Friends,
Yesterday I had the honor of testifying before the Texas House Democratic Caucus Special Hearing on Free Speech. Because of time constraints, I delivered a much shorter version of my remarks. What follows is the full testimony I had prepared—one that more completely traces the constitutional, historical, and political stakes of this moment.
I should add that Attorney Richard Martinez, who, among others, litigated the Gonzalez v. Douglas case mentioned below, reviewed my testimony and gave it a thumbs up. 😊
I’m grateful to share it with you here, and I invite you to listen to the entire hearing at this link. The testimonies were outstanding.
Invited Testimony of Dr. Angela Valenzuela
Texas House Democratic Caucus Special Hearing on Free Speech
Testimony by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
December 9, 2025
Chair, Vice Chair, and Members of the Committee:
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. My name is Angela Valenzuela, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin and Director of the Texas Center for Education Policy and a member of the National Academy of Education.
I speak today as an educator, a scholar of public schooling and higher education, and as someone who has spent decades studying educational barriers facing minoritized youth.
In my remarks, I want to focus specifically on the prohibitions on the teaching of race and gender found in Senate Bill 37—and also embedded, in different form, in the Trump Administration’s Compact for Higher Education.
I will first frame the moment we are living through, and then turn to the precedent-setting Gonzalez v. Douglas case in Arizona, which challenged the dismantling of the Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. That case, I would argue, has direct bearing on the constitutionality of SB 37 and similar prohibitions in higher education, particularly where there is evidence of discriminatory intent or viewpoint-based discrimination or censorship.
We are living through a coordinated backlash against DEI, Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and public education itself. This moment is not about “protecting students” or “ending indoctrination,” as proponents claim. It is about enforcing ignorance and preserving racial and gender hierarchies. At the highest level, it is about erasure and control, controlling the narrative and imposing limits to community self-awareness and empowerment.
That erasure extends beyond policy. It echoes across our shared cultural memory—shaping what is preserved, what is honored, and what is pushed into oblivion. The attacks on Ethnic Studies, the banning of books, the silencing of educators who dare to speak truth—all reflect a calculated project to reorder memory itself.
The troubling intent is not simply to stifle dissent, but to render entire histories incomprehensible to generations yet to come. In this context, ignorance is not an accident; it is carefully manufactured, fortified, and deployed to uphold the existing order—not least by preserving the incumbencies of those in power, as the recent fight over mid-decade redistricting makes clear.
The constitutional lessons from Arizona are not abstract. They map directly onto the policies Texas has now enacted.
In Texas, Senate Bill 17 prohibits DEI offices and programming in public universities. Senate Bill 37 eviscerates faculty governance across the entire higher education system, replacing longstanding traditions of faculty oversight with politically appointed boards and administrators beholden to partisan interests. Together with earlier laws like Senate Bill 3, Texas’s anti–Critical Race Theory bill that constrains the teaching of race and history in K–12 schools, these laws form an interlocking architecture of repression (see Intercultural Development Research Association, 2021).
The effects are concrete. UT Austin alone suffered at least $47 million in cuts to research due to federal funding rollbacks—cuts that have damaged work across race, gender, immigration, public health, and mental health. Projects like Dr. Danielle Clealand’s research on Black Cuban immigrant histories are being erased (Valenzuela, 2025).
This is epistemic violence pure and simple. It is a purge of inconvenient truths. And yet, even in this landscape of "organized forgetting"—or what I term in my own work, either "subtractive schooling," or the "politics of erasure," we still have the U.S. Constitution.
I want to turn now to an important precursor to our current moment: Arizona’s ARS § 15-112, the law used to dismantle Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program. That law prohibited courses that “promote resentment,” “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” or “advocate ethnic solidarity.” These vague, ideologically charged provisions became the blueprint for today’s curriculum wars.
We now see unmistakable echoes of ARS § 15-112 in Texas.
Texas Senate Bill 3 uses nearly identical language in its ban on teaching concepts that might cause students to “feel discomfort, guilt, or psychological distress” because of race or sex—an interpretation so broad that it suppresses discussions of racism, structural inequity, and collective historical experience. Senate Bill 17 bans identity-based programs and affinity centers in higher education, mirroring Arizona’s prohibition on courses “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.” And Senate Bill 37 continues this trajectory by restricting what can be taught in college classrooms about race, gender, and social identity—precisely the kinds of restrictions that were struck down in Gonzalez v. Douglas.
In other words, Texas has not adopted Arizona’s Ethnic Studies ban in one statute. It has adopted it in pieces, across multiple laws. The through-line from ARS § 15-112 to Texas policy is unmistakable: constrain what can be taught, surveil the curriculum for “divisive concepts,” eliminate identity-affirming programs, silence collective narratives, and enforce an atomized, decontextualized vision of the individual student. That is exactly the logic Arizona used, and it is exactly the logic Texas has now replicated.
I had the honor of testifying in the Arce v. Douglas case—now formally known as Gonzalez v. Douglas. Teachers and students sued the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction and members of the Arizona State Board of Education after the elimination of the successful Mexican American Studies program in Tucson. The argument of "viewpoint diversity" was central to the case, but not in the distorted sense we hear today from conservatives who allege—without evidence—that their perspectives are excluded from the college curriculum.
Teachers and students argued that the state targeted their curriculum precisely because it foregrounded Mexican American perspectives, histories, and intellectual traditions (Cabrera et al., 2014). The entire effort was motivated by racial animus and a political agenda to
The federal court agreed, holding that Arizona had engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination motivated by hostility toward Mexican Americans (Gonzalez v. Douglas, 2017). In that case, the law functioned as a shield: it protected teachers from ideological coercion and allowed them to teach historically grounded content without being forced into state-mandated “balance”—the same kind of so-called “balance” Texas now demands through its restrictions on teaching race and gender.
The court ruled that teachers have a right to teach, and students have a right to learn, a curriculum that reflects their experiences and intellectual traditions. Gonzalez v. Douglas stands as a precedent-setting case underscoring this point.
While a state may legislate restrictions on teaching and research, the mere passage of a law does not guarantee its constitutional survival. As Gonzalez demonstrated, when a state suppresses particular perspectives or academic fields—especially those tied to the histories and identities of marginalized communities—it invites serious First Amendment scrutiny and is unlikely to prevail.
In summary, Senate Bill 37, like Arizona’s ARS § 15-112, is vulnerable to a First Amendment challenge because it targets specific viewpoints and identities for suppression.
One day, Ethnic Studies courses will simply be called “a good education.”
Thank you for your time.
References
Gonzalez v. Douglas, 269 F. Supp. 3d 948 (D. Ariz. 2017). https://www.thefire.org/sites/default/files/2018/01/22133613/Gonzalez-v.-Douglas-Memorandum-of-Decision.pdf
Intercultural Development Research Association. (2021). What Texas’ classroom censorship law means for students & schools. IDRA. https://www.idra.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/What-Texas-Classroom-Censorship-Law-Means-for-Students-and-Schools-IDRA-2022.pdf
Valenzuela, A. (2025, May). UT loses $47M in research grants under Trump Administration; more than 60 projects cut: The ideological purge of public research [Blog post]. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2025/05/ut-loses-47m-in-research-grants-under.html
© 2025 Angela Valenzuela. All rights reserved.
This blog post may not be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations in academic, journalistic, or critical reviews with proper attribution.
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