and others who are raising critical questions about Project Matador and its long-term consequences.

I invite you to read and share the article. This is not simply a regional issue. It is a question of what kinds of technological development Texas will support, who will bear the environmental costs, and what obligations we have to citizens and residents in other states, as well as to the generations that follow us. -AV

Draining the Ogallala Aquifer for AI? Project Matador and the myth of limitless growth

A 17-gigawatt AI campus in the Texas Panhandle is staking its future on water the region doesn't have to spare.

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin & Luke Metzger, Executive Director, Environment Texas Research & Policy Center

July 23, 2026

Google Data Center, Council Bluffs, Iowa

A massive artificial-intelligence (AI) infrastructure project is rising approximately 12 miles northeast of Amarillo. Known as Project Matador, the development is being built by Fermi America through a partnership with the Texas Tech University System and promoted as the largest private energy and artificial-intelligence campus in the world.The scale is staggering. Early plans described a roughly 6,000-acre campus capable of generating 11 gigawatts of electricity—enough to power the equivalent of approximately 8.2 million homes, by the company’s own estimate. Now the company says it will produce 17 gigawatts across 7,570 acres, with natural gas, solar energy, battery storage, and four proposed nuclear reactors providing the power.

All of this infrastructure is intended principally to power AI.

The project’s name carries an unsettling irony. In Spanish, matador literally means “one who kills”—the bullfighter charged with dispatching the bull. It was presumably chosen to evoke daring and spectacle, but for a project that could drain a declining aquifer and deepen reliance on natural gas, the literal meaning reads less like incidental branding and more like a warning.

What, exactly, might Project Matador ultimately kill—or help exhaust—if not the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the largest groundwater systems in the United States?

Project Matador is therefore more than an industrial development. It represents an extraordinary commitment of land, energy, water, public institutional resources, and environmental capacity to a privately controlled computational enterprise whose long-term public benefits remain uncertain.

Artificial intelligence is often described as though it were immaterial, existing somewhere in the “cloud.” In reality, AI depends on a vast physical infrastructure of data centers, chips, pipelines, power plants, transmission lines, cooling systems, and water. The cloud is not floating above us. It is being built on Texas soil.

Although Fermi America describes a diversified energy mix, the project’s near-term foundation appears to rely heavily on natural gas. The company boasts about both receiving a clean air permit for up to 6 GW of natural gas power generation and having easy access to both underground gas and ”Waha Hub, a giant U.S. marketplace for natural gas.” In addition, the company has a long-term agreement to purchase a large amount of natural gas each day. This exposes a contradiction at the heart of the AI boom: A technology marketed as futuristic may deepen dependence on anachronistic fossil-fuel extraction and combustion.

Calling Project Matador an “advanced energy” campus does not erase the environmental consequences of its reliance on natural gas. Natural-gas production and combustion release greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, as well as nitrogen oxides and other air pollutants from burning gas. Nitrogen oxides released through fossil-fuel combustion can also contribute to the formation of fine particulate matter, smog, and ground-level ozone. Nor does the prospect of adding solar or nuclear power in later phases cannot retroactively undo the environmental effects of the gas pipelines, gas-fired generating facilities, data centers, and other infrastructure being constructed now. Moreover, considering that the development of pipelines and power plants are durable investments, these may extend fossil-fuel dependence for decades.

The most urgent concern, however, may be water.

Project Matador is being built in a region heavily dependent on the Ogallala Aquifer, the foundation of agriculture, ranching, municipal life, and economic survival across much of the Great Plains.

Yet the Ogallala is being steadily depleted. In large portions of the Texas Panhandle and High Plains, water is being withdrawn far more rapidly than rainfall and natural recharge can replace it.

That makes every major new industrial claim on Panhandle water a matter of profound public importance. Water committed to data centers may no longer be available to farmers, ranchers, towns, ecosystems, or future generations. The question is not merely whether a corporation can afford to buy water. It is whether Texas should permit one of its most resource-intensive technological projects to expand in a region whose principal aquifer is already under severe strain.


The City of Amarillo approved an arrangement allowing Fermi America to purchase as much as 2.5 million gallons of municipal water per day at twice the standard rate. At the maximum level, that allocation alone would equal approximately 912.5 million gallons annually and more than 18 billion gallons over the initial 20-year term.

Yet this represents only part of the project’s potential supply. Fermi America has stated that it secured access to as much as 18.5 million gallons per day through a combination of municipal and private groundwater arrangements. At that upper limit, Project Matador would have access to approximately 6.75 billion gallons annually. Over 20 years, continuous use at that level would total approximately 135 billion gallons.

Access to 18.5 million gallons per day does not necessarily mean the completed project will consume that amount every day. Actual use will depend on the number and size of the data centers, cooling technologies, generating facilities, recycling systems, weather, and the pace of construction. Still, securing access to billions of gallons annually reveals the magnitude of the project’s anticipated water needs.

Fermi America says it will employ closed-loop cooling, recycle water, pay above-market rates, and finance infrastructure improvements. Those claims require independent verification. Closed-loop cooling can reduce withdrawals, but it does not make data centers water-free. Water is still lost through evaporation, cooling-tower blowdown, treatment, maintenance, and other industrial processes. Gas-fired and nuclear facilities will also require substantial water.

Paying more for water does not make it renewable. A higher price may generate municipal revenue, but it does not restore the Ogallala Aquifer. Money cannot quickly replenish groundwater accumulated over thousands of years.

The relevant question is not whether Fermi America can afford this water. It is whether the people of the Panhandle can afford the long-term consequences of surrendering so much of it.

Project Matador also raises serious questions about the role of public universities. The campus is being developed on land controlled by the Texas Tech University System under a 99-year ground lease. Texas Tech describes the partnership as an opportunity for research and workforce development.

Those possibilities should not be dismissed. The project may create construction work, technical employment, tax revenue, research partnerships, and investment in a region often overlooked by major development initiatives. But public benefit cannot simply be asserted. It must be demonstrated.

Texans deserve to know what risks Texas Tech has assumed, what tax abatements or infrastructure commitments support the project, and what protections exist if it is delayed, downsized, sold, or abandoned. They also deserve assurance that university researchers will remain free to independently study and publish findings on water use, pollution, labor conditions, nuclear safety, and community effects.

A public university should not serve merely as a landlord, workforce provider, branding partner, or source of legitimacy for private capital. Its first obligation is to the public.

The project’s employment claims also require scrutiny. Data centers employ large numbers of workers during construction but are highly automated once operational. The public needs independently verified estimates of permanent jobs, wages, local hiring, worker protections, and net public revenue after subsidies and tax abatements are considered.

The promise of four large nuclear reactors should likewise be treated cautiously. Such construction would involve extraordinary financial, engineering, regulatory, and logistical challenges. Communities should evaluate binding agreements and actual construction, not only promotional renderings of what may exist decades from now.

The final form of Project Matador may differ substantially from the sweeping vision now being marketed. In April 2026, Fermi announced that it was looking for a replacement for CEO Toby Neugebauer, the company’s co-founder and largest shareholder. The company’s interim leadership subsequently outlined a restructured strategy labeled “Fermi 2.0.” Neugebauer publicly urged the board to pursue an independent sale of the company and criticized the new direction, while Fermi disclosed a year-to-date net loss exceeding $486 million and confirmed that its first prospective anchor tenant had walked away from a construction-funding agreement. Given’s Fermi’s leadership upheaval and financial strain, regardless of the company’s intentions at the time of its commitments, it’s unclear what will survive the transition.

Beyond the environmental and economic questions lies a larger democratic one. We are increasingly told that artificial intelligence is inevitable and that communities must compete to host its infrastructure or be left behind. This conflates political choices with technological destiny and asks the public to accept nearly any expenditure of water, energy, land, and public resources in the name of AI.

But just because someone says something is inevitable doesn’t make it so, nor should it guide public policy.

Artificial intelligence may advance medicine, science, education, accessibility, and communication. It may also displace workers, intensify surveillance, reproduce discrimination, flood the information environment with synthetic content, and concentrate wealth and political power.

Before committing billions of gallons of water and city-scale quantities of electricity to AI infrastructure, Texans deserve to know what the computing capacity will be used for, who will control it, who will profit, and what enforceable public benefits will result.

Not every use of AI carries equal social value. Computing used for medical research or climate modeling cannot simply be equated with computing used to automate advertising, expand surveillance, replace workers, produce disposable content, or accelerate financial speculation. Yet all may draw from the same aquifer and impose costs on the same communities.

Project Matador should therefore be subject to independent water-impact studies, annual reporting of actual withdrawals and consumption, disclosure of cooling systems and recycling rates, aquifer monitoring, cumulative pollution assessments, drought-response requirements, disclosure of subsidies and tax incentives, and meaningful public participation.

The project must also be evaluated as a whole. A proposed 17-gigawatt campus should not be fragmented into separate permits for wells, pipelines, turbines, data halls, transmission lines, and nuclear facilities in ways that obscure its cumulative impact.

There must also be enforceable limits. During droughts or groundwater emergencies, household, agricultural, and community needs should take priority over nonessential computational demand.

Project Matador embodies a vision of ever-larger data centers, ever-greater computational capacity, and seemingly limitless technological growth. Yet it is being built in a region where water is finite and the Ogallala Aquifer is already declining.

That contradiction cannot be engineered away through corporate branding.

The issue is not whether one is simply for or against artificial intelligence. It is whether private technological ambition should be allowed to outrun democratic governance, environmental stewardship, and the rights of future generations.

The Ogallala Aquifer is not infinite. Natural gas is not clean merely because it powers computers instead of factories. Public land does not cease to be a public trust because it has been leased for nearly a century. And the promise of innovation does not relieve a corporation or public university of its obligation to demonstrate lasting public value.

Project Matador may become a monument to technological achievement. It could just as easily become a monument to an era that mistook computational power for wisdom, corporate scale for progress, and the ability to purchase water for the right to consume it.

Before Texas commits its water, energy, public land, and future to Project Matador, the people of the Panhandle—and the people of Texas—deserve transparency, independent science, enforceable protections, and a genuine democratic voice.

Authors

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at The University of Texas at Austin. Although she has taught environmental policy, her primary scholarship centers on K–12 and higher education policy, with particular attention to educational equity, culture, language, and the politics of education. She earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Stanford University and is the author of the award-winning book Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring (1999).


Dr. Valenzuela is also the founder and author of Educational Equity, Politics, and Policy in Texas, which is regarded as one of the nation’s leading education reform blogs. She is a co-founder of Academia Cuauhtli, a partnership-based, community-anchored Saturday school with district-wide impacts across the Austin Independent School District, where she regularly mentors young people and advances culturally sustaining education.

She was named among the nation’s top 200 education scholars in the 2025 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings and is a member of the National Academy of Education.



Luke Metzger

Executive Director, Environment Texas Research & Policy Center


As the executive director of Environment Texas, Luke is a leading voice in the state for clean air and water, parks and wildlife, and a livable climate. Luke recently led the successful campaign to get the Texas Legislature and voters to invest $1 billion to buy land for new state parks. He also helped win permanent protection for the Christmas Mountains of Big Bend; helped compel Exxon, Shell and Chevron Phillips to cut air pollution at four Texas refineries and chemical plants; and got the Austin and Houston school districts to install filters on water fountains to protect children from lead in drinking water. The San Antonio Current has called Luke "long one of the most energetic and dedicated defenders of environmental issues in the state." He has been named one of the "Top Lobbyists for Causes" by Capitol Inside and received the President's Award from the Texas Recreation and Parks Society for his work to protect Texas parks. He is a board member of the Clean Air Force of Central Texas and an advisory board member of the Texas Tech University Masters of Public Administration program. Luke, his wife, son and daughters are working to visit every state park in Texas.

Public Universities Belong to the Public: Join the August 12 People’s Hearing on Higher Education

Friends,

Texas higher education is being rapidly transformed—mostly without meaningful public consultation, transparent academic review, or adequate consideration of the consequences for students, faculty, families, and communities across our state.

That is why I urge you to join us on Wednesday, August 12, 2026, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus People’s Hearing on Higher Education at the Robert Johnson Legislative Office Building, 1501 N. Congress Avenue, Austin, Texas.

The hearing is being convened by Texas State Representative Lulu Flores and the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus, in partnership with the Latino Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education and our broader coalition of higher education advocates.

The hearing will address the weakening or dismantling of:

• Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies;

• academic freedom and shared governance;

• the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin; and

• community-based knowledge, cultural memory, and the intellectual heritage of the people of Texas.

These are not private institutional matters. Our colleges and universities are public institutions, supported in part by the taxes that all of us pay. Texans contribute to higher education through property taxes, sales taxes, state revenues, tuition, public bonds, philanthropy, and generations of labor and civic investment. These institutions therefore carry obligations not only to administrators, governing boards, or elected officials, but also to the people of Texas.

Taxpayers have a right to know how decisions affecting public universities are being made. We have a right to ask what programs are being eliminated or consolidated, whose voices are being excluded, how public resources are being used, and whether decisions are serving the educational needs of the entire state.

The children and grandchildren of working families should be able to attend universities where they can study the histories, cultures, struggles, and contributions of the communities from which they come. Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian American, LGBTQ+, women, immigrant, rural, and working-class Texans should not be treated as peripheral to the mission of public higher education—particularly when their families help sustain these institutions through taxes, tuition, employment, research, and public service.

The urgency could not be greater. Texas has enacted sweeping restrictions on diversity, equity, and inclusion; expanded political control over curricula and university governance; weakened faculty participation in institutional decision-making; and created conditions in which academic programs may be eliminated, consolidated, or redefined before the public fully understands what is happening.

Universities are not the private property of political leaders, governing boards, donors, or administrators. They are public trusts. Their responsibility is to educate the people, advance knowledge, prepare future generations, and serve the public good.

Decisions of this magnitude should not take place behind closed doors or be announced only after they have become accomplished facts. The people who fund public higher education deserve transparency, accountability, and a meaningful voice in determining its future.

The August 12 People’s Hearing will help create a public record by bringing together students, faculty members, staff, educational leaders, alumni, advocates, community organizations, taxpayers, and concerned Texans. It will provide an opportunity for those most affected by recent policies to speak in their own voices—and for legislators and the wider public to hear what is at stake.

Your presence matters.

A hearing filled with students, educators, parents, families, elders, alumni, and community members sends a powerful message: We pay taxes. We support these institutions. They belong to the public, and the public has a right to be heard.

Please join us on August 12. Come to listen, bear witness, offer testimony, and stand in solidarity with all those defending educational freedom, academic integrity, democratic accountability, and the right of every community to see its knowledge, history, and experiences respected within our public universities.

Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus People’s Hearing on Higher Education

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

9:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

Robert Johnson Legislative Office Building

1501 N. Congress Avenue

Austin, Texas 78701

Please share this announcement with all your networks. 

We are likely to have a press conference on this day. Details forthcoming.

We are not without power. The future of public higher education in Texas is being decided now. As taxpayers, educators, students, families, and members of the public, we must be present, organized, and heard.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

DOGEing the Curriculum: University of Houston may cut 40% of core requirement classes in response to GOP law

Friends:

This is staggering. University of Houston Professor Richard Armstrong is exactly right: the proposed removal of nearly 40 percent of UH’s core courses amounts to “DOGE-ing the core curriculum over the summer while nobody’s looking” (Ketterer, 2026).

Among the courses recommended for removal are Black Liberation Theology, Introduction to Women’s Studies, Introduction to LGBT Studies, Intro to Global Climate Change, Mexican American Urban Communities, Latino Leadership Activism and Organizing, Sexuality and Society, and Voices from Exile and Diaspora (Ketterer, 2026).

This is not routine curricular housekeeping. It is a politically driven narrowing of what Texas students will be encouraged—and, practically speaking, able—to learn.

The intention behind Senate Bill 37 authored by former Senator Andrew Creighton—who is now the president of Texas Tech University—could hardly be clearer. In the official statement of intent accompanying Sen. Brandon Creighton’s bill, SB 37 was described as an effort to address the “unchecked authority of faculty senates” (Texas Senate Research Center, 2025, para. 1). A subsequent House committee analysis reported that the bill’s sponsor was concerned about the “ideological direction of core curricula” and a perceived lack of accountability in faculty governance (Texas House Committee on Higher Education, 2025).

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick was even more direct. He described SB 37 as unfinished business following what he called the largest “pushback against wokeness in higher education” in the nation’s history (Patrick, 2025b). This language leaves little doubt that SB 37 was not simply about efficiency, affordability, or workforce preparation. It was designed to shift control over knowledge away from faculty and toward politically appointed regents, administrators, and state officials.

This is where the relationship to Christian nationalism becomes important.

Christian nationalism is not synonymous with Christianity, Christian faith, Jesus, or religious devotion. It is a political movement that uses a particular interpretation of Christianity to claim authority over American identity, government, education, and public life. As Katherine Stewart (2020, 2025) has documented, this movement is sustained not by religious conviction alone, but by coordinated political organizations, wealthy donors, policy networks, and activists seeking the power to impose their vision on a pluralistic society.

Stewart’s (2012) earlier investigation of the Christian Right’s efforts to gain influence in public schools also reminds us that education has long been a central battleground in this movement’s struggle over whose values, histories, and forms of knowledge will receive public legitimacy.

I am not claiming that every legislator or administrator involved in SB 37 personally identifies as a Christian nationalist. I am arguing that the law’s purposes and consequences align closely with that broader political project.

The contrast is revealing. Texas political leaders have promoted the placement of the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms as a “foundational moral compass” (Patrick, 2025a), while a public university considers removing Black Liberation Theology from its core curriculum. One expression of Christianity—aligned with state authority and a traditional national narrative—is elevated. Another—grounded in the experiences of oppressed communities and demanding racial justice—is marginalized.

That is not religious neutrality. It is the political selection of which religious ideas are considered legitimate.

The other vulnerable courses follow the same pattern. Women’s and LGBTQ Studies challenge prescribed gender and sexual hierarchies. Mexican American, Black, immigrant, and diaspora studies complicate the myth of an innocent and uniformly virtuous nation. Climate-change courses confront powerful economic interests and require students to reckon with collective responsibility. Courses on activism teach students that democracy involves participation, dissent, and organized struggle.

These subjects are not being questioned because they lack intellectual rigor. They are vulnerable because they challenge the racial, gendered, religious, economic, and national orthodoxies that this political movement seeks to protect.

SB 37 created the machinery for this purge by weakening faculty governance, elevating regental control, and redefining education through politically malleable concepts such as “foundational” knowledge, workforce preparation, and return on investment. UH may also be overcomplying with the law by demanding that every individual core course satisfy all of its criteria rather than evaluating the core curriculum as a whole (Ketterer, 2026).

The result will not be a stronger education. Students may face fewer choices, registration bottlenecks, delayed graduation, and diminished opportunities to encounter fields that awaken their intellectual interests and help them understand the diverse society in which they live.

What we are witnessing is most certainly a "DOGEing" of the curriculum, but the objective is not merely to reduce its size. It is to discipline knowledge—to make politically inconvenient courses less visible, less accessible, and eventually less viable.

The University of Houston—or should I say, the stakeholder community around it—should protest and halt this process, this rationing of education. Curriculum must be shaped through transparent, faculty-led deliberation grounded in disciplinary knowledge and educational evidence—not through fear of political retaliation from Austin.

This is not academic accountability.

It is political control over what students are permitted to know. 

How scandalous.

What a shame.

—Angela Valenzuela

References

Ketterer, S. (2026, July 21). University of Houston may cut 40% of core requirement classes in response to GOP law. See the list. Houston Chronicle. https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/education/article/uh-core-curriculum-sb37-22352570.php

Patrick, D. (2025a, March 18). Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick statement on the passage of Senate Bill 10—Placing the Ten Commandments in schools. Office of the Lieutenant Governor. https://www.ltgov.texas.gov/2025/03/18/t-gov-dan-patrick-statement-on-the-passage-of-senate-bill-10-placing-the-ten-commandments-in-schools/

Patrick, D. (2025b, April 15). Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick statement on the passage of Senate Bill 37—Reforming faculty senates. Office of the Lieutenant Governor. https://www.ltgov.texas.gov/2025/04/15/lt-gov-dan-patrick-statement-on-the-passage-of-senate-bill-37-reforming-faculty-senates/

Stewart, K. (2012). The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s stealth assault on America’s children. PublicAffairs (Wikipedia, 2012).

Stewart, K. (2020). The power worshippers: Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism. Bloomsbury Publishing (Wikipedia, 2020).

Stewart, K. (2025). Money, lies, and God: Inside the movement to destroy American democracy. Bloomsbury Publishing (Wikipedia, 2025).

Texas House Committee on Higher Education. (2025). Bill analysis: Committee substitute for Senate Bill 37, 89th Legislature, Regular Session, Texas Legislature Online. https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/analysis/html/SB00037H.htm

Texas Senate Research Center. (2025, March 18). S.B. 37 bill analysis: As filed, 89th Legislature, Regular Session, Texas Legislature Online. https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/analysis/html/SB00037I.htm

University of Houston may cut 40% of core requirement classes in response to GOP law. See the list.

By Samantha Ketterer,Staff WriterJuly 21, 2026

The Ezekiel W. Cullen Building on the campus of University of Houston on Thursday, Nov. 10, 

2022. Elizabeth Conley/Staff photographer

University of Houston administrators could slash almost 40% of the courses offered in the school’s core curriculum to comply with a new state law — including “Intro to Global Climate Change,” “Black Liberation Theology,” “Introduction to Women’s Studies” and “Introduction to LGBT Studies,” according to a list obtained by the Houston Chronicle.

If implemented, the changes would drastically reduce the general education options that undergraduates choose from as they work toward their degrees. The cuts would affect liberal arts departments the most, including professors who teach topics that high-ranking conservative lawmakers view as biased or “woke.”

Any courses that are removed from the core can still be taught, but they’re likely to be taken by a smaller number of students — meanwhile, some faculty fear that the remaining classes won’t have enough seats. Professors have criticized the process and say they were not meaningfully involved in these decisions until now as administrators seek their feedback for a final proposal that will go to the UH System Board of Regents in August.

“This is basically DOGE-ing the core curriculum over the summer while nobody's looking,” said Richard Armstrong, an associate professor of classical studies. “When you think about something that's been that carefully managed and curated, you wonder, why are we being reckless in cutting the offerings?”

READ MORE: A battle over workforce, 'indoctrination' is reshaping core curricula at Texas colleges

UH is among the dozens of institutions across the state assessing their core classes against the backdrop of a broader GOP push for more oversight on Texas’ public college campuses.

While every institution’s “core” looks different, they each include subject requirements and learning objectives set by the state, making up 42 credit hours, or 14 classes. The core has become hotly contested in recent years, as it indicates what every college graduate should know.

Lawmakers wrote Senate Bill 37 in 2025 to unravel what they view as left-leaning indoctrination in college classrooms. The new law didn’t explicitly ban topics but instead enacted four broad guidelines for core classes — such as being “foundational” for a sound education and “necessary” to prepare students for the workforce and civic life.

"The legislation demands real accountability from our institutions," the bill’s author, former state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, said in a statement as lawmakers sent it to Gov. Greg Abbott to sign. "Texas isn't just leading the conversation — we're setting the national standard for restoring academic integrity and accountability on college campuses."

So far, the responses of universities and colleges to the law have been varied. While UH has not issued any policies restricting topics — as the Texas A&M and Texas Tech university systems have done — some UH faculty have been wary.

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In a move that some UH professors viewed as a threat to academic freedom and a precursor to further changes, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Dean Dan O’Connor asked faculty early this spring to sign a memo affirming that they don’t “indoctrinate” while teaching.

The official SB37 review began later, when a working group of nine professors across UH’s academic colleges drafted the recommendations over five “extended” meetings, according to university documents. This month, Provost Diane Z. Chase shared the findings with faculty and opened a feedback form, which closes Tuesday.

Otherwise, the university has disclosed little about the group’s process, beyond sharing the results and giving faculty copies of the guiding questions used to judge courses against the state’s criteria.

UH’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a group that advocates for academic freedom, said that the committee was sworn to secrecy, and that UH general counsel Dona Cornell attended all of the meetings.

When reached by the Houston Chronicle for comment, UH officials said the SB37 review is ongoing and declined to answer a series of questions about the process.

"As part of this process, the UH Core Curriculum Working Group evaluated all core courses using a consistent evaluation framework,” said a statement released by the university. “Based on that framework, the working group prepared draft recommendations, which have been provided to faculty for feedback. These recommendations are just one step in a broader review process and do not represent final decisions. The university leadership will evaluate the recommendations, which must ultimately be approved by UH System Board of Regents."

What could go

The working group suggested taking about 100 courses out of the core and keeping almost 160 others, according to a document summarizing the proposed changes.

While some courses involving politically divisive issues were on the list — like LGBT Studies and climate change — the cuts don’t appear to target race studies as a whole, as “African American Studies” and “Introduction to Latino Cultural Studies” would remain in the core while “Black Liberation Studies” and “Mexican American Urban Communities” were recommended to be removed.

Some courses on the chopping block involve topics exploring political differences, like “Left, Right and Center.” Others concern movements and social change, like “Latino Leadership Activism and Organizing,” “Sexuality and Society,” “Social Class and Mobility in America” and “Voices from Exile and Diaspora.”

But no history or government classes were flagged, sparing courses that focus on histories for specific demographics, including Chicanos, women, Latinos and African Americans.

UH’s members of the AAUP, the faculty union, said the university violated “basic principles of transparency, faculty participation, and fairness” in the review, according to a letter sent to UH President Renu Khator and other administrators on Monday.

They have urged the university to halt the review process.

“This lack of transparency and the exclusion of the vast majority of faculty from the process, should these cuts to the curriculum be upheld, undermines the education UH students will receive,” according to the group’s letter. “A wider range of foundational courses opens up more opportunities for our students to pursue a meaningful and effective college education, setting them up for greater success in graduate work, professional schools, and the workforce.”

They also say that UH overcomplied in following SB37. The group interprets the law as requiring the university’s core in its entirety to meet the state’s four criteria, while UH tasked the working group with ensuring that each individual course meets all four criteria.

The courses on the list also include several that don't touch on political, cultural or social topics.

Rebecca Forrest, an instructional professor in the department of physics, said she was shocked to open the recommendations and see her “Advanced Laboratory 1” course on the list. She has offered it since she created the class 20 years ago, helping physics students learn to convey complicated material and satisfy a core requirement called “Writing in the Disciplines.”

She deems the course essential for the workforce, and believes it meets the criteria of SB 37. To reach more physics students in the future, her department will need to alter its degree plan to require it outside of the core, she said.

“This is doing a disservice to students,” Forrest said. “They won't be well prepared to enter the workplace or graduate school.”

Largely, faculty members critical of the process argue that they have the pedagogical expertise and knowledge of learning objectives to back up their curricular decisions, and they say they’ve previously gone through rigorous processes to ensure that their core courses met state standards. Those processes were upended after SB37 disbanded faculty senates – which led prior curricular reviews – and allowed colleges to replace them with smaller advisory councils that are more limited in function.

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“We are the closest to the students,” Armstrong said. “We are interacting with them all the time, far more than the administration, and we have to create material that really works, that does achieve the goals that we're setting out – pedagogically but also connects to their interests, energizes them.”

Effects on students

People walk across the University of Houston campus near the UH Student Center in Houston, Monday, Oct. 27, 2025.Brett Coomer/Houston Chronicle

By forcing students at a growing university to compete for a more limited number of courses, Forrest, Armstrong and others worry that students will experience a bottleneck at registration and face delayed graduation times.

Other ripple effects are possible. The core is known to draw students to departments – even helping them minor in areas that are known to have smaller numbers of majors.

If their courses are available to fewer students, some professors fear class enrollments will drop further.

UH: Board drops religious studies as major due to low enrollment

Five of the six core courses offered by the classical studies department were recommended for removal, according to the working group’s list. The creative writing department’s only offering in the core was “Creation and the Performance of Literature,” which could now be cut.

“Students find core courses that interest them, that broaden their experience and their education in society,” Forrest said. “All of that makes for more well-rounded students that are better prepared for whatever profession they choose to go into.”