Follow the Trustees: ACTA and the Quiet Reengineering of American Higher Education
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
September 7, 2026
Some of the most consequential changes taking place in American higher education are not the ones that make the biggest headlines. We tend to notice censorship, legislative restrictions on teaching, attacks on tenure, or the elimination of academic programs because these are highly visible. Yet universities can also be transformed much more quietly through changes in governance, funding, accreditation, presidential selection, program review, and decisions about which areas of study deserve institutional investment.
This quieter form of change deserves much more attention.
Historian Nancy MacLean helps us see why in her important AAUP report, The American Council of Trustees and Alumni: A Little-Known Driver of the Attacks on Academic Freedom and Shared Governance. Her focus is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA, an organization founded in 1995 that describes itself as an advocate for academic excellence, freedom, accountability, and responsible institutional governance.
MacLean (2025), however, asks us to look beyond those stated principles and examine how ACTA has sought to translate its ideas into institutional power.
Central to that strategy are university governing boards. As she observes, ACTA has operated for decades on the premise that “Trustees are the key to changing public higher education” (p. 2).
That is worth sitting with.
Trustees certainly have legitimate responsibilities. Governing boards possess significant legal and fiduciary authority, and universities need responsible oversight. But universities are not ordinary corporations or state agencies. Their central work involves teaching, research, curriculum, peer review, and the creation and evaluation of knowledge. Those activities depend upon forms of disciplinary and professional expertise that trustees, legislators, donors, and administrators do not necessarily possess simply by virtue of holding institutional authority.
The AAUP recognized this distinction decades ago in its Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. The statement affirms the authority of governing boards while also stressing the central role of faculty in academic matters. Particularly striking today is its expectation that boards exercise “appropriate self-limitation” (American Association of University Professors [AAUP], 1966).
I keep returning to that phrase, "appropriate self-limitation."
It expresses something increasingly important in contemporary higher education. Having the legal authority to intervene in an academic matter is not the same thing as having the intellectual or disciplinary expertise to make that decision wisely. A governing board may technically possess considerable power, but the health of a university depends in part on knowing when not to exercise it.
This is where the issue becomes larger than university governance itself. What we are witnessing is also a struggle over the governance of knowledge.
Decisions about governance determine far more than organizational charts. They affect which disciplines grow, which programs are consolidated, which faculty positions are created, which areas receive donor support, which curricular requirements students encounter, and which forms of scholarship are regarded as central—or marginal—to the mission of the university.
A university does not necessarily have to ban a book or prohibit a theory to reshape its intellectual landscape. It can accomplish a great deal through budgets, faculty lines, organizational restructuring, curricular requirements, presidential appointments, accreditation standards, and definitions of institutional “excellence.”
In this sense, governance decisions eventually become knowledge decisions.
One of the most useful aspects of MacLean’s report is that she does not treat ACTA as an isolated organization. She places it within a wider conservative policy infrastructure, including ACTA’s advisory role in Project 2025 and its relationship to the State Policy Network. As recently as summer 2026, SPN continued to identify ACTA among its national partners.
Isaac Kamola’s (2024) research provides an important complement to MacLean’s analysis. Kamola documented 155 bills introduced between 2021 and 2023 that targeted various dimensions of academic freedom and university autonomy and traced many of them to a larger network of conservative and libertarian policy organizations.
This broader perspective matters because it suggests that we may be looking at contemporary attacks on higher education too narrowly when we examine each controversy separately. The story is not simply one governor, one legislature, one board of regents, or one university. What deserves examination is the policy ecosystem through which ideas, money, personnel, model legislation, donor priorities, institutional strategies, and governing philosophies circulate.
Ideas become much more powerful when they acquire institutions.
That brings us directly to Texas.
In March 2025, ACTA announced that the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Civic Leadership had joined its Oases of Excellence network. At first glance, that might seem like little more than recognition of an academic program ACTA admires. But ACTA describes its Oases initiative in considerably more ambitious terms. It encourages alumni and donors to support these programs as a means of changing university culture “from the inside.”
That language deserves attention, particularly given what has happened since.
On September 24, 2026, ACTA and UT Austin’s School of Civic Leadership are scheduled to jointly host an event on religious freedom. The gathering will feature ACTA’s National Commission on American History and Civic Education and introduce A Broadside for the Nation, an initiative calling upon colleges and universities to require undergraduate coursework in American history or government. School of Civic Leadership Dean Justin Dyer and ACTA president Michael Poliakoff are scheduled to introduce the program.
None of this means that ACTA “controls” the School of Civic Leadership. The evidence does not support such a claim, and collaboration between a university and an outside organization should not automatically be treated as suspicious. After all, universities work routinely with foundations, professional associations, civic groups, think tanks, institutes, philanthropists, and advocacy organizations across the ideological spectrum.
But neither should the relationship go unnoticed.
What began as ACTA recognition of the School of Civic Leadership through its Oases network has developed into an active institutional relationship around civic education and curricular priorities. Given the broader political environment surrounding higher education in Texas, that relationship deserves public awareness and scrutiny.
The institutional context makes it all the more significant.
Recent Texas Tribune reporting found that the School of Civic Leadership and the Civitas Institute had, or were expected to have, 42 tenured or tenure-track faculty members by August 2026 "nearly triple the 15 positions lawmakers proposed requiring"—against the backdrop of it first Civics Honors cohort last year of 103 students (also see UT News, 2025).
During roughly the same period, UT consolidated seven College of Liberal Arts departments, including Mexican American and Latino Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, into two new academic units. Priest (2026) reported that some staff associated with these areas were terminated or reassigned, while finding no evidence of wholesale faculty dismissals.
I want to be careful here. The available evidence does not establish that the growth of the School of Civic Leadership caused the consolidation of Ethnic and Gender Studies. That causal claim would go beyond what we know.
But the juxtaposition raises a different and entirely legitimate question: What are UT Austin’s institutional priorities?
That question becomes especially important when we consider where substantial new investment is flowing.
A $10 million National Endowment for the Humanities grant supports 16 additional faculty positions connected to new Great Books and Strategy & Statecraft programs. The Great Books program emphasizes texts associated with Western civilization, while Strategy & Statecraft focuses on diplomatic and military history and preparation related to national security (University of Texas at Austin, 2026a).
An additional $12.5 million in philanthropic funding established the Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization and the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars program. Dean Dyer described this initiative as bringing Jewish civilization and modern Israel into the “core” of the school’s educational vision (University of Texas at Austin, 2026b). The School of Civic Leadership is also extending its reach beyond the university through a $1.8 million federal grant supporting three years of professional development for K–12 teachers in Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston centered on what the school describes as the American civic tradition.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about Great Books, Western civilization, constitutional government, Jewish intellectual traditions, religious liberty, American political history, diplomacy, or statecraft. These are entirely legitimate fields of study, and a great university should be capable of supporting serious scholarship in all of them.
My concern is not their existence.
It is the asymmetry.
If intellectual pluralism is an important enough principle to justify substantial investment in programs centered on Western civilization, then intellectual pluralism must also protect Mexican American and Latino Studies.
If interdisciplinarity justifies the establishment and rapid growth of a School of Civic Leadership, that same logic should apply to African American and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies, American Studies, and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies.
And if academic freedom protects conservative intellectual inquiry—and it absolutely should—then it must protect with equal vigor scholarship examining racism, colonialism, gender, inequality, migration, empire, sexuality, and state power.
Otherwise, what we are defending is not academic freedom as a principle. We are defending academic freedom selectively, depending on which knowledge happens to be favored.
That is precisely why MacLean’s work is so useful. It encourages us to pay closer attention to governance itself. When trying to understand how higher education is being reshaped, we need to examine the following:
- who sits on governing boards,
- how trustees are educated about their roles,
- how presidential searches are conducted,
- where donor money is flowing,
- how accreditation is being imagined and reimagined, and
- how supposedly neutral concepts such as “accountability,” “efficiency,” “consolidation,” “intellectual diversity,” “institutional neutrality,” “excellence,” and “civic education” become embedded in policy and institutional practice.
This is not conspiracy thinking. Quite the opposite. It is a call for careful empirical inquiry.
Words such as accountability and excellence are not inherently ideological. Neither are civic education or institutional neutrality. The question is what these concepts come to mean when they are translated into actual institutional decisions. Who benefits from a particular definition of excellence? Which programs gain resources? Which lose autonomy? What gets consolidated in the name of efficiency? Whose perspectives are recognized as evidence of viewpoint diversity? Who decides what counts as neutral?
Those are questions worth asking at any public university, regardless of the political orientation of the people involved.
Trustees, legislators, donors, presidents, faculty members, students, alumni, advocacy organizations, taxpayers, and citizens all have legitimate interests in public higher education. Public universities should be accountable to the societies that sustain them.
But accountability is not the same thing as political control over intellectual life.
That distinction is crucial.
What concerns me most is the possibility that authority is being redistributed in ways that increasingly allow some actors to determine which knowledge receives faculty lines, financial support, curricular standing, institutional legitimacy, and ultimately the opportunity to survive.
By the time a struggle over knowledge becomes publicly visible as the disappearance of a department or a controversy over curriculum, much of the consequential work may already have taken place elsewhere—in boardrooms, budgets, donor relationships, accreditation debates, organizational restructurings, presidential searches, and legislative networks.
That is perhaps MacLean’s most important lesson.
If we want to understand what is happening to higher education, we need to follow the governance.
And here in Texas, we have particularly good reason to do so.
Eyes wide open as the question I believe we should keep asking is a simple one as it reaches to the heart of the matter: Who is governing knowledge—and toward what end?
References
American Association of University Professors. (1966). Statement on government of colleges and universities. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and
American Council of Trustees and Alumni. (2025, March 12). Three programs join ACTA’s Oases of Excellence network, ACTA. https://www.goacta.org/2025/03/three-programs-join-actas-oases-of-excellence-network/
American Council of Trustees and Alumni. (2026). All possess alike liberty of conscience: Guarding our heritage of religious freedom. https://www.goacta.org/event/all-possess-alike-liberty-of-conscience/
Bennett, B. (2024, July 8). A Guide for Progressives on How to Brand Project 2025. https://navigatorresearch.org/a-guide-for-progressives-on-how-to-brand-project-2025/
Kamola, I. (2024). Manufacturing backlash: Right-wing think tanks and legislative attacks on higher education, 2021–2023. American Association of University Professors. [pdf]
MacLean, N. (2025, February 25). The American Council of Trustees and Alumni: A little-known driver of the attacks on academic freedom and shared governance (Action Report No. 4). Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, American Association of University Professors. https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/ActionReport4_ACTA.pdf
Priest, J. (2026, August 13). UT-Austin overhauling core classes but hasn’t detailed how new center relates to the courses. The Texas Tribune. https://www.kut.org/education/2026-08-14/ut-austin-overhauling-core-classes-but-hasnt-detailed-how-new-center-relates-to-the-courses
UT News. (2025, Sept. 22). School of Civic Leadership Welcomes First Cohort of Future Leaders. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2025/09/22/school-of-civic-leadership-welcomes-first-cohort-of-future-leaders/
University of Texas at Austin. (2025, May 8). Board of Regents invests $100 million in UT’s School of Civic Leadership. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2025/05/08/board-of-regents-invests-100-million-in-uts-school-of-civic-leadership/
University of Texas at Austin. (2026a, January 16). UT to launch new Strategy and Statecraft, Great Books majors with NEH grant. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2026/01/16/ut-to-launch-new-strategy-and-statecraft-great-books-majors-with-neh-grant/
University of Texas at Austin. (2026b, January 27). UT launches Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization, Rosenthal-Levy Scholars. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2026/01/27/ut-launches-ackerman-program-on-jewish-and-western-civilization-rosenthal-levy-scholars/
