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.

Institutional Matricide Beneath the Banyans: The Unmaking of an Alma Mater, the New College of Florida, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Institutional Matricide Beneath the Banyans: The Unmaking of an Alma Mater, the New College of Florida

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 20, 2026

This is a story of what I term, "institutional matricide" by Ron DeSantis and his cronies. It is searing critique of the take over of New College of Florida (NCF) by Nathan Allen—a New College alumnus, who previously served as current New College President Richard Corcoran’s Vice President of Strategy and Special Projects in 2023-24—should concern anyone paying attention to the broader restructuring of public higher education because it points to something deeper than administrative missteps: the convergence of political intervention, weakened accountability, and what the author characterizes as “performative accounting.” 

Notably, Nathan Allen ultimately resigned after observing what he characterized as financial mismanagement and outright improprieties under Corcoran’s leadership.

The Substack publication provided below, alleges that institutional leadership is not simply managing a small, struggling honors college, but actively reshaping financial narratives, enrollment metrics, and academic priorities in ways that obscure declining outcomes—falling retention, lower admissions standards, and a shift away from the college’s historic honors mission. Whether one accepts every claim or not, the pattern described—of opaque budgeting, inflated narratives of success, and dismissal of oversight—raises serious questions about stewardship of public funds and the integrity of institutional governance.

All of this begins with the installment of former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran (2016–2018), also the state's former Commissioner of Education (2018–2022) by Governor Ron DeSantis that resulted in a replacement of half of the board, not coincidentally, on January 6, 2023, exactly one year after the attack on the U.S. Capitol. They were then replaced with an admixture of real estate developers and conservatives, including Christopher Rufo who was neither from, nor lived in Florida, at the time.

Corcoran even wrote a book about this—poorly written, but nevertheless revealing—titled, Storming the Ivory Tower: How a Florida College Became Ground Zero in the Struggle to Take Back our Campuses. From there, the DEI officer lost their job, the Women and Gender Studies program and its director, Dr. Amy Reid, were eliminated with somewhere between 35-40 percent of the faculty leaving for other positions in Florida our out of state.

Then came the gutting of the library—shelves stripped bare as books on race and gender, dismissed as “woke,” were thrown into industrial dumpsters (Valenzuela, 2025)—followed by the destruction of a living ecosystem, including the cutting of the mighty Banyan trees brought from India around a century ago by the Ringling Brothers, whose museum stands just beyond the campus. This was not renovation. It was erasure—clearing the ground for an athletics program the college was never intended to serve.

This is me in front of a single Banyan Tree that is similar
to the ones that Corcoran razed on the NCF campus. 

It still brings tears to my eyes as I write these words. I imagine the horror of watching something so deeply loved—so carefully built through relationships, ideas, and shared commitments—be systematically dismantled in real time. Not just buildings or programs, but a way of being together: a fragile ecosystem of open inquiry, care, dissent, and possibility. 

The mighty Banyans—those ancient, life-giving beings brought from afar and rooted into this place over generations—stood as quiet witnesses to that collective life, their vast canopies sheltering all who gathered beneath them. An alma mater, after all, is a nourishing mother. And so their cutting, alongside the hollowing out of the college itself, reads as something more than loss—it is a form of institutionalized matricide, the destruction of the very source that nurtured intellectual, relational, and human flourishing. To witness its unraveling is to feel the rupture not only institutionally, but viscerally—like the loss of a home that once made such flourishing possible.

More broadly, the case of New College reflects a national trend: the politicization of higher education under the guise of reform. What is framed as efficiency, accountability, or ideological “correction” can, in practice, result in the hollowing out of academic standards, the sidelining of faculty expertise, and the redirection of public institutions toward political ends. 

The concern, then, is not just about one college in Florida, but about what happens when governance is driven less by educational mission and more by political theater—where metrics are manipulated, critique is dismissed, and the long-term public good of higher education is subordinated to the devastating impact of what I hope will be a short-term ideological projects.

Reference

Valenzuela, A. (2025, December 22). New College of Florida ‘Statement on the Removal of Books and Library Materials’ Is Not Credible https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2025/12/new-college-of-florida-statement-on.html

New College, USF SM, and the Bottomless Trough by Novum Collegium Fidelis

Maybe Something for Florida Legislators to Consider Read on Substack

Novum Collegium Fidelis

New College, USF SM, and the Bottomless Trough
Maybe Something for Florida Legislators to Consider

Novum Collegium Fidelis
Mar 16, 2026

“The Right is steadily cannibalizing its ability to advance good policy. Yes, it’s the grifters and psychopaths in the podcast Thunderdome, but it’s also the quiet and cynical self-enrichment happening in higher places. In retrospect, the collapse of DOGE was a major defeat.”

The New College President has made public his defense of the disastrous DOGE report, which repeated what nearly everyone already knew: New College appears more political feed trough than education triumph.

Does anyone take the President’s performative accounting seriously? After all, this is the same administration that – in its scandalous 2024 Foundation audit – couldn’t tell the difference between a loss and an unrealized loss.

This is the same administration that budgets negative tuition and that touts a “surge” in new students but doesn’t mention that 59% of all freshmen are athletes (and 19% of all freshmen are baseball players – that’s not a team; it’s a league).

So when the President starts subtracting millions of dollars in expenses because they are “non-recurring,” his argument amounts to “trust me, my dog ate my expenses.”

This fabulist’s story depends on the term “non-recurring,” which appears twice in his desperate apologia. Is the president aware that each one of those two appearances refers to different, non-interchangeable definitions for “non-recurring”? The president’s harshest critics argue that the president knows the difference and is cynically relying on the ignorance of the voters. The more generous conclusion is that he actually has no idea what he’s talking about.

If the Board of Governors or the Florida Legislature is going to entertain the President’s “non-recurring” argument, then I strongly suggest asking for the ledger data. Hire an independent auditor to re-create the college’s finances, and then compare them to the college’s submitted finances. They won’t be recognizable.

Then, in the interest of fairness (and hilarity), request that all other Florida universities reimagine their finances accordingly.

Performative accounting has a history with this administration. In the 2024 legislative session, the legislature awarded the college additional “non-recurring” millions but put that pile of taxpayer cash into an “escrow” account (which I think they invented just for New College).

Senate President Passidomo wanted details. After repeated attempts to deal with the Senate directly, the New College President handed the problem to me. He assured me that Passidomo was ruthless in her unreasonableness. She wanted to know the costs, objectives, and timelines for each expenditure. It’s unbelievable that a steward of taxpayer funds would want to know how all that money was going to be spent.

I explained to the President that it would take a few days to gather the spending details from the multiple relevant departments.

He was exasperated. “Just make it up.” And he walked out of the room.

Despite that, I made a spreadsheet and shared it with the department heads to complete (feel free to public records request it). I was fairly certain then that the Senate didn’t want a work of accounting fiction. I’m fairly certain they still don’t. But God forbid anyone actually review that 2024 spreadsheet and compare it to the college’s current ledger.

But there were earlier signs of egregious political shenanigans. A year before “Just make it up,” the Trustees entertained a presidential salary report so transparently illegitimate as to be unbelievable (included as a New College peer for purposes of setting the president’s salary were 12,000-student open-access online nursing universities and universities whose mission is to offer “flexible, career-oriented education for working adults, particularly military personnel, veterans, and nontraditional students.”)

In his most recent act of desperation, the President claims that New College appears inefficient because “DOGE reduces efficiency to a simplistic equation: total credit hours divided by full-time faculty.” There isn’t a single slide in the report that uses that “simplistic equation” to compare SUS members.

Just make it up.

There is, however, slide 20, which shows that New College’s most egregious area of over-spending is on administrative staff. So maybe don’t blame the faculty. (Check it out for yourself.)

Despite this storied history of chimeric reportage, the President can’t just subtract out expenses. Such expenses are depreciated over the useful life of the tangible asset (“useful” means revenue-contributing). Such expenses (and investments) impact the income and balance sheet statements; they don’t simply disappear (unless you’re Enron).

There’s no suggestion that the President’s process followed these GAAP procedures (just because an expense is “non-recurring” doesn’t mean it was free).

It’s doubtful Florida taxpayers care about New College’s performative accounting. Taxpayers have contributed significant sums to New College, and they’d like to know what they’re getting for their money. That the school has transitioned from an honors college to a remediation program for commuting baseball players would be disconcerting to taxpayers. Maybe the international players who make up the majority of the men’s soccer team need high school math, but why are Florida taxpayers paying for it?

And yet none of this addresses the outcomes. Freshmen student numbers (“FTIC”) remain stagnant from the pandemic years and are below numbers from a decade ago. SAT scores of matriculants are below every year from 1964 to 2022. The college’s freshmen retention has actually declined from last year, despite offering academic remediation programming (including high school level courses) that it has never before offered (because, perhaps, it’s supposed to be the honors college).

And let’s not forget about the students who aren’t recruited athletes. Last year, the number of academically-recruited students is lower than every year from 1964 to 2022, just as SAT scores are.

The president claims to need until 2028 to hit a goal of 1200, but the new student (“FTIC”) growth rate is currently under 2%, which means it’ll take until 2044 (and over $2 billion) to hit a goal of 1200 FTIC.

It’s increasingly apparent that the President is defending a Potemkin college. Governor DeSantis implemented DOGE because “taxpayers deserve better,” and public entities should “justify this spending” (all the Governor’s words). And yet, in a recent faculty meeting, the president called the state’s DOGE report “silly” and argued that the auditor wasn’t qualified. Maybe that was projection.

But really, the debate is over. You don’t have to wait until this Titanic snuggles up to the ocean floor to conclude that it has hit an iceberg.

Everyone is moving on from the obvious and abundant failures of this administration to the question: what do we do next?

The faculty, alumni and taxpayers do deserve better. Sarasota and Manatee counties deserve better. The legislature’s primary option – which, despite what the President claims, has been a topic of discussion for a decade – is to close the college. The President even took the time to address this option to the Board of Governors in September. It’s very real.

There exist factions in the legislature that believe the college is unworkable in any fashion, while others argue that the college should be privatized. Obviously the college’s trustees and the Board of Governors are incentivized to conceal the problems to mask their culpability.

But everyone else agrees that the current administration can’t be believed to act in good faith and that the current costs and their outcomes are disastrous.

So, what are Florida taxpayers to do?

As the legislature considers tethering the USF Sarasota-Manatee campus to this Titanic, maybe ask for more than “just make it up.”

And who was complaining yesterday (March 15) about “the quiet and cynical self-enrichment” and “the collapse of DOGE?” Former New College Trustee Chris Rufo.

------

Nathan Allen, a New College alumnus, served as current New College President Richard Corcoran’s vice president of strategy and special projects in 2023-24.

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.”

Nicholas Lemann and the Coming Unmaking of Higher Education: From Academic Freedom to Political Compliance, by Angela Valenzuela, March 19, 2026

Nicholas Lemann and the Coming Unmaking of Higher Education: From Academic Freedom to Political Compliance

by

Angela Valenzuela

March 19, 2026

Nicholas Lemann’s recent New Yorker essay, “The Unmaking of the American University,” reads less like commentary than warning. What he describes is not simply another round of conservative grievance against higher education, but a new governing model: the use of federal research funding, student aid, and regulatory pressure as tools of ideological control. 

In this emerging order, universities are no longer merely criticized as too “woke,” too liberal, or too insulated. They are being taught a lesson in submission. Their survival increasingly depends not on scholarly excellence or public service, but on political compliance.

What makes this moment so dangerous is that the coercion is structural, part of the existing architecture.

 Universities have become deeply dependent on federal grants and funding streams, yet they lack the level of public trust and political support needed to defend that autonomy when it is attacked. That vulnerability is now being exploited. As Lemann shows, once funding can be suspended, delayed, or restored on political terms, academic freedom becomes fragile indeed. 

This is how control works in the present: not only through laws and bans, but through threat, ambiguity, selective punishment, and institutional fear. The result is predictable—self-censorship, retreat, settlement, and the gradual narrowing of what universities feel safe to teach, study, or defend.

Those of us in Texas should find none of this surprising. We have already seen the state move against DEI, faculty governance, curriculum, tenure, and institutional independence. What Lemann makes clear is that these attacks are no longer isolated to the states. They are being nationalized. 

The awful future he sketches is one in which universities continue to exist, but in diminished form: more compliant, more managerial, less courageous, and increasingly severed from their democratic purpose. If that future is to be resisted, then higher education must do more than protect itself. It must make a forceful public case that knowledge, inquiry, and our very democracy cannot survive when funding becomes a weapon and truth must answer to power. The time to act is now, before institutional silence becomes institutional surrender.

The Unmaking of the American University

For decades, research universities have relied on federal funding, with no guarantee that it will last. Now their survival may depend on compliance with the government.

By Nicholas Lemann | March 9, 2026 | The New Yorker

So far this fiscal year, the National Institutes of Health’s grants to universities are down by more than ninety per cent. Photo illustration by Derek Brahney

For Johns Hopkins, the first shot from the Trump Administration came on February 28, 2025. That day, a press release from the Department of Justice arrived, saying that the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism would be visiting ten campuses, including Hopkins, to investigate potential violations of federal law. Nobody ever visited the university, but subsequent shots had far more severe consequences. The federal government terminated eight hundred million dollars in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Hopkins had been administering; this led the university to lay off more than two thousand employees. The slowdown and termination of scientific-research grants at Hopkins resulted in an additional financial hit of five hundred million dollars last year.

At Brown, administrators learned that their grant funding was ending from an April 3rd article in the Daily Caller, the conservative paper co-founded by Tucker Carlson. “EXCLUSIVE,” the headline read. “Trump Admin Freezes Hundreds of Millions of Dollars to Another Ivy League School.” Later that day, the government stopped payment on all of its research grants to Brown, amounting to five hundred and ten million dollars. Princeton got its notification on March 31st: more than two hundred million dollars in research grants had been suspended. The Trump Administration was simultaneously sending a series of letters to almost every college and university in the country, beginning on February 14th. The first one ordered all schools to end their D.E.I. programs. “It said you can’t discriminate,” the president of Vassar, Elizabeth H. Bradley, told me. “We don’t. We didn’t use the term ‘D.E.I.’ ” Last spring, Bradley recalled, a new letter from the Trump Administration seemed to arrive roughly once a week, warning its thousands of recipients to stop doing something the Administration considered impermissible.

It’s impossible to exaggerate the degree of shock moves like these caused in American élite higher education. One could ask: How did universities not see the assault coming? In the early weeks of 2025, it had been little more than a year since the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned, after facing harsh questioning by members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about antisemitism on campus. Beginning in the first week of his second term, Donald Trump signed a raft of executive orders targeting higher education, by, among other things, ordering investigations into D.E.I. programs and antisemitism on college campuses. And hadn’t the new Vice-President, J. D. Vance, given a widely noticed address at a conservative convention in 2021 which he titled “Universities Are the Enemy”? But, from the universities’ point of view, conservatives’ unhappiness with them is eternal—in one form or another, it goes back more than a century—and it had never escalated to the level of an all-out war, including during Trump’s first Presidential term. It seemed inconceivable that the hostile rhetoric needed to be taken literally.

Now the compact between the universities and the federal government has been broken, and maybe not just temporarily. The Trump Administration has deployed a brutally effective, previously unused technique for getting these institutions’ full attention: suspending their funds, even those appropriated by Congress and legally committed to in contracts. The Trump Administration is unusual in its disregard for the law, rough way of doing business, and heedlessness about the effects of its actions. Still, it isn’t completely out of touch with political reality. These actions are not nearly as unpopular as universities think they should be. The heart of this tragedy is that universities believe themselves to be devoted to the public good but fall far short of the level of public support they need. How did that happen?

The leading American universities are among the oldest institutions in the country—some of them are older than the country. They couldn’t have survived for so long if they hadn’t changed many times over the years, in response to internal and external forces. If one wanted to designate a few key moments as representing the equivalent of the sleek black slab in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” guiding humans to their next great developmental leap, maybe the most significant for universities would be in the late nineteenth century, with their embrace of research as a central activity. A generation of American university presidents went to Germany, where the research university originated, to imbibe the new ideal; they were, as the philosopher Josiah Royce wrote, in 1891, “a generation that dreamed of nothing but the German University.” The primary purpose of the university would henceforth be the pursuit of pure knowledge. This redefined what it meant to be a professor—the job now conferred extraordinary freedom, which could lead to advances, especially in science, that would benefit the whole of society. The advent of the American research university gave birth to formally organized academic disciplines, tenure, and modern research labs. These are universities’ operating systems, not publicly visible but underlying everything that happens.

The black slab reappeared during the Second World War, when the federal government began substantially funding universities. Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who’d spent the war years organizing the government’s defense research projects, including the invention of the atomic bomb, wrote a long memo to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945 suggesting that the U.S. should launch a major new initiative to fund research at universities, which would be controlled by scientists with little direct government supervision. Out of this came the National Science Foundation, in 1950.

Bush’s rationale for this endeavor was partly the promise of medical advances and mainly the coming Cold War. American scientists of his generation were aware that European academic immigrants—Hitler’s gift to the United States—had been crucial to the development of the atomic bomb, and they believed that the U.S. would have to enhance its ability to train scientists and sponsor their research in order to compete with the Soviet Union. There was a larger social vision attached. James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard and a close collaborator of Bush’s, wrote a series of fervid, utopian essays for The Atlantic Monthly during the Second World War, in which he proposed that universities could not only conduct government-funded research but also liberate the United States from any form of inherited privilege. This was urgently necessary, because the Soviet Union was telling the world that it had created a classless society. American universities would draw their students from all regions and all classes (the SAT, which Conant was instrumental in promoting, was supposed to enable this project) and educate them at minimal cost. In return, their alumni would devote themselves to the national democratic project and resist any impulse to pass on money or position to their children.

In the early postwar years, there was tension between people like Bush and Conant, who focussed on favoring a handful of the country’s colleges and universities with research funds, and the leaders of the broad expanse of public universities, who wanted to develop the world’s first mass higher-education system. The person who most effectively pulled together the élite and democratic strains in higher education was Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California, who built a three-tier system—research universities, state colleges, and community colleges—that was meant to educate the entire youth of the state and to direct them to their appropriate socioeconomic destinations, tuition-free. But it took hardly any time for the University of California to come under attack—first, from the left, via Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, which didn’t like its bureaucratic aspect and its rich diet of government defense contracts, and then, far more consequentially, from the right. Ronald Reagan began his political career with a successful race for governor of California in 1966, in which he promised to punish the university for being too tolerant of its student radicals. One of his early moves in office was to support the University of California Board of Regents’ ousting of Kerr.

“The professors are the enemy,” President Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger in 1972, more than a decade before J. D. Vance was born. “Write that on the blackboard a hundred times and never forget it.” Still, Kissinger, like a number of Nixon’s advisers, was himself an academic. And Nixon had declared a war on cancer, which was waged mainly in government-funded research labs at universities. Inside universities, the tide of the New Left, rising since the early nineteen-sixties, had begun to recede. A shift in student interest into business careers was under way. It wasn’t as if peace reigned between universities and the federal government, but full-scale conflict seemed inconceivable: the two sides needed each other.

Knowing what we know now, the postwar years look different, as if a trap was being laid: universities, especially élite universities, were subject to recurrent animosity from the political right, even as they were becoming ever more dependent on the federal government. In Delmore Schwartz’s 1937 short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” the main character imagines himself in a theatre, watching a movie of the courtship that preceded his parents’ horrible marriage. “I stood up in the theatre and shouted: ‘Don’t do it. It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it,’ ” he says. Would it even be possible to feel regret while replaying the establishment of research agencies, the arrival of federal scholarships and loans for college students, the government’s efforts to eliminate discrimination on campuses, and the universities’ role in inventing lifesaving drugs and launching the technology industry? You’d have to be awfully coldhearted to see these developments as potentially problematic, and hardly anybody in higher education did.

When I was a little boy, my grandfather, a pediatrician in the blue-collar town of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, sometimes drove me to Princeton. We’d stand on Nassau Street and drink in the magnificence of the campus, as if it stood for everything great, and also distant, in the world. Today, Princeton is even more magnificent, with beautiful modern buildings scattered among the Colonial and Gothic ones, and elegant stores lining the street across from the campus. Compared with the time of my early visits, Princeton is far more prosperous. After decades of successful fund-raising and other forms of institutional overachievement, the university has an annual budget of more than three billion dollars, and an endowment of more than thirty-five billion dollars. It’s also at once far more open (it’s no longer the province of white Protestant men) and far more closed (it accepts less than five per cent of its undergraduate applicants). Officially, Princeton costs more than ninety thousand dollars a year; students from families with incomes of up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars pay no tuition. Still, the student body comes overwhelmingly from the upper middle class or higher, with the top one per cent heavily represented.

Christopher L. Eisgruber, a legal scholar who, for the past dozen years, has been the president of Princeton, is well aware of these contradictions. “You have institutions that are élite, that can’t let everybody in. We feel pressure for excellence and democratization,” Eisgruber said. “It’s O.K., but it makes things hard. We want to do research of unsurpassed quality, and be open to people from all backgrounds. We make a point of bringing in community-college and military transfers. There’s a tension between these visions. I don’t have a good answer for it.” Early in his presidency, he said, he had put a great deal of time to working on Princeton’s mission statement, a short version of which is carved into a granite circle embedded on the ground in the heart of the campus: “Princeton in the nation’s service and the service of humanity.” The sincerity of the statement doesn’t entirely dispel its cognitive dissonance.

Princeton’s trajectory is typical of the leading private universities. Collectively, they have vastly expanded their reputations and their geographic reach. The Ivy League is now, arguably, the Ivy League of Black America, the Ivy League of star squash players from Pakistan, and the Ivy League of ambitious young conservatives. Many of its students wind up going into high-paying private-sector jobs, especially in technology, finance, and consulting. The over-all picture, at least from the outside, is of fantastically rich and powerful institutions that, while insisting on their moral superiority, hand out tickets to futures of private wealth and prominence, which go mostly to the children of families from the top of the income distribution. Michael Young, the British sociologist who popularized the term “meritocracy” back in 1958, did so to warn that a formal system of selection by the education system would eventually become the object of violent populist rage. Young’s peculiar, and also prescient, dystopian novel “The Rise of the Meritocracy” ends with a murderous uprising against the meritocrats in 2033.

Universities’ vulnerability is internal, as well as external. Schools require the support not only of the federal government but also of faculty, students, alumni, parents, donors, and trustees. As in the fable of the blind men and the elephant, they don’t all have hold of the same thing. “It’s tremendously hard,” Eisgruber said. “They all see the university in a different way. For some, it’s an athletic team. For others, it’s a lab.”

Holden Thorp, a former university president—he was the chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from 2008 to 2013, and now supervises six publications of the American Association for the Advancement of Science—gave me a more cynical version of this sentiment: “If you’re a non-Jewish administrator, like me, you’ve been to so many Shabbat dinners at Hillel that you can say the kiddush. And then you set up a Palestinian-studies center. And, when you’re talking to conservative alumni, you say, ‘Why don’t you get more involved with the business school and the athletic program?’ It was like Willy Brandt promising the East and West Germans that they’d each get what they wanted after unification. The reason is, we couldn’t afford to lose any friends, and we don’t want public controversies. We kept telling people what they wanted to hear, to keep them involved.” The pursuit of U.S. News & World Report rankings, which demands higher per-capita spending on students; the practice of investing endowments in illiquid assets like hedge funds, which generates higher returns (that get spent, not saved) but keeps the money out of easy reach; the ever more competitive market for academic superstars, which means reducing the course loads of the highest-paid faculty members—each of these has gunned the engine a little more, making universities bigger and more expensive to operate, without producing much in the way of rainy-day funds in case something goes very wrong.

When Conant was laying out his vision for higher education in postwar America, he noted that his ideal future citizen “will favor public education, truly universal educational opportunity at every level. He will be little concerned with the future of private education.” In fact, private universities are far more dependent on gifts from donors and close ties to private companies than they used to be, and the leading public universities have developed similar ties to the market economy. And both, private and public, are deeply intertwined with the federal government. Like the big banks in 2008, they combine being rich with being unable to withstand a sudden, major financial setback.

During Barack Obama’s first term, the Department of Education intervened forcefully in the operations of universities, announcing that hundreds of them were under investigation for their handling of sexual-assault allegations. Citing Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funding, the Obama Administration mandated that universities institute specific new procedures for responding to assault accusations. These were somewhat controversial even inside universities, because they were heavily weighted against the accused, and because the Administration indicated that noncompliance could ultimately lead to the loss of federal funds. During those years, many universities were also establishing D.E.I. offices and enacting requirements that applicants for faculty positions produce statements about their commitment to diversity. Conservatives got a picture of universities moving rapidly to the left, and of a Democratic Administration using the power of the state to encourage this.

A dramatic decline of trust in universities among Republicans began during this period, and so did significant decreases, from a low baseline, in the conservative presence on élite-university faculties, especially in the humanities and the social sciences. Gallup polls that measure the public’s trust in institutions have found that, between 2015 and 2024, Republicans’ trust in universities fell from fifty-six per cent to twenty per cent. (Among Democrats, it fell from sixty-eight per cent to fifty-six per cent.) Charlie Kirk established Turning Point USA chapters on hundreds of campuses and began targeting professors whom he considered unacceptably left-wing. The Heritage Foundation launched Heritage Action, a more openly political offshoot. During the Biden Administration, officials from Trump’s first term created think tanks such as America First Legal, the America First Policy Institute, and the Center for Renewing America, which made plans to take a more aggressive approach toward higher education. “Universities are one of the only issues that unites all elements of conservatism—immigration, academic radicalism, anti-wokeness,” Gregory Conti, a political-science professor at Princeton, said. “An attack could have come from any Republican official.”

Lulled by the first Trump Administration’s relative quiescence toward them, universities did not fully appreciate the potency of the conservative mood. But one can get a sense of it from a talk that Representative Virginia Foxx, then the chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, gave at the American Enterprise Institute in the summer of 2024. Foxx said that Trump had told her “he didn’t think the federal government should be involved in education at all,” and that she had replied, “ ‘Yes, sir. The word ‘education’ is not in the Constitution as a responsibility of the federal government. That is my position. However, I am not in charge. If I were, I’d get us out of education in a heartbeat.’ ”

Inside universities, political conflict usually entails various factions disagreeing about which rules and tactics to use in pursuit of causes that everyone agrees on. Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza made for a far more difficult case, because core groups within the university disagreed on the issue at hand—Zionism—as fundamentally and passionately as people can disagree. Immediately, bitter controversies broke out, and it became impossible to unite all the universities’ constituencies in their defense. And, for outsiders, the period after October 7th put post-colonial ideology on very public display—seeming to confirm conservatives’ idea that élite universities’ primary commitment is to a radical version of social justice.

“The moment I knew we had reached the point when we weren’t going to be able to bob and weave our way out of it, as we’d been doing since the nineteen-eighties, was the hearing,” Holden Thorp said—referring to the education committee’s hearing on December 5, 2023, when Representative Elise Stefanik asked the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and M.I.T. whether they would tolerate calls for the genocide of the Jewish people on their campuses. All three presidents replied that it depends on the context. “What they said was very legalistic,” Thorp noted. “You could see it running out of gas. It was uncoupled from the emotions of the moment.” Clips from the December 5th hearing provoked outrage; of the seven university presidents who testified before the education committee during the 2023-24 academic year, only one is still in office.

By many accounts, Josh Gruenbaum, who came into the Administration from KKR, a giant private-equity firm, was key to devising the specific tactic of suspending research grants. Gruenbaum, an ally of Elon Musk’s, was appointed commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, a unit within the General Services Administration, the government’s central purchasing agency. An article published last March in Jewish Insider said that, “as Gruenbaum sees it, why should the federal government enter into lucrative contracts with partners who are out of step with the Trump administration’s priorities?”

Today, Gruenbaum is on a team assigned to implement Trump’s plan to rebuild Gaza. As is typical in this Administration, it has never been clear who is in charge of the confrontation with universities, so multiple departments, a variety of arriving and departing officials, and loose internal alliances have vied with one another for control. The Administration’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism has focussed on its eponymous issue, but the White House, under the direction of Stephen Miller, has paid more attention to dismantling D.E.I. and trans rights. The White House has supervised negotiations with universities—a number of which have made settlements with the government in order to have their funding restored. President Trump himself appears, as usual, most interested in forcing specific enemies to bend to his will and extracting large financial penalties from them, the amounts seemingly plucked out of the air.

Penn, Trump’s alma mater, was the first university to sign a settlement, on July 1, 2025. The Administration restored a hundred and seventy-five million dollars in suspended grants; Penn promised to ban trans women from participating in women’s athletics and to revoke their previous titles and awards. Columbia, the site of the country’s largest and most publicized pro-Palestine protests, settled soon afterward. (I have been a Columbia faculty member since 2003, and I was co-chair of the university’s antisemitism task force.) The government agreed to resume payment of Columbia’s scientific-research grants and to end its investigation of the university for alleged violations of civil-rights laws, and Columbia agreed to pay the government two hundred million dollars—the largest cash settlement thus far—and to appoint a “resolution monitor” to oversee its compliance with these terms. The settlement also contained specific provisions about academic matters; under one, Columbia agreed that the provost’s office would conduct a review of several programs, including the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies.

Perhaps the Administration’s biggest tactical mistake was a long letter to Harvard that went out on Friday, April 11, 2025, signed by three officials from three different departments and filled with demands. (According to the Times, Administration officials later said that the letter had been sent in error.) It did not bother to say, in the case of every demand, what laws the Administration was accusing Harvard of violating; some of the demands—like a ban on admitting international students who are “hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence”—were flamboyant policy preferences. That gave Harvard an opening to sue the Administration for, among other things, violating its First Amendment rights. In September, a federal judge in Boston ruled in Harvard’s favor, saying that the Administration’s actions amounted to “retaliation, unconstitutional conditions, and unconstitutional coercion.” The Trump Administration has appealed the decision, but, for now, Harvard’s funding has been restored.

Harvard, however, is both resisting and negotiating. Trump has announced several times that a settlement with the university is imminent; on February 2nd, hours after the Times published a story that the negotiations were proceeding in Harvard’s favor, he demanded a billion-dollar penalty from the university. Harvard so far has not issued a public response. The university evidently can’t afford to walk away.

After Columbia, the next university to settle with the Trump Administration was Brown, on July 30th. Brown has a veteran president, the economist Christina H. Paxson, who has been in office since 2012. She negotiated a peaceful end to campus protesters’ encampment in the spring of 2024. But when the Administration cut off funding to Brown, last April, Brown did not, like Harvard, receive poorly drafted threats that it could take to federal court. It also has a medical school and a public-health school, both of which are heavily dependent on federal grants. In a statement announcing the settlement, Paxson said that the funding freeze “posed enormous challenges for Brown’s research mission and financial stability.”

During negotiations with the Administration, Brown maintained control of what is taught and researched there. The heart of the agreement, however, is similar to Columbia’s: Brown’s grants were restored, and government investigations of the university ended; in return, Brown agreed to pay fifty million dollars over ten years to “workforce-development organizations” in Rhode Island. The agreement included terms on how the university will handle antisemitism and D.E.I.—Brown promised to undertake measures such as keeping trans women out of women’s locker rooms and making special recruiting efforts at Jewish schools—but these don’t apply to teaching and research.

After the settlement was signed, Trump put up a triumphant post on Truth Social: “Woke is officially DEAD at Brown.” A few weeks later, the Administration published a ten-point “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” and asked nine universities, including Brown, to sign it. This was another of the Administration’s mistakes: the compact came from the Department of Education, which isn’t a major dispenser of grants, so it combined a lot to dislike (such as “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”) with a low cost to resistance. Brown was the second university, after M.I.T., to announce that it would not comply. That gave Paxson some political credibility with opponents of the settlement. A few weeks later, she sent a lengthy message to alumni, saying that she would like to reduce Brown’s dependency on federal grants. Reducing it wouldn’t come close to eliminating it. Brown gets eighty-three per cent of its research funding from the federal government; the number among its peer institutions typically isn’t much lower. Nobody, it seems, can do without the grants. After Brown, the University of Virginia, Cornell, and Northwestern settled; U.C.L.A., like Harvard, is negotiating. (After failing to extract a billion-dollar fine from U.C.L.A., the Trump Administration recently sued the university, alleging civil-rights violations.)

At least a portion of the conservative world has exulted over having forced the universities to submit. One of the most floridly triumphant is Christopher Rufo, the Seattle-based provocateur who’s helped lead attacks on universities. “We’re renegotiating the relationship between the university and the state, the university and the wider society,” Rufo said. “The universities violated the fundamental compact. They forgot it ever existed. We’re having a debate that only one side sees clearly.” He recalled, “When we launched a campaign to decapitate the leadership of Harvard, I was astonished. They were catastrophically ill-equipped for a political fight.” In a month, he said, Claudine Gay, the Harvard president who’d resigned in 2024, “gave one comment to the Boston Globe. I thought, What are these people doing?”

It wasn’t simply that the universities were bad at politics. Many presidents were aware that their trustees, the legal owners of private universities, would not have supported resistance. “It begins with trustees. Our job is to be fiduciaries,” Andrew Bursky, a businessman who is the chair of the board at Washington University, told me. Universities, he said, have not kept up their relationships with politicians: “We were engaged with the community, but not with the state legislature or the Feds. Like, zero. We need to build relationships. If we don’t get it fixed, it’s going to be fixed for us.” Faculties were not united, either. Long ago, Clark Kerr remarked that research universities are collections of individual entrepreneurs; this applies particularly to star scientific researchers, who are responsible for funding their own labs and can move them to another university.

At some universities, a divide has opened between grant-dependent scientists who support settling with the Trump Administration and grant-free humanists who don’t. Grant-funded science is far more expensive than most other university research; it involves elaborately equipped labs, staffs of graduate students and postdocs, animals used as research subjects, and considerable paperwork requirements. Universities typically have no way of keeping these labs going without multiyear grants; an abrupt halt, like the Trump Administration’s, can be disastrous.

When the attack on higher education came, Christopher L. Eisgruber was serving as the chair of the board of the Association of American Universities, an organization whose members are the leading recipients of research funding. Eisgruber publicly disagreed with Columbia’s decision to settle with the Administration, but a more conservative wing, informally headed by Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt, and Andrew D. Martin, the chancellor of Washington University, was against the idea of the organization taking a stand. As a result, the A.A.U. made no statement. Diermeier told me, “There’s often an inability to get out of the bubble. The presidents are not all aligned. One group, of which I have been an advocate, believes that higher education has drifted away from its core purpose—that it has become politicized. And, then, there are other influential voices who think there’s nothing wrong, that it’s just a political takeover. That position leads to the resistance language.”

What if a university president had taken the conservative critique seriously long before Trump recaptured the White House—would it have made a difference? We have a natural experiment to test that question: Johns Hopkins. And we know what happened: it didn’t help.

Hopkins was founded, in 1876, as the first American university designed to emulate the German research-university model from the start. The only academic ever to become President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, got his Ph.D. in political science from Hopkins in its early years. Today, Hopkins is the largest private employer in Maryland, and the largest recipient of federal research funds in the country, thanks to its medical complex and its Applied Physics Laboratory, a defense contractor situated twenty miles away from its main campus. Its undergraduate college is small and heavily skewed toward premeds.

Ronald J. Daniels, a Canadian law professor, became president of Hopkins in 2009. When Trump returned to the White House, Daniels appeared to be riding high. One of Hopkins’s alumni, Michael Bloomberg, has given the university more than four billion dollars during Daniels’s tenure. Its school of public health is now named after Bloomberg; his donations allowed Hopkins to permanently adopt need-blind undergraduate admissions, among other things. The peak of student protest during Daniels’s presidency came not during Israel’s war on Gaza but in 2019, in response to his decision to establish a campus police force; in 2024, he helped persuade students who’d set up an encampment to take it down. In recent years, Hopkins created a school of government in D.C. and the S.N.F. Agora Institute, which is aimed at strengthening democracy and will soon move into a new headquarters on the university’s Baltimore campus.

In 2021, Daniels published a book titled “What Universities Owe Democracy.” In it, he calls on universities to do more “civic education” and complains that the segmentation of academic life makes this difficult to accomplish, which in higher education is conservative-coded. Daniels went on to speak about the themes of the book at the American Enterprise Institute, in D.C., which led to a formal partnership between A.E.I. and Hopkins—a sign that Daniels wanted to reach out to conservatives in a highly visible way. (A.E.I. has started an initiative to influence universities in a conservative direction.) Daniels has endorsed the idea of hiring more conservative faculty members, and he was one of thirty university presidents who attended a conference in Dallas last spring called Restoring Trust in Higher Education, organized by Diermeier and Martin.

Even so, without warning, the Administration terminated hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to Hopkins. After a few months, just as mysteriously, some of the grant flow was switched back on, but the university’s research funding is still down by forty-three per cent. This is in line with decreases nationally, especially in grants for health research, but cuts of that magnitude are particularly devastating at Hopkins because of its large medical complex. It’s the top recipient of N.I.H. grants in the country.

Last July, America First Legal filed a complaint against Hopkins with the Justice Department, saying that D.E.I. practices at its medical school violated the law and that its undergraduate-admissions office was not complying with the Supreme Court decision abolishing affirmative action. But there have been no obvious consequences of this complaint. So far, Hopkins hasn’t asked to negotiate a settlement with the government, and it hasn’t been asked. Only a few faculty members, all in the humanities, have written critically about Daniels’s handling of the situation. “My sense is that the university is trying to keep a low profile,” Robert Lieberman, a political scientist at Hopkins who formerly served as provost, told me. “If you’re a university president and you look around, those who have stuck their heads out of the foxhole have been shot. The rational response is to keep your head down.”

Theodore J. Iwashyna, a doctor and researcher who is on the faculty of Hopkins’s medical school and its public-health school, does federally funded research on recovery from acute diseases like pneumonia and sepsis. Iwashyna described his life as a grant recipient, up to now, as having been similar to that of a small-business owner who has a trusted local banker. Researchers like him produce a grant proposal (these can run to as long as five hundred pages), wait a few months, and get a score from a panel of experts. (Another medical researcher told me that she and her colleagues are scrubbing words from their proposals that might be triggering to officials in this Administration, like “disparities” and “equitable.”) If all goes well, they eventually get a document called a Notice of Grant Award, which Iwashyna compared to a letter of credit, giving the researcher enough certainty about funding to be able to keep working.

Hopkins covers the costs of the front end of this process; what makes this worthwhile is that the federal agencies Iwashyna works with make multiyear commitments. He gave a vivid example of how harmful the recent slowdown in grant-making has been: a Hopkins pulmonologist submitted a proposal to the N.I.H. to test his hypothesis that a widely used device called a pulse oximeter, which clips onto a patient’s finger and measures the oxygen level of the blood, might regularly produce inaccurate readings. This is not a minor question—just about every patient in an intensive-care unit is outfitted with a pulse oximeter. The proposal got an unusually strong score from an expert panel last June, but the Notice of Grant Award still has not arrived. Nationally, N.I.H. grants to universities are down by more than ninety per cent in the current fiscal year; during that time, the National Cancer Institute hasn’t made a single grant.

Iwashyna and his colleagues worry about the future. Who’s going to want to go into medical research as a career? With large cuts in admission to Ph.D. programs at many universities—the intake of Ph.D. candidates at Hopkins’s public-health school is down by fifty per cent—how can people who remain interested in research even get the opportunity? “This Administration has introduced multiple levels of stochastic dysfunction,” Iwashyna told me. “Everything is brittle, nothing is working. Then they pick individual institutions to bully. Part of how bullies function is to make sure the others are too scared to intervene. . . . It disturbs me. I was a nerdy kid in the nineteen-eighties. I recognize these tactics from the folks I knew growing up who valued humiliation.” He mentioned Biff Tannen, the bully in the “Back to the Future” movies. “That fucking guy is running the country right now.”

Trump could do much more damage to élite universities during the rest of his Presidential term—or he could lose interest, because it has become more gratifying to remove heads of state. That would not solve the universities’ problem of thick dependency on the government and thin political support. Even in deep-blue districts, where universities are often the largest employers, it’s hard to find political candidates who are making the defense of higher education a central theme in their campaigns. Meanwhile, conservatives in Oklahoma, Utah, Florida, Kansas, Iowa, and Texas have attempted to intervene in the operations of their public universities, through measures such as influencing curricula, increasing teaching loads, and restricting tenure.

When it comes to higher education, the house of conservatism has many mansions. One is filled with burn-it-down insurrectionists, like Rufo, who see universities primarily as enemy territory, a stronghold of the left. Another is focussed on making a university education cost less and teach job skills, not the liberal arts—hence the Trump Administration’s efforts to eliminate student loans in fields with a low “return on investment.” Yet another is made up of the small cohort of conservative professors. They may be pleased that universities are at last paying attention to their complaints. At a recent convention of Heterodox Academy, an association of professors who feel uneasy with what they describe as the ideological orthodoxy on campuses, one of the group’s co-founders, Jonathan Haidt, led the audience in a loud chant: “We told you so!” But these various factions are not always aligned.

A book by the political scientists Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn (both conservatives), published just before Trump’s first term, reported that “many conservative academics feel more at home in the progressive academy than in the Republican Party.” Conservative academics are often traditionalists in fields like political philosophy and English literature, whose most cherished cause is restoring great-books courses and the study of topics such as aesthetics and diplomatic history. Their discomfort with the universities where they work is not just about wokeness; it can also be about the overwhelming careerism of the students.

Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton who is probably the most prominent member of this group, told me that one year he and the philosopher Cornel West had been asked to make a presentation to incoming first-year students and their parents about the benefits of a liberal-arts education. “There we were, in the biggest lecture hall on campus,” George recalled. “Eisgruber was there. I started and said, ‘We want to have your children use these years to become deeper, more independent thinkers. Our classes will unsettle you. You’ll be challenged.’ I could tell I was not making the sale—the parents weren’t buying it. They were thinking about Morgan Stanley. Then Cornel came on and said, ‘Your children have come here to learn how to die. You have to learn how to die before you can learn how to live.’ I saw one dad turn to another and say, ‘Seventy-eight thousand a year for this?’ ”

Most of the conservative academics I spoke to were not just deeply unhappy with Trump’s having cut off scientific-research funding; they were also concerned about how the conservative cause of the moment, viewpoint diversity in faculty hiring, might be implemented. Their objection is partly on principle—conservatives almost always oppose affirmative action, so, to be consistent, they oppose “affirmative action for conservatives”—and partly practical. Renaming D.E.I. offices, adopting “institutional neutrality” policies, and removing flamboyant social-justice messaging from departmental websites is easy. Changing faculty hiring practices is nearly impossible. An essential feature of research universities is that schools and departments have autonomy over employment. Even a university president who publicly endorses viewpoint diversity, which not many do, would have a hard time putting it into place. Robert Doar, the president of A.E.I., told me that he had pressed his higher-education team to endorse viewpoint diversity. “I said, ‘I don’t get it. I make the final decisions here, but a president who overrides a department’s decision is violating academic freedom?’ They told me, ‘No, it’ll never go.’ I said, ‘I guess you can’t fight city hall.’ ”

Very rarely, university presidents who are concerned about ideological dogmatism in a department temporarily take control of it—but the standard move to bring more conservatives on board is to establish an entirely new part of the university. Hopkins has done this with the School of Government and Policy, which recently hired a conservative economist, Peter Arcidiacono, a longtime opponent of affirmative action, away from Duke. Washington University has created a public-health school; its new dean, Sandro Galea, came from Boston University, and told me that he specifically wanted to work in a red state. He said that his school will, among other things, be empathetic toward people “whose primary interface with the world is faith.” More than a dozen public universities were ordered by their state legislatures to teach civics courses, meant to be comfortable places for conservative students and faculty.

These are not wholesale changes. Conservatives’ fundamental problem is that they cannot compete with major universities, in the way that conservative political candidates can compete with liberals in election campaigns. Many of America’s leading corporations are less than a hundred years old; few of its leading research universities are. To acquire a large tract of land in a population center, put up dozens of buildings, create a full suite of academic departments, and add the professional schools and hospitals that support the universities’ scholarly activities economically—it’s all but impossible. At a Heritage Foundation conference last year, participants mused about building up Christendom College (in Front Royal, Virginia) or College of the Ozarks (in Point Lookout, Missouri) into positions of national prominence, but that’s improbable in any of our lifetimes. Colleges recently constituted on the principle of being anti-woke—like the New College of Florida, which was overhauled by Governor Ron DeSantis to have a conservative bent, and the University of Austin, which began enrolling students in 2024—are small and shaky. Because most students and their parents see college as a path to employment, ideological upstarts have limited appeal.

What’s more plausible is that research universities in the Sun Belt—Emory, Vanderbilt, Tulane, the University of Texas—will rise to the top tier, as California universities did after the Second World War. Of the original nine universities the Administration asked to sign its proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” Vanderbilt and U.T. were two of the few that did not entirely reject it. Vanderbilt has announced that it is going to open campuses in New York City, San Francisco, and West Palm Beach. But these universities will still be a long way from a collective conservative paradise. They will simply present a modified version of the familiar picture, with professors and students who may be more conservative than their counterparts at other universities but who are still to the left of alumni, donors, employers, trustees, and money-providing politicians.

Conservatives are likely never going to be able to create universities they approve of that are anywhere near the level of the universities some of them would like to destroy. But that does not mean that universities are going to get beyond the crisis of the past couple of years intact—that a truly effective collective resistance will emerge, or that the moment will pass, or that the public will become aware of how valuable the universities are. Back in the days when the system that is now under attack was being invented, Clark Kerr gave a lecture at Harvard in which he posed this question: “How may the contributions of the élite be made clear to the egalitarians, and how may an aristocracy of intellect justify itself to all men?” People who spend their lives in universities think they know the answer—medical breakthroughs, opportunities for future leaders from humble backgrounds, the expansion of knowledge—but the public, evidently, isn’t persuaded. Can the government, even in different hands, forget what it has learned in the past year about how easy it is to get universities to give it the deference that businesses give their largest customers? It seems unlikely.

The government has many weapons in its arsenal, which don’t require the presence of Trump in the White House to be used. Federal research funding amounts to more than sixty billion dollars nationally, much of which goes to the top universities; the total value of outstanding government student-loan debt is well over a trillion dollars, and this affects nearly every college and university. What if more conditions were attached to those loans? Optimists can point to some partial political victories for the academy in the past year: the Administration moderated a proposed increase in the endowment tax, and Congress passed an increased budget for the N.I.H. (which doesn’t guarantee that the Administration will release the money). Fundamentally, though, what has seemed to universities to be a rock-solid set of arrangements isn’t fully protected by law.

The premise of the great American universities today is a difficult one, to say the least: that they can be fantastically selective (but in a completely fair way), offer their students and faculty access to the most prestigious and well-rewarded precincts of American society, relentlessly increase their costs, assure the world that they are devoted to public service and social justice, and win the public’s grateful appreciation for being among our country’s most successful institutions. Trump, with his unerring talent for exploiting vulnerabilities in the liberal order, took full advantage of these contradictions and has caused enormous damage. It is going to be hard to undo. The golden era of autonomy for universities is probably not going to return. ♦