“I Will Not Submit”: A Powerful Day at the Historic Texas People’s Hearing, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., August 13, 2026

“I Will Not Submit”: A Powerful Day at the Historic Texas People’s Hearing

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

August 13, 2026

Yesterday’s historic Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus People’s Hearing in Austin on “Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom” was powerful—intellectually, emotionally, and politically. It was also a reminder of what becomes possible when elected officials, students, faculty, advocates, allies, and community members come together to insist that public institutions remain accountable to the people they serve.

My special thanks go to Texas State Representative Lulu Flores for convening the hearing and for placing yesterday’s gathering within a much longer history of Mexican American political struggle in Texas. I especially appreciated her acknowledgment of the late State Representative Irma Rangel, the first Mexican American woman elected to the Texas House of Representatives, as well as the presence yesterday of former State Senator Gonzalo Barrientos.

That recognition mattered. Rangel and Barrientos represent a generation of Mexican American legislators who understood the importance of listening directly to communities and translating public testimony into policy. Their work reminds us of an earlier era when People’s Hearings and other forms of public engagement helped legislators confront inequities in higher education and imagine remedies. Barrientos helped initiate the legislative response to the elimination of affirmative action in Texas higher education, and Rangel ultimately authored House Bill 588, which became the Texas Top Ten Percent Law.

That history gives yesterday’s hearing even greater significance. People’s Hearings are not merely symbolic exercises. They create a public record, bring harms into public view that institutions might otherwise treat as merely administrative, and generate ideas capable of changing public policy.

I am also deeply grateful for the tireless work of the Latino Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, whose members have worked for months to bring attention to what is happening at UT Austin and to help make yesterday’s hearing possible. Dr. Emilio Zamora deserves special recognition for conceiving the idea of holding a People’s Hearing in the first place and for playing a central role in transforming that idea into reality. 

Drawing on the long tradition of People’s Hearings as vehicles for public testimony, democratic accountability, and policy change, he recognized the need to create a public forum where students, faculty, advocates, and community members could place their concerns directly before elected officials. He was also deeply involved in the organizing work required to bring the hearing together. 

I am also very grateful to Alicia Perez Hodge, Dr. Maria Unda, Neto Longoria, and the rest of this remarkable crew, whose sustained work, relationships, and persistence were indispensable. Organizing an event like this requires countless conversations, meetings, phone calls, invitations, drafts, negotiations, and acts of persistence that the public rarely sees. Yesterday’s powerful gathering was possible because people had an idea, organized around it, and refused to give up.

I left equally grateful to everyone who participated: the legislators who listened, the students who spoke with eloquence and courage, the faculty who brought scholarship and experience to the conversation, the community leaders who reminded us of the historical stakes, and the advocates who have been doing this work for years. People spoke with intellect, heart, urgency, and an unmistakable commitment to the future of public higher education in Texas.

And the timing could hardly have been more striking.

Today, the Austin American-Statesman Editorial Board published an opinion piece titled, “Texans Deserve Answers About UT’s New Center for Humanities,” arguing that a public university entrusted with taxpayer dollars has an obligation to explain major institutional decisions, particularly during a period of sweeping change.

That call for public accountability echoes one of the clearest messages emerging from yesterday’s hearing:

What is happening at UT Austin cannot simply be explained away as administrative reorganization.

The consolidation of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies into a new institutional structure involves fields representing decades of scholarship, institution-building, mentorship, intellectual struggle, and community investment. What happens to them matters not only to the university. It matters to the people of Texas whose histories, experiences, cultural contributions, and struggles for democracy these fields have helped document, interpret, and preserve.

We are, quite literally, in the fight of our lives for the heart and soul of Texas higher education.

I am sharing three videos I recorded yesterday because they capture something that words alone cannot fully convey. There was a palpable sense in the room that something consequential is happening—and that silence at this moment would itself constitute a choice, and a poor one at that.

One message came through repeatedly:

There is still time for repair.

But that window will not remain open indefinitely.

Once departments lose their institutional standing, faculty lines disappear, graduate programs weaken, students go elsewhere, intellectual communities disperse, and decades of accumulated institutional knowledge are lost, restoration becomes extraordinarily difficult. What may look reversible on an organizational chart can become practically irreversible in the life of a university.

That is why this moment requires more than documentation.

It requires intervention.

And perhaps no moment captured that spirit more powerfully than longtime Chicana activist, intellectual, and movement leader Martha Cotera’s clarion call:

“I WILL NOT SUBMIT!”

Her words rang through the halls.

They were more than an expression of defiance. They summoned a much longer history of communities that fought their way into universities, demanded the right to study their own histories, created Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies, challenged exclusion, and insisted that public institutions become more genuinely democratic.

That history was present in the room yesterday—from the acknowledgment of the late Irma Rangel, to the presence of Gonzalo Barrientos, to Martha Cotera’s declaration, to the students now inheriting struggles they did not create but are being called upon to confront.

We inherit these struggles, but we also inherit their possibilities.

The question before us is whether we will allow institutions built through decades of sacrifice to be quietly diminished—or whether we will insist that Texas higher education remain capacious enough to tell the full story of Texas, accountable enough to answer to the public, and courageous enough to sustain the scholarship a democratic society requires.

Yesterday, the answer from the People’s Hearing was unmistakable.

We will not submit.

We will organize.
We will testify.
We will document.
We will teach.
We will remember.

And, most importantly, we will continue demanding repair while repair is still possible.

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

The Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus is holding hearings throughout the state and recording these important public proceedings. Rep. Lulu Flores’s recording of yesterday’s hearing should also be available soon, helping ensure that the testimony, concerns, and calls for action expressed in Austin become part of the public record.

How to Occupy a University, by Deena Varner, The Higher Ed Advocate, Aug. 5, 2026

Friends:

Deena Varner’s powerful essay, “How to Occupy a University,” makes an argument that deserves far more attention: the political remaking of higher education does not always arrive through dramatic legislation, mass firings, or the outright closure of universities. Sometimes it happens quietly, through the ordinary machinery of administration.

That is precisely what makes the developments at Texas Tech so troubling.

Varner shows how Chancellor Brandon Creighton’s memoranda move authority away from faculty expertise and shared governance and place it increasingly in systems of review, compliance, certification, and political oversight. The university remains open. Classes continue. Degrees are awarded. Committees still meet. But the location of authority changes—and with it, the meaning of the institution itself.

Another useful concept for understanding this process is institutional capture, a term increasingly invoked by critics to describe what happens when institutions that are supposed to exercise some degree of independent judgment are brought under the control of political actors or ideological movements. Capture does not necessarily require eliminating an institution. More often, it involves taking control of its leadership, procedures, priorities, and decision-making structures so that the institution begins serving purposes different from those for which it was established.

This is where the connection to Project 2025 becomes especially important. Project 2025 is not simply a collection of conservative policy proposals. As Varner emphasizes, it is also concerned with how political change can be made durable through personnel, supervision, organizational design, and the relocation of institutional authority. What we are witnessing in Texas higher education may be a version of that same strategy.

The goal is not necessarily to destroy the university. It is to capture it—to make the university administer its own political transformation.

That distinction matters. A university can retain its buildings, departments, students, and public identity while steadily losing the professional autonomy, faculty authority, academic freedom, and independence of judgment that make it a university in the democratic sense.

Varner gives us another powerful word for what follows from institutional capture: occupation. The two concepts work together. Institutional capture identifies the transfer of power; occupation describes the condition that results when the institution continues to function outwardly while its internal authority has been redirected toward the priorities of those who captured it.

This is also why administrative procedures deserve far more public scrutiny. The gravest threats to higher education will not always announce themselves as attacks on higher education. They may arrive as memoranda, compliance procedures, curricular reviews, reporting requirements, personnel decisions, reorganizations, and seemingly routine administrative directives. As Varner puts it, the danger is that the university’s own mechanisms can become vehicles for its political transformation.

We therefore need to pay attention not only to what universities are prohibited from doing, but also to who is acquiring the power to decide what universities may teach, study, say, and become.

That is the deeper struggle now underway in American higher education. It is not merely a fight over particular courses, programs, or words. It is a struggle over who will govern the university—and whether our public universities will remain institutions capable of independent inquiry or become instruments of political power.

Please attend tomorrow's August 12th People's Hearing at the Texas Legislature If you are desirous of speaking your truth. 

-Angela Valenzuela

How to Occupy a University
Project 2025, Texas Tech, and the Administrative Remaking of Higher Education

The Higher Ed Advocate
Aug 05, 2026

by Deena Varner

Project 2025 is often described as a plan to dismantle the administrative state. Its public reputation rests on its policy proposals, but the document itself spends an astonishing amount of time elsewhere—on administration. It explains how agencies should be organized, how political appointees should be selected and managed, how civil servants should be evaluated and eliminated if they are not ideologically aligned, how authority should move through organizations, how priorities should survive changes in personnel. Again and again, it returns to the same practical problem: how does an institution continue to implement its ideological agenda in perpetuity?

That question does not end in Washington. It appears, in a different form, in the documents now reshaping public higher education in Texas.

Public debate about higher education in Texas has focused largely on legislation—restrictions on DEI, classroom speech, curricula, and faculty governance. But laws do not reorganize universities by themselves. They establish authority in the abstract. The work of transforming an institution begins afterward, in implementation documents that rarely attract public attention because they present themselves as ordinary administration.

Brandon Creighton’s memoranda are two of those documents.

Implementation

Last year, Creighton was a Texas state senator. He authored or co-sponsored much of the state’s recent legislation aimed at making the state more hostile to minoritized students, women, and LGBTQIA+ people, and dismantling public universities as we know them. In November 2025, he was appointed the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, which serves more than 65,000 students.

One of his first acts was to implement a course content review process in which all faculty were required to disclose whether their courses mentioned gender or sexuality. If a course did mention such topics, faculty were instructed to remove any such materials unless and until they were approved by the Board of Regents—a group of political appointees whose role historically has been fiduciary. On April 9, 2026, this system of prior restraint was replaced with a permanent and near total ban on classroom instruction of topics related to gender identity and sexual orientation.

While this level of censorship is unprecedented in American history, the significance of the Creighton memoranda lies also in the university it imagines. They shift judgment away from faculty and toward administrative oversight. They treat disciplinary expertise as something to be monitored rather than trusted. Questions that once belonged primarily to departments and faculty governance are now questions of compliance, review, certification, and institutional accountability.

Creighton’s memos reorganize how the university governs itself.

Occupation

The mechanisms the memoranda use are familiar: Universities already have administrators. They already produce guidance documents. They already certify compliance with state and federal law. The Creighton memos pervert these mechanisms such that they become vehicles for a political project that Creighton himself could not accomplish in the Texas senate.

The version of Texas Senate Bill 37 that Creighton authored proposed a sweeping reorganization of higher education in the state, including far-reaching restrictions on curricula and faculty authority. Even within the extraordinarily conservative Texas legislature, several of its most expansive provisions proved impossible to enact. The questions they raised, however, did not disappear. They reappeared in a different form—not as legislation, but as administration.

While this level of censorship is unprecedented in American history, the significance of the Creighton memoranda lies also in the university it imagines. They shift judgment away from faculty and toward administrative oversight. They treat disciplinary expertise as something to be monitored rather than trusted.

Under Creighton’s regime, the ordinary machinery of the university has acquired a new purpose: ideological capture. The point is no longer simply to administer the university but to align its ordinary operations with his preferred political vision.

From the outside, little appears to have changed: students attend classes, degrees are awarded, departments meet, and committees deliberate. The transformation appears in the relocation of authority, in the definition of what a university is, whom it serves, and what its members are allowed to say and learn.

This is the institutional imagination of Project 2025. Law and policy matter, but so do the mechanisms through which they become routine. Durable political victories require institutions that reliably reproduce a governing vision, and this is accomplished through personnel, supervision, and organizational design.

Creighton has applied these lessons to one university system, and he has plans to apply them to the national system of public higher education.

The genius—and the danger—of this approach is that it does not require dramatic confrontation. No loyalty oath announces the arrival of a new political order, as it did during the McCarthy era. No public purge signals that the university has entered a different era, as it did during the Stalin era. The transformation proceeds through memoranda, implementation guidance, reporting requirements, compliance reviews, curricular certifications, and administrative procedures. In the Creighton era, each document appears technical. Together they redefine the institution.

Creighton’s defining innovation is that the institution becomes the instrument of its own destruction.

For generations, political movements have sought to discipline universities from the outside—through funding cuts, legislation, purges, or public pressure. Those tools remain. But something equally ambitious is emerging alongside them: the effort to redirect the university’s own administrative machinery toward political ends. The institution is asked to preserve its legitimacy while gradually relinquishing the traditions of professional judgment that gave that legitimacy its democratic value.

Project 2025 imagines remaking the federal bureaucracy by reorganizing its internal structures. The documents now emerging from Texas suggest a parallel ambition for higher education. They point toward a university that looks increasingly familiar from the outside while operating according to a different sovereign logic.

That is not destruction. It is occupation.

The National Stage

Public universities occupy an unusual constitutional position. They are created, funded, and governed in part by the state, yet they have never been understood as ordinary state agencies. Legislatures appropriate funds and governors appoint regents, but the work of producing and evaluating knowledge has historically rested elsewhere—in disciplinary communities, faculty governance, and professional judgment. However imperfectly realized, that division of labor and authority has long defined the relationship between public universities and democratic government.

The Eleventh Circuit’s recent decision striking down key provisions of Florida’s Stop WOKE Act reaffirmed that arrangement. In protecting faculty speech against state-imposed orthodoxy, the court did more than vindicate individual expression. It preserved the institutional conditions under which universities can exercise independent judgment. In protecting speech, First Amendment doctrine has also helped preserve the institutional arrangements through which universities exercise independent judgment.

That is not destruction. It is occupation.

That constitutional tradition leaves a practical problem for political movements seeking to reorganize higher education. If professional judgment cannot simply be displaced by legislative command, then the institution itself becomes the site of ideological struggle. The question is no longer only what the law permits the state to do. It is how the university’s own procedures can be redirected toward different ends.

Creighton’s memoranda belong to this second category. They are implementation documents, and implementation is where abstract political authority becomes institutional practice. Every review process, every certification requirement, every layer of administrative oversight answers the same question: where does judgment reside? Every implementation document answers a constitutional question disguised as an administrative one.

Universities are not unique in this respect. The press occupies a similar constitutional position. Neither governs in the ordinary sense, yet both perform a public function by producing knowledge, testing political claims, and establishing standards of credibility that governments do not control. Their legitimacy depends upon their ability to reach judgments that are not merely extensions of partisan political power.

Authoritarian movements have long sought to subordinate institutions whose authority they do not fully control, and whose commitment to free thought and expression is an obstacle to their success. The occupation of Texas Tech illustrates one way that project can proceed: not by dismantling the university from without but by redirecting the ordinary procedures by which it operates.

Creighton’s memoranda are remarkable not only for their prohibition of ideas, speech, and expression but for the administrative architecture they construct. The institution continues to teach, deliberate, certify, and govern. But these activities no longer exist primarily to create and cultivate knowledge. Instead, the work of the university is concentrated on demonstrating fidelity to the political priorities of its occupying force.

The university remains. Its sovereign logic does not.

Project 2025 imagines reorganizing the federal bureaucracy so that its ordinary operations reliably reproduce a governing vision. The political project emerging from Texas demonstrates how that same organizational logic can be extended to institutions that constitutional traditions have historically insulated from direct political control.


Deena Varner is an assistant professor of practice in the English department at Texas Tech University. She is the author of From the Courtroom to the Boardroom: Privatizing Justice in the Neoliberal United States, which examines how legal and civic rights are eroded through administrative procedures. She is writing in her capacity as a private individual and not on behalf of her employer.

The Christian Nationalist Government Is Here, by Eric Lane, August 11, 2026

Eric Lane ends his powerful essay posted below, “The Christian Nationalist Government Is Here,” with the question that matters most: What are we going to do about it?

Let's not grow fearful here, my friends. The answer, ultimately, is democracy.

If Americans are concerned about the growing fusion of religious ideology and governmental power, the most consequential response available to them is to vote—and to vote en masse.

Christian nationalism did not acquire political influence overnight. It built organizations, cultivated candidates, developed legal strategies, created networks of donors and activists, and, crucially, turned people out to vote. 

Those who believe in religious pluralism, public education, academic freedom, civil rights, constitutional government, and the separation of church and state must understand the importance of electoral participation with equal seriousness.

That does not mean everyone must vote the same way. It means citizens must pay attention to what candidates actually stand for, examine their records, and vote for those who genuinely represent their interests and their understanding of democracy.

And voting cannot be treated as something that happens only during presidential elections. Governors appoint officials. Legislatures write laws. State boards determine educational policy. Judges interpret constitutional rights. Members of Congress decide what becomes federal law. And all of this is happening while school boards, city councils, and county governments exercise enormous power over everyday life.

The lesson of Lane’s essay is therefore larger than Christian nationalism. Organized political minorities can exercise extraordinary political power even when the broader public disengages.

Democracy has always depended upon participation.

So, what are we going to do about it?

Register. Organize. Learn where candidates stand. Help others participate. Vote in primaries, local elections, midterms, and presidential elections.

And above all, vote in numbers large enough that government once again reflects the will and interests of the people it is supposed to serve.

-Angela Valenzuela

The Christian Nationalist Government Is Here
The Christian nationalist capture of the United States government has entered its most dangerous stage.

Eric Lane | Substack
Aug 11, 2026

With his confirmation as attorney general, Todd Blanche—a man who wants to put “God front and center again” and make Christianity “actually a benefit”—now commands the Department of Justice and the vast machinery of federal law enforcement.

He is not alone. Pete Hegseth, openly aligned with Christian nationalism and its patriarchal vision of biblical authority, runs the Department of War. Russell Vought, a chief architect of Project 2025, is turning the Christian right’s blueprint into the daily machinery of government.

Christian nationalists no longer stand outside the gates demanding power. They are inside, pulling the levers.

Blanche’s confirmation gives them something indispensable to every authoritarian movement: the power to decide whom government protects, whom it prosecutes, and whose rights count.

And Blanche has already told us what he believes government should do. During a July 30 call organized by the White House Faith Office, he said his goal was to ensure that “God is front and center again” and that being a Christian in America is “actually a benefit.”

A benefit. That word gives the game away. Under the Constitution, Christianity is not supposed to be a benefit. Neither is Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, atheism, or any other religious identity. Government may neither punish nor reward you because of your beliefs. That is religious liberty. What Blanche described is religious privilege. There is a name for that: Christian nationalism. And when government enforces that privilege, there is another name for it: tyranny.

Agency by Agency

Blanche chairs Trump’s Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias. Notice what Trump did not call it. It is not a task force against religious discrimination generally. The administration singled out Christians, constructed a persecution narrative around them, then handed the man who runs federal law enforcement the job of acting on it.

Blanche also served as an ex officio member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, chaired by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and populated with Franklin Graham, Ben Carson, Paula White-Cain, Eric Metaxas, and Kelly Shackelford. The seat belongs to the attorney general, making the point sharper: whoever runs Justice receives a place on a commission whose report compared church-state separation to a “Berlin wall” and whose chairman declared there is “no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in the Constitution.”

The campaign extends far beyond Justice.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has repeatedly used official communications to preach Christianity to more than 100,000 employees. Her Easter message told the entire workforce that “we celebrate” the Resurrection, invoked “our faith,” and proclaimed Jesus “our risen Lord.” Seven USDA employees and a federal workers’ union have sued, arguing that Rollins used the authority of her office to proselytize a captive workforce. She has continued sending the messages since the lawsuit began.

At Veterans Affairs, Secretary Doug Collins, a Baptist minister and Air Force Reserve chaplain, created his own anti-Christian-bias task force. He instructed employees to report colleagues for “informal policies, procedures, or unofficial understandings hostile to Christian views,” and asked for names, dates, and locations. Imagine the atmosphere that creates: federal employees wondering whether a colleague will report them for an opinion deemed insufficiently friendly to Christianity.

At Housing and Urban Development, Secretary Scott Turner has erased any remaining ambiguity. Turner, an associate pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church, has said Washington is “a mission field” and that “HUD is a great vehicle, but the Kingdom is the mission.” At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority Conference, he told the crowd, “The Biden administration worshiped the government as their God, but we in the Trump administration, we will worship God Almighty.”

At the Department of Education, Linda McMahon has partnered the federal government with Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and dozens of other conservative organizations through the America 250 Civics Education Coalition. The department calls it civics programming. The Freedom From Religion Foundation calls it an attempt to rewrite history through a Christian nationalist lens. Look at the partners and decide which description fits.

This is not a series of officials occasionally mentioning God. Agency by agency, Christian nationalists are replacing religious neutrality with Christian preference, turning public offices into pulpits and federal power into an instrument of religious restoration.

The Capture of the Other Branches

The project does not stop with the executive branch.

House Speaker Mike Johnson worked as an attorney for Alliance Defending Freedom, one of the most powerful legal organizations in the Christian right. He has called the Bible his worldview and the “ultimate source of all truth.” He has dismissed church-state separation as a “misnomer” and argued that the Founders intended America to be a Christian nation. He now occupies the highest position in the House of Representatives.

The same movement built the Supreme Court’s religious-right supermajority. Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society spent decades constructing the judicial pipeline. Leo advised Trump and helped shepherd Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh through confirmation. Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment completed the six-member conservative majority. That Court overturned Roe v. Wade. It has redirected public money toward religious education, expanded religious exemptions, protected public prayer by government employees, and steadily dismantled the wall separating church and state.

These justices did not emerge from a constitutional mist. They came through an ideological assembly line built by Leo, financed by secretive conservative money, and designed to remake American law. The operation worked.

The President Chosen by God

None of this could happen without the millions of white evangelical Protestants who supply the movement with votes, money, and divine permission. A PRRI survey conducted after the 2024 election found that 60 percent of white evangelical Protestants agreed that “God ordained Donald Trump to be the winner.”

Think about what that belief does to democracy. If voters elect a president, they may criticize him, restrain him, remove him. If God chooses the president, political opposition starts to look like rebellion against divine authority. Investigations become persecution. Court decisions become attacks on God’s servant. Elections matter only when they ratify what believers have already declared to be God’s will.

Trump’s personal conduct poses no obstacle to this theology. His evangelical defenders compare him to Cyrus, the pagan king God supposedly used for a purpose Cyrus never understood. It is a useful miracle. Every moral failure becomes evidence of a mysterious plan. Trump need not be honest, faithful, or particularly religious. He is the imperfect vessel chosen to destroy their enemies.

Trump understands the transaction. He gives the Christian right judges, abortion restrictions, public money for religious schools, and federal power. In return, its leaders place a halo over his head and tell their followers his authority comes from somewhere higher than the ballot box.

Leonard Leo supplied the judges. Russell Vought supplied the blueprint. Project 2025 supplied the personnel and policies. White evangelical Protestant supremacy supplied the army, and its religious leaders assured that army that God had chosen its commander.

Todd Blanche now holds the prosecutorial sword. The question is no longer whether Christian nationalists seek control of the United States government. Todd Blanche now holds the prosecutorial sword. Christian nationalists have captured enormous power across all three branches of the United States government. The question is no longer what they intend to do with it. They have already told us.



The question is: What are we going to do about it?

REMINDER NOTICE: Historic People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education is taking place on Wednesday, August 12, 9-11:45 AM, Texas Capitol

August 10, 2026

Dear Friends:

This is a reminder that the historic People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education is taking place on Wednesday, August 12, from 9:00 AM to 11:45 PM at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center at 1501 N. Congress, Austin Texas. The People’s Hearing will be followed by a press conference at 11:45 AM. We have a great lineup of witnesses and press conference presenters who will be offering testimony and commenting on the assault on Ethnic, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies at Texas colleges and universities.

The Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus, State Representative Lulu Flores, and the Latino Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education (LC4EHE) encourage everyone to prepare oral and written testimony so that we may issue a report on your voice and perspective concerning censorship, academic freedom, and authoritarianism in Texas higher education institutions. We will focus on the curtailment of Ethnic, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies at the University of Texas at Austin and look forward to a rich conversation on the larger statewide threats to higher education. 

These items will direct you to the following links:

1. the general invitation letter that you can share with friends and colleagues;

2. an event flyer; 

3. a map noting the nearby Capitol Visitors Parking Garage and the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center;

4. a fact sheet on the threats to diversity and academic freedom 

5. Connect livestream channel or on Facebook Black Brown Dialogues on Policy

Register electronically ASAP at: https://actionnetwork.org/events/austin-tlpc-peoples-hearing/. If you plan to testify, please click on this link background reading material to inform your testimony. 

Regardless of whether you attend the hearing, you may submit your written testimony to Dr. Emilio Zamora at emiliosoliszamora@gmail.com. If you do attend and wish to present your written testimony, please register in person at the event before 9 AM. You may submit written testimony of any length; however, please know that oral testimony is limited to 3 minutes. 

If you have any questions, call or write Neto Longoria (737) 359-5087, Rlongoria10@gmail.com or Alicia Perez-Hodge at (512) 736-8449, barriogirl40@gmail.com

In Solidarity,

Alicia Pérez-Hodge, Coordinator, LC4EHE

Emilio Zamora, Ph.D., Secretary, LC4EHE

María Del Carmen Unda, Ph.D., Deputy Coordinator, LC4EHE

After Colleges Reject ‘Compact,’ Trump Officials Try a Letter, by Michael C. Bender and Alan Blinder, New York Times

Friends,

As covered by New York Times columnists, Michael C. Bender and Alan Blinder this letter from Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has to be understood in context.

The U.S. Department of Education's recent open letter inviting colleges and universities to restore public confidence through greater transparency, public commitments, and institutional self-assessment arrives wrapped in the language of partnership. On its face, few would object to these aspirations. Public universities exist to serve the public, and they should always be prepared to explain how they fulfill that mission.

The difficulty lies not in the request but in the vexed history that precedes it.

Trust is built through consistency between words and actions. Over the past several years, colleges and universities have confronted an unprecedented campaign of political intervention into higher education. 

Institutions have faced investigations, funding suspensions, threats to academic programs, restrictions on faculty governance, and efforts to influence what may be taught, researched, or discussed. Most notably, the administration's earlier proposal for a "Compact" with higher education sought to link federal research funding to ideological commitments that many universities concluded would compromise their independence. The overwhelming rejection of that proposal reflected a broad consensus that public accountability must never become political allegiance.

Against this backdrop, an open letter requesting voluntary declarations of institutional commitments cannot be viewed in isolation. It inevitably raises questions about purpose and intent. When trust has already been weakened by repeated attempts to expand political oversight of higher education, requests for public affirmations may reasonably be viewed with caution rather than confidence.

The issue extends beyond any single administration. It concerns the fundamental relationship between democratic government and institutions of higher learning. Universities are accountable to the public, but they are not extensions of the state. Their legitimacy depends upon their capacity to pursue knowledge wherever the evidence leads, to cultivate intellectual diversity rather than ideological conformity, and to protect inquiry from political pressure regardless of its source.

This distinction is especially important today. Throughout American history, periods of political polarization have often produced demands that universities align themselves with prevailing political agendas. Yet higher education serves democracy best when it maintains sufficient independence to question prevailing orthodoxies—including those advanced by government itself. Academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and shared governance were developed precisely to preserve that independence.

None of this suggests that universities are beyond criticism. Higher education has legitimate shortcomings that deserve serious public discussion, including affordability, student debt, public accessibility, governance, and the need to strengthen public confidence. Universities should welcome thoughtful critique and remain open to reform. 

But reform, my friends, loses its legitimacy when it becomes inseparable from efforts to centralize political authority over curriculum, research, hiring, admissions, or campus life.

Trust, therefore, cannot be restored through carefully worded letters or symbolic gestures. It emerges gradually through reciprocal respect. Government demonstrates its trustworthiness by honoring constitutional principles, protecting due process, respecting institutional independence, and refraining from using public resources to reward political compliance or punish dissent. Universities demonstrate theirs through openness, accountability, rigorous scholarship, and faithful service to the public.

Trust must move in both directions. Until governmental actions consistently reflect respect for the autonomy of America's colleges and universities, skepticism is not evidence of institutional obstinacy. It is a rational response born of recent experience and a necessary safeguard for the democratic—and democratizing—purposes that higher education was created to serve.

-Angela Valenzuela

After Colleges Reject ‘Compact,’ Trump Officials Try a Letter

By Michael C. Bender and Alan Blinder

August 3, 2026 | New York Times

The open letter from Education Secretary Linda McMahon fell far short of the attempt at a compact last year that dangled research money in return for embracing the Trump administration’s agenda.
Linda McMahon, the education secretary, signed the letter that asks every postsecondary institution in the nation to publicly state its commitments and planned changes “before the end of 2026.”Credit...
Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

The Trump administration is making another push to persuade university leaders to address policies that it says have eroded trust with the American public, sending an open letter on Monday to college leaders asking them to respond to concerns over academic standards, admissions procedures and tuition costs.

The letter, signed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, is a significant departure from an attempt last year to incentivize universities with a so-called compact that dangled easier access to research funding for schools that embraced the administration’s agenda. That proposal was widely rejected.

This time, the administration is not proposing any new legal or regulatory mandates and avoids any specific requests for eliminating protections for transgender students. Instead, Ms. McMahon asks every postsecondary institution in the nation to publicly state its commitments and planned changes “before the end of 2026.”

University presidents and governing boards are asked to address seven subjects — including free speech, foreign influence, artificial intelligence and academic rigor — and post the statements prominently on their websites.

Ms. McMahon’s letter, which does not include any funding threats, suggests that changes will improve academia’s reputation among American parents and students.

“The dilution of academic standards, opaque admissions policies and a domineering monoculture have badly eroded public trust,” she wrote, adding that “only full candor and transparency can begin to strengthen the bonds between higher education and the American people.”

It was not immediately clear how the nation’s thousands of colleges and universities would respond to Ms. McMahon’s letter. But Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, which was not involved in talks with the government before the letter’s release, said he regarded the missive as “a tentative handshake” between the administration and academic institutions. He predicted a significant response.

“For many institutions, this is kind of a no-brainer — it’s a fill-in-the-blanks kind of thing if they want to do it,” said Dr. Mitchell, who noted that many of the topics Ms. McMahon asked schools to discuss had already been subjects of immense debate among education leaders.

Barbara R. Snyder, the president of the Association of American Universities, said she had engaged with administration officials before the missive’s release on Monday. She was joined in the discussions by the chairman of the group’s board, Chancellor Douglas A. Girod of the University of Kansas, and the board’s vice chairman, President Ronald J. Daniels of Johns Hopkins University.

In an interview, Ms. Snyder said that the three had “approached this opportunity in good faith” and that she believed the discussions could advance “a working relationship with the government.”

Ms. Snyder said she had communicated a four-word mantra to administration officials: “No carrots, no sticks.”

The new push comes about 10 months after administration officials, including Ms. McMahon, proposed a compact to try to pull schools into ideological alignment. The document called for, among other conditions, a cap on international enrollment; a tuition freeze; and consideration of “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

It also called for institutions to pledge to adhere to the administration’s preferred definitions around biological sex. And it encouraged policies to “recognize that academic freedom is not absolute, and universities shall adopt policies that prevent discriminatory, threatening, harassing or other behaviors that abridge the rights of other members of the university community.”

But the effort collapsed after many of the schools the White House handpicked for feedback on the idea condemned the proposal in scathing terms.

A central grievance was the administration’s suggestion that it would give schools preferential treatment for federal funding in exchange for backing the compact’s ideas. That proposal collided with generations of history, practice and competition among universities to secure funding on the basis of merit. And since the idea emerged months after the administration sought to choke off billions in money to schools it disfavored, it deepened fears that the White House was eager to trade largess for loyalty.

The compact envisioned stiff financial penalties, such as the reimbursement of “all monies advanced by the U.S. government during the year of any violation,” for any participating university that the Justice Department alone deemed out of compliance.

Although a handful of small institutions volunteered to sign, only one of the name-brand schools that the government initially asked for feedback — the University of Texas — was sweepingly enthusiastic. Most others, in public and in private, sounded notes like Sally Kornbluth, M.I.T.’s president, who warned that the proposal included ideas “that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution.”

Confronted with rare, largely united resistance from higher education leaders, the administration backed down, and its ambitions for a celebratory event in the autumn faded. Administration officials insisted at the time that they were not surrendering on the idea of a reworked compact.

They also began inserting some ideas into policy. The State Department, for example, started prioritizing visa requests for students at schools that were under a 15 percent cap on international students enrolled in undergraduate classes that the compact had envisioned.

But Dr. Mitchell said he was pleased by “the change in tone” that Monday’s letter seemed to suggest. “It’s much less pugilistic than many things that have come out of this administration,” he said. “I think that it identifies several important positive principles — and it calls out a couple of things that we know we need to do better.”


Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.


Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.