Manufacturing “Cancel Culture” at UT: Crisis Discourse, Governance, and the Politics of SB 17 and SB 37
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
March 1, 2026
Something remarkable has happened at the University of Texas at Austin—and throughout Texas higher education. In a state with a long history of suppressing Mexican American Studies, resisting desegregation, and policing the boundaries of public knowledge, we are now told that Women’s and Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies are the true threat to free speech.
Accordingly, the American Association of University Professors (2024) warns that increasing legislative interference in curriculum and governance poses a direct threat to academic freedom by subordinating professional judgment to political authority.
Let all of this sink in.
Fields devoted to studying power, inequality, race, gender, and colonialism are being framed as authoritarian.
And the state is intervening—ostensibly to protect liberty.
This narrative did not arise from faculty misconduct findings, accreditation failures, or scholarly scandal. It was constructed. It was amplified. And under SB 17 (2023) and SB 37 (2025), it has now been operationalized into law.
To understand what is happening in Texas higher education, we must call this what it is: a governance transformation justified through crisis discourse.
Wilson and Kamola (2023) show how selective campus incidents are magnified through coordinated media ecosystems and donor networks into "evidence" of systemic institutional failure. What might otherwise remain a local disagreement becomes proof of a national emergency.
The cycle is predictable: identify controversy, amplify outrage, declare ideological capture, legislate reform.
In Texas, crisis preceded cure.
Before SB 17 dismantled DEI infrastructures, DEI was framed as coercive orthodoxy. Before SB 37 weakened shared governance, faculty senates were portrayed as partisan strongholds. The ground was prepared rhetorically long before it was altered legislatively.
Nancy MacLean (2017) reminds us that institutional transformation rarely occurs through dramatic abolition. It happens through procedural redesign. Authority shifts quietly. Governance structures are recalibrated. The institution remains standing—but its operating logic changes.
That is what SB 37 represents.
I have been at UT Austin for decades. I have seen intense disagreements over public positions faculty have taken. I have watched colleagues disagree sharply about theory, about politics, about pedagogy. That was not dysfunction. That was shared governance in action.
What I had never seen—until now—was the systematic restructuring of governance itself through state mandate.
The American Association of University Professors has been clear for over eighty years: academic freedom is not merely an individual right. It is a structural condition sustained by shared governance (AAUP, 1940/2015; AAUP, 1966/2015). Faculty bear primary responsibility for curriculum and instruction precisely because disciplinary expertise—not political expediency—should determine academic content.
When faculty senates are weakened or replaced with advisory bodies responsive to political oversight, the architecture changes. Authority moves upward and outward.
And here is the inversion: this restructuring is justified in the name of protecting free speech.
Let us pause.
The disciplines most frequently labeled “propaganda”—Women’s and Gender Studies, Black Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Indigenous Studies—operate through peer review, accreditation standards, and national scholarly associations. They assign canonical texts. They demand evidence-based argumentation. They expose students to intellectual traditions spanning centuries.
Critique is not cancellation.
The American Association of University Professors has been clear for over eighty years: academic freedom is not merely an individual right. It is a structural condition sustained by shared governance (AAUP, 1940/2015; AAUP, 1966/2015). Faculty bear primary responsibility for curriculum and instruction precisely because disciplinary expertise—not political expediency—should determine academic content.
When faculty senates are weakened or replaced with advisory bodies responsive to political oversight, the architecture changes. Authority moves upward and outward.
And here is the inversion: this restructuring is justified in the name of protecting free speech.
Let us pause.
The disciplines most frequently labeled “propaganda”—Women’s and Gender Studies, Black Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Indigenous Studies—operate through peer review, accreditation standards, and national scholarly associations. They assign canonical texts. They demand evidence-based argumentation. They expose students to intellectual traditions spanning centuries.
Critique is not cancellation.
The irony is staggering. It's the powers that be that are doing all the canceling.
In fact, what these disciplines do—systematically—is analyze power. They interrogate racial hierarchy, gender stratification, settler colonialism, capitalism, and state formation. They ask who benefits, who is excluded, and how institutions reproduce inequality.
That analytic posture is not authoritarian.
It is foundational to the liberal arts.
The deeper issue is authority. Who decides what counts as legitimate knowledge?
The AAUP has repeatedly warned that legislative interference in curricular matters displaces professional judgment and produces chilling effects even in the absence of explicit speech bans (AAUP, 1940/2015; AAUP, 1966/2015). When lawmakers define entire areas of inquiry as suspect, scholars internalize risk. Research agendas narrow. Hiring patterns shift. Students receive the message.
The language of neutrality becomes the mechanism of control.
Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation have advanced national reform blueprints targeting DEI, curriculum, and governance structures. These agendas do not typically call for closing universities. They call for recalibrating them—redefining academic freedom as compliance with politically supervised neutrality.
When these reform agendas converge with state legislation like SB 17 and SB 37, the result is not isolated policy disagreement. It is structural realignment.
And here is where Texas history matters.
This state has long wrestled with who controls knowledge production—from textbook battles to bilingual education fights to Mexican American Studies bans in K–12. The current moment is not an anomaly. It is a continuation of a longer struggle over narrative authority.
What is new is the scale of governance redesign.
If shared governance erodes, if faculty expertise is subordinated to political oversight, if entire domains of inquiry are stigmatized through law, the university does not collapse. It shifts.
The liberal arts tradition conservatives claim to defend depends on contestation—from Plato’s dialogues to Du Bois’s sociological interventions to contemporary critical theory. A university that cannot sustain rigorous analysis of race and gender is not defending liberal education. It is curating it.
The question before Texas is not whether one agrees with every argument advanced in Women’s and Gender Studies or Ethnic Studies.
The question is whether academic legitimacy will continue to be determined by scholarly communities within shared governance structures—or by political actors invoking crisis.
Free speech does not erode because students argue.
It erodes when governance systems are redesigned to align inquiry with state-defined boundaries.
SB 17 and SB 37 are not cultural skirmishes. They are governance interventions. And governance is the backbone of academic freedom.
If we allow that backbone to weaken while congratulating ourselves for defending free speech, we should be honest about what is happening.
We are not rescuing the liberal arts. We are redefining them in the image of political oversight.
In fact, what these disciplines do—systematically—is analyze power. They interrogate racial hierarchy, gender stratification, settler colonialism, capitalism, and state formation. They ask who benefits, who is excluded, and how institutions reproduce inequality.
That analytic posture is not authoritarian.
It is foundational to the liberal arts.
The deeper issue is authority. Who decides what counts as legitimate knowledge?
The AAUP has repeatedly warned that legislative interference in curricular matters displaces professional judgment and produces chilling effects even in the absence of explicit speech bans (AAUP, 1940/2015; AAUP, 1966/2015). When lawmakers define entire areas of inquiry as suspect, scholars internalize risk. Research agendas narrow. Hiring patterns shift. Students receive the message.
The language of neutrality becomes the mechanism of control.
Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation have advanced national reform blueprints targeting DEI, curriculum, and governance structures. These agendas do not typically call for closing universities. They call for recalibrating them—redefining academic freedom as compliance with politically supervised neutrality.
When these reform agendas converge with state legislation like SB 17 and SB 37, the result is not isolated policy disagreement. It is structural realignment.
And here is where Texas history matters.
This state has long wrestled with who controls knowledge production—from textbook battles to bilingual education fights to Mexican American Studies bans in K–12. The current moment is not an anomaly. It is a continuation of a longer struggle over narrative authority.
What is new is the scale of governance redesign.
If shared governance erodes, if faculty expertise is subordinated to political oversight, if entire domains of inquiry are stigmatized through law, the university does not collapse. It shifts.
The liberal arts tradition conservatives claim to defend depends on contestation—from Plato’s dialogues to Du Bois’s sociological interventions to contemporary critical theory. A university that cannot sustain rigorous analysis of race and gender is not defending liberal education. It is curating it.
The question before Texas is not whether one agrees with every argument advanced in Women’s and Gender Studies or Ethnic Studies.
The question is whether academic legitimacy will continue to be determined by scholarly communities within shared governance structures—or by political actors invoking crisis.
Free speech does not erode because students argue.
It erodes when governance systems are redesigned to align inquiry with state-defined boundaries.
SB 17 and SB 37 are not cultural skirmishes. They are governance interventions. And governance is the backbone of academic freedom.
If we allow that backbone to weaken while congratulating ourselves for defending free speech, we should be honest about what is happening.
We are not rescuing the liberal arts. We are redefining them in the image of political oversight.
History teaches us that when authority over knowledge production shifts from scholarly communities to political power, the effects rarely remain confined to a single department. Such shifts tend to expand, normalizing intervention and narrowing the boundaries of acceptable inquiry across the institution. Once the precedent is set—that legislatures may define which fields are suspect, which governance structures are dispensable, and which scholarly frameworks are legitimate—the logic does not easily contain itself.
The question, then, is not whether one program is next. It is whether the university itself—its autonomy, its governing norms, its capacity for independent judgment—can withstand sustained political encroachment.
At moments like this, institutional repair requires more than rhetorical defense. It requires civic action. If governance structures have been weakened through legislation, they must be restored through legislation. If academic freedom has been narrowed by those in power, then the democratic remedy is clear: voters must hold those officials accountable and elect leaders committed to institutional autonomy and the public mission of higher education.
If we are to truly live in a free society, the defense of the university must be understood as inseparable from the defense of democracy itself.
References
American Association of University Professors. (1940/2015). 1940 statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and
American Association of University Professors. (1966/2015). Statement on government of colleges and universities. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and
MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Penguin Press.
Wilson, J. K., & Kamola, I. (2023). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment