Silence Is Not Neutral: UT, the Compact, and the Fight for Fair Admissions in Texas Higher Education by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 Silence Is Not Neutral: UT, the Compact, and the Fight for Fair Admissions in Texas Higher Education

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

November 25, 2025

The University of Texas at Austin’s apparent refusal—or strategic silence—regarding the federal “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” marks an interesting, if not troubling, moment for public higher education in Texas. To be sure, UT has been navigating mounting political pressure from students, alumni, faculty, and community members. Even the editors of the Austin American-Statesman recently weighed in.

Faculty groups across the country have condemned the Compact as an effort to reshape universities into instruments of political ideology rather than centers of inquiry (Spitalniak, 2025). While universities across the country have rejected the Compact outright, UT has neither affirmed it nor denounced it, and that silence suggests more than institutional deliberation. It suggests political constraint indicating a modicum of success by opponents, but silence nevertheless.

Consider the KXAN segment below which questions why UT should be compelled to openly reject the Compact if it is already moving toward Compact-like outcomes as a result of recent state-imposed policy changes?

The Compact, proposed by the federal administration, would condition access to federal research funding on compliance with a slate of politically charged requirements: restrictions on faculty governance, limits on hiring autonomy, reinterpretations of free-speech policy, constraints on international student enrollment, and a prohibition on what it calls “proxies” for race or sex in admissions. 

All told, this moment exposes a parallel misunderstanding that urgently needs correction: the widespread claim that Texas’ Top Ten Percent Plan is a “race-based” or affirmative-action-style policy (e.g., Mukherjee, 2023). This mischaracterization has resurfaced because the Compact prohibits admissions criteria that correlate with race; some commentators have leapt to the false conclusion that the Top Ten Percent Plan is therefore racially motivated. But historically and legally, the policy is race-neutral.

The Top Ten Percent law, created under House Bill 588 in 1997, guarantees automatic admission to Texas public universities for students who graduate in the top ten percent of their high school class (Flores & Horn, 2020). It does not ask for racial identification, does not classify students by race, and does not treat students differently based on race. Its origin lies in Hopwood v. Texas, which barred the use of race in admissions in the mid-1990s. Legislators—seeking to broaden opportunity without violating the ruling—created a system that relied on class rank, not racial preference, to expand access across the state (Flores & Horn, 2020).

A key detail is that UT–Austin operates under a unique statutory modification to this law. In 2009, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 175, which allows UT–Austin to cap automatic admissions at 75 percent of its entering Texas freshman class beginning in 2011. This adjustment was made at UT’s request, as the flagship campus argued that full application of the Top Ten Percent rule would consume the entire entering class. Even with this cap, however, the Top Ten Percent Plan remains the policy mechanism through which the majority of UT’s freshman seats are filled—and it remains fully race-neutral.

While the Top Ten Percent Plan does increase racial and socioeconomic diversity, that outcome reflects the deeply segregated landscape of Texas high schools rather than any use of race within the statute itself. Legal scholars are unequivocal on this point: the percentage plan “is race-neutral…and its operation ensures broad diversity in every dimension” without invoking racial classification (Dorf, 2024, p. 112). 

At the same time, as Flores and Horn (2016) demonstrate, the plan’s current iteration—though it expands opportunity—still falls short of eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in access to Texas’ most selective universities. Miscasting the law as race-based is therefore not only factually incorrect but politically perilous, particularly at a moment when genuinely race-neutral mechanisms remain among the few available tools to advance equitable access in higher education.

The confusion is especially harmful now, as UT contemplates whether the Compact’s ban on “proxies” could be interpreted to target class-rank admissions. Class rank measures academic performance within schools; it is not a racial proxy under federal law (Dorf, 2024). Yet if political actors succeed in recasting it as race-based, they could undermine a foundational element of Texas admissions policy—one that is already modified at UT–Austin through SB 175 and thus particularly vulnerable to political reinterpretation.

If UT ultimately rejects the Compact—as it appears to have done—we as a public must nevertheless remain vigilant in defending the truth about the Top Ten Percent Plan as a race-neutral. Misrepresenting it only deepens confusion and fuels the political manipulation already surrounding higher education.

At a time when academic freedom, democracy, and access to higher education are under assault, clarity is essential.

References

Flores, S. M., & Horn, C. L. (2016). The Texas Top Ten Percent Plan: How it works, what we know, and what we should learn from it. UCLA, E-Scholarship.org. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4hm2n74b

Dorf, M. C. (2024). Race-neutrality, baselines, and ideological jujitsu After Students for Fair Admissions. Texas Law Review, 103, 269.

Mukherjee, R. (2023). 'Percent plans' undermine meritocracy in higher education: They function as a form of indirect affirmative action. City Journal.

Priest, J. (2025, November 17). UT-Austin still silent on Trump compact after deadline to sign passes: Most other invited universities have rejected the administration’s offer tying priority federal funding to campus policy changes. The Texas Tribune.

Spitalniak, L. (2025, October 8). Trump’s higher-ed compact draws condemnation from faculty and college unions. Higher Ed Dive.

The Rise of the Latino Far Right is Less about a Political Shift and More About an Emotional Realignment: An Analysis of the Emotional Architecture of Latino Conservatism

The Rise of the Latino Far Right is Less about a Political Shift and More About an Emotional Realignment: An Analysis of the Emotional Architecture of Latino Conservatism

I invite you to view and listen to this on my Youtube Vlog: 

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

November 19, 2025

Paola Ramos’ (2024a) insightful analysis in her award-winning book, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America, could not be more urgent for Texas and the nation. She argues that contemporary politics—especially around race, immigration, and education—is driven less by policy debates than by emotion. This emotional terrain helps explain a phenomenon many political observers once considered unthinkable: the rapid rightward shift among segments of the Latino electorate.

Democrats have long assumed that Latino voters would remain a reliable bloc, but recent elections have shattered that assumption. Donald Trump, despite his virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric and punitive border policies, won a higher percentage of the Latino vote in 2020 than he did in 2016 (Ramos, 2024). 

Ramos travels across the country to understand how and why this is happening, revealing a complex emotional and psychological landscape that has been largely ignored by both parties. What she finds is deeply relevant to Texas and other states, where political actors continue to weaponize fear, disgust, resentment, and grievance to inform immigration policy along the U.S.-Mexico border, reshape public education, and redefine belonging.

Across states and regions—including the Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida—Ramos meets Latino underdog GOP candidates, January 6th insurrectionists, Evangelical pastors, border vigilantes, and culture-war crusaders. Figures like Monica de la Cruz, who ran on a platform to “finish what Donald Trump started,” or David Ortiz, who identifies as a Spaniard and fought to preserve a statue of a conquistador in New Mexico, exemplify how narratives of cultural anxiety and racial hierarchy are being reactivated within communities of color.

Ramos interviews Pastor Luis Cabrera, whose calls to “Make America Godly Again” fuse Evangelical traditionalism with nationalist grievance, and Anthony Aguero, a Mexican American independent journalist turned border vigilante, who uses fear and conspiracy to radicalize his audience (Ramos, 2024b). Through these stories, Ramos shows how tribalism, traditionalism, and trauma within the Latino community have become powerful emotional levers. 

Many Latinos, like their white counterparts, fear losing their place in American society, and political actors have seized upon those fears to draw them toward movements that seem at odds with their own interests. The emotional void left by institutions—schools, local governments, political parties—has been filled by rhetoric that promises comfort, order, and belonging, even when those promises undermine the very communities they target.

This emotional landscape becomes even more dangerous when understood through Bryn Nelson’s (2024) framework of stochastic terrorism, a term law enforcement officials use to describe strategies in which public figures weaponize disgust and dehumanization to provoke unpredictable acts of hostility or violence (also see Hancock, 2000; Deigh, 2006). Importantly, the

emotional lexicon Ramos draws upon—fear, loss, resentment, nostalgia, belonging, abandonment, betrayal, pride, identity crisis, trauma, and tribalism—aligns closely with what scholars identify as the politics of emotion. 

These are not incidental feelings; they form the emotional architecture of political behavior. Ramos demonstrates that people defect not because they have been persuaded by new policy ideas, but because they are searching for emotional clarity, emotional safety, and emotional purpose.

Nelson explains that disgust is one of the most potent triggers humans possess, a biological response evolved to protect us from contamination. When politicians and pundits attach disgust to entire communities—immigrants, bilingual children, LGBTQ+ youth, educators, university researchers—they construct emotional conditions in which harassment, censorship, and even violence feel justified. The resulting harm is often diffuse, uncoordinated, unpredictable, and deniable by those who helped incite it.

These dynamics reveal why Texas’ education crisis cannot be understood apart from this emotional infrastructure. The attacks on Ethnic Studies, queer and trans students, DEI programs, university researchers, teacher autonomy, and historical truth are not policy disagreements. 

They are emotional strategies rooted in fear and disgust, strategies that now resonate with portions of the Latino electorate that have been recruited into grievance-based movements (Ramos, 2024). Figures like de la Cruz do not emerge in a vacuum; they reflect a broader realignment fueled by narratives of loss, nostalgia, and racial anxiety.

This is why after-school programs, community-based educational initiatives, and investment in public education matter so profoundly. Programs like our Saturday school, Academia Cuauhtli in Austin, Texas, are not just pedagogical interventions; they are emotional counterforces. 

They create spaces where children and families experience dignity, recognition, cultural pride, belonging, and joy—what some grotesquely deride as “identity politics,” but which are, in truth, the emotional foundations of human development and democratic belonging. 

These are the very emotions that protect against the vacuum where the manipulations described by Ramos and Nelson find fertile ground. These programs remind young people that their languages are assets, that their ancestors were scientists, mathematicians, engineers, activists, and philosophers, and that they have a rightful place in this society—truths that the current political climate works aggressively to suppress.

Ramos’s work makes clear that Latino political shifts are not driven solely by ideology but by unmet emotional needs—needs for safety, coherence, identity, and belonging. Nelson warns that when disgust is mobilized against communities, violence becomes ambient and unpredictable. 

Together, they illuminate what is happening in Texas schools: an emotional crisis disguised as a policy debate. And they underscore why our third spaces rooted in ceremony, storytelling, danza, bilingualism, and ancestral knowledge are not merely educational alternatives—they are frontline defenses against the weaponization of fear and disgust.

People do not defect from harmful ideologies unless they have somewhere better to belong. Our responsibility, especially in Texas' current political storm, is to continue building those places—spaces of corazón where community, culture, and emotional truth serve as the antidote to disinformation, division, and dehumanization.

References

Deigh, J. (2006). The politics of disgust and shame. Journal of Ethics, 10(4), 383–418.

Hancock, A. M. (2000). The public identity of the “welfare queen” and the politics of disgust. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Nelson, B. (2024). How Stochastic Terrorism Uses Disgust to Incite Violence: Pundits are weaponizing disgust to fuel violence, and it’s affecting our humanity. Scientific American.

Ramos, P. (2024a). Defectors: The rise of the Latino far right and what it means for America. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Ramos, P. (2024b, September 23). The immigrants who oppose immigration: A desire to prove their Americanness has driven more and more Latinos to turn against newcomers, The Atlantic.

Reflections on Thursday’s Hearing: Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and the Implicit Defense of Ethnic and Women and Gender Studies

Reflections on Thursday’s Hearing: Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and the Implicit Defense of Ethnic and Women and Gender Studies

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

November 15, 2025

I spent Thursday morning at the Texas Capitol for a public hearing convened by the Committee on Civil Discourse and Freedom of Speech—covered only briefly by CBS Austin but deserving of far more attention. I arrived wary; “free speech” hearings at the Legislature often serve as vehicles for protecting only conservative speech. But I was struck by how many witnesses, including UT-Austin President Jim Davis, returned repeatedly to the democratic values that make universities vital: free expression, the right to protest, and our responsibilities to one another. What emerged—whether intended or not—was a both a genuine defense of free speech and academic freedom together with an implicit defense of Ethnic and Women and Gender Studies.

The irony, of course, is that while the committee frames its mission as promoting “civil discourse,” its political subtext often privileges conservative voices. Yet Thursday’s testimony revealed something deeper: an acknowledgment that universities cannot fulfill their mission without safeguarding the very fields some lawmakers want to undermine—Mexican American Studies, African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. When witnesses described the world students must be prepared to navigate—a world comprised of diverse publics, where history is taught fully, and identity understood in context—they were describing the intellectual terrain these disciplines provide.

President Davis emphasized the need to cultivate “a culture of trust” as a solemn public obligation: trust between students and faculty, between universities and communities, and trust that difficult conversations can happen without political retaliation. That framing matters deeply at a time when Texas universities face intensifying scrutiny and intrusion into academic life, especially in the shadow of SB 37’s elimination of faculty governance statewide.

And then came the day’s most striking contradiction. While lawmakers at the Capitol extolled free expression, the Texas A&M University System—our other flagship institution—voted to restrict “any course that advocates race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” The contrast was sharp: a public celebration of free speech in Austin and a simultaneous move toward censorship in College Station.

This simultaneous embrace and suppression of speech reveals a deeper truth: free speech is being defended selectively, championed only when it aligns with certain political preferences. Yet even within that contradiction, the hearing surfaced an important consensus. It made clear, at least as I heard it, that universities cannot possibly prepare students for the world as it is while silencing the study of race, gender, power, or identity—most especially through crucial fields like Ethnic Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and other threatened fields that promote both intellectual rigor and democratic life.

In the midst of legislative pressure, institutional fear, and now A&M’s sweeping restrictions, Thursday’s testimony served as a reminder that free speech is not a partisan possession and academic freedom is not a negotiable privilege. They are the bedrock of higher education—principles exemplified by the very fields currently under attack.

Even in fraught political spaces, the values we fight for can still be spoken aloud. That matters—for our students, for our institutions, and for the democratic possibilities we must continue to defend and imagine. As always, these views are mine and mine only. I do encourage you to hear the hearing yourselves to see if you hear what I did.

'We have to get it right': Texas lawmakers host hearing on free speech at universities

Texas A&M’s New Policy Is a Blueprint for Institutionalized Censorship — And a Warning for the Nation

 Friends,

This is all so surreal. The Texas A&M University System decided yesterday to restrict any course that “advocates race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” This is a blatant intrusion of politics into the classroom. Despite the regents’ rhetoric about “rigor” and “transparency,” this policy is designed to give university presidents—and by extension the state—the power to pre-approve what faculty can teach. When a professor must seek administrative permission to assign a chapter mentioning race, gender, or sexuality, academic freedom is no longer intact.

The new “24-7 reporting mechanism” for students to flag “inaccurate or misleading content” introduces a surveillance element that is as chilling as it is unnecessary. It effectively deputizes students to police their professors, echoing the “snitch” systems used during the Red Scare, when politically motivated accusations served as tools to intimidate and purge faculty. Far from enhancing instruction, this kind of mechanism discourages honest inquiry, prompts self-censorship, and erodes the trust that makes learning possible. It is designed to chill speech, not strengthen education.

Claims that these changes “reinforce academic freedom” are disingenuous. Academic freedom means that scholarly experts, not political appointees, determine what is appropriate for their courses. Once content tied to race, gender, or identity requires presidential approval, the independence of teaching and research is already compromised.

This entire effort follows a familiar pattern: create a controversy, punish educators, and then impose sweeping restrictions in the name of “fixing the problem.” It mirrors the logic of SB 17 and other recent attempts to dismantle DEI and sanitize discussions of power, inequality, and identity across Texas higher education.

The policy applies to all twelve A&M institutions, affecting more than 150 existing courses on gender and sexuality alone. Its reach is enormous. And its purpose is clear: to suppress whole areas of study—Black studies, Latino studies, Indigenous studies, gender studies, queer studies—that challenge political orthodoxy and broaden students’ understanding of society.

We should call this what it is: censorship dressed up as oversight. When politicians decide which histories and identities are permissible in the classroom, the university stops being a place of inquiry and becomes an instrument of ideology. Texas A&M’s decision is not just a setback for academic freedom in Texas; it is a warning to the country about how quickly public education can be hollowed out when fear and politics drive policy.

-Angela Valenzuela

Texas A&M System approves new policy that could limit 'race or gender ideology' courses

By Kyle McClenagan | Houston Public Media

Published November 13, 2025 at 6:38 PM CST

The Academic Building at Texas A&M University. Houston Public Media

Courses at Texas A&M University System schools that advocate "race or gender ideology or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity" will only be allowed with pre-approval, following a policy change approved Thursday.

The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents voted unanimously to approve two policy changes that limit curriculum related to sex and gender identity and prohibit faculty from teaching material outside of the approved course syllabus. While the policy changes go into effect immediately, they will not be enforced until the spring semester, according to the board.

Several former and current faculty members spoke against the changes ahead of the board's vote. Two faculty members spoke in favor of the change, and nearly 150 letters were also sent to the board regarding the proposal.

Speaking ahead of the committee vote Thursday, committee chair Sam Torn said a rigorous review of university courses will accompany the policy changes.

"The board agreed it was essential for the Texas A&M University System to refine existing policies and lead the way with an in-depth and repeatable review of our courses so that we can, simply put, make sure we are educating, not advocating, and that we are teaching what we say we are going to teach," Torn said.

The policy changes came several months after then-Texas A&M University President Mark Welsh resigned after controversy over a gender-related lesson resulted in the ousting of several educators. Welsh reportedly received a $3.5 million payout after resigning.

The university system's Civil Rights Protections and Compliance policy also has been revised to state that "No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO or designee."

Before the final vote, the board updated the policy revision, changing it from "teach race or gender ideology" to "advocate race or gender ideology."

This means a university president or other high-level administrator will have the review authority over course material. According to the Texas A&M University course catalog, there are over 150 courses regarding gender and/or sex offered on the main campus.

The system's Academic Freedom, Responsibility, and Tenure policy was also revised to "clarify that a faculty member will not teach material that is inconsistent with the approved syllabus for the course," according to the meeting agenda.

Additionally, the board approved changes to the system's Expressive Activity on Campus policy to comply with Senate Bill 2972, which, according to Inside Higher Ed, limits how, when and where individuals can hold demonstrations on campus.

These policy changes apply to all 12 of the universities under the Texas A&M System, which includes Texas A&M University, Prairie View A&M, Tarleton State, West Texas A&M and others.

Texas A&M System Chancellor Glenn Hegar said courses and curriculum will be reviewed to ensure transparency and academic responsibility.

"This is not a one-time review," Hegar said. "We will review courses every semester to ensure our students are receiving the appropriate course material."

The new race and gender policy has garnered condemnation from educational rights advocates, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which sent a letter to the regents earlier this week arguing the policy amounted to censorship.

"We urge the board to reject these proposals, which invite — indeed, practically guarantee — unconstitutional political interference with faculty teaching and academic freedom," the letter reads. "Academic freedom requires that faculty, not administrators, determine whether, when, and how to teach material germane to the topic of their courses."

Before the final vote, FIRE special counsel Robert Shibley told Houston Public Media the policy change would affect a wide swath of curriculum, from civil rights to the Civil War or even classical Greek plays.

"That would subject dozens or potentially hundreds of courses to the veto of high-level administrators," Shibley said. "So, even if a faculty member just wants to assign one chapter of a book, and it has something to do with race or gender, that means that the college president is going to have to pre-approve that."

James Hallmark, vice chancellor for academic affairs for the Texas A&M System, said during Thursday's meeting the new policies are not meant to "introduce new limitations on scholarly inquiry."

"This does not diminish academic freedom; it reinforces the balance between academic freedom and academic responsibility," Hallmark said. "These policy changes complement the academic review and transparency initiative currently underway, and together they ensure clear course purposes, student accessible reporting mechanisms, regular review, and continuous quality improvement."

As part of the review process, Hallmark said there would be a "24-7 reporting mechanism" for students to report what they consider "inaccurate or misleading course content."

Shibley, the FIRE special counsel, said the potential creation of such a reporting mechanism could have a "chilling" effect on faculty.

"That just increases the likelihood of chilling faculty members from following their academic conscience and teaching what they think is appropriate for that course," he said. "Obviously, you hope everybody is going to be doing everything in the best faith possible. But hope is not a plan, and you want to make sure that your policies don't invite that kind of abuses."

Torn, the committee chair, said the policy change is "not symbolic" and that course enrollment, "workforce relevance," and "financial stewardship" would be among additional criteria included in the review process.

Shibley said there will likely be legal fallout from the policy changes due to legal precedent from the Red Scare of the 1950s that protects professors from political interference.

"The Legislature and the government generally is not allowed to launder censorship attempts through different third-party agencies," he said. "These sort of vague and overwrought policies invite the kind of abuses to the extent that they're basically inevitable."

The New Censors of College Station: Texas A&M’s regents are trying to ban ideas, not “ideology,” by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The New Censors of College Station: Texas A&M’s regents are trying to ban ideas, not “ideology.”

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

November 11, 2025

The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents is preparing to vote on a policy that would ban any class teaching “race” or “gender ideology” unless it receives prior presidential approval. Let’s call this what it is: a direct assault on academic freedom and the public university itself.

This is not about “viewpoint diversity.” It’s about control—about transforming higher education into a compliance arm of a political movement that cannot tolerate dissent. The terms “race ideology” and “gender ideology” are not scholarly; they are political inventions, designed to delegitimize entire fields of knowledge before the debate even begins. They caricature scholarship as indoctrination and turn inquiry itself into a suspect activity.

The policy defines “race ideology” as teaching that “shames” a group or “ascribes intrinsic guilt.” This is rhetorical sleight of hand: a way to equate studying racism with promoting hate. The idea that exploring racial hierarchy or systemic injustice is itself “ideological” is absurd—and chilling. By that logic, teaching U.S. history, sociology, or constitutional law could all become suspect.

Texas A&M’s proposal does not clarify what counts as “approval” or who decides when a topic crosses the line from instruction into forbidden territory. The ambiguity is the point. It invites fear, self-censorship, and administrative intervention in what should be the domain of scholarly judgment. Once faculty must seek permission to teach the truth, the classroom becomes a monitored space rather than a space for learning.

It is grimly ironic that A&M’s regents propose to insert these restrictions into the section of their policy titled “Civil Rights Protections.” There is nothing protective about censorship. In fact, the very disciplines now being targeted—Ethnic Studies, women and gender studies, and queer studies—are the ones that gave us the intellectual tools to understand discrimination and civil rights in the first place. Erasing them does not defend students; it erases the very history of freedom itself.

This new censorship is a betrayal of the university’s core purpose: to pursue truth, test ideas, and prepare citizens capable of critical thought. It signals that the regents trust neither their own faculty nor their students. It reduces education to indoctrination by omission—a sanitized curriculum tailored to avoid discomfort, reflection, or social complexity—and which woefully misses the mark on a need to prepare students for an increasingly diverse society.

Those pushing this policy claim they are protecting students from being “shamed.” In reality, they are protecting power from being questioned. What they call “ideology” is simply scholarship that exposes how race, gender, and power operate in society. They seek not academic balance but political obedience.

Texas A&M once stood for service, discovery, and intellectual independence. If its regents pass this policy, they will trade that legacy for something smaller and meaner: fear. The university will lose credibility not because it teaches too much, but because it has decided to teach less.

The crisis in higher education isn’t about “bias” in the classroom—it’s the orchestrated attack on higher education that has led to a corrosion of public trust through bad-faith attacks on the pursuit of knowledge itself. Academic freedom is not a partisan indulgence. It is the lifeblood of democracy. Once administrators dictate what can be thought, taught, or named, education ceases to be education at all.

Texas deserves better. So do its students. Much better.

TAMU Regents will vote to ban classes in race, gender ideology without prior approval
A TAMU Board of Regents proposal would ban classes teaching race and gender ideology unless the president approves it, the latest threat to academic freedom.
By Lily Kepner, Staff WriterNov 10, 2025



Texas A&M University Regents will vote on a proposal to ban courses with race or gender ideology unless they obtain prior approval from the president or a designee.Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman


Texas A&M University System regents will vote Thursday to ban classes on “race” and “gender ideology” unless they are approved by the institution’s president or a designee — the latest escalation in a statewide conservative push to rid universities of liberal leaning teaching.

If passed, the Texas A&M System, which serves 175,000 students as the second largest university system in the state, would be the first institution to explicitly bar teaching related to “race ideology.”


Texas A&M University President Mark Welsh greets supporters as he exits the administration building after resigning under pressure Friday, Sept. 19, 2025, in College Station. Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman

The policy proposal describes the term as “a concept that attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity, accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy or conspiracy, ascribe to them less value as contributors to society… assign them intrinsic guilt” or promotes activism “rather than instruction.” It defines gender ideology as “a concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex,” though biology and Women’s and Gender Studies scholars for decades have found that not all people fit into male or female categories neatly.

The prohibition, set to be considered at a Thursday board meeting, doesn’t detail the approval process for these courses or what would happen to Texas A&M’s ethnic and LGBTQ studies departments. Both definitions would be added to the “Civil Rights Protections and Compliance” policy, and this would be the first form of prohibited instruction in that policy.

A Texas A&M System official declined to comment on the policy, but said it will be discussed at the meeting. Members of the public can submit written testimony at least 24 hours before the meeting begins.

Opponents of the proposal say the policy will impede academic freedom and hurt Texas A&M University’s quality of education. The Texas American Federation of Teachers and American Association of University Professors chapter said the “unconstitutional” policies would “codify institutional censorship.”

“By considering these policy changes, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents is telling faculty, ‘Shut up and teach — and we’ll tell you what to teach,’” Brian Evans, president of Texas AAUP-AFT, said in a news release. “This language and the censorship it imposes will cause irreparable harm to the reputation of the university, and impede faculty and students from their main mission on campus: to teach, learn, think critically and create and share new knowledge.”

The intensifying political pressure to stop teaching that “belittles” conservative views or encourages “liberal ideology,” boosted in posts on X by Gov. Greg Abbott and a compact deal from President Donald Trump, has pressured universities across the state to reform fast.

DEEPER DIVE: As UT, Texas face increasing political pressure, experts warn: We’ve been here before

Texas Tech University System Chancellor Tedd Mitchell banned classroom instruction that teaches there are more than two genders to comply with a new state law, House Bill 229. Angelo State University reportedly told professors to remove pronouns from their bios and pride flags from their walls to avoid unwanted attention, though it later walked back the directives.

The University of Texas System announced a course audit of gender studies courses for alignment with the law and its “priorities,” and the flagship campus is considering consolidating departments that may have become “overly fragmented.”

But Texas A&M University has been at the epicenter of recent political turmoil. Controversy first erupted Sept. 8 when a state representative posted a video from an anonymous student whistle blower accusing her professor, Melissa McCoul, of breaking the law by teaching there are more than two genders.

McCoul, her department head and college dean lost their jobs within two days of the online controversy, and President Mark Welsh resigned shortly after. Regents agreed to pay him a $3.5 million settlement. Welsh had said McCoul was fired for “academic responsibility” because her class strayed from the approved syllabus, but McCoul’s syllabus, which was public, disclosed she would be covering diverse groups in children’s literature that may at times be controversial.

Another Texas A&M System proposed policy change would require faculty to teach only material consistent with the approved curriculum, but Leonard Bright, a professor at Texas A&M and president of the Texas A&M Chapter of the AAUP, said that standard is unrealistic for a professor. He said it infringes on a professor’s right to craft their teaching based on expertise alone.

The policy, if passed, would also invite subjective restrictions on gender identity and race-related teaching that would impede professors' ability to accurately teach the full breadth of all fields or answer students questions if they pertain to current events, he said.

“We’re telling people that we’re going to sell you a whole piece but what they’re going to get is half of it,” Bright said. “We’re going to have to tell them that with a straight face that I cannot teach this without getting bullied. It’s going to severely impact our classes in ways that we can’t even we can’t even predict.”

Robert Shibley, the special counsel for campus advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the policy would be a violation of academic freedom, a principle upheld by the Supreme Court after the McCarthy era, which gives professors the freedom to teach without political interference.

“The warping of the search for truth and the pursuit of knowledge happens when administrators get involved in making academic judgments instead of the faculty,” Shibley said. “That kind of centralization is a very bad idea. It’s an invitation for political interference. And if it happens, and it will happen, that kind of interference is unconstitutional.”



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.

When “Rigor” Becomes a Weapon: The Ideological Attack on 'the Studies' Fields at the University of Texas at Austin, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

When “Rigor” Becomes a Weapon: The Ideological Attack on the 'Studies' Fields at the University of Texas at Austin

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

November 10, 2025

Christopher Schorr’s recent report, Are the “Studies” Worth Studying?, claims to measure academic rigor at the University of Texas at Austin. What it actually does is recycle a familiar political attack on ethnic and gender studies under the pretense of social science method. From its title forward, the report manufactures its conclusion first and hunts for data later.

Geez—beginning with a slur, “the Studies,” Schorr collapses a wide range of intellectually distinct departments into a single caricature. He then proceeds to compare them with STEM and social science programs using cherry-picked data drawn from a questionable time period that overlaps with the upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is a portrait of academic life so distorted that it tells us far more about the author’s ideology than about the university itself. 

For the record, “the Studies” appear nowhere in scholarly classification, allowing Schorr to dismiss diverse intellectual traditions as a single ideological bloc. The centerpiece of the analysis is a crude equation of grade distributions with “rigor.” If a department awards more A’s, Schorr concludes, it must be less rigorous. That logic collapses under the weight of even introductory research-methods standards. Grades are not standardized across disciplines; they reflect different epistemologies, pedagogies, and assessment practices.

What Schorr calls evidence of “low rigor” is, in fact, a misunderstanding of how different disciplines assess learning. Departments such as Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and African and African Diaspora Studies rely on research, writing, and critical engagement with lived experience—not multiple-choice exams or lab problems. To equate fewer B’s and C’s with higher standards is to misread diversity of method as deficiency.

Measuring a laboratory course by the same yardstick as an ethnographic field study makes about as much sense as evaluating engineers and poets with the same exam. It would be just as absurd as measuring aerospace engineering programs by how well they rate on cultural competence—or judging literature departments by their mastery of thermodynamics.

Rigor is not a matter of how many students get A’s. It is demonstrated through valid and reliable assessments of learning—clear rubrics, demanding capstones, peer review, and measurable intellectual growth. Instructors who grade on mastery rather than competition are not “inflating” grades; they are honoring learning as a developmental process rather than a ranking contest.

The report’s methods are as careless as its premises. It pools data from pandemic-era semesters (2020–2024), when universities across the country temporarily altered grading policies to accommodate extraordinary disruptions. It flattens UT Austin’s plus-minus grading system into whole letters, artificially raising GPAs. It treats small seminars with 10 students as equally representative as 900-seat lecture courses. And it controls for nothing: not student preparation, prior GPA, or instructor variation—variables every social-science graduate student learns to include before drawing conclusions.

When the statistics crumble, the ideology shows through. Schorr’s citations rely heavily on polemics, RateMyProfessors blurbs, and the so-called “grievance studies” hoax. He conflates community-engaged scholarship and decolonial inquiry with “activism,” ignoring half a century of peer-reviewed research demonstrating their rigor and social impact.

The report concludes with a call to abolish entire departments—an act it euphemistically calls “improving rigor.” In truth, it proposes an intellectual purge, one that would silence precisely the fields that interrogate race, gender, power, and the structures of exclusion in our society. This is not the defense of truth the author claims; it is a narrowing of truth to fit an ideology.

If Schorr truly cared about academic rigor, he would advocate for transparent rubrics, common assessment frameworks across institutions, and longitudinal studies that track actual learning gains. Instead, he offers a polemic that undermines the very academic freedom he pretends to defend.

The real crisis in higher education isn’t grade inflation. It’s the corrosion of public trust through weaponized statistics and bad-faith scholarship. Reports like this one sow suspicion of faculty, delegitimize entire fields of study, and mislead the public about what crucially important segments of the academy actually do, namely, teach students when and how to question power and to think critically about the world they are poised to shape.

Universities deserve honest inquiry, not political theater dressed up as "data." If we care about rigor, let’s start by demanding it from those who claim to measure it.

Reference

Schorr, C. (2025). Are the ‘Studies’ worth studying? A cross-department comparison of academic rigor at the University of Texas at Austin. America First Policy Institute. https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/issues/are-the-studies-worth-studying-a-cross-department-comparison-of-academic-rigor-at-the-university-of-texas-at-austin

ARE THE 'STUDIES' WORTH STUDYING? A CROSS-DEPARTMENT COMPARISON OF ACADEMIC RIGOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Christopher Schorr, Ph.D. | May 8, 2025 | America First Policy Institute

INTRODUCTION

In competitive environments, a common dictum holds: “They can’t all be winners.” University grading seems to defy this rule. During the last three decades, grade point averages (GPA) rose 17% at four-year public universities and 16% at private non-profit universities (Nam, 2024). Grade inflation diminishes the value of grades as repositories of information pertaining to academic quality. This, in turn, harms universities’ pedagogical and professional missions. When excellent students are indistinguishable from merely competent students, student achievement wanes, and universities (e.g., graduate admissions officers) and prospective employers are forced to evaluate applicants by other means (Arum & Roksa, 2011; Nickolaus, 2024; Cerullo, 2023).

Student migration into less rigorous courses and disciplines contributes to grade inflation (Hernandez-Julian & Looney, 2016). Several notoriously lax-grading disciplines, collectively known as “the Studies,” have well-earned reputations for prioritizing activism over scholarship (Bawer, 2023). As described in this report, the Studies’ strong ideological and activist commitments could contribute to lax grading by creating alternatives to traditional assessments of academic quality. Increased enrollment in the Studies would, therefore, tend to harm overall (university-wide) grading rigor (hereafter, “rigor”). 

This report investigates this possibility at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), a large public university. It presents findings from an analysis of 10 semesters of grades obtained from 21 disciplines spanning three fields of study: the Studies, the social sciences, and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). It finds the Studies to be considerably less rigorous than comparison fields. When considered alongside longstanding concerns regarding the limited intellectual merits of these disciplines, these findings raise serious doubts as to the value of continuing to host these disciplines. This report concludes with several recommendations for improving rigor in higher education.

RIGOR AND GRADE INFLATION

What does an “A” grade signify in a university setting? How does it differ from a “B” or a “C,” for instance? Universities sometimes provide official answers to these questions; however, most students and faculty know grading rigor often differs by course, department, and field. 

Academic rigor is closely related to grade inflation, the tendency for grades to increase over time. Grades have been likened to a currency in that, much as the value of the dollar depreciates overtime due to increases in the money supply, the value of a given grade (e.g., an “A”) and high GPAs depreciate overtime due to the proliferation of higher grades. The primary culprit for grade inflation appears to be increasingly lax grading in response to “consumer demand” from students and parents; however, changes in student quality and student self-selection into easier-grading courses are contributing factors as well (Rojstaczer, 2023; Hernandez-Julian & Looney, 2016).

Rigor describes the setting and maintaining of high standards to preserve the value of grades against inflationary pressures.[1] The failure to maintain rigor undermines the usefulness of grades as signals of academic quality—i.e., subject matter mastery, diligence, and skill. The proliferation of “A” grades in undergraduate settings complicates efforts by employers and graduate admissions officers to separate the academic wheat from chaff, forcing them to rely on other metrics (Nickolaus, 2024; Cerullo, 2023). 

Failing to maintain rigor also reduces student learning by removing a key impetus for course mastery. As described in an internal Yale University memo, compromising rigor results in “students who do exceptional work [being] lumped together with those who have merely done good work, and in some cases with those who have done merely adequate work” (Mayhew, 1993). Students appear to be studying and learning less than in years past, yet grades continue to rise year-over-year (Babcock & Marks, 2010; Arum & Roksa, 2011). This paradox suggests the failure to maintain rigor has harmed student learning while also distorting the economy of academic grading. 

Most research in this area addresses declining rigor over time (grade inflation); however, removing the time dimension can help to illuminate other important factors. For example, the natural sciences and math are typically more rigorous than the social sciences, which, in turn, are more rigorous than the humanities (Achen & Courant, 2009; Rojstaczer & Healy, 2010). Students appear to recognize this pattern insofar as self-selection into less rigorous disciplines is among the drivers of grade inflation (Hernandez-Julian & Looney, 2016).

THE STUDIES 

One field of study—the Studies—deserves special attention. The Studies are a collection of relatively new academic disciplines such as “Women and Gender Studies,” “African American Studies,” “Mexican-American / Latin(o/a/x) Studies,” and so on.[2] The Studies have been criticized for prioritizing political and social activism over rigorous scholarship (Ginsberg, 2025; Schalin 2025). 

As discussed further below, this reputation makes the Studies a presumptive target for investigations of rigor and/or grade inflation. The Studies often fare poorly in cross-department comparisons. For example, “Afroamerican and African Studies” and “Women’s Studies” ranked 14th and 21st out of 25 departments respectively in terms of rigor at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007 (Achen & Courant, 2009). More recently, an internal Yale College report uncovered that “Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies” awarded “A” grades to 92% of students in introductory courses.[3]“African American Studies” (82.2% “A”), “Regional Studies” (82.7% “A”), “Ethnicity, Race, and Migration” (85.4% “A”), and “Education Studies” (85.8% “A”) followed closely behind (Fair, 2023).[4] 

Figure 1: Bachelor of Arts Degrees Awarded by "Studies" Departments, 2000-2023