UT cuts all Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies courses from core curriculum By Lily Kepner, Staff Writer Sep 24, 2026

Friends:

What is happening to Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at UT Austin is no longer easy to describe as ordinary curricular housekeeping. As Lily Kepner reports below, every course in the field has been removed from the university’s core curriculum, even as related majors have already been eliminated and dozens of courses addressing race, gender, inequality, and social difference have been rejected from the core. Taken together, these decisions raise a larger question about what kinds of knowledge UT now considers central to an undergraduate education—and which forms of knowledge are being steadily pushed to the margins.

The pattern is especially troubling because exclusion from the core is not merely symbolic. Core status helps determine enrollment, visibility, faculty workload, and ultimately the institutional viability of programs. When this occurs alongside policies that make low enrollment a potential justification for eliminating programs or faculty positions, the danger is obvious: first narrow access to the curriculum, then point to declining enrollment as evidence that the field no longer warrants support. As Lisa Moore puts it in Kepner’s reporting, it can look very much like an “intentional starvation” of the work.

Dr. Maria Cotera's commentary to this piece is most cutting: “(We’re) essentially digging our own graves before we’re pushed into them,."

What concerns me most is the larger intellectual project taking shape. A public university should be expanding students’ capacity to understand the complexity of the world they are entering—not narrowing that world by deciding that the study of gender, sexuality, race, migration, inequality, and historically marginalized communities is somehow too “specialized” to belong in a common curriculum. These are views and decisions by non-specialists, by the way. 

The question before us is therefore larger than the fate of particular courses. It is about who gets to define legitimate knowledge at a public university, whose histories remain visible, and whether curricular reform is becoming a vehicle for something much closer to institutional capture—as discussed on Monday's October 5th blog.

UT cuts all Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies courses from core curriculum

By Lily Kepner,Staff WriterSep 24, 2026

University of Texas students walk past the scaffolding-covered UT Tower as construction continues on the landmark, Aug. 26, 2026. Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman

Starting next semester, no Women’s, Gender and Sexuality courses will count toward core curriculum requirements at the University of Texas.

On Tuesday, department chair Danielle Clealand told faculty in the Social and Cultural Analysis Department that the provost’s office rejected all women’s and gender studies courses from counting toward UT’s core, according to an email reviewed by the Statesman. The provost’s office also eliminated dozens of courses on race from counting toward the core.

All undergraduate students must pick from a menu of courses to fulfill their core requirements before graduating. 

The provost’s decision affects courses including Mexican American Women from 1940 — present; Women and the Holocaust; Intro to African American Women’s History; LGBTQ Literature and Culture; and Native American Women’s History.

Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies was the only field within the newly consolidated Social and Cultural Analysis Department that had all of its courses cut from the core, said professor Jo Hsu, who specializes in gender studies and rhetoric. All classes in that field will now be elective for future students.

“The pattern is pretty clear,” Hsu said. “Even within the other (department) units, all courses that referenced women were rejected.”
 
Asked about the changes, UT spokesperson Mike Rosen referred to the university’s core curriculum report, which was drafted by 22 faculty members. It states a core curriculum should provide students with a broad education that can “complement and guide their more specialized studies.”

“Rather than a genuine core curriculum that provides a coherent general education, the current system  is a vast distribution requirement that includes more than 600 courses, many of which are on topics that are quite narrow,” the faculty members wrote. “Highly specialized courses have an important place in UT Austin’s curriculum, but not as parts of its core.”

In total, the social analysis department asked the provost to review 49 courses so they could count toward core curriculum requirements — of those, 16 were approved. Some courses focusing on race and urban studies including Slavery and its Legacies, Urban Unrest, Statistical Analysis of Social Disparities and Building Sustainable Societies were also rejected.

The announcement follows the provost’s decision to eliminate majors in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; African and African Diaspora Studies; and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, against the recommendation of the College of Liberal Arts.

Lisa Moore, the former chair of the women and gender studies department, which was combined with three other departments into the new social analysis department this fall, condemned the cuts as “blatant” viewpoint discrimination and a “singling out” of her field.

The classes won’t be cut from the course catalog, but their exclusion from the core — and the elimination of related major offerings — will diminish enrollment, Moore said. That’s especially concerning after UT regents recently changed policy to allow programs and professors with low enrollment to be cut, she said. 

Director of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas, Lisa Moore in her office in Burdine Hall, Feb. 18, 2026. No classes from Moore's former department will count toward core curriculum requirements. Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman

“It just seems like a very intentional starvation of our work,” Moore said. “We’re being set up to fail.”

Other classes affected

UT is refining its academic offerings as part of a transition to a new core curriculum that will launch as soon as fall 2028, pending approval. That model will require all students to take classes in Western civilizations, humanities and artificial intelligence, and narrow which courses can qualify.

Other classes affected

UT is refining its academic offerings as part of a transition to a new core curriculum that will launch as soon as fall 2028, pending approval. That model will require all students to take classes in Western civilizations, humanities and artificial intelligence, and narrow which courses can qualify.

“(We’re) essentially digging our own graves before we’re pushed into them,” Cotera said.

UT did not respond to questions about the fast timeline, but President Jim Davis previously told regents that preparing for the new core will take two years and require a significant university-wide lift. The UT system must certify compliance with SB 37’s core curriculum review by January 2027.

In another batch of cuts to the College of Liberal Arts, the provost cut dozens of signature, or “topics,” courses from the core curriculum — courses that counted for UT’s prior core, but were subject to review for being too narrowly focused. Those cuts include Climate Change History; Ethics of Artificial Intelligence; God and AI; Race, Ethnicity and Health; and U.S. Immigration Enforcement. 

The provost approved introductory classes on Mexican American and Latina/o Studies; Black Studies and American Studies to remain in the core, as well as dozens of signature courses including Jewish Women’s Life Writings and Visionary Women.

However, the classes approved at UT were not immune to changes: Cotera said political pressure on UT prompted her to alter her Introduction to Mexican American/Latina Studies course to increase the chances of it being approved.

She excluded a week on border violence and a week on women’s and gender studies from the syllabus, fearing those aspects would cause the whole course to be cut. The course was ultimately approved.

“I understood and informed others that I was self-censoring because I wanted to be documented. I want people to know what I (felt I) had to take out,” Cotera said.

Fears surrounding the changes

Faculty fear the university’s sidelining of diverse fields will mar the university’s reputation.

“Lately, the calls that I have with prospective students begin with them asking whether they would be welcome or even safe at UT,” Hsu said. 

Cotera believes recent changes will impact how students are prepared for the workforce. Though she believes aspects of the university’s new core curriculum, such as the required study of great thinkers, will offer students valuable lessons, cutting ethnic and gender studies courses when the state’s Latino population is rapidly growing is “irrational” and “embarrassing,” Cotera said.

“It looks like an intentional form of exclusion,” Cotera said. “I’m not sure how they’re going to use their class in Western civilization in the workforce, but I can promise you, they’ll use their class on understanding Latino cultures.”

UT’s course catalog for next semester is expected to be published Oct. 1. The provost and president have not informed the wider university community about the major or core curriculum cuts.

Lily Kepner

Higher Education Reporter

Lily Kepner started at the American-Statesman in October 2023. She has appeared on BBC, NPR and Texas Standard to talk about her coverage, which has spanned the impact of state laws and politics on the University of Texas, pro-Palestinian protests, free speech, the anti-DEI ban, LGBTQ student belonging and more. Kepner graduated with honors from Boston University's College of Communication in 2023, where she received the college's highest awards for writing and journalism leadership and led the award-winning student newspaper as Editor-in-Chief. In her time with the American-Statesman, she contributed to reporting that won an Edward R Murrow Award for breaking news, won the School Bell Award for Outstanding Feature from Texas State Teachers Association, and Critics Choice for Best of Austin in the Austin Chronicle. Previously, she has been published in USA Today, The Boston Globe, The National Catholic Reporter and GBH. Kepner is passionate about accountability and service journalism and encourages anyone to reach out to her to tell their story or share a tip.

UT’s leaders are putting the university’s academic strength at risk, Austin American-Statesman, October 1, 2026

Friends:

Jason Brownlee’s important commentary in the Austin American-Statesman on the restructuring underway at UT Austin calls attention to a fact that deserves much greater emphasis: 99 words in an earlier version of Senate Bill 37 did not become Texas law. The Senate committee substitute would have directed governing boards reviewing the core curriculum to exclude courses that “teach identity politics,” teach certain ideas about racial responsibility, are based on theories that “systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege” are inherent in U.S. or Texas institutions or were created to maintain inequities, or require students to adopt an ideology (Texas Legislature, 2025). 

Thanks to the hard-won efforts by AAUP and other groups, that language was removed before final passage. This legislative history matters because it establishes an important boundary between what lawmakers proposed and what they ultimately enacted. What I also heard in relation to this is that higher education administrators expressed concern at the time about a possible barrage of First Amendment lawsuits since constitutionally-speaking, one can eliminate programs but not ideas.

The final version of SB 37 is hardly inconsequential for curriculum or faculty governance. It requires governing boards to conduct comprehensive reviews of general education curricula at least once every five years, expands board authority over academic programs and curricula, and significantly restructures faculty-senate governance. Brownlee’s point is therefore an important one: when universities treat these subjects as though SB 37 itself rendered them presumptively unacceptable, they risk collapsing the difference between the law that passed and language that the Legislature expressly left behind.

That distinction is particularly consequential at UT Austin, where the restructuring of Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, the elimination of majors, and the rejection of numerous proposed core courses have unfolded alongside a sweeping reconsideration of the undergraduate curriculum. Whatever one thinks of SB 37, fidelity to the law requires precision about what it actually says. 

The Legislature gave governing boards considerably greater curricular authority, but it stopped short of enacting the explicit content restrictions contained in that deleted 99-word passage. If universities nevertheless reproduce those restrictions through administrative practice, the question Brownlee raises becomes unavoidable: Are institutions implementing SB 37—or going beyond it by administratively accomplishing what the Legislature declined to put into law?

Like Dr. Brownlee, I, too, worry about the dystopian vision our university leadership is advancing: a deliberate whitewashing of the curriculum that narrows the boundaries of legitimate knowledge, pushes race, gender, inequality, and other inconvenient histories to the margins, and increasingly reflects the Christian nationalist strategy of remaking public institutions from within—that I and others otherwise term, "institutional capture."

By this I mean the use of governing boards, administrative authority, curricular review, hiring, restructuring, and other formal mechanisms of institutional power to redirect a public university away from its broader educational mission and toward a narrower ideological agenda.

Reference

Texas Legislature. (2025). Committee substitute for Senate Bill 37, 89th Legislature, Regular Session. Texas Legislature Online. https://capitol.texas.gov/billlookup/History.aspx?LegSess=89R&Bill=SB37

UT’s leaders are putting the university’s academic strength at risk

By Jason Brownlee, Guest Columnist, Austin American-Statesman



Oct 1, 2026 Scaffolding covers the University of Texas Tower. Faculty and students deserve a voice as UT reshapes its core curriculum and reorganizes academic departments, Jason Brownlee writes. Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman

In spring 2025, University of Texas President Jim Davis tapped William Inboden as the lone candidate for provost, circumventing rules that required faculty and student input, as well as competitive hiring. Davis claimed that leadership gaps in the Tower justified the carveout for Inboden. In retrospect, though, his end run was a portent of how the president and provost would operate.

During the past year, they have avoided dialogue with students, faculty and staff while pushing through tectonic changes in undergraduate training and academic departments. The result is a climate of angst and confusion that jeopardizes the world-class institution their predecessors built.

The backdrop of this moment is Senate Bill 37, in effect since Sept. 1, 2025. The law abolished faculty senates and mandated five-year curriculum audits. To the dismay of the bill’s original author, however, SB 37 did not wind up dictating what professors could teach. In fact, legislators expunged a 99-word passage that would have banned courses on “identity politics” and “systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege” so that the bill could pass.

Rather than following the law on the books, Davis and Inboden acted as if the defeated draft had become policy. Last October the president announced UT would be carrying out the first “thorough reconsideration of [its] core requirements” in 20 years. Among the 18 faculty members Davis tapped for this undertaking, not one was a scholar of gender and ascriptive identities, or systemic oppression. In fact, three-quarters of College of Liberal Arts' (COLA) departments had no seat on the curriculum committee.

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One professor in COLA predicted the women’s, gender and sexuality studies program was done for. Asked by the Chronicle of Higher Education whether he agreed, Inboden replied: “My plea to everyone on campus is: Wait until we actually have something announced, and then we can have that discussion.”

Those taking the provost at his word waited in vain. In April COLA turned seven departments into two, including an amalgam of American Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, Latino/a Studies, and African-American Studies. Just last month, the provost’s office nixed the component departments’ majors and rejected most of their proposed core courses. Meanwhile, 88% of the essential authors for UT’s new “Great Questions of Human Life” requirement are male — and none of them are gay or queer. (No Baldwin, Woolf or Foucault, among others.)

Without Davis and Inboden clearing the air, I have struggled to understand how their apparent priorities — clutching the detritus of SB 37, retrofitting syllabi for the pre-civil rights era — advance any policy goal, such as post-graduate job placement or legal compliance. On the contrary, the opacity and arbitrariness emanating from the Tower is anathema in higher education, especially in times of change.

The lesson of UT’s last major curriculum review is that administrators should embrace consultation, not shun it. In 2004-06, Presidents Larry Faulkner and William C. Powers Jr. led an inclusive and deliberative reassessment of undergraduate education. Their task force included students and eschewed ideological conformity. It also helped make a great university even greater. Between 2011 and 2022, the four-year graduation rate rose 21 points (to nearly 74%). UT-Austin entered the top 40 of all U.S. universities and the top 10 public ones. Dozens of its graduate programs became national leaders.

When Davis and Inboden took up their posts, the university had never been stronger. I cannot fathom why they would want to jackhammer any pillar of that success. For current Longhorns to thrive in Texas and in the world, intellectual life at UT must remain every bit as diverse and vibrant as game-day crowds at Darrell K. Royal Stadium.

I worry that the president and provost are advancing a very different vision. My plea to them is: Open the discussion you promised and listen to your campus.

Jason Brownlee is a professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas and the author of “Force Without Authority: America’s Wars in the Middle East and South Asia.” He is expressing his views as a private citizen.

Does Protest Matter? Remembering the Student Takeover of the TUSD Board in Defense of Mexican American Studies and Liberation through Literacy, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Does Protest Matter? Remembering the Student Takeover of the TUSD Board in Defense of Mexican American Studies and Liberation through Literacy

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

October 5, 2026

I came across this remarkable video again thanks to my colleague, Arizona State University professor Dr. Carrie Sampson, who shared it as a reminder of the courage of Tucson students fighting to save their Mexican American Studies program. It is worth watching, especially now.

On April 26, 2011, students with UNIDOS—United Non-Discriminatory Individuals Demanding Our Studies—took over a Tucson Unified School District board meeting. They occupied the board members’ seats and chained themselves to the dais in an effort to stop a vote threatening their Mexican American Studies program. These were young people who understood very clearly what was at stake. They understood that what they had learned was precious—not only for themselves, but for future TUSD students and generations yet to come. Adults in positions of authority were making decisions about their education, their history, and their identities, and the students refused simply to sit quietly and watch it happen.

What stays with me as I watch the video is that, for a moment, these students actually took power. They disrupted the usual choreography of institutional authority, where officials sit above and the public sits below, where officials speak and students listen, and where adults deliberate while young people live with the consequences. The Tucson students turned that arrangement upside down by occupying the very seats from which power was exercised. There is something deeply democratic about that image. It reminds us that authority is never entirely beyond challenge.

It also makes me think about the late historian and Chicano Studies scholar Rodolfo Acuña’s (2012) powerful reflection on the purpose of Chicano Studies. Writing during the Tucson struggle in 2012, Acuña argued that he never understood the field primarily as an academic exercise or simply as a collection of disciplines. For him, its purpose was pedagogical: “to liberate students through literacy.” 

Drawing on Paulo Freire and a longer tradition linking literacy to citizenship, Acuña understood education as something that should enable students to read not only words, but the world around them—to understand their circumstances, develop a sense of themselves, and participate in transforming the conditions shaping their lives.

Seen through Acuña’s lens, the Tucson students’ actions were not separate from their education. They were one of its most powerful expressions. These young people had learned to read power. They could recognize what was happening institutionally, understand what was being taken from them, organize collectively, and act. Acuña himself described the Tucson Mexican American Studies teachers in Freirean terms, recalling that the word that came to mind when he encountered their work was “praxis”—the joining of reflection and action. The students occupying the boardroom were, in a profound sense, putting that praxis into practice.

Of course, we know what happened afterward. Their protest did not immediately save Mexican American Studies. Under tremendous pressure from the state of Arizona, Tucson Unified eventually dismantled the program in 2012. One could therefore ask whether the protest mattered at all, but that is too narrow a way to measure resistance. Protest is not only about whether a vote changes that day or whether an institution immediately reverses course. It also establishes a public record of dissent.

The Tucson students made certain that nobody could later claim that Mexican American Studies disappeared quietly or with the consent of those most affected. Their presence, their organizing, their walkouts, and even their bodies chained to the dais became part of the historical record. They made clear that they saw what was happening, that they objected, and that they refused to go along.

That matters because silence can so easily be rewritten as acquiescence. Over time, deeply contested decisions can come to look inevitable, even ordinary. Protest prevents that erasure. It leaves behind testimony, images, organizations, legal claims, scholarship, memories, and political language that others can later take up.

That is exactly what happened in Tucson. The struggle continued through community organizing, scholarship, teaching, activism, and eventually litigation. In 2017, a federal court found that Arizona officials had acted with discriminatory intent and racial animus in targeting Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program, violating students’ constitutional rights. The students’ protest was not the sole cause of that later outcome, of course, but it became part of a much larger record of resistance that refused to let the story end with the program’s dismantling.

This is why the Tucson example feels so important today. Students, faculty, teachers, parents, and communities continue to confront decisions about curriculum, academic freedom, books, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, diversity, and who ultimately has authority over knowledge in our public institutions, from K–12 schools to colleges and universities. 

Acuña helps us see that these struggles are about more than preserving particular courses or programs. They are also about what education is for. Is it primarily about producing conformity, or should it help young people become thoughtful, critically literate participants in democratic life? Acuña’s answer was clear: education should give students the capacity to understand themselves and their world—and to act upon that understanding.

Sometimes we protest because we hope to stop something immediately. At other times, the significance of protest becomes visible only later, when others inherit the record that was created, become inspired by it, and fashion new ways to build upon it.

The young people of Tucson left such a record. They made it impossible to say that everyone simply “went along to get along.” Their resistance became one part of a longer struggle, showing how an act of opposition can contribute to organizing, scholarship, litigation, and future movements.

Perhaps that is the deeper lesson here. We cannot always know in advance what an act of resistance will accomplish. But when people publicly refuse injustice, they prevent power from telling the whole story. They leave something behind for those who come next. They contribute to an unfolding archive of resistance.

And Acuña helps us see something else: these students were not simply defending Mexican American Studies. In their courage, their critical understanding, and their willingness to act, they were showing us what Mexican American Studies had already given them: a critical consciousness and a hope for a better, more inclusive world—one open not only to diverse viewpoints, but also to different histories, forms of knowledge, cultural experiences, and ways of imagining our shared future. In that sense, their protest was itself evidence of the liberatory education they were fighting to preserve.

Many thanks to Dr. Carrie Sampson for sharing this video and reminding us of the courageous stand these young people took.

So, does protest matter? It absolutely does. Their protest mattered, and it still does.

#GrassRootsDemocracy #SaveEthnicStudies #SaveMexicanAmericanStudies

Reference

Acuña, R. (2012, June 13). The purpose of Chicano Studies was “to liberate students through literacy,” LatinaLista. https://latinalista.com/rodolfo-f-acuna-the-purpose-of-chicano-studies-was-to-liberate-students-through-literacy/

INVITATION: Rethinking Schools 40th Anniversary Celebration, Monday October 5th, Workers Defense Project at 5:30 PM CST

 Friends:

For forty years, Rethinking Schools has been so much more than a publication. It has been a source of courage, imagination, intellectual nourishment, and community for educators committed to creating schools worthy of our children and our democracy. Again and again, its pages have reminded us that teaching is never simply about transmitting knowledge; it is also about helping young people understand their world, recognize their own dignity and histories, and imagine how that world might be made more just. It is a joy to celebrate this remarkable legacy—and especially meaningful to do so at a moment when the principled, justice-centered work of Rethinking Schools is needed as urgently as ever. 

If you're in Austin on Monday evening, do consider attending this celebration at 5:30 PM at the Workers Defense Project per Larry Miller's invitation below. As you can see, curriculum writer Courtney Wai will speak on her important work in South Texas connecting WW II internment camps and Chicana/Chicano  civil rights based in Crystal City. Sounds awesome already.

-Angela Valenzuela

Rethinking Schools is dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism. This work is more important than ever, given the attacks educators and students are facing. 

Rethinking Schools

In honor of our 40th anniversary, please join us to celebrate and to learn how local educators are using Rethinking Schools in their work.

We are gathering on Monday October 5th at the offices of the Workers Defense Project (5604 Manor Rd, Austin, TX 78723) at 5:30 PM CST.

Sponsors:

Angela Valenzuela: Professor, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, UT

Anne Lewis: Independent Filmmaker, UT-Austin Professor of Practice, TSEU-CWA 6186 Executive Board Member 

Andrew Gonzalez: Former AISD Social Studies Teacher, Current Austin ISD Trustee, PhD Student at the University of Texas at Austin

Jesse S Gainer: Professor, Curriculum and Instruction, TSU

Nancy Valdez-Gainer: Professor (TSU), Director of The Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award

Courtney Wai: Teacher, Prentiss Charney Fellow, Education and Public Programs Manager, Densho

Ellen Bravo: Author and Activist

Larry Miller: Retired Teacher, Editor of Rethinking Schools

The program will include a short history of the work of Rethinking Schools (RS). Andrew Gonzalez, a Trustee of AISD will talk about his use of Rethinking Schools in the classroom as a social studies teacher. Nancy Valdez-Gainer and Jess Gainer will speak about their experience in a study group based on one of RS’s most popular books, Teaching For Black Lives. Courtney Wai will talk about her work in South Texas, creating curriculum connecting a World War 2 internment camp and the Chicano civil rights movement based in Crystal City, Texas.

Please RSVP to Larry Miller at Larry@rethinkingschools.org

 

Subscriptions: Annual Magazine Subscription - Rethinking Schools 

Donations:  Donate to Rethinking Schools 40th Anniversary

The End of Science? Agnosis and American Fascism, by Paul Edwards, Ph.D., September 2026 issue, Science, Technology, & Human Values

Friends,

I urge you to read this deeply concerning and important essay by Dr. Paul N. Edwards, Professor Emeritus of Information, History, and Science and Technology Studies:

Edwards, P. N. (2026). The end of science? Agnosis and American fascism. Science, Technology, & Human Values. https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439261474980 [posted below]

A key term in the title is agnosis, which Edwards uses to describe the deliberate production of ignorance, nonknowledge, or antiknowledge. Just as important is his idea of knowledge infrastructures: the institutions, people, methods, archives, and professional norms that allow societies to produce reliable knowledge over time.

This is what makes the essay so relevant to higher education. Edwards asks us to see attacks on research funding, federal data, scientific expertise, universities, and academic freedom not as isolated developments, but as threats to the very infrastructure through which a democratic society comes to know itself.

That argument resonates strongly with something I have been emphasizing on this blog: academic freedom is part of the infrastructure of civil rights. If we weaken the institutions that produce knowledge about inequality, discrimination, public health, environmental harm, and governmental action, we also weaken our capacity to document injustice and demand accountability.

For good measure, I am cutting and pasting Science and Technology Studies courses offered currently at UT as I fear, based solely on Edwards' essay, that these courses could be at risk of getting cut largely because of their interdisciplinarity and criticality:

STS Coursework at UT Austin

UT Austin features a formal "STS" course designation within its academic catalogs, bridging the liberal arts, social sciences, and technical innovation. Notable options include: [1]

• STS 318: How We Shape Discoveries and How They Shape Us (examining the cultural and technical complexities of energy, biomedicine, and nanoscience). [1]
• STS 319: Information Technology and Social Life (analyzing how digital tech mediates work, home, and social structures). [1]
• STS 332: Nanotechnology and the Science Revolution. [1]
• STS 380: Proseminar: Current Issues in the Societal Impact of Science and Technology (a graduate-level overview examining science as a human enterprise). [1]

There may be others, but this is what a quick Google search turned up.

The essay is sobering, but Edwards does not end in despair. His call is for scholars and citizens to defend evidence, preserve knowledge, protect institutions, and act.

I couldn't agree more. And it's what we've been doing—and consistently so—here in Texas.

It is a long read, but a very important one.

-Angela Valenzuela

The End of Science? Agnosis and American Fascism by Paul N. Edwards, September 2026 issue, 

Abstract

The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annually awards the John Desmond Bernal Prize to one or more individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Past winners have included founders of the field, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to understanding the social dimensions of science and technology. This article is the revised text of the 2025 Bernal Lecture by Paul Edwards.

In January 2025, fascists led by Donald Trump took over the United States federal government for the second time. Following the Heritage Foundation blueprint Project 2025, these far-right authoritarians colluded with mega-corporations, billionaires, and white-nationalist Christian evangelicals to disrupt the government, nullify democratic processes, and execute Trump's every whim as “policy.” His regime has successfully (if not entirely) evaded Constitutional checks and balances; manipulated corporate affairs, the US economy, foreign allies, and the entire rules-based world order by means of tariffs, executive orders, extrajudicial killings, threats of force, and war; created a huge, militarized secret police force (Immigration and Customs Enforcement); brought false charges against political opponents to neutralize and punish them; and, resuscitated the 19th-century colonial Monroe Doctrine to license renewed US imperialism. The Trump autocracy has brought major American institutions to their knees, singling out federally funded scientific enterprises and research universities for ideological assault via budget cuts. Incredibly, even as I write, leaders at the highest levels of our government are discussing how to suspend the 2026 elections by declaring a trumped-up national emergency.

These actions and characteristics are hallmarks of fascism, “a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism” (American Heritage Dictionary, 5th edition). Like many of you, I never imagined the United States would come to this. Naïf that I was, I believed that democratic norms and institutional guardrails would hold. I imagined, even more naively, that science and reason would ultimately prevail. Even as I feared the worst, I secretly hoped that US science and democracy would help steer the world away from a future of dangerous climate change, deadly pandemics, out-of-control artificial intelligence (AI), and ever more destructive wars.

Dear reader, I could not have been more wrong. As I receive with great humility this highest of prizes from the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), I can only plead that its namesake J.D. Bernal suffered from the same delusion. In 1939 (of all years), Bernal wrote that “we have in the practice of science the prototype for all human common action. The task which the scientists have undertaken—the understanding and control of nature and of man himself [sic]—is merely the conscious expression of the task of human society….In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose” (Bernal 1939). How I wish it were so.

Both that delusion and my fear of its failure arrived early in my life and simultaneously. I spent my teenage years in Staunton, Virginia, a small town of 18,000 in the Shenandoah Valley. It was a differently mediated world then, a world of books, magazines, newspapers, and three television channels. No email, no Internet, no online anything—and not a lot for a young person to do. So, I read, and read, and read. On the stairway landing just outside my bedroom, my parents positioned a bookshelf containing encyclopedias for children and young adults (the Britannica had pride of place in our living room, but that was reserved for school projects). I sat on that landing many nights, paging through the twenty-volume Book of Knowledge and The World Book encyclopedia.

My other love was the science fiction section of the Staunton Public Library. I read nearly every book. Those stories told of technological wonders “indistinguishable from magic,” as Arthur C. Clarke put it in 1962, some of them becoming reality before my bright young eyes. My childhood was the Atomic Age, promising nuclear energy “too cheap to meter,” along with nuclear submarines. Nuclear airplanes! Nuclear refrigerators! And nuclear weapons, too dangerous to use, but too powerful to abandon. I watched the first moon landing on TV at a summer camp in upstate New York. My daydreams were rockets to the stars, but my nightmares were of mushroom clouds rising over distant cities as I desperately sought escape. Computers, robots, and AI abounded in those novels. Miracle machines that could save the world. Or take it over. Or destroy it.

My political coming of age happened around the first Earth Day in 1970. I read my copy of The Environmental Handbook (Bell 1970) until it fell apart. By eighth grade, I had organized a school “Ecology Club” and led my first protest march to a construction site near the school where workers were struggling to ignite downed trees with motor oil, covering the school area with thick smoke.

And there you have my entire career in a nutshell. I became a “professor of world disaster,” as a student affectionately (?) called me. I’ll take the title, thanks.