Silence Has a Sound: Texas' SB 37, the End of Shared Governance, and the Structured Diminishment of Voice, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Silence Has a Sound: Texas' SB 37, the End of Shared Governance, and the Structured Diminishment of Voice

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 23, 2026

What if the 1963 song, “The Sounds of Silence” authored by Paul Simon and that he & Art Garfunkel sang is not only existential loneliness, but the quiet cultural condition that makes authoritarianism possible? Or might it not reflect dystopian futurity under American fascism about which Katharine Stewart writes in her New York Times best-selling book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (2025)?

I encourage you to listen to the song here. 

Listen here. 

While Paul Simon did not explicitly write the song as a critique of fascism, critical theorists—from Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt to Herbert Marcuse—have long warned that domination often advances not only through coercion, but through conformity, passivity, and the erosion of meaningful dialogue about which Simon indeed wrote.

In this vein, Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/2002) theorize how mass culture can dull critical consciousness, producing compliance rather than critique. Arendt (1951) reminds us that authoritarianism thrives where public discourse collapses and individuals retreat into isolation. 

Read in this light, the song’s haunting refrain—“people talking without speaking, people hearing without listening”—evokes not just alienation, but a hollowing out of democratic life itself. 

It has a sound. It surfaces in whispers and half-spoken cautions, in the careful recalibration of what can be said and where, in meetings where voices once carried authority but now trail off into procedural quiet. It lingers in the pauses before someone decides whether it is safe to speak, in the substitution of clarity with ambiguity, critique with compliance. It hums beneath the surface of institutional life—not loud enough to name, but present enough to shape behavior.

It's not like scholars and people, in general, have nothing to say. It's that the conditions for saying it have been quietly rearranged. It is the sound of knowledge narrowed, of questions deferred, of dissent rerouted into safer channels. It is not the spectacle of repression that defines it, but its subtlety. 

And once you learn to hear it, it is everywhere.

Contemporary scholars extend this diagnosis into our present moment. Brown (2019) argues that neoliberalism hollows out democratic institutions from within, converting them into instruments of market and political control. Henry Giroux (2022) describes the rise of “authoritarian neoliberalism,” where higher education becomes a key site for disciplining thought and narrowing dissent. He argues for critical analyses of the current, politicized context of education and the need for a collective pedagogy of resistance with social justice, freedom, and democracy as its goals.

Fraser (2019) similarly points to the entanglement of economic, political, and cultural crises that destabilize democratic publics, making them more vulnerable to reactionary capture. Building on Fraser, Stewart, outlines the history and processes of the current moment, naming it "reactionary nihilism." Together, these scholars help us see that silence is not merely absence—it is produced, structured, and weaponized.

In Texas, this “silence” is no longer metaphorical—it is being institutionalized. Under SB 37, faculty senates—the historic vehicles of shared governance—have been stripped of meaningful authority or eliminated altogether, consolidating decision-making power in governing boards and political appointees. This restructuring represents more than administrative change; it marks a profound shift in the governance of knowledge, where faculty expertise is subordinated to political oversight. 

At the same time, the law expands top-down control over curriculum, enabling the rejection, restructuring, or defunding of programs deemed ideologically suspect—developments that dovetail with ongoing efforts to marginalize or eliminate Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and related fields.

As Marcuse (1964) warned in One-Dimensional Man, advanced systems of control do not always silence through overt repression; they produce conditions in which dissent becomes increasingly difficult to articulate, let alone sustain. 

From this vantage point, the “sounds of silence” becomes newly legible as a political condition: not simply the absence of speech, but the structured diminishment of voice. It is the quieting of faculty governance, the narrowing of permissible knowledge, and the normalization of a system in which critique is not dramatically crushed, but procedurally sidelined.

This interpretation may exceed the original intent of the song’s authors. But as with much enduring art, its meaning expands in relation to historical context. In our present moment, the “sounds of silence” is not just something we hear—it is something being built.

We are not without power, however, beginning with the vote. Lest we all get turned into their not-so-grand vision of "one dimensional man"—as Iowa, per yesterday's blog, wants to do—let's run all these power players, these anti-democratic incumbents, out of office. And let's not vote new ones in.

Sí, se puede! Yes, we can!

References

Arendt, H. (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. Harcourt, Brace & Company.

Brown, W. (2019). In the ruins of neoliberalism: The rise of antidemocratic politics in the West. Columbia University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/brow19384

Fraser, N. (2019). The old is dying and the new cannot be born: From progressive neoliberalism to Trump and beyond. Verso.

Giroux, H. A. (2022). Pedagogy of resistance: Against manufactured ignorance. Bloomsbury Academic.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments (G. S. Noerr, Ed.; E. Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1944)

Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Beacon Press.

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

I Was There: New College of Florida, Manufactured Narratives, and the Politics of Decline, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. March 23, 2026

I Was There: New College of Florida, Manufactured Narratives, and the Politics of Decline

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 23, 2026

I was there last week, meeting with students and faculty who tell a much different story than the one offered by Trustee Lance Karp—a story that Brian Cody now vehemently critiques with data.

What I encountered on the ground was not a campus experiencing renewal or “momentum,” but one grappling with dislocation, loss, and profound uncertainty. Students spoke of instability in housing, disrupted academic pathways, and a palpable sense that the institution they chose—or once knew—was slipping away. Faculty described conditions of constraint, attrition, and a steady erosion of shared governance. These are not abstract concerns. They are lived realities.

Against this backdrop, Karp’s recent defense of New College reads less like an account of institutional health and more like an attempt to manufacture it.

Cody’s analysis cuts through this narrative with empirical clarity. Since Richard Corcoran’s takeover in 2023, New College has experienced measurable declines across key indicators: falling SAT scores, lower incoming GPAs, a dramatic drop in national rankings, and stagnating—or declining—enrollment among first-time-in-college students. At the same time, the institution is facing what can only be described as a self-created housing crisis, with roughly 40 percent of students relegated to hotels and off-campus accommodations despite millions in state funding allocated for housing. These are not the markers of a thriving honors college. They are signs of institutional distress.

And yet, rather than addressing these issues, current proposals seek to expand New College’s footprint by absorbing the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee campus—effectively transferring resources and infrastructure to an institution that, by all available evidence, is struggling to sustain itself. That this proposal is moving forward in the face of opposition from elected officials and regional stakeholders only underscores the extent to which political priorities—not educational outcomes—are driving decision-making.

What we are witnessing here is not simply mismanagement. It is something more systemic: the fake production of manufactured momentum under conditions of decline.

This is where the story connects to a broader national pattern. As we have seen in Texas and Florida alike, governance interventions in higher education are increasingly accompanied by narrative interventions—claims of success, renewal, or correction that are not borne out by the data, but are nonetheless mobilized to justify further restructuring. 

The result is a kind of “policy theater,” if you will, in which institutional deterioration is reframed as transformation, echoing Nathan Allen's allegation of President Corcoran's "performative accounting" (Valenzuela, 2026). Expressed differently, policy theater, of which performative accounting is a part, functions as a mechanism of concealment—masking decline with carefully curated narratives that justify continued political control.

And importantly, this dynamic does not operate in isolation. It coexists with—and is reinforced by—what I have called shadow censorship. When faculty are marginalized, governance structures weakened, and institutional futures tied to political agendas, the space for dissent narrows. The ability to publicly challenge these narratives diminishes. Silence, in such contexts, is not accidental—it is produced.

That is why Cody’s intervention matters. It restores something that is increasingly under threat: accountability grounded in evidence.

Because without that, we are left with narratives untethered from reality—narratives that can justify not only the dismantling of institutions, but their reconfiguration in ways that may be far more difficult to undo.

Reference

Valenzuela, A. (2026, March 20). Institutional matricide beneath the banyans: The unmaking of an alma mater, the New College of Florida, Educational Equity, Politics, and Policy in Texas. 

Brian Cody: New College Failures vs. Manufactured Momentum

Brian Cody

Critics question New College performance amid push affecting USF Sarasota-Manatee

Last week, in response to the premiere of a new documentary about New College of Florida, Trustee Lance Karp offered a defense of the college that lacked any actual evidence. The timing of his response also suggests the college is trying to revive energy around a bill that would shut down the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus and transfer its property and debt to New College. Let’s look at some actual facts.

Since Richard Corcoran took over in early 2023, New College has seen a:

— Drastic decline in SAT scores for the incoming class, dropping from an average of 1233 the year before Corcoran arrived, down to 1153 in Fall 2024.

— Sharp downturn in high school GPA for the entering class: before Corcoran, 55% of FTIC students had a 4.0 or higher; after Corcoran, only 41% had a 4.0 GPA or higher. This is a major problem, given that New College is“the legislatively designated Honors College of Florida,” yet it seems to be struggling to recruit honors students.

— Nosedive in the U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings, dropping 59 spots, so New College is no longer even in the top 100.

— Drop in FTIC (first time in college) students this year, reporting only 183 FTIC students in Fall 2025 compared to 188 the year before Corcoran arrived, a decrease likely due to the focus on recruiting out-of-state transfer athletes rather than academically excellent FTIC Florida students.

— Self-perpetuated housing crisis with 40% of the student body living in hotels and off-campus housing — despite receiving $20 million in taxpayer money for student housing. Karp, along with most of the New College trustees, has not voted to construct new permanent dorms at any time in the last three years. He has been content with approving payment for hotels and temporary housing rather than actually fixing the problem. This is a self-created housing crisis, and stealing dorms from USF Sarasota-Manatee doesn’t solve it.

Elected officials, including House Rep. James Buchanan and U.S. Rep. Vern Buchanan, as well as the Manatee County Chamber of Commerce, have all raised concerns about the bill, which would result in USF Sarasota-Manatee being shut down. New College is a school being run poorly, and its leadership should not be rewarded, especially not in ways that hurt USF and the Sarasota-Manatee region.

It is notable that Karp and the rest of the New College trustees have met half as often as their counterparts at USF (11 Board and Committee meetings at New College this academic year compared to 21 at USF). This absentee trusteeism means the Legislature needs to step in to keep the wheels from coming off at New College, not penalize USF and the entire Sarasota-Manatee region to reward New College’s self-created problems.

Brian Cody is an alum of New College of Florida, a former New College trustee (2004-2006), and a current Board member of the Novo Collegian Alliance.

All Eyes on Utah: Conscience, Control, and the Expansion of Shadow Censorship, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

All Eyes on Utah: Conscience, Control, and the Expansion of Shadow Censorship

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

What is happening in Utah may appear, at first glance, to be about protecting student conscience (Weissman, 2026). But look more closely, and it reveals something far more consequential: the continued expansion of state power into the classroom—and the next phase in the governance of higher education.

A newly passed bill would allow students to opt out of course assignments that conflict with their “sincerely held” moral, religious, or ideological beliefs. On its face, this may sound reasonable—even humane. Who could object to protecting conscience? But in practice, the bill introduces a mechanism through which academic content itself becomes negotiable, subject not to disciplinary standards or faculty expertise, but to individualized moral veto backed by state authority. Faculty who deny such requests must justify themselves to a “neutral arbiter.” Assignments that ask students to engage perspectives they disagree with—long a cornerstone of higher education—now risk being recast as coercion.

This is not simply accommodation. It is a restructuring of authority.

And importantly, it does not operate through outright bans. Instead, it produces what I have called shadow censorship—a form of anticipatory self-regulation in which institutions and faculty adjust their behavior in response to perceived political risk. As critics note, the law’s ambiguity—what counts as a “sincerely held belief”? what constitutes a “fundamental alteration”?—is precisely what gives it power. Under such conditions, faculty may begin to avoid assigning controversial material altogether. Why risk a complaint? Why invite scrutiny? The likely result is not a wave of formal opt-outs, but a quiet narrowing of what gets taught in the first place.

This is how governance becomes pedagogy.

Utah is not alone. This bill follows a familiar pattern seen across states like Texas and Florida, where governance overhauls, DEI bans, and curricular interventions have steadily redefined the boundaries of academic freedom. What is new here is the mechanism: rather than removing content directly, the state empowers individuals—backed by institutional review processes—to contest it from within. It is a subtler form of control, but no less effective.

And like so many recent policies, it is likely to travel.

As we have seen with book bans, DEI legislation, and curriculum mandates, once a model is established in one state, it quickly becomes a template for others. Utah’s “conscientious objection” framework may well become the next export in the growing policy ecosystem reshaping higher education nationwide.

The deeper issue, then, is not conscience. It is power—who decides what counts as legitimate knowledge, and under what conditions it can be taught. When that authority shifts away from educators and toward political frameworks of acceptability, the consequences are profound. Students are no longer asked to grapple with difference; they are permitted to opt out of it. Faculty are no longer empowered to challenge; they are incentivized to avoid.

Even if the bill does not become law, shadow censorship means that the university, once again, is quietly transformed.

Reference

Weissman, S. (2026, March 16). Utah could allow conscientious objection to class assignments, Inside Higher Education.

Utah Could Allow Conscientious Objection to Class Assignments

If signed into law, a bill recently passed by the State Legislature would permit students to opt out of coursework that goes against their conscience or religious beliefs.


Utah students will be able to ask to waive assignments based on their moral convictions if a recently passed bill is signed into law. Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Михаил Руденко, David Schaffer and NikonShutterman/iStock/Getty Images

By Sara Weissman

Utah representative Mike Petersen was inspired to introduce new legislation after receiving a call from his daughter, a master’s student in social work in Louisiana. She was disturbed that a professor had asked the class to write to a local lawmaker in favor of LGBTQ rights.

“She … said, ‘Dad, I just got told I needed to write a letter to my legislator advocating for some policies that don’t align with me,’” Peterson said. She didn’t raise her concerns to the instructor “because she was afraid.”

Petersen has since sponsored a bill, passed by the Utah Legislature this month, that would allow students in the state to opt out of some coursework that conflicts with their religious beliefs. The legislation now awaits the governor’s signature.

The bill creates a process by which students at Utah public colleges and universities could request to skip upcoming assignments for a mandatory class or major requirement that go against a “sincerely held religious or conscience belief.” For example, a student could ask in advance to opt out of watching a sexually explicit film required on a course syllabus. A professor who denies a student’s request would have to explain the decision to a “neutral arbiter” assigned by the university, according to the bill. That person would assess whether nixing the assignment—or subbing in an alternative—counts as a “fundamental alteration” to the class’s learning objectives.

The bill also states that professors can’t “compel a student to publicly take or communicate a specified position,” such as requiring them to write a letter to a lawmaker or publish an article espousing a particular viewpoint.

The bill leaves it to the Utah Higher Education Board to come up with more specific guidance on how these policies should be applied and requires the board to report back to the Legislature on how implementation goes.

The legislation would be the first of its kind to extend conscientious objection to higher education, though Petersen sees the bill as an extension of a previous law he advanced in 2024 that allows state government employees to abstain from work activities they object to on moral grounds. He emphasized that Utah’s state Constitution includes a provision that “the rights of conscience will never be infringed.”

“I think we have to live up to that promise,” he said.
Academic Freedom Concerns

Laura Benitez, state manager for U.S. free expression programs at PEN America, a free speech advocacy organization, worries the law could compel professors to change the assignments they give their students, out of fear of heightened scrutiny from university leaders and state lawmakers. She also argued the bill chips away at professors’ authority to decide what materials and activities they use to teach based on their expertise.

“We consider this bill to be an infringement on academic freedom, having sincere, significant consequences on professors’ ability to make decisions about what they can teach and assign in the classroom,” Benitez said. “A professor’s choices about how to achieve the learning outcomes of the course is part of what academic freedom is.”

Robin Wilson, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who helped craft and present the bill, said she believes academic freedom should be “balanced off” by the needs of students “trapped” in a course—and if that makes faculty reconsider certain assignments, so be it. She compared students with conscientious objections to students with post-traumatic stress disorder who might want an alternative to violent material.

As faculty, “I think it’s OK for us to be checked sometimes,” she said. “This is a mechanism for faculty to kind of stop for a moment and consider what the experience of their students might be.”


She also believes the law can prevent conflicts over course material from blowing up. She cited a recent incident at Texas A&M University, in which a student filmed an argument with a professor over reading material related to gender identity, resulting in the firing of the professor and two administrators. Wilson argued that a public battle—or a student quietly suffering moral discomfort—is less likely if there’s a process in place to handle these types of student objections.

“You’re going to have parties work things out” because “they’re going to have someone in the room that can lower the temperature of that conversation”—the neutral arbiter, she said. “We don’t need that in the newspapers.”
‘Disservice’ or Safeguard?

Critics of the bill also worry that students may opt out of readings and assignments that force them to engage with alternative perspectives in a way that could hamper their education.

Students benefit from “assignments that really require you to engage in critical thinking and grapple with perspectives and opinions that are different from your own—and sometimes that involves putting yourselves in the shoes of someone who you disagree with,” Benitez said. “To take away the professor’s ability to put students in that situation [is] a disservice” and a “betrayal and a mistrust of students’ … ability to actually grapple with things that they are going to grapple with out in the world.”

Petersen believes the provision that an accommodation can’t be a “fundamental alteration” to a course will prevent students from getting out of assignments that would benefit them. Universities have veto power.

“You can’t say, ‘I’m going to be a climatologist, but I don’t want to take a class on climate change,’ or ‘I’m going to study nursing, but I don’t want to learn about how to give a shot because I’m an antivaxxer,” he said. “It doesn’t work for that.” In a similar vein, “I don’t think learning about evolution is going to violate someone’s conscience.”

But in some cases, there’s more than “one way for a student to learn the information, and maybe we could be just a little more creative, a little more thoughtful about that,” he added.

Charles Russo, Joseph Panzer Chair in Education and research professor of law at the University of Dayton, said he disagrees with the bill and doesn’t think it should become law because it limits faculty’s control over teaching and isn’t specific enough about valid requests or alternative assignments. Still, he believes it raises some valid concerns.

“I think it infringes on academic freedom, but I think it’s a reaction,” Russo said. “More often than not, it would be the liberal perspective trying to get a kid who disagrees to write these kind of assignments, and I would like to get some ideological balance in there. I think educators have to be sensitive to the beliefs of their students … Respect needs to go both ways.”

He’d prefer state lawmakers stay out of it and stressed that, especially in law school, assignments that force students to engage with multiple sides of an issue are important. But he hopes that colleges and universities have internal conversations about how to accommodate students’ conscientious objections to coursework.

“Mandating that a student write a paper that’s antithetical to one’s deeply held religious beliefs, I think, can be problematic,” he said. “I’m not saying drop the assignment, but maybe come up with an alternative assignment for people who have such strongly held feelings,” as long as the alternative is “in keeping with the spirit, the goal.”
The Broader Impact

The bill offers a broad definition of conscience: “a sincerely held belief as to the rightness or wrongness of an action or inaction.”

That means the legislation extends beyond religious beliefs—which was intentional, Wilson noted. She believes the law could accommodate a wide range of objections, including political, philosophical and other ideological concerns about coursework.

“You’re just allowing everybody—believers, nonbelievers … to all say, ‘Wait a minute, I have a moral center, and my moral center matters to me,’” she said.

Russo said, ostensibly, a pacifist could argue they don’t want to do an assignment focused on studying war. He believes that complaint is unlikely to succeed if challenged in court, but it raises questions about how the bill could be applied.

Despite its broad nature, Petersen foresees the legislation as having “very little impact” on the state’s universities, because they can weed out unreasonable requests; in any case, only a “handful” of professors are likely to run into these issues with their students, he said.

But Benitez believes the bill could have more serious ripple effects.

She acknowledged there are ways to implement the bill that “wouldn’t be catastrophic”; for example, a law professor could ask a student to write an opposing argument on a less personal or sensitive topic if they conscientiously object to the original assignment. But in a heated political climate where higher ed leaders already feel pressure to “overcomply” with policymakers’ laws and guidance, she fears the consequences of the bill “will go further than what the bill text actually says.” And while the law could protect all kinds of objections in theory, she believes in practice it “will be used to target specific viewpoints,” like content related to LGBTQ+ issues, which “we ultimately see as censorship.”

She noted that while students opting out of coursework is a new concept for higher ed, it’s been a contentious issue in K–12 schools. Notably, the U.S. Supreme Court last year sided with religious families seeking to opt their children out of readings with LGBTQ+ themes in Mahmoud et al. v. Taylor.

She worries that Utah’s bill, which she expects the governor to sign, could become a model for other states, following the way such conflicts have spread in the K–12 sector.

“This is the first time we are seeing this particular kind of measure, but we have seen with every kind of censorship that we have tracked since 2021 that it might start in one state, but it will absolutely be copy-pasted in another state,” she said.

All Eyes on Iowa: Shadow Censorship in the Remaking of the University in Real Time, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

All Eyes on Iowa: Shadow Censorship in the Remaking of the University in Real Time

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 22, 2026

If we have learned anything over the past few years, it is this: what happens in one state rarely stays there. Florida, Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and Utah have each, in turn, served as testing grounds for a new model of higher education governance—one that moves beyond critique into control. Now, all eyes are on Iowa.

According to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a single legislative cycle, Iowa Republicans have introduced more than 20 bills aimed at restructuring both public and private higher education. Taken individually, some proposals may appear technical or even reasonable—tuition guarantees, expanded community-college degrees, civics requirements. But taken together, they reveal something more consequential: a coordinated effort to redefine the purpose, governance, and boundaries of the university.

Governance boards would be reshaped, faculty authority diminished, general education scrutinized, DEI eliminated, and even land acknowledgments prohibited. Meanwhile, new curricular mandates would narrow how history and citizenship can be taught, explicitly restricting attention to subgroups. Excuse me? You mean Anglo male history only? To be sure, this is not only unconstitutional per the First and Fourteenth amendments (see Valenzuela, 2026), but an unmistakable signal about which knowledges are now considered legitimate and which are to be erased.

This is not simply reform. It is redesign.

And crucially, it is the kind of redesign that gives rise to what I have elsewhere called shadow censorship (Valenzuela, 2026)—a form of indirect, anticipatory suppression in which institutions begin to limit expression not because they are explicitly ordered to, but because they recognize the shifting boundaries of what is politically permissible. 

Policies like those proposed in Iowa do not need to ban every idea outright. Instead, they reshape the conditions under which universities operate: who governs, what is funded, what is taught, and what is deemed risky. Under such conditions, institutions internalize constraint. Faculty rethink syllabi. Programs narrow their scope. Administrators act preemptively to avoid scrutiny. The result is not always visible censorship, but something more insidious: a gradual shrinking of intellectual life.

This is how governance becomes culture.

Importantly, Iowa is not innovating in isolation. It is assembling. Nearly every element of its legislative package has been tested elsewhere: DEI bans in Texas, governance interventions in both Florida and Texas, curriculum mandates across multiple states, and ongoing challenges to tenure and faculty governance nationwide. What makes Iowa significant is the combination—the bundling of these efforts into a comprehensive policy regime. This is policy diffusion in real time: not simple replication, but refinement and consolidation into a more durable model of control based on what they have learned from other states like Texas and Florida.

The implications are far-reaching. When lawmakers gain the ability to influence spending decisions, reshape governing boards, dictate curricular content, and restrict hiring practices, the line between public accountability and political control begins to collapse. And as that line blurs, shadow censorship becomes normalized. Universities need not be told explicitly what they cannot do; they begin to anticipate it. They adjust. They comply. They silence themselves.

For those of us in Texas, this trajectory is all too familiar. Senate Bill 17 and Senate Bill 37 and related efforts have already demonstrated how quickly institutional landscapes can shift under political pressure. Iowa now offers a glimpse of what comes next: a more integrated model of governance—one that operates not only through policy, but through the cultivation of institutional fear and constraint.

So yes, all eyes should be on Iowa. Not because it is unique, but because it is indicative. What is being built there is not just a set of policies, but a governing framework—increasingly shared by a number of states, including Texas. It is one that produces compliance without always needing to command it.

And that is precisely how shadow censorship works. 

Reference

Valenzuela, A. (2026, March 20). Shadow censorship: How fear is rewriting higher education in Texas. Educational Equity, Policy & Politics in Texas. Politics and Policy. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/03/when-fear-governs-sb-17-shadow.html

All Eyes on Iowa

In recent years, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Texas, and Utah have taken turns leading conservative efforts to make colleges less woke, less expensive, and more work-force-oriented. Here comes the Hawkeye State.

Iowa Republicans are pushing an aggressive agenda to revamp public and private colleges. More than 20 bills have been introduced this month, The Chronicle’s Aisha Baiocchi reports. Among notable proposals:

• Community-college bachelor’s degrees: Two-year colleges could offer four-year degrees that fill unmet local work-force needs. Private colleges say that could put them out of business, The Chronicle’s Lee Gardner reports.
• Public-university governance overhaul: Regents’ terms would be shortened, a student regent would lose voting power, and lawmakers would be added as nonvoting board members, The Gazette reported. The Legislature could reverse spending decisions. Post-tenure review, program cuts, general-education scrutiny, and Faculty Senate limits would loom.
• Civics at public colleges: Undergraduates at public universities would have to take courses on American history and government that couldn’t be “devoted to the study of subgroups,” according to The Gazette. 
• Civics at private colleges: The House Higher Education Committee chair asked private colleges to adopt the same requirements pitched for their public counterparts, citing “a gradual erosion of foundational knowledge about our nation’s history, its founding principles, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship,” the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• State endowment tax: Lawmakers softened an initial proposal but still want to make endowments valued at $500 million or more subject to Iowa’s 7.1-percent corporate tax rate, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• Tuition guarantee: In-state tuition at public universities would be frozen for each incoming cohort of undergraduates, starting in 2027, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• … and more: Other bills seek to tell regents to sign the Trump administration’s higher-ed compact, bar public universities from hiring Chinese citizens on H-1B work visas, prohibit land acknowledgments, and eliminate DEI from general-education courses.

The bigger picture: What’s proposed in one state inevitably resurfaces in another. Much of what’s being discussed in Iowa has been seen elsewhere, but this particular combination is worth watching as a leading indicator of how other big-government conservatives will try to flex their power over campuses.

🎓 Lee’s full story asks whether expanded community-college degrees could fix education deserts. Aisha’s full story explores the back-and-forth over other bills.

Surviving the State: Policy Neglect in the Rio Grande Valley

Friends:

Bekah Hinojosa’s powerful account of life in the Rio Grande Valley reveals what many policymakers refuse to confront: for marginalized communities, “disaster” is not episodic—it is structural. In a region marked by chronic underinvestment, failing infrastructure, and deep poverty—conditions disproportionately affecting Brown, Indigenous, and Latino populations—power outages, unsafe water, and extreme heat are not anomalies but predictable outcomes of long-standing policy neglect. Public resources have not flowed where they are most needed; instead, as Hinojosa notes, the region sees massive investments in border enforcement infrastructure while basic systems—electricity, water, housing—remain fragile or absent. Climate change intensifies these conditions, but it is the state’s uneven allocation of resources and accountability that renders entire communities perpetually vulnerable.

In response, community organizers have developed “Just Recovery Kits”—tools originally designed for emergencies but now used for daily survival. Their very necessity is an indictment of the state. When residents must rely on water filters to make tap water safe, solar chargers to compensate for unreliable electricity, and mutual aid networks to fill systemic gaps, we are no longer talking about resilience alone—we are witnessing the privatization of survival under conditions of abandonment. 

Hinojosa’s piece makes clear that what is often framed as community strength is, in fact, a response to policy failure—which is good to remember lest we romanticize community. In the Rio Grande Valley, survival has become a form of environmental justice work precisely because the state has failed to guarantee the basic conditions for life.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

We Built Disaster Kits for Our Rio Grande Valley Neighbors—They Use Them for Daily Survival

As climate 'shocks' increasingly puncture wealthier parts of the U.S., they lengthen like a shadow across this borderlands region.

By Bekah Hinojosa

Bekah Hinojosa with disaster kit and checklists. Image: Venisha Colón
Published:February 13, 2026, 9:21 am
Last updated:February 19, 2026, 4:20 pm

Bekah Hinojosa with disaster kit and checklist. Photo credit: Venisha Colón

On a typical sunny South Texas day, I made a run to the grocery store, H-E-B, near my apartment in Brownsville, Texas. I walked around, and just as I stretched my arm to grab some sausage from the freezer everything went pitch black in front of my eyes.

“Did I die?” I thought. “Is this the afterlife?” When I heard cries from other shoppers and the lights switched on, I saw people’s concerned faces.

This was far from my first power outage in Brownsville, one of many communities stretched across the Rio Grande Valley, which itself spans four counties along the Rio Grande River and the Gulf of Mexico.

Our combined population of about 1.43 million is often referred to by the Wall Street Journal as one of the poorest regions in the country. Brownsville was recently ranked the second “neediest” city in the U.S. Tax dollars don’t reliably trickle back to build basic infrastructure. Instead: We get billion-dollar border walls.

Power goes out with gusts of wind, a storm, or high consumption during extreme temperatures.

Water service is even worse. It’s not uncommon for homes or businesses in Brownsville and throughout South Texas to lose power or face other infrastructure issues, such as water shortages and boil-water advisories. In some parts, people lack access to running water or electricity entirely.

The Brownsville area suffers from crumbling infrastructure due to inadequate funding, mishandling of city resources, and various forms of exploitation. The makeup of this South Texas region is predominantly brown, Indigenous, or Latine. Poverty is an epidemic.

Elements included in a typical disaster kit. Image: Venisha Colón

As a local economist summarized recently:

“42.2 percent of children in McAllen … and 39.2 percent in Brownsville-Harlingen live below the poverty line, and many of them live in a chronic state of food, health, and housing insecurity.”

Climate change impacts, such as flooding and extreme heat, make it worse.

Texas has had a record number of state-declared disasters and is gaining a national reputation for frequent disaster declarations, such as those from the Texas Winter Storm of 2022 and Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Cameron County Emergency Management’s website says that between 1953 and 2024 Texas has suffered 374 disaster declarations; that’s almost 6 disasters a year. The number of disasters and their extremity due to climate change are increasing, as we’ve witnessed in just the last three years, Winter Storm Uri and the devastating flood that dropped over 20 inches of rain in the Rio Grande Valley last year. These rising crises have forced families and organizations to devise their own solutions for daily survival, and also during extreme weather.

I’m from the Rio Grande Valley and have lived here for several decades, and I have experienced six devastating tropical storms. My late grandma, who was multigenerational from the Rio Grande Valley, taught me to help your neighbor. She met a man from Mexico walking the streets of Mercedes, Texas, who needed a dollar, and she brought him to her house for dinner and a safe place to sleep.

A person helping another is essential; however, a group of us realized that as disasters were rising, different resources were needed. I became a founding member of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, which focuses on ways to contact those most impacted by disasters and to create ways for immediate aid.
One of the projects that we have developed is a Just Recovery Kit. We built these kits for our neighbors with climate crises in mind, but found many needed them for daily survival.

Each kit may include a high-quality water filtration system, large jugs, a carbon monoxide detector, non-toxic insect spray, a solar battery charging system, gloves, personal protective equipment (PPE), and more. The Just Recovery Kits designed by our members are assembled for each family based on their needs and include contact information should they require maintenance.

Bryan Parras, an environmental justice advocate based in Houston with Another Gulf Is Possible is the lead designer of the kits. He told me how quickening hurricane disasters on the upper Texas coast inspired him.

“It would be in Texas and then Louisiana, starting with Katrina, then Rita, then Ike, Gustav,” Parras said. “It could go on and on.”

South Texas Environmental Justice Network (SOTXEJN) members distribute kits to families at an Emergency Preparedness Conference in Alamo, TX, in 2023.

Like Bryan, I’ve also experienced an increase in disasters on the lower coast. The area has mandatory cooling shelters for the high temperatures, but never enough. Last year, a family was found dead in their home in Brownsville due to extreme heat and lack of air conditioning. Ask anyone in the region, and they have a personal disaster survival story about living in South Texas.

My colleague’s car filled with water during a thunderstorm; my father was rescued as his car was being washed away.

My apartment was without electricity for three days during Texas’ winter storm Uri.

One summer, my cheap shoes fell apart because of the hot asphalt.

These disasters have severe consequences in a region doubly marked by the daily disaster of poverty. Not only are basic needs lacking, but it can be challenging to find items needed to prepare for or recover from a disaster.

Bryan explained to me how, over the years, the Just Recovery Kits evolved from a disaster kit to one that improves people’s daily needs.

“A lot of our communities are starting in a place where they are behind most of the population; it’s much harder for them to recover from disasters,” he said.

“But if we have products to help them inch their way up to a more equitable space, then that’s the whole point of the kits—to improve their quality of life, their health, their capacity for thinking about emergencies, and to provide them with those things that are unaffordable or not a priority: ‘I have to buy groceries before masks, sorry.”

Dina Nuñez, a community organizer in Brownsville has been forced to rely on the kits daily. She said she doesn’t trust the water coming out of the faucet from the Brownsville Public Utilities Board (or BPUB). Water here mostly meets federal drinking-water standards, but there are ongoing debates over safety still. The Environmental Working Group lists a variety of contaminants found in the water that are known cancer causers.

“I use it [the kit] frequently, especially the water filter, I use it every day,” she told me in Spanish. “We know the water is contaminated, for sure. There was actually an agency that came to my house to do water testing. They tested the faucet, our water mill, and it came back that the city water is actually highly contaminated.”

She went on to say that rising extreme heat means the public utility, which is already failing her with bad water, is also continuously raising the cost of electricity.

“They [the public utility] still don’t want to be responsible,” she said.

“It’s like they don’t actually filter the water. And there are high bill costs coming up. During high heat times, the [kilowatt] usage charge goes up whether we use it or not—BPUB keeps raising those in our monthly electricity bills.”

South TX EJ Network has distributed 200 kits to families living in Cameron and Hidalgo counties over the last three years. Our organization also plans to build a network, or “resilience hub,” of families with kits who can receive and disseminate vital emergency information and help others in their neighborhoods.

There’s a need to inform the public utility of ways to meet the community’s needs. Until improvements are made, the South TX EJ Network will continue brainstorming solutions, such as providing kits to support the families who need them.

Shadow Censorship: How Fear Is Rewriting Higher Education in Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Shadow Censorship: How Fear Is Rewriting Higher Education in Texas

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 20, 2026

The "shadow censorship" that happened recently at the University of North Texas Denton is not an isolated incident. It is a window into the present—and future—of higher education in Texas. I use the concept of “shadow censorship” to describe a form of indirect, anticipatory suppression of expression in which institutions restrict rights to free speech and expression in response to a perceived political threat rather than any explicit directive. This concept is embedded in a recent blog post that I authored titled, UT’s Gender and Ethnic Studies Shake-Up: Name the Pressures. Name the Politicians. Name the Agenda.

According to leaked transcripts reported by Breeding-Gonzales (2026), the removal of Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez’s exhibit, Ni de Aquí Ni de Allá—meaning "neither from here, nor from there"—was not driven by formal complaints, policy violations, or even clear institutional review. Instead, it was driven by fear—fear of political backlash, fear of legislative retaliation, and fear of losing funding. 

As Dean Karen Hutzel reportedly told faculty, administrators might weather public criticism—but elected officials have the power to “slash programs” and target institutions. That is the governing reality now.

No official ban was issued. No law explicitly required the exhibit’s removal. No formal complaint process appears to have been activated. And yet, the outcome was the same. The exhibit was taken down, windows covered, work was returned. Geez, what a slap in the face to this artist.

This is precisely the kind of institutional behavior that Senate Bill 17 (SB 17) has helped normalize. While SB 17 formally targets diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices and initiatives in Texas public universities, its effects extend far beyond administrative restructuring (Texas Legislature, 2023). It has created a broader climate of surveillance, risk aversion, and ideological scrutiny—one in which anything perceived as politically controversial, particularly around race, migration, gender, or state power, becomes vulnerable.

Quiñonez’s work—particularly his critique of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—entered what Dean Hutzel described as “a different space.” 

That phrase is doing a great deal of work here. It signals a shift from artistic and academic evaluation to political risk calculation. In this “different space,” expression is no longer protected by institutional mission, but evaluated through the lens of potential backlash.

And here is where the censors in the background come into view.

They are not always visible. They do not always issue direct orders. But they are present nonetheless—in legislative hearings, in donor networks, in coordinated political campaigns, in media ecosystems that amplify outrage, and in the demonstrated willingness of state actors to intervene in university governance. Texas lawmakers have already shown they are willing to eliminate programs, restructure institutions, and replace leadership when universities are perceived to be out of alignment with conservative political priorities (Keith & Zickar, 2025; Valenzuela, Unda, & Mena Bernal, 2024).

University administrators are paying attention.

As the transcripts reveal, UNT leadership explicitly referenced recent leadership purges at the University of Texas and Texas A&M as cautionary examples (Breeding-Gonzales, 2026). Faculty were warned to be careful in their speech—even in classrooms—because they might be recorded and targeted. They were told not to expect legal protection from the university if they came under attack. Policies, they were reminded, “are violated constantly” in the current environment.

This is not simply fear, my friends. It is governance through fear.

As Garces et al. (2021) suggest, the emerging prototype of the “censored university” is structured by repressive legalism—where ambiguity in legal norms, combined with the specter of enforcement, constrains institutions from pursuing equity-oriented practices. In such a context, even the inclusion of a Latino artist it had previously courted becomes untenable. 

Under such conditions, universities begin to self-regulate in anticipation of punishment. They retreat strategically. They internalize external control. All they need now is for faculty and students to do the same, however undemocratic or patronizing.

What we are witnessing at UNT is a textbook case of shadow censorship and repressive legalism and the implications are profound.

Today it is a professional artist’s exhibit. Tomorrow it is a graduate student’s thesis. Next, a classroom discussion. A syllabus. A research agenda. When faculty begin to second-guess what can be said, shown, or taught—when students learn that their intellectual and creative work is subject to political veto—we are no longer operating within a system of higher education as a public good. We are operating within a system of managed expression.

The symbolism here also matters. UNT is an Hispanic-Serving Institution. The silencing of a Mexican American artist exploring bicultural identity—ni de aquí ni de allá—is not incidental. It reflects a broader pattern in which knowledge about race, migration, and inequality is increasingly targeted as politically suspect. In this sense, the exhibit’s removal is not just censorship; it is part of a larger project of disciplining which histories, identities, and critiques are permitted to circulate in public institutions.

To be sure, administrators like Dean Hutzel are navigating an extraordinarily constrained environment. Her comments reflect a genuine attempt to “minimize harm” and preserve the college’s long-term viability. But this is precisely the dilemma: when survival requires silence, the institution’s core purpose is already compromised.

Once fear governs, the university—in effect— is already being unmade.

The lesson here is not simply that censorship is happening. It is that it is hard at work to normalize it—rationalized as strategic, necessary, even prudent. And this is the deeper danger of SB 17 and its policy ecosystem. It is not only what the law explicitly prohibits, but what it makes institutions afraid to do.

If we are to defend higher education, we must confront not only overt attacks, but these quieter forms of control. We must name the censors—even when they operate indirectly. And we must refuse the logic that asks universities to trade their intellectual freedom for institutional survival.

Because in the end, a university that cannot defend expression, critique, and truth is not protective at all.

It is getting grotesquely disfigured.

References

Breeding-Gonzales, L. (2026, February 20). UNT dean’s fears of political repercussions led to removal of art exhibit, leaked transcripts show. KERA / Denton Record-Chronicle.

Garces, L. M., Johnson, B. D., Ambriz, E., & Bradley, D. (2021). Repressive legalism: How postsecondary administrators’ responses to on-campus hate speech undermine a focus on inclusion. American Educational Research Journal, 58(5), 1032–1069. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312211027586

Keith, M.G. & Zickar, M.J. (2025). Academic freedom under siege: How state legislatures are reshaping higher education. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 18(3):378-386. doi:10.1017/iop.2025.10024

Texas Legislature. (2023). Senate Bill 17 (88th Legislature).

Valenzuela, A., Unda, M., & Mena Bernal, J. (2024). Disrupting colonial logics: Transformational resistance against SB 17 and the dismantling of DEI in Texas higher education. Ethnic Studies Pedagogies, 3(1), 7–24.

UNT dean's fears of political repercussions led to removal of art exhibit, leaked transcripts show
KERA

By Lucinda Breeding-Gonzales | Denton Record-Chronicle

February 20, 2026 at 4:46 PM CST


Lucinda Breeding-Gonzales / Denton Record-Chronicle Students placed flowers and messages to the University of North Texas leaders during a memorial staged for the canceled exhibit by Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez on Monday outside the UNT CVAD Gallery.



In leaked transcripts of meetings held by leaders of the University of North Texas art school, Dean Karen Hutzel wouldn’t tell faculty or staff who ordered an exhibit closed and removed from a campus gallery. She described the decision as an “institutional directive” in a meeting with faculty, and told college staffers that she was expecting “a media storm.”

Administrators might survive public excoriation, she said. Elected representatives, however, can more readily slash programs, impugn professors and hold state funding over college executives’ heads.

Hutzel discussed administrators’ widespread fears over funding loss, and how those concerns are compounded by leadership purges at the University of Texas and Texas A&M University after ideological clashes with Texas Republicans, who have spent the last two legislative sessions fighting what they say is leftist bias and indoctrination in public education.

Texas public universities have seen curriculums forcibly overhauled by lawmakers, and entire programs have been eliminated because they don’t align with the conservative values of Republican lawmakers in the state house or in Washington.

The UNT College of Visual Arts and Design has been in headlines across the country since it shuttered an exhibit last week by globally known street artist Victor Quiñonez, known broadly by the graffiti tag he developed in east Dallas, Marka27.

The graduate of Dallas’ renowned Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts had an exhibit, “Ni de Aquí Ni de Allá,” open Feb. 3 in the CVAD Gallery. The exhibit explores Quiñonez’s identity as a bicultural and bilingual American. Born in Juarez, Mexico, Quiñonez grew up in east Dallas.

His exhibit, whose title translates to “neither from here, nor from there” included work from his “ICE Scream” series. The work uses a popular Mexican treat, the paleta, to honor his heritage while it considers incarceration and deportation.

He crafted huge, melting paletas out of resin that encase handcuffs and guns. There are official-looking seals that read: U.S. Department of Stolen Land Security, and the phrase U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement. Smaller resin paletas encase scenes of Mexican-American life and immigrants, and the words “U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement” on the popsicle sticks.

Faculty, students and alumni quickly denounced the removal as censorship, and especially bristled that a Hispanic-serving institution silenced a Mexican-American artist. CVAD students staged a sit-in at the Board of Regents meeting Thursday and warned the regents that the censorship of Quiñonez’s show would hurt confidence in CVAD programming and hurt recruitment.

The Denton Record-Chronicle obtained transcripts of Hutzel’s Feb. 10 meeting with staff at CVAD, and from a Feb. 11 meeting with faculty. The newspaper confirmed with several CVAD faculty members, independently, that CVAD had virtual meetings on Feb. 10 and 11.

In Hutzel’s meeting with faculty, she requested the recording be turned off, and a staff member confirmed that the recording had stopped. In the transcripts, only Dean Hutzel was named. Names mentioned by faculty, department leaders, Hutzel and staff were redacted in the transcripts obtained by the Record-Chronicle.

Hutzel’s message to faculty and staff was both mysterious and clear: The directive didn’t come from CVAD leadership; she couldn’t confirm whether a visitor or viewer lodged any formal complaint about the show, or if any university official saw the exhibit when it opened; and it was Quiñonez’s ICE-related art that led to the exhibit’s removal.

She cautioned faculty and staff from making any public statements and to be careful when talking to students, lest they be recorded and have their remarks posted online. Hutzel said she expected the university’s brand strategy and communications team to issue an approved statement that faculty and staff could use, but that she didn’t plan to respond to media inquiries.

As of Friday morning, it doesn’t appear that the statement has been released, and university officials have only publicly confirmed that the exhibit was closed, a loan agreement with Boston University was terminated, and that the art would be returned.

And perhaps the most ominous warning? Art faculty shouldn’t expect the university’s legal counsel to protect them if they become a target of political ire.

“So, would UNT legal not represent faculty who were basically, like, they have freedom of speech under the Constitution,” a CVAD department official asked. “Would [that] guarantee legal represent a faculty member ... ?”

“They never would have, they never would have,” Hutzel said. “No, it would never have been the case. ... I don’t believe the university is going to deploy their legal counsel to protect an individual faculty member. I don’t think we’ve seen that elsewhere, either. Again, I mean, I’m just being honest. It’s not an absolute answer, but that’s how I understand it. And I just want to be honest in what I understand.”

Hutzel told faculty that university policies “are violated constantly” in the current environment, and that professors and staff shouldn’t rely on policies to be set in stone.

“For UNT, the stakes are high in that, if you’re paying attention to the news, you may have seen what’s happened at, for instance, Texas A&M, and UT in Austin, and the leadership shifts that have happened there,” she said. “And the new presidential leaders that have come into those institutions, and the programs that are now coming out of them are being canceled by those institutions. ... UNT is very vulnerable to a similar situation.”

Hutzel said she has empathy for UNT leaders and seeks to balance that with advocacy for CVAD.

“My ultimate goal is to minimize harm here and to protect CVAD so that we can continue to teach and mentor and create art,” she told faculty. “Even now, when it feels like the conditions are getting more and more constrained. But our ability to preserve our ability to educate students is, for me, not meaning that we’re retreating from our values, but that we’re thinking longer term and how we sustain ourselves.”

The faculty meeting also revealed deep and persistent fears over having students record professors and teaching fellows, and then post recordings online to damage or end their careers. Those fears aren’t unfounded. A Texas A&M professor was fired last September after a student recorded a class discussion about gender identity in children’s literature.

“So, for instance, if you are teaching screen printing, and because the college originally kind of suggested instructors can talk about students about censorship, like, within their classes and have these powerful small group conversations, but if a student records a faculty member discussing or critiquing censorship in a class that does not specifically relate to that, that is another point of vulnerability,” a department chair said, according to the transcript. “And I just wanted to point that out. ... I’m worried about all of us. I’m worried about you. I’m worried about our students, and that’s just something to keep in mind as we have these conversations that like, just remember, you know, you can be recorded, and I hate to spread paranoia, but that is just something that we need to be aware of.”

Hutzel spoke positively about Quiñonez’s art with staff members who hadn’t seen the show before it was closed.

“It was a beautiful exhibit,” Hutzel said. “It represented the artist’s experiences as a Mexican American in this country.”

Hutzel explained that the college made an agreement with Boston University to host the exhibit “at least a year ago,” which is also around the time Texas lawmakers who represent Denton County said they received a high number of complaints about an exhibit at the UNT Union Art Gallery by two Muslim female students. All four representatives demanded that the university close the exhibit because it was antisemitic. The exhibit closed on its scheduled date.

CVAD doesn’t operate or manage the student union gallery.

Hutzel herself didn’t appear to object to the exhibit. She told staff members that Quiñonez’s political pieces were the reason the gallery windows were covered with paper and the art removed.

“... Some of the pieces included what’s deemed as anti-ICE messaging,” she said. “And so ... that topic itself has entered a different space, and so it was that aspect of it that the university leadership became very concerned about ... the political and public response [and] scrutiny across the spectrum.”

One CVAD staff member asked what will happen when students plan to include political expression in solo or group shows.

“Another good question, and it’s one that I’ll be navigating as well [in] some meetings this week,” she said. “I, too, am questioning and concerned with what work we show and if there is a change to that.”

Faculty suggested renting spaces off campus, or partnering with spaces in the community that might host exhibits off campus for Master of Fine Arts candidates. The larger concern was that censorship could eventually reach students.

“If they’re censoring work at a professional level in our home gallery, then faculty and students are going to be next,” a faculty member said. “I don’t want to be alarmist, but I also think it is a lot, you know what I mean? And they’re paying tuition to come here to make work with us, and make the work that they want to make. So, I feel like it’s kind of my responsibility to be honest with them as much as I can. You know what I mean? That’s just my perspective.”

Faculty pressed college leadership on how the closure would affect students who make and show art on campus, asking, “Is it on us to talk to our adjuncts and [teaching fellows]?”

“I don’t know what to tell them,” a department chair said. “And I don’t know what you should tell them. I don’t think anyone has any answers. Like ... maybe if they have questions and come to you, I don’t know that I would recommend setting a meeting to talk about this because, honestly, I don’t know what should be said.”

Others said the removal of the Quiñonez exhibit could hurt recruitment of graduate students, who shoulder instruction for many CVAD programs. And removing the work of a professional artist could hurt faculty recruitment. Hutzel mentioned communicating with a student from California who enrolled in CVAD because she was impressed by faculty art.

“There are going to be hits and implications,” Hutzel said. “And yet, you all are still highly respected as artists in your own right. And that recruits students. It’s because of you all individually. And what you’re doing is what grad students come here for. But it’s going to impact us for a little bit.”