This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
Juneteenth, Fort Worth, and the Sacred Work of Black and Brown Coalition
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
June 19, 2026
At today's National LULAC Convention in Fort Worth, Reverend Haynes offered a timely and powerful reminder on Juneteenth: “You don’t have a civil rights movement without a Black and Brown coalition” (Haynes, 2026). “Black and Brown” is, of course, an imperfect shorthand—one that cannot possibly contain the vast diversity of our peoples, histories, languages, cultures, and ancestral journeys
Yet it also names something real and necessary: our sheer numbers, our shared stakes, and our collective power when we refuse division. His words landed with prophetic force because they named what our histories have long taught us: our struggles for freedom, dignity, education, labor rights, voting rights, and democracy have never been separate. They have always been intertwined.
I am not exaggerating when I say that every invited visit I have ever made to speak in Fort Worth has been connected, intentionally, to the work of Black and Brown peace, unity, and coalition. Important leadership has been taking root there for many years. That is why Reverend Haynes’ words felt so resonant. Fort Worth is not merely a backdrop. It is a site of memory, organizing, and possibility.
Juneteenth itself reminds us of this deeper truth additionally underscored by Reverend Haynes. It commemorates June 19, 1865, when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, finally learned of their freedom more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation (National Park Service, n.d.; National Museum of African American History and Culture, n.d.).
And how poetic that in Fort Worth, we also honor Dr. Opal Lee, the beloved “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” whose lifelong advocacy helped make Juneteenth a federal holiday. In 2016, at the age of 89, Lee began walking from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., to build support for national recognition of Juneteenth.
Her 2.5-mile walks in major cities throughout the U.S. symbolized the two and a half years that Black Texans remained enslaved after the Emancipation Proclamation (National Juneteenth Museum, n.d.; National Museum of African American History and Culture, n.d.). Juneteenth became a national holiday, signed into law by President Joe Biden on June 17, 2021.
God bless Opal Lee!
The power of one, no less.
The power of mission and calling.
Reverend Haynes’ message was clear: in a nation “conceived in liberty,” the unfinished work of freedom belongs to all of us (Haynes, 2026).
It is both prophetic and poetic that LULAC would gather on Juneteenth in Fort Worth, a city so closely connected to Dr. Opal Lee’s historic witness. This day calls us not only to commemorate emancipation, but to resist every effort to divide Black and Brown communities from one another.
His reminder that we do not have a civil rights movement without Black and Brown coalition speaks directly to the work many of us are trying to sustain across Texas. In Austin, Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe and I formed Black Brown Dialogues on Policy to deepen precisely this kind of relationship—one grounded in trust, shared struggle, policy analysis, legislative advocacy, and youth leadership. Black Brown Dialogues on Policy has brought together academics, students, community members, advocates, and lawmakers to confront anti-DEI policy, defend ethnic studies, and build solidarity across communities (Black Brown Dialogues on Policy, n.d.).
Through this work, we have mentored many young people into a vision of public life rooted not in division, but in solidarity, study, strategy, and service. That matters because coalition is not merely a response to crisis. It is how we practice democracy. It is how we build the relationships necessary to defend one another when the institutions around us falter.
This is the spirit of Juneteenth, too. It is not only a day of remembrance, but a call to solidarity. It asks us to honor freedom by defending it together. It asks us to remember Dr. Opal Lee’s Fort Worth-rooted witness and to continue building the bridges that others would prefer to see broken.
Our coalitions are not optional. They are the seedbed of democracy. From civil rights to educational equity, from voting rights to the defense of public institutions, Black and Brown unity remains one of the most powerful antidotes to authoritarianism, erasure, and fear.
So today, I honor Reverend Haynes’ words, Dr. Opal Lee’s legacy, National and Texas LULAC, Fort Worth—as well as Dallas, by the way—that boasts a long history of coalition work, and the youth we are mentoring into this struggle.
Juneteenth is a celebration, yes—but it is also a summons. It reminds us that delayed freedom is still unfinished freedom, and that none of us gets free alone.
Thanks to Dr. Ana Coca for sharing Rev. Haynes' speech.
Sí se puede! Yes we can!
Happy Juneteenth! ¡Feliz Juneteenth!
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
LULAC Council 4721, District VII
Education Committee Chair, Texas LULAC
References
Black Brown Dialogues on Policy. (n.d.). Virtual town hall: DEI and ethnic studies policy in the 88th session of the Texas State Legislature. https://youtu.be/xEi3Rtc0QQ0?si=eYxJeGqbnUQg3Xf1
Haynes, F. D., III. (2026, June 19). Remarks at the National LULAC Convention[Speech]. National LULAC Convention, Fort Worth, TX.
Darrell M. West’s 2022 Brookings Institution essay, “Trump is not the only threat to democracy,” upon which I build from yesterday's blog, reads today less like a warning than a framework for understanding what has now come to fruition.
Written in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, West’s central point was that Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy, but not the only one. The deeper danger lies in the political ecosystem—and echo chamber—that has learned from him, copied him, enabled him, and built governing machinery around authoritarian impulses (West, 2022).
West identified several interlocking threats: "copycat candidates, legal coups, a toxic information ecosystem, the decline of authoritative institutions, and the widespread prevalence of counter-majoritarianism in our political system" (West, 2022). Since Trump’s return to office, these dangers are no longer theoretical. They have become governing strategies.
As The Washington Post reported, Trump’s first week back in power was designed to “flood the zone,” moving rapidly through executive actions, pardons, security-clearance revocations, and a detailed policy blueprint that reflected a far more organized operation than his first administration (Arnsdorf & Morse, 2025).
This is where Project 2025 matters. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership gives institutional form to this anti-democratic project. It translates grievance into governance by pairing policy proposals with personnel pipelines, executive-branch restructuring, and a theory of presidential power that would make dissent within government difficult (Dans & Groves, 2023). The level of planning is all still quite chilling.
Even as Trump and his advisers attempted during the campaign to distance themselves from it, The Washington Post reported that several top officials in the incoming administration had ties to the Project 2025 coalition, including Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Tom Homan (Arnsdorf & Morse, 2025).
What we are witnessing, then, is not simply Trump’s personal grievance politics. It is the institutionalization of those grievances into executive action, budget policy, personnel decisions, ideological discipline, and attacks on the very institutions that make democratic accountability possible.
West’s warning about “legal coups” is especially important. The danger is not always dramatic. It can arrive through emergency declarations, executive orders, manipulated funding streams, attacks on courts, and legal theories that stretch presidential power beyond democratic limits.
Trump’s executive order attempting to restrict birthright citizenship effectively placed a long-settled constitutional guarantee under direct challenge (Sacchetti et al., 2025). The Post has also reported that emergency powers have become central to Trump’s governing style, with critics warning that the administration is invoking crises to justify extraordinary executive authority (Bendavid, 2025).
The ill-fated Iran War—as we must all surely know by now—is another manifestation of this same anti-democratic pattern. This is not simply a foreign policy issue. It is a constitutional issue. Congress, not the president alone, holds the power to declare war.
Yet Meyer & Alfaro (2026) reported that the House passed a war powers resolution seeking to push Trump to end a conflict that Congress had not authorized, while the Senate considered similar measures amid growing impatience over the administration’s unilateral conduct of the war. Days later, the Republican-led Senate rejected a resolution that would have blocked Trump from ordering further strikes on Iran, underscoring the degree to which congressional checks on war-making power have weakened under partisan pressure (Meyer, 2026).
That matters because democracy is not only about elections. It is also about whether constitutional limits mean anything when the executive branch claims emergency authority, bypasses Congress, and then dares the other branches to stop it.
War concentrates power. It disciplines dissent. It shifts public attention away from domestic accountability. These are useful ploys for tyrants as these can be used to rally obedience, punish critics, and normalize rule by crisis. In this sense, the Iran War fits West’s warning about legal coups and emergency powers: authoritarianism often advances not by openly abolishing democracy, but by hollowing out the institutions that restrain executive power.
The attack on higher education fits squarely within West’s concern about the decline of authoritative institutions. Universities, news organizations, nonprofits, courts, think tanks, and professional associations are essential to democratic life because they produce knowledge, preserve evidence, hold power accountable, and teach people to think critically. That is precisely why they are under attack.
Notwithstanding Trump's Compact for higher education (Austin American-Statesman Editorial Board (2025), the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against universities makes this clear.
Columbia University’s compliance with federal demands under threat of losing $400 million in federal funding generated widespread concern over academic freedom, shared governance, student protest rights, and government intrusion into curriculum (Powers & Brown, 2025). Columbia later reached a settlement with the Trump administration: the university agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government and $21 million to resolve related employment claims, while regaining access to much of its federal research funding—a resolution critics viewed as a dangerous precedent for federal coercion of universities (Office of the President, 2025; Reuters, 2025)
Harvard, by contrast, publicly resisted federal demands that reached into governance, hiring, admissions, DEI programming, student protest policy, and the intellectual life of the university. Federal officials responded in April 2025 by freezing billions in research funds. Although U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs later ruled the freeze unlawful and the administration reinstated grants and contracts previously awarded to Harvard, the Trump administration appealed the ruling and continued its broader legal campaign against the university (Raymond, 2025; Raymond & Stempel, 2026; also see Guardian Staff and Agencies).
The Widener Library at Harvard University, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025, in Cambridge,
Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa) via Associated Press
For those of us in Texas, none of this feels distant. We have already witnessed the state-level version of this same project through attacks on DEI, tenure, shared governance, ethnic studies, gender studies, and academic freedom. What is happening nationally under Trump is connected to what we have seen in Texas, Florida, and other states: the effort to narrow what can be taught, who can belong, which histories count, and which institutions are permitted to challenge power.
West also warned about attacks on the information ecosystem. Here, too, his concerns have been borne out. Trump’s escalating lawsuits against media organizations—including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and others—must be understood not only as legal actions, but as intimidation strategies aimed at independent journalism (Wagner & Nover, 2026). A democracy cannot function when journalists are chilled, universities are threatened, lawyers are punished, and public servants are expected to demonstrate loyalty to a person rather than to the Constitution.
The attack on law firms is similarly alarming. The Washington Post has reported on executive orders targeting major law firms, including measures affecting contracts, security clearances, and access to federal buildings. These actions strike at the independence of the legal profession and the right to representation—both foundational to the rule of law (Berman & Stein, 2026). When lawyers fear representing disfavored clients, democracy itself is weakened.
Finally, West’s point about counter-majoritarianism remains crucial. The United States already has political structures that allow minority rule: the Electoral College, the Senate, gerrymandered districts, voter suppression, and a judiciary shaped by presidents who did not always win the popular vote. Trumpism exploits these structures. It does not need majority support to govern aggressively. It needs institutional leverage, fear, disinformation, and compliance.
This is why West’s essay remains so urgent. Trump is dangerous, but Trumpism is larger than Trump. It is a political infrastructure. It is a governing style. It is a movement that seeks to discipline universities, intimidate journalists, weaken courts, punish dissent, restrict voting, erase histories, bypass Congress, and turn public institutions into instruments of ideological control.
The work before us, then, is not only electoral. It is educational, institutional, legal, cultural, and moral. We must defend academic freedom, public education, independent journalism, voting rights, civil rights, Ethnic Studies, DEI, congressional war powers, and the right to dissent. We must refuse the normalization of intimidation. And we must insist that democracy is not simply the act of voting; it is the entire ecology of institutions, rights, knowledge, and public trust that makes self-government possible.
Darrell West warned us in 2022 that Trump was not the only threat to democracy. Today, we can see the full force of that warning. The threat is not only a man. It is a machinery. And naming that machinery clearly is part of how we begin to resist it.
Dans, P., & Groves, S. (Eds.). (2023). Mandate for leadership: The conservative promise. Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation. https://www.mandateforleadership.org/
I want to call attention to this important Brookings Press article by Darrell M. West on academic freedom and democracy. West’s central point is one we urgently need to take seriously in Texas: attacks on academic freedom are not only attacks on faculty or universities. They are attacks on democracy itself.
West argues that democracies require more than elections, rules, and courts. They also require a vibrant civil society and an independent knowledge sector where educators, researchers, journalists, nonprofit leaders, and students can ask hard questions, challenge authority, and engage evidence without fear of political punishment.
When public officials begin dictating what can and cannot be taught, when scholars fear retaliation for their expertise, and when censorship becomes normalized, democratic life itself begins to erode.
That is precisely why the crisis at The University of Texas at Austin matters far beyond campus. SB 17, SB 18, the dismantling of DEI infrastructure, threats to tenure, weakened shared governance, and the consolidation of fields like Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies are not isolated policy choices.
Together, they reflect a broader attempt—animated in part by Christian nationalism and its hostility to pluralism—to narrow the boundaries of knowledge, discipline faculty, and make certain histories, identities, and critiques less visible.
West reminds us that authoritarianism often begins by discrediting independent experts and weakening institutions that hold power accountable. That should give us pause. A public university that cannot protect the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn cannot fully serve students, democracy, or the public good.
Texas is one of the most diverse states in the nation. Its future depends on whether our institutions can educate students honestly about the world they are inheriting. To censor or suppress scholarship on race, gender, inequality, immigration, Indigenous histories, or democracy is not neutrality. It is political interference masquerading as reform.
At UT Austin, we should be expanding intellectual inquiry, not shrinking it. We should be strengthening shared governance, not bypassing it. We should be protecting faculty expertise, not intimidating it. And we should be investing in the fields of study that help students understand Texas in all its complexity, beauty, and contradiction.
West’s warning is clear: when academic freedom is weakened, democracy is weakened with it. Texas leaders should heed that warning before more damage is done.
Students walk past Wilson Library on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, U.S., September 20, 2018. Picture taken on September 20, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Drake
Legislation recently signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis challenges academic freedom in fundamental respects. His “Stop WOKE Act” restricts public higher education institutions, and others, from teaching about racial injustice, therefore impinging on traditional faculty prerogatives to teach courses based on their substantive expertise. In addition, provisions in the bill that allow administrators to fire professors who fail to comply with newly enacted pedagogic restrictions threaten the job security of those working in public universities.
Less understood, though, is how these threats to academic freedom also endanger democracy itself. Many analysts worrying about democracy today focus on procedural protections, such as voting rights, institutional rules, due process, and the rule of law, among other things. These features are basic requirements of functioning democracies and are the bedrock of our political system.
Yet one of the overlooked ingredients of democracy is a vibrant civil society with a knowledge sector that is free of political interference and the ability to train students in independent analysis and critical thinking. As argued in my new Brookings Institution Press book, “Power Politics: Trump and the Assault on American Democracy,” I cite a number of current threats to civil society in general and the knowledge sector in particular that are very dangerous for the United States. Democratic systems require the free flow of information, mechanisms to hold leaders accountable, and healthy civic discourse. Many of these features are under attack right now in the knowledge sector, with ominous consequences for universities, nonprofits, and think tanks.
The Value of Academic Freedom
Academic freedom is one of the reasons the United States’ higher education system has long been the envy of the world. Providing teachers and professors with the freedom to teach important ideas and encourage critical thinking among students is key to freedom, economic prosperity, and innovation. People need independence and liberty to challenge authorities, question leadership, and develop new ideas.
The scope and benefits of academic freedom, naturally, have been challenged and debated over the years. For example, conservatives have long argued that the academic freedom on college campuses is a veneer that creates a hostile environment against conservative scholars and values. In response to these arguments, some universities have created free speech zones in order to encourage an open flow of ideas. Other places have developed courses, lecture series, conferences, workshops, and academic enterprises designed to promote out-of-the-box thinking or a diversity of viewpoints. Yet, current efforts to outright silence scholars and teaching marks an important, and dangerous, escalation of this issue.
Recognizing the moral authority of independent experts, when despots come to power, one of the first things they do is discredit authoritative institutions who hold leaders accountable and encourage an informed citizenry. In Hungary, for example, government authorities attacked the Central European University that operated in Budapest and forced its relocation to Vienna, Austria. Having independent educators was deemed incompatible with an illiberal political regime. It is easy to slide into authoritarianism when fact-checkers and independent analysts are discredited and civil society organizations are weak in their capacity to question political leaders. If academic experts are discredited and lack legitimacy with the general public, it is hard for them to be effective in civic discussions. And if they worry about prosecution or selective law enforcement, it will limit their ability to challenge government authorities.
The Risk of Intimidation
In recent years, we have seen a number of cases where political leaders upset about criticism have challenged professors and sought to intimidate them into silence. One example took place in Virginia when GOP party chair Rich Anderson asked the University of Virginia to investigate Professor Larry Sabato after he tweeted “Trump, who governed on the edge of insanity for four long years, has gone over the edge. Yet millions of people and 90%+ of GOP members of Congress, still genuflect before this false god.”
According to a news account, the prominent commentator wrote this after Trump claimed in 2021 he soon would be reinstated as president. Anderson made the investigation request on the grounds that the educator’s statements “appear to violate the university’s mission statement and faculty code of ethics” and that they represented “bitter partisanship.” Fortunately, university officials defended academic freedom by putting out a statement reminding people “there is nothing in the university’s code of conduct that limits faculty from engaging in expression that is protected under the First Amendment.” That ended the matter in terms of this particular intimidation, except for whatever distraction the GOP critique caused the well-known commentator.
Other examples can be found in the area of teaching critical race theory. In a number of states, Republican legislators have introduced bills that banned or restricted the teaching of America’s racial injustices in public educational institutions. Some of these bills enacted in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and elsewhere explicitly banned instruction of the New York Times’ “1619 Project” that took a critical stance on the way America dealt with slavery.
A survey analysis undertaken by UCLA researchers found that 894 K-12 school districts across the country (one-third of the study’s sample) have seen efforts to restrict teaching about America’s racial history or racial equity in general. Many educators reported a “newly hostile environment for discussing issues of race, racism, and racial inequality and more broadly diversity, equity, and inclusion” and felt high levels of threats and intimidation.
These and other reactions demonstrate what a dangerous time it is for university and K-12 educators. Rather than have pedagogic autonomy and be free of political interference, legislators are directly placing restrictions on what can be said and taught within the classroom. In the same way other American institutions are being undermined and delegitimized, K-12 schools and universities are being weakened through restrictions on course content and teaching approach.
Silencing Expertise
Experts are vital to democracy because they bring in-depth knowledge to civic discourse. Yet some public officials don’t like it when expertise is used against their own policy decisions. For example, several University of Florida election experts discovered this when they were asked to testify concerning the impact of new election laws on minority voters. Worried about possible voter suppression, these scholars agreed to share their views about the harmful effects of new restrictions, only to be informed by their dean they would not be able to testify. It took lengthy negotiations and negative news stories about the university before educational administrators reversed their stance and allowed the experts to testify.
Endangering Independence
Having independent authorities who can operate freely is important, but a recent episode illustrates how scholar independence has been challenged in new ways. At Yale University, Beverly Gage, the director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, came under fire from top donors to her program. After one of her program’s professors wrote an opinion piece entitled “How to Protect America From the Next Donald Trump,” founding donor Nicholas Brady complained to university officials about the article and is quoted as saying “this is not what Charles Johnson and I signed up for.”
In response, Yale set up a new advisory board composed mainly of conservative Republicans, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Brady indicated he wanted someone to observe program courses and report back on what was being taught. At that point, Gage asked the university to protect her academic freedom and argued, “It’s very difficult to teach effectively or creatively in a situation where you are being second-guessed and undermined and not protected.”. Yet, unlike the University of Virginia case where a professor under attack was supported by high-level administrators, Gage did not feel she received adequate support from her deans. So she resigned “saying the university failed to stand up for academic freedom amid inappropriate efforts by its donors to influence its curriculum and faculty hiring.”
Weaponizing Libel and Defamation Laws
With academic freedom and scholar independence being challenged, libel laws and defamation lawsuits are getting weaponized and personal investigations are becoming more common. People from several different organizations have faced political or legal risks from expressing their viewpoints as time-worn protections based on freedom of speech and freedom of expression have started to unravel.
For example, Donald Trump has made a practice of weaponizing libel laws by suing opinion writers who penned commentary critical of him. In 2020, for example, his campaign lawyers filed lawsuits against writers for the New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN, claiming op-ed articles had impugned Trump’s character by arguing there was a “quid pro quo” between Russia and the billionaire to aid his 2016 election.
Months later, many of these suits were dismissed by judges on grounds that they lacked merit, but their mere filing ran up legal fees and contributed to an atmosphere of fear and intimidation in various quarters. Writers have to worry if they author pieces critical of politicians that their personal texts and emails will be subpoenaed, their phone calls investigated, or they will get sued and be forced to spend a lot of money and endure considerable stress defending themselves.
There also has been an increase in defamation lawsuits on college campuses from aggrieved people. Graduate students who have complained about faculty members have been sued for defamation and professors have sued one another as well as outside agents for what they saw as false and defamatory statements.
Taken together, these lawsuits illustrate the threats to personal freedom that attack the very basis of civil society and the knowledge sector that is crucial to the functioning of American democracy. These activities challenge the ability of experts and nonprofit advocates to be independent, undermine their capacity to hold leaders accountable, and discourage experts from writing critical pieces about leaders and/or donors.
Without the means to question authority and work free of fear, it becomes easy for countries to slide into illiberalism or outright authoritarianism. There needs to be system-wide protections, otherwise faculty members are forced to depend on the vagaries of particular deans and high-level administrators. In today’s world, the risks are readily apparent and everyone should fear the possibility that the U.S. may follow the path of other nations that have limited academic autonomy, weakened freedom of expression, and harmed democracy itself.
The student editorial board rightly centered faculty concerns over academic freedom, tenure, shared governance, DEI, and the chilling effects of state legislation like SB 17 and SB 18. Their point was simple and powerful: a university cannot claim excellence while ignoring the conditions under which faculty teach, research, mentor, and serve. Faculty well-being is not a private employment matter. It is fundamental to the academic mission of the university.
In this context, former President Jay Hartzell’s stated goal of attracting “more elite faculty and students” raises an uncomfortable question: if this is not an indictment of, or even an insult to, the faculty and students already here, what exactly does it mean? UT Austin is already home to extraordinary faculty, staff, and students.
The crisis is not that they are insufficiently elite; it is that university and state leaders are undermining the very conditions that brought them here and would keep them here: academic freedom—the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn; tenure rights and protections; shared governance; the intellectual diversity that Ethnic and Women and Gender Studies brings; and respect for the communities that make Texas what it is.
Since then, these concerns have only deepened. UT Austin has witnessed layoffs, program consolidations, diminished shared governance, and an increasingly constrained environment for teaching and research on race, gender, inequality, and democracy itself. These are not isolated administrative decisions. They are part of a broader political project to narrow what can be studied, taught, debated, and imagined in public higher education.
At times, it feels like a slow-moving train headed toward disaster, or toward some dystopian vision that refuses to see the very diversity before our eyes, while authoritarian forms of censorship become increasingly normalized.
The Daily Texan editorial board understood what many leaders still refuse to acknowledge: students lose when faculty are silenced, intimidated, or driven away. Texas loses when its flagship university becomes a place where scholars must look over their shoulders before doing the work that public universities exist to do.
UT Austin should be a beacon of intellectual courage, democratic inquiry, and public purpose. Instead, it is being made into a cautionary tale. That must change.
The recent publication of a survey of Texas faculty is as clear-cut as it is concerning.
According to a Sept. 5 American Association of University Professors (AAUP) survey, Texas faculty are dissatisfied with the conditions and direction of higher education in Texas. 61% of those surveyed would not recommend Texas for a faculty position to out-of-state colleagues, and 26.3% plan to interview elsewhere next year. Top concerns for faculty include the state’s political climate, academic freedom, salary, and diversity, equity and inclusion issues.
As one of Texas’ flagship institutions and a top 10 public university, UT represents the Texas education system internationally. UT can’t afford to neglect its faculty without risking long-term damage to its reputation and academic standing. At the time of publication, UT did not respond to a request for comment.
In his Sept. 18 State of the University Address, President Jay Hartzell said he, the provost and the deans will be working on “how, across the entire academic enterprise, we attract more elite faculty and students.”
Faculty is essential to the success of any university. But as it stands, we are failing ours. If UT wants to recruit and retain top-tier faculty, UT must prioritize their satisfaction and address key issues impacting their success. UT has a responsibility to protect academic freedom, and this begins with protecting faculty well-being.
According to the AAUP survey, the failure to address faculty concerns may result in a decreased retention of faculty, loss of academic talent and damage to the quality of higher education.
“These findings serve as a wake-up call for policymakers, administrators, employers, and other concerned citizens, emphasizing the urgent need to address the concerns raised by faculty members,” the survey said.
Intellectual debate and dialogue allow students and faculty to build upon each other’s independent analysis and critical thinking. State legislation constantly challenges the boundaries of academic freedom. Increasing limitations on academic freedom can have hefty implications not just on our education but on our political structure.
“(Faculty) are worried that people outside the University are going to be telling us what we can and can’t teach, what we have to say and what we can’t say in the classroom,” said Daniel Brinks, a professor in the School of Law and chair of the government department. “That will be a problem for students’ ability to learn, faculty’s ability to teach and do research, and the University’s ability to be an authentic academic institution.”
Senate Bill 17 has had lasting impacts on faculty perceptions of academic freedom. The University’s over-compliance with SB 17, including firing certain staff members without justification, raises concerns about UT’s commitment to faculty well-being amid the enactment of legislative changes.
“There’s a chilling effect … with Senate Bill 17, which banned DEI programs and practices, but it also put in there some pretty severe penalties,” said Brian Evans, president of the Texas Conference of AAUP. “If you are a faculty member perceived to be giving a training on diversity, equity and inclusion, you can face disciplinary action, including being terminated or dismissed.”
Additionally, SB 18 was intended to ban tenure at Texas public universities. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick proposed the bill because he felt professors at UT use the stability their tenure provides to “poison the minds of our next generation,” as he wrote in a Feb. 18, 2022 statement.
“These professors claim ‘academic freedom’ and hide behind their tenure to continue blatantly advancing their agenda of societal division,” Patrick wrote in a statement released April 20, 2023.
The bill was modified to keep tenured professors — with caveats. However, they can still be let go at the University’s discretion.
SB 18 may disproportionately impact untenured faculty who speak publicly on identity-related issues. The bill instills fear, making professors weary that a progressive curriculum would get them fired. If UT wants professors to continue to foster discourse in their classrooms, they must actively seek to protect tenure and ensure the stability of faculty.
“(AAUP) felt that SB 18 would potentially erode the protections of tenure … the whole reason there’s tenure is to protect academic freedom,” said Andrea Gore, a professor in the College of Pharmacy and Vice President of UT Austin’s chapter of AAUP. “If we didn’t have something that told us our jobs are going to be secure if we tackle difficult topics, we might not tackle those topics, and that would be a huge disservice to the students of the state of Texas.”
Forums exist for faculty to air their grievances, including the Faculty Council, but rarely does faculty input result in actual change. For example, the Council released a July 12 report criticizing UT’s handling of pro-Palestian demonstrations, and the council openly condemned President Hartzell’s mass layoffs following SB 17, which they said were made “without consultation of Faculty Council Leadership or other faculty leaders, in violation of shared governance practices, and without due process.”
In neither case did UT change or reverse its course of action despite callouts from faculty. If faculty cannot make change at UT, they may look for employment somewhere they can.
“Faculty Council, to me, is mostly a propaganda machine … it gives a veneer of a democratically-run institution,” said Stuart Reichler, an associate professor of practice in the College of Natural Sciences. “The reality is that the President and the other top administrators at the University decide what does and doesn’t happen.”
UT does have a requirement to adjust its practices according to the Texas legislature, but it also has a responsibility to recognize and act on the pleas of those it employs. If we can’t provide the basic protections our faculty deserves, how can we expect to attract and retain faculty members who contribute so to the prestige of UT Austin?
The University will soon become the face of Texas’ higher education failures unless it starts truly listening to its faculty.
The editorial board is composed of associate editors Tenley Jackson, Tanya Narwekar, Ava Saunders and Anjali Shenoy and editor-in-chief McKenzie Henningsen.
James Temple’s reporting in MIT Technology Review is deeply alarming. The Trump administration has shut down more than 100 NSF-funded climate studies, cutting off tens of millions of dollars in research on climate change, clean energy, methane emissions, sea-level rise, heat waves, environmental justice, and community adaptation. This is not simply a budget decision. It is an attack on the knowledge infrastructure we need to survive on a warming, increasingly unstable planet.
What makes this especially troubling is that these cuts come at the very moment when we should be expanding, not shrinking, our public capacity to understand a hot Earth. We are already seeing the consequences of extreme heat, water stress, storms, flooding, pollution, and energy insecurity.
Communities most affected by these crises are often the very ones whose realities are dismissed when environmental justice research is labeled “DEI” and made politically suspect.
This is how anti-democratic politics works: not only by censoring speech, but by defunding the research that helps people see clearly. If we cannot study climate harms, public health impacts, methane emissions, community vulnerability, or clean-energy transitions, then we are left less prepared, less protected, and less free.
We should be very concerned. A government that disables climate science while the Earth heats up is not protecting the public interest. It is abandoning it.
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s "America Undone” series, examining how the foundations of US success in science and innovation are currently under threat. You can read the rest here.
The Trump administration has terminated National Science Foundation grants for more than 100 research projects related to climate change amid a widening campaign to slash federal funding for scientists and institutions studying the rising risks of a warming world.
The move will cut off what’s likely to amount to tens of millions of dollars for studies that were previously approved and, in most cases, already in the works.
Affected projects include efforts to develop cleaner fuels, measure methane emissions, improve understanding of how heat waves and sea-level rise disproportionately harm marginalized groups, and help communities transition to sustainable energy, according to an MIT Technology Review review of a GrantWatch database—a volunteer-led effort to track federal cuts to research—and a list of terminated grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) itself.
The NSF is one of the largest sources of US funding for university research, so the cancellations will deliver a big blow to climate science and clean-energy development.
They come on top of the White House’s broader efforts to cut research funding and revenue for universities and significantly raise their taxes. The administration has also strived to slash staff and budgets at federal research agencies, halt efforts to assess the physical and financial risks of climate change, and shut down labs that have monitored and analyzed the levels of greenhouse gases in the air for decades.
“I don’t think it takes a lot of imagination to understand where this is going,” says Daniel Schrag, co-director of the science, technology, and public policy program at Harvard University, which has seen greater funding cuts than any other university amid an escalating legal conflict with the administration. “I believe the Trump administration intends to zero out funding for climate science altogether.”
The NSF says it’s terminating grants that aren’t aligned with the agency’s program goals, “including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), environmental justice, and misinformation/disinformation.”
Trump administration officials have argued that DEI considerations have contaminated US science, favoring certain groups over others and undermining the public’s trust in researchers.
“Political biases have displaced the vital search for truth,” Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said to a group of NSF administrations and others last month, according to reporting in Science.
Science v. politics
But research projects that got caught in the administration’s anti-DEI filter aren’t the only casualties of the cuts. The NSF has also canceled funding for work that has little obvious connections to DEI ambitions, such as research on catalysts.
Many believe the administration’s broader motivation is to undermine the power of the university system and prevent research findings that cut against its politics.
“It certainly seems like a deliberate attempt to undo any science that contradicts the administration,” says Alexa Fredston, an assistant professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
On May 28, a group of states including California, New York, and Illinois sued the NSF, arguing that the cuts illegally violated diversity goals and funding priorities clearly established by Congress, which controls federal spending.
A group of universities also filed a lawsuit against the NSF over its earlier decision to reduce the indirect cost rate for research, which reimburses universities for overhead expenses associated with work carried out on campuses. The plaintiffs included the California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has also lost a number of research grants.
(MIT Technology Review is owned by, but editorially independent from, MIT.)
The NSF declined to comment.
‘Theft from the American people’
GrantWatch is an effort among researchers at rOpenSci, Harvard, and other organizations to track terminations of grants issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NSF. It draws on voluntary submissions from scientists involved as well as public government information.
A search of its database for the terms “climate change,” “clean energy,” “climate adaptation,” “environmental justice,” and “climate justice” showed that the NSF has canceled funds for 118 projects, which were supposed to receive more than $100 million in total. Searching for the word “climate” produces more than 300 research projects that were set to receive more than $230 million. (That word often indicates climate-change-related research, but in some abstracts it refers to the cultural climate.)
Some share of those funds has already been issued to research groups. The NSF section of the database doesn’t include that “outlaid” figure, but it’s generally about half the amount of the original grants, according to Noam Ross, a computational researcher and executive director of rOpenSci, a nonprofit initiative that promotes open and reproducible science.
A search for “climate change” among the NIH projects produces another 22 studies that were terminated and were still owed nearly $50 million in grants. Many of those projects explored the mental or physical health effects of climate change and extreme weather events.
The NSF more recently released its own list of terminated projects, which mostly mirrored GrantWatch’s findings and confirms the specific terminations mentioned in this story.
“These grant terminations are theft from the American people,” Ross said in an email response. “By illegally ending this research the Trump administration is wasting taxpayer dollars, gutting US leadership in science, and telling the world that the US government breaks its promises.”
Harvard, the country’s oldest university, has been particularly hard hit.
In April, the university sued the Trump administration over cuts to its research funding and efforts to exert control over its admissions and governance policies. The White House, in turn, has moved to eliminate all federal funds for the university, including hundreds of NSF and NIH grants.
Daniel Nocera, a professor at Harvard who has done pioneering work on so-called artificial photosynthesis, a pathway for producing clean fuels from sunlight, said in an email that all of his grants were terminated.
“I have no research funds,” he added.
Another terminated grant involved a collaboration between Harvard and the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), designed to update the atmospheric chemistry component of the Community Earth System Model, an open-source climate model widely used by scientists around the world.
The research was expected to “contribute to a better understanding of atmospheric chemistry in the climate system and to improve air quality predictions within the context of climate change,” according to the NSF abstract.
“We completed most of the work and were able to bring it to a stopping point,” Daniel Jacob, a professor at Harvard listed as the principal investigator on the project, said in an email. “But it will affect the ability to study chemistry-climate interactions. And it is clearly not right to pull funding from an existing project.”
Plenty of the affected research projects do, in one way or another, grapple with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But that’s because there is ample evidence that disadvantaged communities experience higher rates of illness from energy-sector pollution, will be harder hit by the escalating effects of extreme weather and are underrepresented in scientific fields.
One of the largest terminations cut off about $4 million dollars of remaining funds for the CLIMATE Justice Initiative, a fellowship program at the University of California, Irvine designed to recruit, train and mentor a more diverse array of researchers in Earth sciences.
The NSF decision occurred halfway into the 5-year program, halting funds for a number of fellows who were in the midst of environmental justice research efforts with community partners in Southern California. Kathleen Johnson, a professor at UC Irvine and director of the initiative, says the university is striving to find ways to fund as many participants as possible for the remainder of their fellowships.
“We need people from all parts of society who are trained in geoscience and climate science to address all these global challenges that we are facing,” she says. “The people who will be best positioned to do this work … are the people who understand the community's needs and are able to therefore work to implement equitable solutions.”
Gender-Baiting Is Dehumanizing—And It Hurts Families Across the Political Spectrum
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
June 13, 2026
Elaine Godfrey’s Atlantic piece on the Paxton-Talarico Senate race is a sobering reminder that we are likely to see an ugly campaign season in Texas. Already, the attacks on James Talarico have moved beyond policy disagreement into gender-baiting, mockery, and false claims about his identity. These tactics are not only dishonest; they are dehumanizing.
Whatever one thinks of Talarico’s politics, no candidate should be reduced to insults about masculinity, gender identity, or sexuality. This kind of rhetoric does not merely target one public figure. It sends a message to every LGBTQIA perso—and to every young person who is questioning, searching, or simply different—that their dignity is conditional and that their humanity can be turned into a punchline.
That cruelty is especially painful because Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual (LGBTQIA) people are not abstractions. They are our children, siblings, cousins, parents, students, neighbors, colleagues, and friends. They live in Democratic families, Republican families, religious families, secular families, rural families, urban families, and every kind of Texas family.
Geez, human variation does not sort itself neatly by party, denomination, ZIP code, or ideology.
That is not “higher education gobbledygook.” It is lived reality.
So when political leaders mock gender identity or use anti-LGBTQIA insinuations to score points, they are almost certainly wounding people in their own communities—and quite possibly in their own families.
They may imagine they are attacking an opponent, but the damage radiates outward. It reaches the child listening from the back seat, the teenager in the pew, the college student afraid to come home, the parent who loves their child but now feels politically cornered into silence.
Most positively, this moment also reminds us that LGBTQIA people have never been merely the objects of ridicule or fear. They are agents of courage, culture, family, faith, scholarship, public service, and democratic possibility. Every year on June 28, communities around the world observe International LGBT Pride Day, honoring the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City—a watershed moment that helped catalyze the modern gay liberation movement.
Pride is not only a celebration. It is a public affirmation that people who have been shamed, criminalized, silenced, and excluded are fully human and fully worthy of dignity, safety, joy, and belonging.
Happy Pride Month, by the way!
This is why gender-baiting is so morally bankrupt. It asks us to move backward, toward shame and stigma, precisely when history calls us forward—toward recognition, repair, and love.
This is not strength. It is not faith. It is not leadership. It is the politics of humiliation.
Texas deserves better than campaigns built on ridicule. We can debate taxes, schools, health care, immigration, war, democracy, and the future of the state without stripping people of their dignity. In fact, we must. A democracy worthy of the name depends not only on votes and institutions, but on the moral discipline to recognize one another as fully human.
The truth is simple: LGBTQIA Texans belong to all of us. They are part of every community, including those that pretend otherwise. To attack them for political gain is to attack the sacred fabric of family, faith, and human dignity itself.
TWO THINGS are as certain as bluebonnets in spring now that Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee for the Senate in Texas: Democrats have a better-than-usual chance of winning statewide. And the next 23 weeks are going to be hideous.
Paxton’s big win comes days after President Trump stuck his finger into the wind, determined that the incumbent, John Cornyn, was toast, and gave the attorney general his last-minute support. Even though the nearly 28-point margin was surprising, it was probably always going to be Paxton. A runoff tends to attract the hardest of the hard-core—the kind of determined voter who is willing not only to show up to vote in March, but to show up and vote in March, sit through 12 weeks of brutal attack ads, then head back out to the polls in May. The kind of Republican who might argue, as one woman did in Dallas when I spoke with her last week, that Paxton and Trump are bringing masculinity back to the party like Bambi’s father “coming out of the forest with those huge antlers.”
Now that these dutiful Republicans have secured the animated stag of their dreams, they will turn their attention to his general-election opponent: James Talarico, the 37-year-old Democratic state lawmaker and aspiring Presbyterian minister. In some ways, the two men have become avatars for their respective parties, which will spend the next five months ruthlessly attacking each other.
Paxton, a MAGA folk hero, seems even more committed to the movement than Trump himself is. As attorney general, he filed dozens upon dozens of lawsuits against Presidents Obama and Biden, and sued to overturn the 2020 election results. Paxton and Trump happen to share a strikingly similar ethical and legal rap sheet: Both men have been indicted (Paxton’s charges involved securities fraud and were dismissed after he agreed to do community service and take an ethics class); both have been impeached (Paxton was suspended by the Texas House but later acquitted by the Senate); and both have been accused of—and deny—infidelity. (Angela Paxton is now divorcing Ken on “biblical grounds.”)
Although Talarico doesn’t yet have Paxton’s name recognition, he does have strong youth-pastor energy and, at least for now, the moral high ground. As a faith-forward economic populist, Talarico has a core campaign message of love triumphing over hate, and little guys taking on the billionaires. Republicans know that they’ve got a tough race ahead of them, which is why they’ve already settled on a strategy: make Talarico seem like a weird dude.
Unfortunately for Democrats, Talarico has been more than a little helpful in this effort. In 2021, the state lawmaker said that “God is nonbinary,” a statement that is off-putting to some Christians, not because they believe that God is literally a man but because they can’t fathom why someone would drag God into the earthly debate over gender identity. Talarico has also said that there are six biological sexes and that he supports access to abortion, in part, because God asked for consent when he blessed Mary with the baby Jesus. As a candidate in 2022, he pledged to run a “non-meat campaign,” which was never going to play well in cattle country.
Lately, Talarico has been doing some backtracking. “I know there are two sexes, men and women. I also know there’s a very small percentage of people who have these chromosomal abnormalities, and I believe they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect,” he told CBS this week, adding that there are “some statements that I’ve made that I certainly regret.” Whenever Talarico is accused of being insufficiently pro-meat, his campaign circulates a photo of the candidate gnawing on a turkey leg at the state fair.
Still, both sides have heaps of material to work with. Which is why the next few months promise a total inundation of negative advertising online, and on the airwaves in Texas. Democrats will hammer into voters Paxton’s scandals—and the failures of Republican leadership. “Will Republicans get away with running a superficial attack campaign when Texans are really hurting?” Matt Angle, a state Democratic strategist, told me. “They’ve been in control for 30 years. If something’s broke, they broke it.” Meanwhile, Republicans are already parroting Paxton’s proposed “Tala-freako” and “Low-T Talarico” nicknames. This morning, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller wrote on X that Democrats have nominated their “first transgender senate candidate.” (Talarico is not transgender.) “We have not seen ugly yet,” Vinny Minchillo, a Texas Republican strategist, told me. They’re going to make Talarico “the woke DEI candidate of all woke DEI candidates. And pound him, pound him, pound him.”
The task ahead will be tough for Talarico, who will have to decide when to counter these attacks directly—Define thyself lest ye be defined, as the political maxim goes—and when to remain firmly astride his moral high horse. He will also have to fend off the unprecedented amounts of money that Republicans are pumping into the race in order to protect their fragile Senate majority. Already, Paxton has secured the backing of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which initially endorsed Cornyn and which, last night, dutifully scrubbed its website of all anti-Paxton press releases and ads.
Yet for Talarico, hope remains. No Texan needs reminding that inflation is high, or that the war in Iran has the whole world on edge and gas prices rising. Trump’s polling is bad, and among Texans, Talarico has higher favorability numbers than both Paxton and the president. In what might end up being a particularly good year for Democrats, victory is not only possible but achievable.
Still, if Democrats have done one thing well in Texas over the past 30 years, it’s dash hopes. The last time a Democrat came close to winning statewide in Texas was in 2018. Back then, Senator Ted Cruz beat Beto O’Rourke by roughly 215,000 votes. This time, the figure that Republicans have their eye on is 778,139, or the number of Texans who voted in the March GOP primary but who were not excited enough about either Republican candidate to vote in the runoff. A drop in turnout was expected. But a 36 percent decline “mirrors a lack of Republican enthusiasm we’ve seen in other states,” Minchillo said. For Texas Republicans, that number is “distressing.”
Last night on Truth Social, Trump congratulated Paxton and promised to hold a few rallies to help gin up some excitement. “Texas, this will be FUN!” the president teased. We’ll see.
