Academic Freedom Is Civil Rights Infrastructure: What UT's Dismantling of Ethnic and Gender Studies Costs Us, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. [A LULAC Statement]

Academic Freedom Is Civil Rights Infrastructure: What UT's Elimination of Ethnic and Gender Studies Costs Us

A LULAC Statement prepared by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., Education Committee Chair in preparation for the September 19, 2026 convening of the board in Galveston, Texas, 

Academic freedom is usually defended as a professional courtesy—a protection professors enjoy—an internal matter for faculty senates and accreditors. That framing is a mistake, and it is a mistake civil rights organizations cannot afford to repeat.

For LULAC, academic freedom is infrastructure. It is the machinery that produces the evidence our advocacy runs on. Take it apart and our work does not merely become harder in some abstract sense. It becomes unprovable.

Our committee writes with new urgency. On September 17, 2026, UT Austin's provost eliminated the undergraduate majors in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women and Gender Studies (Cordova, 2026). Not consolidated. Eliminated.

Every Victory Rested on Somebody's Research

Consider how our tradition actually won.

When Delgado v. Bastrop ISD ended the de jure segregation of Mexican American children in Texas schools in 1948, it rested on documentation of how districts sorted children and on what basis. When Hernandez v. Texas reached the Supreme Court in 1954, the case turned on demonstrated patterns—decades of jury exclusion in Jackson County, the social facts of a community treated as a class apart. 

When school finance litigation exposed the chasm between property-rich and property-poor districts, the argument was built from data somebody had to collect, analyze, and publish. When voting rights cases have tested Texas redistricting, they have depended on demographers and political scientists willing to put their findings on the record under oath.

None of that evidence fell from the sky. It came from scholars who were free to ask questions the state of Texas would have preferred nobody ask, and free to publish answers that embarrassed powerful institutions.

That is the relationship: researchers produce the record, advocates convert the record into remedy. Break the first half and the second half collapses. And it is intentionally "getting collapsed."

What Was Built, and How Long It Took

The Center for Mexican American Studies was established at UT in 1970, "born of the civil rights movement," with Américo Paredes among its principal founders and its first director (Center for Mexican American Studies, n.d.). In 2014, UT created the first academic department in the United States devoted comprehensively to Mexican American and Latina/o life, and the university announced it with pride: President Bill Powers said the new department would ensure "that UT is the best place for Latino studies in the United States" (University of Texas at Austin, 2014).

Fifty-six years of institution-building. A national first. A major that no longer exists.

How It Was Dismantled

The elimination did not arrive out of nowhere. It is the final step in a sequence that this blog and the public record now documents clearly (Ayala, 2026; Valenzuela, 2026).

Senate Bill 17 took effect January 1, 2024, closing the Multicultural Education Center, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Monarch Program serving immigrant students. By April, roughly 60 staff who had worked in those programs were terminated—half of whom were Black and half of whom were Latino, and the majority, women. 

Senate Bill 37, adopted in June 2025, curtailed shared governance—faculty senates now exist only at a governing board's pleasure, presidents appoint half their membership, and a new ombudsman may recommend withholding state funds from noncompliant institutions.

In August 2025, UT abolished its Faculty Council outright, going beyond what SB 37 required. In October 2025, the Graduate Student Assembly was blocked from even considering resolutions opposing SB 17 and SB 37.

In February 2026, UT announced the closure of seven departments in the College of Liberal Arts, folding Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies into a single unit, the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. The consolidation was originally slated for Fall 2027; the timeline was accelerated by a full year.

In September 2026, seven months after that merger and weeks into the accelerated implementation, the majors were eliminated. Yes, gone.

The sequence matters. The very bodies that might have questioned, resisted, or demanded accountability for these decisions had already been dismantled before the decisions were announced. That was not incidental; it was structural. In work I have described elsewhere (Valenzuela, 2024), the mechanisms of internal deliberation and resistance are weakened first, clearing the way for consequential decisions to proceed with diminished scrutiny. The result is not merely organizational change, but profound institutional disruption, with significant human costs, including trauma and harm to faculty, students, and communities (Zamora & Valenzuela, 2023; Valenzuela, 2024).

The Condition of the "New Department"

What replaced these departments deserves description, because it tells you what the merger was for.

According to Dr. Cary Cordova, an American Studies professor at UT who gave a first-person account to The Higher Ed Advocate, the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis began the fall semester without an operating budget for the academic year, and her colleagues could not obtain keys to their buildings (Cordova, 2026).

Faculty have simultaneously been told they must resubmit courses they have taught for years for approval against the university's rewritten core curriculum, on a two-week turnaround. Courses not submitted in time are automatically removed from the core. As Cordova describes the standard being applied: "no SCA courses—no matter the topic—will be included in the core without a new approval" (Cordova, 2026).

Who conducts that review matters. "We are not being reviewed by our peers," Cordova writes, "but by AI and people who hold our scholarship in deep disregard" (Cordova, 2026). She further reports that the dean declined to advance African American Women's History and Native American Women's History as even worthy of consideration for the core, and draws the conclusion herself: "the message is very clear: women of color are not welcome at this university" (Cordova, 2026).

Set that beside where the university has been investing. The Civitas Institute was founded in 2022 with $6 million and the backing of the lieutenant governor's office. The School of Civic Leadership created to house it now carries 44 faculty and is launching degree programs in Civics Honors, Great Books Honors, and Strategy & Statecraft. The rewritten core curriculum against which our colleagues' courses are now being judged was designed by a committee heavy with School of Civic Leadership faculty, and narrows general education toward Western civilization and U.S. history (Valenzuela, 2026).

One department cannot get keys. Another is conferring new degrees. The resources did not vanish in a budget crisis. They were redirected.

A Department Is Not a Course List—and a Major Is Not a Course List Either

In February, the university's defense was that nothing had been eliminated: the courses would persist and the faculty would remain employed. Seven months later, the majors are gone. Any future assurance from this administration should be evaluated against that record.

We should still be precise about what remains at risk, because precision is what the university is counting on us to lack. Courses may survive the core review. Faculty remain on payroll. But a major is the structure that lets a student declare a field, be advised in it, complete a coherent sequence in it, and graduate credentialed in it. Without the major, there is no pipeline—no undergraduates entering the field, therefore fewer graduate students, therefore fewer scholars, therefore less research and an intentionally impoverished field.

And a department is the structure that controls hiring lines, tenure standards, and the internal argument about what counts as significant scholarship. Merge four fields into one unit and you manufacture a permanent competition for a shrinking pool of lines. Remove the major, and the field loses the enrollment numbers it would need to justify those lines in the first place.

The attrition from here will be gradual, and it will be attributed to student demand. That is how a field is ended without anyone having to announce its end—except that this time, someone did announce it.

What This Costs Our Communities

Texas Latinos are not a minor constituency awaiting occasional study. According to the Texas Demographic Center's 2023 estimates, Hispanic Texans constitute 39.8% of the state's population, compared with 38.7% for non-Hispanic White Texans—the largest population group in Texas (Texas Demographic Center, 2025). The crossover is not an artifact of one estimation method; Census Bureau estimates placed Hispanic Texans at 40.2% against 39.8% non-Hispanic Whites as of July 2022, a plurality—meaning the largest share—rather than the majority that headline coverage claimed (Asch, 2023).

By either accounting, the flagship has eliminated the undergraduate major devoted to studying the state's largest population group, in the very years that group became the largest.

The infrastructure being dismantled is where knowledge about our schooling, our labor, our health, our neighborhoods, our political representation, and our histories has been produced.

When it goes, the consequence is concrete. The next time a district's discipline data shows our children being pushed out, the next time a redistricting map dilutes our vote, the next time a bilingual program is defunded or a colonia goes without water, the scholar who would have documented it will hold a position in another state, and the dissertation that would have established the pattern will never have been written.

No data, no case. No case, no remedy.

That is not a side effect of these decisions. For anyone who would prefer our conditions to remain undocumented, it is the entire benefit.

What LULAC Calls For

Restore the majors. This is the immediate demand, and it is specific: reinstate the undergraduate degree programs in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women and Gender Studies, with their advising structures and graduation pathways intact.

Extend the two-week deadline and disclose the review. Faculty are being asked to justify years of curriculum in a fortnight, against criteria they did not set, before reviewers whose identity and methods have not been disclosed. If artificial intelligence is being used to evaluate whether courses belong in the core, the university should say so publicly, name the system, and publish the criteria. A public institution owes the public that much.

Allow faculty to submit appeals for rejected courses. To not do so would make the review process effectively one-sided, leaving faculty with no meaningful opportunity to correct errors, challenge inconsistent applications of the criteria, or respond to judgments that could remove long-standing courses from the core curriculum. Any process consequential enough to determine what students may count toward their core education should include a transparent and timely mechanism for reconsideration.

Fund the department it created. A unit operating a semester into the year without a budget or building access is not being administered. It is being starved.

Restore the faculty's role in academic decisions. No degree program at a public university should be eliminated without a recorded vote of the faculty who teach in it. We call on the Board of Regents to reconstitute an elected faculty governance body at UT Austin with guaranteed consultation rights over program closure, and on the Legislature to revisit SB 37, which made this year's decisions possible by removing everyone with standing to object.

Protect the people. Staff, untenured faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students in these fields are the most exposed and the least able to speak without professional risk. Organizations with institutional standing like Texas LULAC should be the ones speaking.

Sustain the scholars while we fight for the programs. Restoring the majors is the goal, and it will not happen this semester. In the meantime, the people who do this research need somewhere to keep working. We call on foundations, professional associations, and Latino-serving institutions across Texas to fund fellowships, research partnerships, and publication support for scholars of Mexican American and Latina/o life whose institutional footing has been cut out from under them. LULAC councils will make our own records, our testimony, and our community's knowledge available to that work.

LULAC has always understood that power prefers our conditions to stay invisible, and that making them visible is the first act of every campaign we have ever won. Defending academic freedom is not a detour from that work. It is that work, at the point where it begins.

References

Asch, S. (2023, June 23). Texas is officially majority Hispanic, according to the Census Bureau. Texas Standard. https://texasstandard.org/stories/texas-population-majority-latino-census-bureau-update/

Ayala, A., III. (2026, February 14). UT Austin’s elimination of Mexican American and Latina/o studies is a betrayal of Texas. Latinopia.com. http://latinopia.com/latino-literature/latinopia-guest-blog/guest-blog-alfonso-ayala-iii-elimination-of-mexican-american-studies-and-latina-o-studies/

Center for Mexican American Studies. (n.d.). About. The University of Texas at Austin, College of Liberal Arts. Retrieved September 18, 2026, from https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/cmas/about.html

Cordova, C. (2026, September 17). Breaking: UT Austin eliminates ethnic and gender studies majors. The Higher Ed Advocate. https://higheredadvocate.substack.com/p/breaking-ut-austin-eliminates-ethnic

Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. (n.d.). About. The University of Texas at Austin, College of Liberal Arts. Retrieved September 18, 2026, from https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mals/about/

Texas Demographic Center. (2025, July 2). Texas population: Trends and characteristics [Presentation slides]. https://demographics.texas.gov/Resources/TDC/Presentations/88837d2e-786a-4c0a-a0d3-55fd7d54cef8/20250702_TexasWorkforceCommission.pdf

University of Texas at Austin. (2014, September 10). New groundbreaking department to focus on Latino, Mexican American experience. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2014/09/10/new-groundbreaking-department-to-focus-on-latino-mexican-american-experience/

Valenzuela, A. (2026, September 7). The political transformation of UT. Texas Education Equity. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-political-transformation-of-ut.html

Valenzuela, A. (2024, December 20). Monopoly tycoons in a game of Jenga: The censorship of bodies, protest, and speech at UT-Austin. Texas Observer. https://www.texasobserver.org/censorship-ut-austin-professor-angela-valenzuela/ 

Zamora, E., & Valenzuela, A. (2023, February 13). Anti-DEI law implementation has been a disaster. Texas Observer. https://www.texasobserver.org/anti-dei-law-implementation-has-been-a-disaster/

@TexasLULAC @LULAC #LULAC #AcademicFreedom #LatinoCivilRights #HigherEd #CensorshipHurtsUs #NuestraHistoria

UT students attacked by Bo French call his comments “disgusting” and too familiar, by Megan Menchaca, Sept. 14, 2026

7:52 AM · Sep 13, 2026

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52.9M

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Friends:

My students shared this with me the other evening. What happened was that someone named "Bo French" saw a group of University of Texas students in burnt orange celebrating a Longhorn touchdown and read something else into the picture: foreignness. Nothing visible in that photograph established where those students were born, what passports they carried, where they went to high school, or how long their families had lived in Texas. Yet French treated their appearance as sufficient proof that something had gone terribly wrong at the state’s flagship university.

The photograph was not, as French initially suggested, a graduation scene. It captured students celebrating a touchdown in the closing moments of UT’s game against Ohio State. French nevertheless posted it alongside the ominous declaration that “the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined” and subsequently argued that foreigners were displacing Americans at the university (Menchaca, 2026). What transformed an ordinary scene of college football fandom into a supposed demographic crisis was not information about the students. It was the way they looked.

The Indian American Advocacy Council identified precisely that problem, condemning French for assuming that brown students pictured at UT must be foreigners (Kharade, 2026). Consider how much French did not know when he made that judgment. He did not know the students’ hometowns, their citizenship, their family histories, or even their names. Dhairya Gupta, one of the young men visible in the photograph, is in fact a naturalized American citizen (Menchaca, 2026). French’s inference therefore worked backward: appearance produced the conclusion, and the conclusion supplied the story. The faces themselves became the evidence.

French subsequently reframed the controversy as a policy question: Should American universities prioritize Americans? But that defense raises an empirical question, and UT’s enrollment structure provides a fairly clear answer. Texas law already makes Texas residents overwhelmingly dominant in undergraduate admissions. Up to 75% of each entering class is filled through automatic admission of highly ranked Texas high school graduates, and beginning with the fall 2026 entering class, UT reduced its automatic-admission threshold to the top 5% of graduating Texas seniors (Dey, 2024). 

International students, meanwhile, numbered 1,923 among 44,314 undergraduates—roughly 4% of the undergraduate population (Texas Global, 2026; University of Texas at Austin, 2025). Those numbers do not support the picture of a university being overtaken by foreign students. They describe a Texas public university whose student body increasingly reflects the diversity of Texas itself.

Nor was the objection to French’s rhetoric confined to his political opponents. Republican leaders criticized the post as well, including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, who described it as intolerant and racist (Kharade, 2026). That matters because the issue here is larger than a conventional partisan disagreement over immigration or university admissions. There is a legitimate public debate to be had about international enrollment, admissions priorities, and who public universities are designed to serve. But that debate begins with facts. It cannot reasonably begin by looking at brown students in a football stadium and presuming that they are foreigners.

And perhaps that is what makes the original photograph so revealing—but not in the way French intended. These students stood in the heat, crowded into the student section, raised their hands in the Hook ’em Horns sign, and erupted when their team scored. There is nothing anomalous about that scene. It is Texas in 2026. The students pictured should not have to produce birth certificates, passports, or family histories to establish that they belong in the stands—or at the university. Their faces are not immigration documents.

References

Dey, S. (2024, September 16). UT-Austin tightens automatic admission threshold to 5% of Texas' top high schoolers. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/16/ut-austin-top-five-percent-threshold/

Kharade, P. (2026, September 14). Indian American Advocacy Council condemns Bo French's racist post on brown students from University of Texas. The Free Press Journal. https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/indian-american-advocacy-council-condemns-bo-frenchs-racist-post-on-brown-students-from-university-of-texas

Menchaca, M. (2026, September 14). UT students attacked by Bo French call his comments "disgusting" and too familiar. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/09/14/bo-french-university-texas-austin-students/

Texas Global. (2026). 2025–2026 international enrollment. The University of Texas at Austin. https://global.utexas.edu/about/international-enrollment

University of Texas at Austin. (2025). Facts and figures. https://www.utexas.edu/about/facts-and-figures

UT students attacked by Bo French call his comments “disgusting” and too familiar
In a statement Monday night, university officials indirectly addressed Bo French’s comments, calling students at the game Saturday night “incredible fans.”
by Megan Menchaca Sept. 14, 2026, 9:03 p.m. Central | Texas Tribune

Texas Longhorns fans and players celebrate following the NCAA football game against the

Ohio State Buckeyes at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin on Saturday.

Students said they were not surprised a Republican candidate lobbed racist attacks about

South Asian students seen celebrating the win. Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch/

USA TODAY Network via REUTERS

Students at the University of Texas at Austin said they were dismayed — but unsurprised — by the racist attacks lobbed at them online after a Republican candidate for statewide office suggested white Americans were being “displaced.”

Bo French, the Republican running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, on Sunday posted racist comments on X that included an image of UT students of South Asian descent celebrating the victory.

“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote in a post featuring a photo of the students. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

On Monday, French defended his comments on a conservative radio talk show. But by then, the posts had reverberated across social media, attracting comments like “Bollywood University” “Are we watching a cricket game,” “I didn’t know the stadium was in India,” and “The America we grew up in no longer exists.”

Dhairya Gupta, a senior at the University of Texas, is included in the bottom right of the photo, wearing a burnt orange T-shirt with his right arm extended into a “Hook ’em Horns” hand sign. He said he’s accustomed to seeing racist comments online, but it was “insane” to see a Republican candidate say derogatory things about him and his friends.

“When I look at that picture, I don’t see a problem,” Gupta said in an interview Monday with The Texas Tribune.

RELATED STORY
Karl Rove said he’ll break 30 years of only supporting Republicans to vote against “bigot” Bo French Sept. 14, 2026

The controversy is the latest in a long line of incendiary comments made by French that have been condemned by his fellow Republicans, many of whom have endorsed him.

The comments also follow years of conservative lawmakers attacking diversity, equity and inclusion policies at public universities like UT.

French — who did not immediately respond to a request for comment — referred to the students’ picture as “foreigners” who displaced Americans, without having any information about their status. The citizenship status of all the students in the photo are unknown, although Gupta told The Dallas Morning News he is a naturalized citizen.

Approximately 26% of degree-seeking undergraduate students at UT are Asian, up from 20% a decade ago. About 29% of students are white, which is down from 44% in the same time period. UT has been prohibited from considering race in its admissions process since a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2023.

Students said the cohort of South Asian students at the football game happened partially by happenstance. Like everyone else, they and their friends waited many hours in line in the heat before the highly anticipated game against Ohio State and ran to the closest seats to the field when UT let them into the student section of the stadium.

“If you were at the game, you know that picture is taken extremely out of context,” said Arsheeya Moyeen, a UT sophomore. “I’m gonna be completely candid. I think, as a politician, as somebody in the public eye, to take something like that out of context and manipulate it to fit your agenda and your views on a certain race is extremely unprofessional.”

Kevin Eltife, chairman of the UT System Board of Regents, shared a statement online Monday evening — about a day after French’s post — thanking students at the game for “making us proud.”

“When I stood on the sidelines at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium Saturday night and looked up at the seats filled with incredible fans, I saw Longhorns,” Eltife said. “It’s the same remarkable view I have at graduation ceremonies and anytime I’m on campus. I’m proud to celebrate all our Longhorn students today and every day.”

UT President Jim Davis said in a follow-up social media post that the university’s students were exceptional and “all of them are Longhorns.” UT did not respond to a request for further comment.

The photo French shared is a screenshot from a video that the official social media accounts of Texas Athletics posted Saturday evening. The 17-second vertical video shows a group of students in one part of the student section celebrating after the Longhorns scored a touchdown in the final minute of the game.

UT sophomore Lisa Varghese, who was sitting in the same section as Gupta and Moyeen, said she was shocked at the ignorance she saw on social media in response to the video and French’s post. She said French was using skin color and “blatant racism” as a divisive factor to tear people apart.

“To complain about skin color and to complain about other people ‘taking over’ UT Austin and how disappointing that is is just disgusting,” Varghese said. “It really is because I feel like football and sports (are) something that should be uniting. It should be a uniting factor. It should be something that we all come together to celebrate.”

Moyeen said racist posts on social media toward certain groups are disappointing, but she believes they have become normalized. She said she initially ignored the “horrible racist generalizations” under UT’s initial video on social media — until French made his tweet.

“There will always be racist people out there who feel OK with hiding behind a screen and commenting things about people that they don’t know, but for a politician running for a public office to come out and say those same hateful things just takes it to a whole different level that you truly can’t ignore anymore,” Moyeen said.

French said UT was “filled with foreign nationals” and argued that the school has prioritized foreign students and workers. However, under state law, 90% of UT freshmen must be in-state residents, while the remaining 10% are international students or out-of-state students. International students comprised about 4% of undergraduates in the 2025-26 school year.

UT offers automatic admission to all in-state residents in the top 5% of their high school graduating class. Under state law, 75% of UT’s freshman class must be admitted under this policy. The remaining students are admitted through a holistic process that considers factors such as grade point average, extracurriculars and personal essays.

Gupta said he’s concerned about the broad sentiment of French’s post and how many people publicly agreed with him. He said, though, it brought a smile to his face seeing the Longhorns who were vocally defending him, his friends and the other pictured UT students on social media.

“It seemed like the actual Texas alumni seemed to be very passionate about the fact that these are also students at the university, and this is the university,” Gupta said. “It’s not defined by the demographic(s) of the university itself, but by the culture of the university.”

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a major financial supporter of The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in our journalism. Find a complete list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.

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WITH PROPOSED FEDERAL RULES, HERITAGE FOUNDATION UPENDS HIGHER EDUCATION by Katie Rainwater

Friends,

Related to my earlier post this morning, I strongly encourage you to read this analysis by Drs. Katie Rainwater and John Warner on the impending disaster that we can totally avert if we act expeditiously. 

Don't get scared. Educate yourself with these documents and links I've shared and act. And act now! Time is of the essence.

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

With Proposed Federal Rules, Heritage Foundation Upends Higher Education
Who is up for a little Christian Nationalism embedded into our higher education system?

Katie Rainwater and John Warner

Last week we promoted an informational webinar on how to participate in the public comment process for resisting a proposal originating with the Heritage Foundation that will fundamentally alter how higher education operates in the United States. Today, we’re fortunate to have expert analysis from Katie Rainwater, fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, faculty at Florida International University, and a researcher on how national conservatism seeks to change education so that our systems that are meant to serve everyone are instead operating from an explicit right-wing vision. Prof. Rainwater tells us what these operators plan and how and why we must resist it - John Warner

WITH PROPOSED FEDERAL RULES, HERITAGE FOUNDATION UPENDS HIGHER EDUCATION

by Katie Rainwater

Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts recently declared that higher education requires a “moral reset.” Roberts – who professes that the founders envisioned a Christian nation and an American people who honor eternal truths – holds that higher education should be grounded in recognition of “one coherent, universal truth with a capital ‘T’.” Roberts and his Heritage Foundation colleagues envision a sharp departure from university systems premised on institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and humanistic learning. They aim to drastically restrict the number of students pursuing 4-year degrees, arguing that the degrees are a costly and unproductive hindrance to the formation of male-headed households. Their goal is to vocationalize education while also ensuring the curriculum and research at universities supports Christian Right policy goals.

The Heritage Foundation’s path to transforming higher education runs through red states, especially those like Florida where they maintain close relations with the governor. Yet the capacity of states to change their higher education systems is constrained by federal legislation which requires universities to maintain accreditation with a federally recognized accreditor to access federal financial aid. Locking in state-level reform and achieving nationwide transformation thus requires - in Robert’s words - “totally upend[ing] the accreditation system.” Proposed changes to the rules revising the federal recognition of accreditors do just this, achieving nearly all the policy goals for accreditation set out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

Moralistic Teaching and Partisan Research

Guided by DeSantis, the Florida state legislature has given right-wing ideologues control of the general education curriculum and of newly created centers on public university campuses. The Heritage Foundation has been critical to both developments.

In 2023, the Heritage Foundation helped pass Florida Senate Bill 266, which took curricular decision-making authority for the general education curriculum away from faculty experts, instilling it in the Board of Governors (BOG). To make an initial cull of courses, the BOG turned to Scott Yenor, a Christian nationalist and misogynist who advised DeSantis for two years as a Tallahassee-based Claremont Institute director. When Yenor left Tallahassee to become a director at the Heritage Foundation, oversight of Florida’s general education curriculum was given over to Jason Jewell, a right-wing activist who formerly led a Great Books program at a conservative Christian college.

Last year, as Chief Academic Officer of the State University System, Jewell presided over the creation of a sanitized, Florida version of an open access sociology textbook. After faculty raised awareness that the state was censoring the textbook to exclude content on race and gender, the BOG removed “Introduction to Sociology” from the general education curriculum, relegating it to the same fate as already excluded courses like “Sociology of Gender and Social Problems.” Notably, “Families in the United States” is now the only sociology course that can be taken for general education credit in the state of Florida – a testament to the Heritage Foundation’s goal of bolstering the “traditional” family.

The “moral reset” of Florida universities has also included the creation of new centers through which the Heritage Foundation is leveraging millions of dollars of Florida taxpayer money in service of its own deeply partisan ends. Following advocacy by a council linked to the Heritage Foundation, the Florida state legislature established the Hamilton School on the University of Florida’s campus. The aim of the school and a related center which should be headed by a “serious right-wing politics person,” Yenor explained in an email obtained through a public records request, is to create “a generation of thoughtful, strong, practical leaders to head up the conservative movement” and to produce “a new group of young male leaders who could lead the state.”

Other university centers created by the state legislature are even more directly tied to partisan advocacy. The Adam Smith Center at Florida International University hosts the Heritage Foundation-conceived “Carvalho Dialogues” (named after the late, far-right Brazilian conspiracy theorist) to convene right-wing Latin American politicians in support of imperialist America First and conservative policy goals. The Institute for Governance & Civics at Florida State University employs faculty affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and the conservative Christian legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom to produce research and advocacy in support of Christian Right policy objectives like undermining public schools and upending anti-discrimination laws.

They Want Fewer People to Go to College

The education landscape in Florida is being changed in other, less transparently ideological ways. Yenor has observed that “as late as 1980, only 8% of the country went to college.” Yenor, who orchestrated the shuttering of DEI programs in Florida universities and who thinks women should be trad wives, proposes, “The United States should move toward 8% from its current 46%.” Project 2025 argues that postsecondary education policy should be “rebalanced to focus far more on bolstering the workforce skills of Americans.”

“When I became Governor,” DeSantis said at a February 2026 press conference, “I made the point very strongly that there is more than one way that you can succeed as a young person.” The Yale and Harvard graduate proceeded to explain, “Not everyone needs to go to a four-year brick and ivy university.” DeSantis recently declared Florida number one in the nation for workforce education. Under the DeSantis administration, Career and Technical Education has expanded in K-12 schools and more students participate in pre-apprenticeship programs.

DeSantis is careful to frame educational pathways as purely a personal choice. But if higher education contracts to 1960 levels of attendance, it is undoubtedly the working class and students of color who would lose access. Last month, the Heritage Foundation released model legislation that penalizes state universities for open admission policies. Cheered by the Heritage Foundation, Florida has, of course, already eliminated the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs designed to foster the success of once excluded groups.

The Proposed Rules

Much more prescriptive than the enabling legislation, the proposed rules specify ways that accreditors must assess - and must not assess - institutions. Here are the implications of a few of the most significant changes:

Accreditors Must Ensure Institutions Toe the State Line. The Heritage Foundation has long sought to change the law so that states can create their own accreditation systems. In 2014, DeSantis, then a US congressional representative, sponsored a failed Heritage Foundation-supported bill to this effect. As Governor, last year, DeSantis created a new state-run accrediting group to enable Florida and other member states to evaluate their state university systems according to standards that they devise.

The proposed rules lock in state control over higher education institutions by preventing accreditors from enforcing quality standards that contravene state law. Although the proposed rules introduce a new requirement for institutions to maintain academic freedom policies, faculty in states like Florida will not be empowered to exercise academic freedom as state law precludes teaching about systemic oppression in the general education (SB 266) or collaborating in research with colleagues in Venezuela (SB 846).

(It is also worth noting that the proposed rules unmoor academic freedom from two closely related principles: shared governance and tenure. The proposed rules eliminate a requirement for faculty involvement in accreditors’ decision-making bodies and require accreditors to evaluate institutions for “sufficient flexibility in instructional staffing” although job security is a necessary precondition for the exercise of academic freedom.)

Ideological Centers Are In. A provision of the proposed rules that requires accreditors to ensure institutions support intellectual diversity could be used to compel speech or to impose ideological centers like those that the state legislature created in Florida on campuses where they are not already in place.

Studies Degrees Are Out and So Are Some Students. The proposed rules change how accreditors evaluate institutions by requiring them to assess whether unspecified minimum expectations are met at the institutional and programmatic level on metrics of student success, including economic returns on degrees. Siri Terjesen, a Heritage Foundation-recognized Florida Atlantic University professor and a member of the committee that created the proposed rules, has identified "gradflation”– the production of more liberal arts degree holders than the job market can allegedly absorb – as a serious problem. The rules could be wielded to require universities to eliminate degree programs, like Women and Gender Studies, that the Right charges have a low return on investment.

Or, even more troublingly, student success metrics on completion and graduation rates could be used to require universities to cut student enrollment. Under Secretary of Education, Nicholas Kent has declared that the new rules will enable him to hold institutions accountable for enrolling students with a low likelihood of success. The proposed rules also prohibit accreditors from adopting any standards related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Wielding the Secret Weapon

The Department of Education claims that the rule changes will enable them to address real problems with the higher education system such as increasing tuition and inadequate graduation rates. But these are not good-faith actors. Trump has called accreditation his “secret weapon”, and he has stocked the Department of Education with generals from the Heritage Foundation who are ready to take their shots. In a 2023 report, the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke argued that career bureaucrats needed to be disempowered; instead, entrusting “political appointees with both the legal and the policy sides of accreditation.” Last year Burke was appointed the Department of Education’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policies and Programs. Former Heritage Foundation staffer Jay Greene now chairs the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity [NACIQI]. which is charged with assessing accreditors.

Preventing the Heritage Foundation from using the accreditation system to decimate higher education will require faculty to organize our campuses and communities to support our colleges and universities as an indispensable public good. Most immediately, faculty and the public should submit comments on the proposed rule changes. For the proposed rule changes to go into effect next year, the Department of Education must meet a November 1 deadline for addressing all public comments. We can impede the adoption of the proposed rules by submitting public comments that document specific harms that will result if the rules are adopted. Consult this AAUP guidance to learn how to submit your proposed comment by midnight on September 21. You can also watch a recording of the previously mentioned webinar that shares additional guidance and suggestions.

Guidance for Submitting Comments to the AIM Committee

In response to Trump’s April 2025 executive order, the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) committee at the Department of Education issued proposed rule changes that would completely rewrite how the accreditation process works.

The AIM committee is currently stocked with Heritage Foundation operatives and Ron DeSantis allies, who have been working for years to shatter the non-partisan and independent accreditation process. The proposed changes would have a catastrophic effect on higher education, which will lock in MAGA education priorities for years to come. Check out AAUP resources for an overview of what is at stake with accreditation.

The AIM committee is currently receiving public comments on these proposed rules changes. It is critical that AAUP members, faculty, staff, and students submit comments to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the issues at stake. All comments must be responded to by the Department of Education, which only has until November 1 to respond. Strong comments can: 1) result in positive changes to the proposed rules; 2) slow the process down; and 3) serve as the basis for future legal action.

Strong comments:

Cite the specific proposed regulatory change

Use your personal experience and circumstances to describe a specific harm.

Please see the templates below for ideas about how to shape your comments. You can upload comments any time before Monday, September 21 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. Additional resources can be found at the American Federation of Teachers, Alliance for Higher Education, and EdTrust

The AAUP is also looking to publicize concerns raised by our members. If you are interested in making your comments public, or want support drafting your comments, please contact: cdaf@aaup.org.

A guest post by Katie Rainwater Sociologist in Florida writing about the National Conservative movement's decimation of public education. Subscribe to Katie

You Can Help Prevent a Major Disaster for Higher Education, Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, Sept. 11, 2026

Friends:

Sometimes the most consequential threats to higher education arrive disguised as technical changes that few people notice until their effects are already felt. The proposed federal changes to accreditation deserve our attention now, especially with the public-comment deadline of September 21 approaching. The encouraging news is that this is still a moment when faculty, students, administrators, and members of the public can learn what is being proposed and make their voices heard.

Reference

U.S. Department of Education. (2026, August 19). U.S. Department of Education Issues Proposed Rule to Overhaul and Improve America’s Higher Education Accreditation System, https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-issues-proposed-rule-overhaul-and-improve-americas-higher-education-accreditation-system

You Can Help Prevent a Major Disaster for Higher Education

An opportunity for your voice to be heard.

Sep 11, 2026

Imagine you had the ability to go back in time and stop Elon Musk and DOGE minions from wrecking USAID, an established institution providing demonstrable benefits to people around the world, delivering outsized impacts relative to resources spent.

Post-secondary education is confronting a DOGE-like threat, an attempted takeover by right-wing ideologues, using a model crafted by the people who brought you Project 2025. You don’t need a trio of precogs bathing in a milky pool to tell you that these folks are not interested in broad-based democratic representation or a diversity of views in higher ed.

The vehicle through which this is being attempted is institutional accreditation. Accreditation on its face is not interesting. It is time-consuming, bureaucratic, and the kind of thing most college faculty want to avoid so they can do their work of teaching and research.

But accreditation rooted in principles of academic freedom is a necessity for this work to happen free from external interference and partisan political oversight. Currently, there is a very real attack on these principles through an attempt to create new accrediting bodies that will be empowered to erase these rights.

We previously covered this issue through the “Academic Freedom on the Line” podcast with Bob Shireman, an expert on accreditation:



Academic Freedom on the Line Podcast: Accreditation, with Bob Shireman

John Warner and Bob Shireman
·
June 6, 2025
Listen now

We also featured an interview with Matthew Boedy about Ron DeSantis’s creation of the Commission for Public Higher Education, an attempt to create alternative accrediting bodies that will allow institutions to operate without many of the protections currently in place.



A Stealth Threat to Academic Freedom That We Can Stop in Its Tracks

John Warner
·
September 2, 2025

Read full story

This news is worrying, but the good news is that there are established mechanisms for resistance, resistance which comes from individuals expressing their disapproval of these attempts to unmake our public-serving institutions and turn them into vassals of one political party.

On Monday, September 14, at 7 p.m. ET, the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom will be hosting “Accreditation and You,” a webinar to learn about the far right’s attempt to capture higher ed accreditation, what is changing and why it matters, and how you can join in the fight and take action. In this webinar, you will learn how to write and submit effective comments—in advance of an important September 21 deadline—about the federal Department of Education’s dangerous proposed revision of the rules that govern accreditors, get resources (faculty senate resolutions, analysis, information sheets), connect with academic workers in your states and nationally, and help problem solve and plan our campaign.

This is our opportunity to head off an attack that could have generational impacts, if successful. Individual resistance matters. Every voice counts.

Please consider joining us for the event.

More professors want to leave Texas this year, citing political climate, censorship, survey says, by Milla Surjadi, Dallas Morning News 9.15.26

Friends:

The piece suggests that what we are witnessing in Texas higher education is no longer simply faculty dissatisfaction with a single law or university administration, but the emergence of a broader climate of uncertainty about whether professors can continue to do their work with professional independence.

SB 37 gives governing boards substantially greater authority over curriculum and institutional governance, while recent system-level policies have intensified scrutiny of particular areas of teaching and scholarship. At the same time, faculty are increasingly reluctant to recommend Texas as a place to build an academic career. 

My own students have expressed discouragement about the current state of affairs, and I understand why. Without a doubt, this is a difficult moment to be a student or a faculty member, and we should not sugarcoat what is happening. 

I hope the broader public is paying close attention and remains civically engaged, because the consequences will extend well beyond university campuses. When talented faculty conclude that they can teach, research, and build their careers more freely elsewhere, Texas universities risk losing not only individual scholars but also the intellectual vitality, mentorship, research capacity, and institutional reputation that take decades to build—and are not easily recovered.

-Angela Valenzuela

More professors want to leave Texas this year, citing political climate, censorship, survey says

A larger percentage of Texas respondents said they plan to look for a job in another state this year compared to last year, according to a survey by the American Association of University Professors.

By Milla Surjadi,Staff Writer

Sep 14, 2026

The University of North Texas campus in Denton. 

The Dallas Morning News Staff
A greater percentage of Texas professors want to leave the state this year than last year, citing its political climate and concerns about censorship, according to a recent survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors.

Of more than 1,000 Texas respondents, about a third said they had applied for a job in another state in the last two years, and about 35% said they planned to do so in the next hiring cycle. That’s an increase from last year, where about a quarter of respondents answered that they had applied for a job or were planning to do so.

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A majority of the Texas professors, around 70%, also said they would not encourage graduate students or faculty colleagues to seek a job in the state. That percentage is up from 60% of respondents last year.

The annual survey from the professors union polled nearly 3,000 faculty members in public and private institutions in the South. Fewer professors responded to the survey this year. There were 2,763 total respondents this year, down from 3,926 last year. In Texas, there were 1,023 respondents, down from 1,126 last year.

Related: Republicans are remaking Texas' public universities. Some professors are leaving
Professors cited their state's broad political climate as the top reason they wanted to leave for another job. Many Texas professors who said they had applied for an out-of-state job cited the political climate, concerns about academic freedom, shared governance and DEI issues. Many also expressed frustration with recent restrictions at their institutions around how race and gender can be taught.

The survey provides a rare glimpse into how many professors are eyeing exits as Texas’ universities undergo a Republican-led overhaul to root out perceived liberal bias on campus and in classrooms. Public data on how many Texas professors have left the state or profession is sparse.

In the past year, a new state law has given governor-appointed regents more oversight over public universities, including course offerings. Several university systems are cutting classes and academic programs related to race and gender as Republican lawmakers target those fields.

Related: Republican lawmakers praise new college oversight law. Critics say it’s led to censorship

Many Texas professors have raised concerns university leaders have gone further than the law prescribes in restricting what can be taught. A third of Texas respondents said they had syllabuses or curriculum choices questioned or changed by administrators in the last year.

“I would suspect that the many events in higher education that have happened in Texas in the last year made those numbers go up in significant ways,” said Matthew Boedy, president of the Georgia AAUP chapter who oversees the survey. “Texas is at the center of a lot of attacks.”

He added that the survey also reflects professors who may want to leave their state, but cannot due to personal circumstances or academic discipline.

Some professors and Democrats have warned recent reforms could lead to a brain drain — an exodus of Texas’ most intellectually capable professors and years of tumultuous recruitment and retention. Supporters of higher education reform have pushed back on such predictions, arguing that addressing ideological biases and aligning universities with workforce needs will attract more professors, students and jobs to Texas.

Texas Tech University System Chancellor Brandon Creighton, a former senator and the architect of recent conservative laws reshaping higher education, told The Dallas Morning News in February the system was seeing record-high faculty interest.

The AAUP survey, which was open through August, polled professors from 13 states: Texas, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Arkansas. The survey has been conducted by the Georgia AAUP chapter since 2022, and added Oklahoma for the first time this year.

The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.

The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, Judy and Jim Gibbs, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Ron Steinhart, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab's journalism.

Milla Surjadi
HIGHER EDUCATION REPORTER