Where Are the Democrats? Why Ignoring the Assault on Higher Education Is a Strategic Mistake By Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Where Are the Democrats? Why Ignoring the Assault on Higher Education Is a Strategic Mistake

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

April 25, 2026

At a moment when Texas is rapidly remaking higher education, the question posed at a recent gathering at the University of Texas—“Where are the Democrats?”—should not be dismissed as rhetorical. It is a warning.

Over the past three years, Texas Republicans have not merely criticized universities; they have systematically restructured them. Through Senate Bill 17, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts have been dismantled. Through Senate Bill 37, faculty governance has been weakened and authority shifted upward to politically appointed boards. Beyond legislation, we are now witnessing the installation of former lawmakers as university system chancellors, direct pressure campaigns on faculty and programs, and the quiet but consequential narrowing of curricula—particularly in Mexican American Studies and Ethnic Studies more broadly.

This is not episodic policymaking. It is coordinated governance.

And yet, as Lily Kepner, writing for the Austin American-Statesman reports, Democratic leadership has largely chosen to sideline higher education as a central political issue heading into the midterms, citing the press of “kitchen table” concerns like affordability and health care. The calculus is familiar: higher education is perceived as politically risky, too easily caricatured, and insufficiently resonant with voters. 

This is precisely the miscalculation.

Higher education is a kitchen table issue. It is where students decide whether they belong. It is where families encounter the rising costs of tuition and the shrinking availability of programs that reflect their histories. It is where future teachers, nurses, engineers, and civic leaders are formed. To wit, it provides access to all of the professions. 

And increasingly, it is where political actors—rather than professors who have devoted their lives and careers to scholarship and teaching—are deciding what can be taught, what can be researched, and what can be said.

To treat this as peripheral is to concede the terrain.

Republican leaders understand this well. Their messaging—casting universities as sites of “indoctrination”—has been paired with policy that transforms governance structures, disciplines faculty speech, and reorients curriculum. As one policy advocate bluntly stated, the work of “getting rid of stuff” is giving way to a new phase: building a reordered university. That includes proposals to center “Western civilization” in core curricula, monitor foreign influence, and further regulate academic standards.

In other words, the project is not simply subtractive. It is reconstructive.

Democrats who choose not to engage this arena are not avoiding risk; they are absorbing it. By ceding narrative control, they allow higher education to be defined by its critics while alienating students, faculty, and communities already mobilizing in defense of it. They also miss an opportunity to connect higher education policy to the very concerns they claim to prioritize. Affordability, workforce development, and democratic participation are all shaped—profoundly—by what happens on our campuses.

There is also a deeper issue at stake: democracy itself.

When faculty self-censor out of fear, when programs like Mexican American Studies are administratively weakened or eliminated, when governance is restructured to minimize dissent, the university ceases to function as a space of inquiry and becomes instead a managed environment. What we are witnessing is not simply policy change, but a redefinition of the public university’s role in a democratic society.

This is why the current moment demands more than quiet concern or behind-the-scenes conversations. It requires a clear, public, and sustained defense of higher education as a public good.

To be sure, Democrats face real constraints in Texas. They do not control the legislature, and they are navigating multiple urgent crises. But political limitation is not the same as political absence. Messaging, coalition-building, and agenda-setting remain powerful tools—even, and especially, in minority positions.

Indeed, we have seen glimpses of what this could look like: public statements in defense of students, testimony challenging vague restrictions on classroom speech, and convenings that center free expression. But these efforts remain fragmented, intermittent, and insufficient to match the scale of the transformation underway.

Meanwhile, the consequences are anything but abstract. Students report feeling unheard. Faculty describe narrowing their syllabi. Entire fields—especially those grounded in the histories and experiences of communities of color—face an uncertain future.

And still, the question lingers: Where are the Democrats?

If higher education continues to be treated as a secondary issue, the answer will become increasingly clear—not in press conferences or policy papers, but in the very structure of our universities.

By 2027, when the Texas Legislature reconvenes, the groundwork being laid today will shape what is politically possible tomorrow. The choice is not whether to engage, but whether engagement comes too late.

Because by then, the question may no longer be where the Democrats are.

It may be whether there is anything left to defend.

As Texas conservatives reshape higher ed, advocates ask: Where are the Democrats?

Going into the midterms, Texas Republicans say they have momentum to build conservative values in higher ed. Some advocates say Democrats aren’t doing enough.

By Lily Kepner,Staff WriterApril 22, 2026

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, left, with Texas AFT President Zeph Capo,

 speaks at a news conference at the AFL-CIO in Austin on Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026. Weingarten said in April

 that Democrats need to do more to address conservative reforms of higher education.

Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman

Randi Weingarten could have chosen anywhere to launch the American Federation of Teachers’ plan to elevate higher education issues in the midterm elections. She chose the University of Texas.

Weingarten, the president of the national teachers' union, last week spoke before a crowd of about 100 people gathered to oppose threats to academic freedom and protect ethnic studies programs at higher education institutions.

At UT, President Jim Davis has promised to address conservative concerns that the university has let indoctrination replace inquiry by recommitting his institution to “balance” and civic education. The changes during Davis' first year in office — including the consolidation of gender and ethnic studies and leadership shakeups — have made some faculty fearful that UT is changing in response to political pressure, not input from students, staff or the public.

Get the latest UT news from Lily Kepner delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for Inside UT.

At a time when Republicans are successfully reforming higher education, Democrats, Weingarten said, are not doing enough to stop them or to advocate for universities.

“We know where the Republicans stand,” Weingarten said. “We see this stripping out of people’s right to learn, right to teach, and we’re seeing the undermining of pluralism. And so part of my question — and I say this as a lifelong Democrat — is where are the Democrats? Where is the fight?”

Ahead of midterm elections, changes to higher education should be a central issue for Democrats, Weingarten said. But as conservatives are shaping Texas universities in their image, Democrats, experts say, can’t keep up — and may not benefit strategically from trying.

Michael Harris, dean of Southern Methodist University’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development and an expert in university behavior, said Republicans in Texas “without question,” have controlled the narrative around higher education for decades.

But how Texas conservative leaders have reshaped the state’s colleges and universities is unlikely to be a big factor in the midterm elections for Democrats given the success Republicans have already had and the other pressing national issues dominating the news, he said.

Kendall Scudder, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said that the party considers education access a “kitchen table issue” and is concerned about how political interference will impact educator retention. But Texas Democrats are limited in what they can message on as other issues like affordability or health care intensify, he said.

The party isn’t intentionally sidestepping higher education, but it is prioritizing other pressing concerns families face, he said.

“I understand this frustration from these organizations with us, I get it, but the challenge that Democrats are facing is that we’re drinking through a fire hose,” Scudder said. “Of course, these issues are important to us. I mean, we are the ones who created these institutions and invested in them in the first place, and that could be part of why Republicans are trying to tear them down.”

‘Now we can finally start’

As Democrats fight other battles, Republicans will want to center education in the midterms because their messaging works, said Cal Jillson, a politics professor at SMU.

“They’re running against universities as hotbeds of socialism,” Jillson said. “And that intimidates and frightens lots of parents.”

Republicans are also in a position of power to drive the debate around higher education in Texas, Harris said.

Since 2023, Texas Republican lawmakers — who hold a majority in the Texas Senate and House and every statewide seat — have banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs at universities, weakened tenure, curbed free speech and gutted faculty’s role in governing their schools.

This year, conservatives have secured non-legislative wins too, pressuring universities to fire professors and eliminate classes and departments targeted for being too liberal. Since the beginning of 2025, three former conservative lawmakers were named chancellors of state university systems, putting them in a position to further change how their universities operate.

Texas Tech University Chancellor Brandon Creighton is one of those newly

Sen. Brandon Creighton looks over paperwork with his staff at a Senate Committee on Education hearing.

Creighton now leads the Texas Tech University System as chancellor. He is one of several Republicans appointed to higher education leadership positions in 2026.

Ricardo B. Brazziell/American-Statesman

appointed conservative leaders. He authored major higher education reforms laws as a state senator and was critical of perceived indoctrination at universities. At a recent conference hosted by the conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation, he told the audience that there was “garbage” in higher education curriculum that he and others had to root out.  

Glenn Hegar, the newly appointed chancellor of the Texas A&M University System is now overseeing a vast overhaul of how LGBTQ, gender and race topics are taught at all his system campuses.

Before 2027, when the Texas Legislature next meets for a regular session, Republicans are planning how to be more proactive around higher education policy.

“We’ve been getting rid of stuff in higher ed, and now finally we can actually start to pass things instead of clearing the way,” said Kate Bierly, higher education policy director for TPPF.

In an interview, Bierly said the think tank is planning future changes, including drafting legislation that would center Western civilization in core curriculum, curb foreign influence and target grade inflation.

‘An assault on public education’

Higher education is certainly not above reproach, according to the Pew Research Center, which found 70% of Americans believe higher education is heading in the wrong direction. Universities are to blame for the public’s lack of trust, a report from a specially appointed Yale University committee concluded this week.

The committee, charged with investigating public distrust in higher education, found that grade inflation, varied intellectual experience, political correctness, affordability challenges and investments into areas outside of a university’s core academic purpose detract from universities’ ability to build public trust and grow and produce knowledge.

“Both sides of the political aisle should be alarmed and even appalled at the lack of quality civic education that kids are getting at universities,” Bierly said in an interview before the report was released. She added that her organization’s suggested policies could gain bipartisan support.

But Weingarten said the Republican-controlled discourse discredits the good higher education already does and distracts from pressing issues like affordability and equal college access.

AFT’s policy blueprint for the midterms centers around broad issues with wide appeal, including regulating artificial intelligence and enhancing career education and innovation. The teachers’ union higher education platform also outwardly opposes the federal government’s “unprecedented campaign to control higher education” through research and program cuts that threaten the institutions, she said.


Weingarten said the policies are something either party could adopt to get higher education back on track. But Democrats aren’t engaging, she said, and in doing so, they’re leaving higher education behind.

Centering higher education’s value and adopting AFT’s platform before the midterms would be an unnecessary political risk for Democrats with little potential reward, Jillson, the political scientist, said.

Because of the Republican majority, “it is very difficult for Democrats in Texas to shape issue definition, let alone policy,” he said. With affordability issues and the declining trust in President Donald Trump’s leadership, Democrats, he said, “should play the hand that they hold right now.” They should focus on attacking Republican policies instead of trying to define new ones, Jillson said.

“Much of the public believes that there are issues and problems that need to be addressed and resolved. So you can’t just be a proponent of higher education as it currently exists without some danger,” said Jillson. “Certainly they don’t want to make it a midterm issue.”

That wasn’t always the case. Two years ago, Democrats often stood with students in opposition to Republican policies on college campuses. U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, D-Austin, visited UT with other Democrats the day after dozens of people were arrested at a pro-Palestinian protest. Texas Democrats also drafted statements and made public remarks opposing UT’s decision to fire staff after it adopted Senate Bill 17, a law banning diversity, equity and inclusion support for students.

At the AFT press conference last week, Casar, who is up for reelection, decried Texas’ “extremist politicians trying to control what gets taught in our classroom,” but left before questions. Colin Diersing, a spokesperson for Casar, declined to respond to criticism from AFT on Democrats’ lack of action or answer if Casar has reached out to Texas university leaders directly.

Still, some Texas Democrats are paying closer attention and weighing in on higher education changes in their own way. Last December, the Texas House Democratic Caucus held a virtual “People’s Caucus” on free speech in December to counter an official interim hearing focused on civil discourse after Charlie Kirk’s murder.

In November, Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, who is the vice chair of the House Higher Education Committee, testified against the UT System Board of Regents’ policy limiting how professors can discuss controversial topics. The lawmaker said she feared the policy would be too vague and could chill classroom debate. The board thanked her, but passed the policy regardless.

At the same press conference Casar spoke at, Howard said she has met privately with UT President Davis to share her concerns on academic freedom and pressure from conservatives and the federal government. She said she knows leaders may be “hesitant” to meet with a Democrat in this political climate.

“There is probably less communication going on than there should be and that I would like to see,” Howard said about the relationship between Democrats and university leaders. “The leadership of the institutions have been put in a very difficult position.”

UT did not respond to requests for comment.

On the windy march to the Texas Capitol where Weingarten launched AFT’s higher education policy platform, students, professors and community members chanted: “Save UT.”

Professors spoke of censoring themselves out of fear of retaliation if they said the wrong thing. Students spoke of their desire to be heard in university decisions impacting the classes and programs available to them.

“If you are fighting against the assaults on higher education and trying to make the case about how important it is to the next generation of students,” Weingarten said. “Why not go right to the place where the fight is?”


April 22, 2026

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.

Winning the Case, Losing the Ground: How Policy Threats Still Govern—Especially Through Proposed Funding Cuts, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Winning the Case, Losing the Ground: How Policy Threats Still Govern—Especially Through Proposed Funding Cuts

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

April 24, 2026

A court victory can halt a policy. It cannot, on its own, undo the conditions that policy created. The recent injunction against the NIH’s proposed cap on indirect costs is a clear legal win—one that reaffirms procedural integrity and the limits of executive overreach. But the terrain on which universities operate has already shifted, and it has shifted most decisively through the politics of funding cuts.

The Trump administration’s proposed 15 percent cap on indirect research costs—long a source of uncertainty across higher education—ultimately met a significant legal barrier. In a January 5, 2026 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit unanimously affirmed a lower court ruling blocking the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from implementing the cap. The court held that the policy violated federal law, bypassed required procedures, and unlawfully imposed a blanket limit across all NIH grants. The nationwide injunction remains in place. Universities, for now, can continue to rely on their negotiated indirect cost rates (American Council on Education, 2026).

This is, by any reasonable measure, good news.

And yet, without reckoning with the politics that animate it, this is far from the whole story.

Even before the courts intervened, the proposed cap had already begun to do its work. As Zahneis (2025) reports, internal communications at the University of Iowa reveal a striking institutional response: confusion, financial alarm, and a palpable sense of political constraint. Faced with the prospect of losing tens of millions in research support, university leaders acknowledged their “limited ability to publicly fight” the policy. Faculty were advised to speak only as private citizens. Public messaging was deliberately softened—“we will need to tone it down a bit.” Meanwhile, the institution began pausing grant submissions, slowing hiring, and preparing for contraction.

In other words, the chilling effect preceded the legal outcome.

This is what governing through funding looks like. It is also what I have called shadow censorship: a form of constraint that operates not through formal prohibition, but through anticipatory compliance. The policy itself may be blocked, but its signal—its warning—circulates widely. Institutions read that signal and adjust accordingly. Speech narrows. Risk tolerance declines. Strategic silence emerges, not by mandate, but by design.

The First Circuit’s ruling is therefore both a victory and a revelation. It affirms that agencies like the NIH cannot unilaterally rewrite the terms of federal research funding in ways that violate congressional intent or established regulatory frameworks. It also reinforces the role of the courts as a critical check on executive overreach. Importantly, the court’s reasoning is likely to shape parallel cases involving the Department of Energy and Department of Defense, suggesting broader implications for the governance of federal research.

But the decision does not—and cannot—undo the anticipatory effects already set in motion.

The lesson here extends beyond Iowa, beyond NIH, and even beyond this particular administration. We see similar dynamics in Texas under SB 17, in Florida’s higher education restructuring, and in federal policy proposals that signal ideological priorities through funding mechanisms. Across these contexts, the pattern is consistent: policy operates not only through what is enacted, but through what is threatened, implied, and anticipated.

Institutions do not wait for final rulings. They adapt early.

This is why the notion that “the courts will fix it” is, while comforting, insufficient. Legal victories matter—they create space, restore rights, and set precedent. But they do not automatically restore the conditions of open inquiry or institutional courage that may have already been compromised. By the time a policy is blocked, its disciplining effects may already be embedded in organizational behavior.

So yes, this ruling deserves recognition. It is a meaningful check on unlawful governance and a reminder that procedural integrity still matters.

But if we stop there—if we treat this as a resolution rather than a moment of reflection—we risk missing the deeper transformation underway.

The more difficult question is this: What would it take for institutions not only to survive such policy threats, but to resist their anticipatory force? What would it mean to refuse the quieting of institutional voice before the law has even spoken?

Because the central lesson remains unchanged.

Policy does not need to be fully enacted to be effective. It need only create enough risk to reshape behavior.

And in that sense, even a policy that fails in court can still succeed in governing. 

And then we wonder why there is public distrust of higher education.

References 

American Council on Education. (2026, April 13). Higher education associations fight federal cuts to indirect cost rates. https://www.acenet.edu/Policy-Advocacy/Pages/Law-Courts/Association-Lawsuit-NIH-FA.aspx#:~:text=The%20lawsuits%20include:%20*%2022%20state%20attorneys,halting%20the%20implementation%20of%20the%20DOE%20cap

Zahneis, M. (2025, June 16). Facing research cuts, officials at U. of Iowa spoke of a “limited ability to publicly fight this.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/facing-research-cuts-officials-at-u-of-iowa-spoke-of-a-limited-ability-to-publicly-fight-this

Facing Research Cuts, Officials at U. of Iowa Spoke of a ‘Limited Ability to Publicly Fight This’
By Megan Zahneis

June 16, 2025 | Chronicle of Higher Education

Illustration by The Chronicle; Getty Images

The National Institutes of Health’s announcement in late February that it would cap indirect research funding at 15 percent sent universities across the nation into a panic. Emails obtained by The Chronicle via a public-records request offer a glimpse into how one research-intensive institution reacted in the immediate aftermath of the unexpected news — with confusion, concern, and at times, a sense of powerlessness.

Asked by a faculty member what he and his peers could do to help, the University of Iowa’s interim vice president for research suggested only “acting as a private citizen to call our legislators and tell them what a bad idea this is (from your own phone or using your own email).” The campus’s location in a solidly red state hindered it from fighting the policy change, Lois J. Geist seemed to imply in her reply. “Being located where we are we have limited ability to publicly fight this as faculty or as an institution.”

While the funding cap is frozen pending a federal judge’s ruling, the messages exchanged between Geist and other top officials at the University of Iowa provide a rare and revealing glimpse into internal conversations on a campus facing millions in cuts — and clear incentives to stay quiet. (Geist and one of those officials, through a university spokesperson, declined an interview. Four others did not respond to requests for comment.)

‘Tone It Down’

Within hours of the NIH’s announcement, which came late on the afternoon of Friday, February 7, a flurry of emails among Iowa administrators had commenced. The cap, an Iowa associate vice president for research predicted Friday night, “is going to have a significant effect on us (and everyone else).” By early the following morning, efforts were underway to gauge just how significant it would be. A manager in the division of sponsored programs shared a “back-of-the-envelope calculation” that estimated an average annual budget gap of $45 million, based on Iowa’s current reimbursement rate of 55.5 percent for indirect costs.(Often referred to as “facilities and administrative” costs, indirect costs account for money that institutions spend on research but that isn’t tied to a specific grant or project, such as facilities, equipment, and staff expenses.)

While the director of Iowa’s grant-accounting office worked through the weekend on producing more precise figures, others discussed the university’s public response. Peter S. Matthes, vice president for external relations and senior adviser to the president, proposed wording for an update on the webpage where the university posts federal-policy news.

“Overall, the federal transition continues to be a rapidly changing environment,” read the update, which was soon posted under Geist’s name. It said the university was working with organizations like the Association of American Universities and Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities to “monitor and interpret” the Trump administration’s policy changes. Iowa, it promised, was “actively engaging with our federal delegation as well to ensure they understand the profound impact this change would have.”

Administrators also kept tabs on how their colleagues at other institutions were responding, both through email chains (the listserv of provosts in the Big Ten Academic Alliance, Iowa Provost Kevin C. Kregel noted, “is very active!”) and by tracking their public statements. Jennifer Lassner, an associate vice president for research, forwarded a link to a message from the University of Michigan as a “communication example"; in that memo, Arthur Lupia, Michigan’s interim vice president for research and innovation, stressed that the at-risk funding was used to conduct “vital research that saves lives, creates jobs, enhances national security, and improves quality of life for people in every part of our state and across the nation.”

The then-director of strategic communications in Geist’s office responded approvingly — “nice message!” she said of the Lupia memo — and suggested using it as a model for one Geist could send to the campus. The federal-update post, she noted, “is sort of passive — folks will have to go looking for it.” Geist said she was “fine” with issuing a statement, but added: “We will need to tone it down a bit.”

While Michigan and Iowa list one another as peer institutions and share membership in the Big Ten and an R1 designation, their home states operate under opposite political circumstances: Michigan is run by a Democratic trifecta, but Republicans control both houses of the Hawkeye State’s government as well as its governor’s office. Michigan also stands to lose about three and a half times as much as Iowa does under the 15-percent indirect-cost cap, according to a Chronicle analysis.

Indeed, the message Geist sent the afternoon of Monday, February 10 — approximately 72 hours after the NIH announced its policy — was more circumspect than Lupia’s, referring to “high-impact research” that “has tangible benefits for the lives of Iowans” and promising that “we recognize the urgency of the situation and are working to assess potential impacts at the college, department, lab, and investigator level.”
‘We Need the Foundations’

In her message, Geist said that “until we have more clarity,” Iowa would not submit new NIH grant applications and advised researchers “exert extra caution and defer starting new activities.” The university, she wrote, would also avoid hiring graduate research assistants whose salaries hadn’t already been budgeted as a direct cost on a funded project. Within a half hour, at least five faculty members had replied, expressing concern and asking questions. Among them was the faculty member whom Geist told that the university would have “limited ability to publicly fight this.” In response to another email, Geist said that the university would not be joining the lawsuit that 22 states — all led by Democratic attorneys general — brought against the NIH to stop the cap.

A third faculty member asked Geist to share concrete numbers to “make these impacts quantifiable.” Turning to an analysis prepared by Maria H. Soliman, the director of Iowa’s grant-accounting office, Geist told him the university would be on the hook for about $50 million. Beyond that, she said, Iowa would “lose grants and the ability to hire people on those grants because the amount of available money will be inadequate.” She also indicated the university would likely rely on outside support: “We need the foundations to weigh in to stop this as it will also impact our ability to do their research.” (The private sector has since faced its own troubles trying to offer patchwork funding.)

A federal judge in April issued a permanent injunction against the 15-percent cap, which the NIH is appealing. Meanwhile, a cohort of organizations that represent research universities has sketched out two alternatives, STAT reported last week; one would vary indirect-cost rates by institution and grant type, and the other would require each grant proposal to list its indirect costs as line items.

Andy Thomason, assistant managing editor at The Chronicle, contributed reporting.
Read other items in What Will Trump's Presidency Mean for Higher Ed? .
We’d like to hear from you — tell us how The Chronicle has made a difference in your work or helped you stay informed. You can also send feedback about this article or submit a letter to the editor.

When Consolidation Is Elimination: Ethnic Studies, Faculty Governance, and Power at UT, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

When Consolidation Is Elimination: Ethnic Studies, Faculty Governance, and Power at UT

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

April 24, 2026

UT President Jim Davis talks with Daily Texan
News Editor Maryam Ahmed in his office during the
first sit-down interview of his tenure.

In an April 9, 2026 interview with The Daily Texan, reporter Maryam Ahmed pressed UT President Jim Davis on decisions that cut to the core of the university’s academic mission: the consolidation of Ethnic Studies and related departments, the restructuring of faculty governance, and the question of public trust in higher education (Ahmed, 2026a, 2026b). What emerges is not reassurance, but a troubling portrait of governance redefined, faculty voice narrowed, and critical fields rendered administratively vulnerable under the language of “efficiency” and “stewardship.”

At issue is not whether combining departments yields intellectual “fullness,” as Davis suggests. Ethnic Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies are already deeply interdisciplinary by design. They were built to cross boundaries, challenge siloed thinking, and interrogate power. The claim that they must be consolidated to achieve interdisciplinarity reflects not innovation, but a misreading—or dismissal—of their intellectual foundations.

What remains unspoken is that “consolidation” is rarely neutral. It often functions as a quiet form of elimination—not of people, but of departmental standing, autonomy, and power. Departments carry budget authority, hiring lines, curricular control, and institutional visibility. Collapse them, and you reduce the number of sites where faculty exercise collective authority. This is not merely organizational—it is political. Power moves upward and inward, away from the very units that have historically produced the most sustained critiques of inequality.

Equally flawed is the premise that these fields are not already in dialogue. Ethnic Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies have long operated in robust conversation—through joint appointments, cross-listed courses, and shared theoretical frameworks. To suggest they must be administratively merged to “see from different angles” misreads their history and erases existing collaboration. What is presented as integration risks becoming administrative diminishment.

When department chairs raised objections, Davis acknowledged “difference of opinion,” but deferred to a “consensus recommendation.” The question is unavoidable: whose consensus—and under what conditions was it produced?

That question takes on added urgency in light of Texas Senate Bill 37. The elected Faculty Council has been replaced with an appointed advisory body that, by Davis’s own admission, is “not intended to be representative.” This is not a procedural adjustment; it is a redefinition of governance itself. Representation is not incidental—it is the democratic core of faculty authority. What replaces it is curated input: invited voices without collective power.

Davis casts this shift as a move from “discord” to “stewardship.” But governance without disagreement is not governance—it is management. The Faculty Council’s openness enabled contestation, visibility, and record. Informal conversations, however frequent, cannot substitute for structures that allow faculty to deliberate, dissent, and hold leadership accountable. They invite candor, perhaps—but not power.

Seen in this light, the consolidation of Ethnic Studies is not an isolated decision. It is part of a broader transformation in how authority is organized and exercised. When representative structures weaken, decisions about curriculum and resources become more susceptible to top-down rationales—especially those framed in neutral administrative language. Terms like “efficiency” and “balance” function as what critical policy scholars call “discursive cover,” recasting political choices as technical necessity (Fairclough, 1992; Tauber & Wolf, 2018).

Davis denies that political pressures shaped the decision. Yet this claim must be read within the context of Texas Senate Bill 17, which has already dismantled DEI infrastructure and chilled institutional commitments to equity. Even without explicit directives, universities operate under conditions of anticipatory compliance—aligning themselves with perceived political expectations to avoid risk. In such an environment, structural changes to fields like Ethnic Studies rarely occur in a vacuum.

The same ambiguity surrounds resources. Davis insists that “nothing has changed,” yet acknowledges uncertainty ahead. Faculty concerns about moving from multiple funding streams to fewer reflect well-established patterns: consolidation often leads to internal competition, diminished autonomy, and eventual contraction. The metaphor of a recombined pie obscures a central reality—who controls the knife.

There is also an intellectual cost. Ethnic Studies does not simply add perspective; it anchors critical inquiry into race, power, colonialism, and inequality. When absorbed into larger units, its distinctiveness—and its capacity to challenge dominant frameworks—can be diluted. The result is not interdisciplinarity, but incorporation: difference folded into sameness.

Public trust will not be restored through consolidation or administrative redesign. It is built through transparency, accountability, and genuine shared governance. It requires not only listening to faculty, but ensuring they have real, representative power in shaping institutional direction.

UT Austin is not just reorganizing departments—it is redefining who gets to decide what counts as knowledge, whose voices carry authority, and which fields are allowed to remain visible as distinct sites of critique.

And that is the real stakes of this moment: not whether programs are combined, but whether the university still has the structural capacity—and the political will—to sustain knowledge that speaks back to power, rather than being quietly reorganized out of it.

References

Ahmed, M. (2026a, April 9). Exclusive: UT President Jim Davis reflects on first year leading University. The Daily Texan. https://thedailytexan.com/2026/04/09/exclusive-ut-president-jim-davis-reflects-on-first-year-leading-university/

Ahmed, M. (2026b, April 9). Read the full transcript of UT President Jim Davis’ first interview since taking office. The Daily Texan. https://thedailytexan.com/2026/04/09/read-the-full-transcript-of-ut-president-jim-davis-first-interview-since-taking-office/

Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Polity Press.

Tauber, R., & Wolf, S. (2018, December 5). Students, faculty discuss free speech. The Williams Record. https://williamsrecord.com/4037/news/students-faculty-discuss-free-speech/

America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs—Should We Be Worried?

The short answer as to whether we should be worried about AI is—yes! And this is not because mass AI-driven unemployment is already a settled fact, but because the speed of change, the incentives driving corporate adoption, and the absence of serious public planning together create a dangerous vacuum. 

As Josh Tyrangiel writing for The Atlantic makes clear, the real threat is not simply that AI may displace workers, but that it could do so faster than our institutions can respond, leaving millions vulnerable while political leaders, CEOs, and policymakers look the other way. 

Even economists who disagree on timing acknowledge the stakes: if AI compresses years of labor-market disruption into months, the damage will extend far beyond jobs to democracy itself, deepening inequality, anxiety, and political instability. What should concern us most is not only the technology, but the nation’s striking lack of preparation for a transition that may already be underway.

-Angela Valenzuela

America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs

Does anyone have a plan for what happens next?

By Josh Tyrangiel

Illustrations by Stephan Dybus March, 2026 | The Atlantic

Listen1.4x

Seek

46:2247:56

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting. The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. The new machines weren’t just spinning cotton or shaping steel. They were operating at speeds that the human body—an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes—simply wasn’t built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there’s a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things.

Still, the machines pressed on.

So Massachusetts created the nation’s first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work hours, conditions, wages, and what economists now call “negative externalities” but were then called “children’s arms torn off,” policy makers figured they might be able to produce reasonably fair outcomes for everyone. Or, if you’re a bit more cynical, a sustainable level of exploitation. A few years later, with federal troops shooting at striking railroad workers and wealthy citizens funding private armories—leading indicators that things in your society aren’t going great—Congress decided that this idea might be worth trying at scale and created the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Measurement doesn’t abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting—of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts—signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. Over time, that intention matters. It’s one way a republic earns the right to be believed in.

The BLS remains a small miracle of civilization. It sends out detailed surveys to about 60,000 households and 120,000 businesses and government agencies every month, supplemented by qualitative research it uses to check and occasionally correct its findings. It deserves at least some credit for the scoreboard. America: 250 years without violent class warfare. And you have to appreciate the entertainment value of its minutiae. The BLS is how we know that, in 2024, 44,119 people worked in mobile food services (a.k.a. food trucks), up 907 percent since 2000; that nonveterinary pet care (grooming, training) employed 190,984 people, up 513 percent; and that the United States had almost 100,000 massage therapists, with five times the national concentration in Napa, California.

These and thousands of other BLS statistics describe a society that has grown more prosperous, and a workforce endlessly adaptive to change. But like all statistical bodies, the BLS has its limits. It’s excellent at revealing what has happened and only moderately useful at telling us what’s about to. The data can’t foresee recessions or pandemics—or the arrival of a technology that might do to the workforce what an asteroid did to the dinosaurs.

I am referring, of course, to artificial intelligence. After a rollout that could have been orchestrated by H. P. Lovecraft—“We are summoning the demon,” Elon Musk warned in a typical early pronouncement—the AI industry has pivoted from the language of nightmares to the stuff of comas. Driving innovation. Accelerating transformation. Reimagining workflows. It’s the first time in history that humans have invented something genuinely miraculous and then rushed to dress it in a fleece vest.

There are gobs of money to be made selling enterprise software, but dulling the impact of AI is also a useful feint. This is a technology that can digest a hundred reports before you’ve finished your coffee, draft and analyze documents faster than teams of paralegals, compose music indistinguishable from the genius of a pop star or a Juilliard grad, code—really code, not just copy-paste from Stack Overflow—with the precision of a top engineer. Tasks that once required skill, judgment, and years of training are now being executed, relentlessly and indifferently, by software that learns as it goes.

AI is already so ubiquitous that any resourceful knowledge worker can delegate some of their job’s drudgery to machines. Many companies—Microsoft and PricewaterhouseCoopers among them—have instructed their employees to increase productivity by doing just that. But anyone subcontracting tasks to AI is clever enough to imagine what might come next—a day when augmentation crosses into automation, and cognitive obsolescence compels them to seek work at a food truck, pet spa, or massage table. At least until the humanoid robots arrive.

Many economists insist that this will all be fine. Capitalism is resilient. The arrival of the ATM famously led to the employment of more bank tellers, just as the introduction of Excel swelled the ranks of accountants and Photoshop spiked demand for graphic designers. In each case, new tech automated old tasks, increased productivity, and created jobs with higher wages than anyone could have conceived of before. The BLS projects that employment will grow 3.1 percent over the next 10 years. That’s down from 13 percent in the previous decade, but 5 million new jobs in a country with a stable population is hardly catastrophic.

And yet: There are things that economists struggle to measure. Americans tend to derive meaning and identity from what they do. Most don’t want to do something else, even if they had any confidence—which they don’t—that they could find something else to do. Seventy-one percent of respondents to an August Reuters/Ipsos poll said they’re worried that artificial intelligence will “put too many people out of work permanently.”

This data point might be easier to dismiss if the modern mill and factory owners hadn’t already declared that AI will put people out of work permanently.

In May 2025, Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, said that AI could drive unemployment up 10 to 20 percent in the next one to five years and “wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.” Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, estimated that it would eliminate “literally half of all white-collar workers” in a decade. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, revealed that “my little group chat with my tech-CEO friends” has a bet about the inevitable date when a billion-dollar company is staffed by just one person. (The business side of this magazine, like some other publishers, has a corporate partnership with OpenAI.) Other companies, including Meta, Amazon, UnitedHealth, Walmart, JPMorgan Chase, and UPS, which have recently announced layoffs, have framed them more euphemistically in sunny reports to investors about the rise of “automation” and “head count trending down.” Taken together, these statements are extraordinary: the owners of capital warning workers that the ice beneath them is about to crack—while continuing to stomp on it.

It’s as if we’re watching two versions of the same scene. In one, the ice holds, because it always has. In the other, a lot of people go under. The difference becomes clear only when the surface finally gives way—at which point the range of available options will have considerably narrowed.

AI is already transforming work, one delegated task at a time. If the transformation unfolds slowly enough and the economy adjusts quickly enough, the economists may be right: We’ll be fine. Or better. But if AI instead triggers a rapid reorganization of work—compressing years of change into months, affecting roughly 40 percent of jobs worldwide, as the International Monetary Fund projects—the consequences will not stop at the economy. They will test political institutions that have already shown how brittle they can be.

The question, then, is whether we’re approaching the kind of disruption that can be managed with statistics—or the kind that creates statistics no one can bear to count.

AUSTAN Goolsbee is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Barack Obama. He’s also one of the few economists you would not immediately regret bringing to a party. When I asked Goolsbee if any conclusive data indicated that AI had begun to eat into the labor market, he delivered an answer that was both obvious and unhelpful, smiling as he did it. The nonanswer was the point.

I’ve known Goolsbee long enough to enjoy these moments, when he makes fun of our shared uselessness. Economists are rarely equipped to give straight answers about the present. Journalists hate when the future won’t reveal itself on deadline.

We spoke in September, shortly after the release of what’s come to be known as “The Canaries Paper,” written by three academics from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. By crunching data from millions of monthly payroll records for workers in jobs with exposure to generative AI, the authors concluded that workers ages 22 to 25—the canaries—have seen about a 13 percent decline in employment since late 2022.

For several days, the paper was all anyone in the field wanted to talk about, and by talk about I mostly mean punch holes in. The report overemphasized the effect of ChatGPT. Youth employment is cyclical. The same period saw a sharp interest-rate spike—a far more likely source of turbulence. “Canaries” also contradicted a study released a few weeks earlier by the Economic Innovation Group, which argued that AI is unlikely to cause mass unemployment in the near term, even as it reshapes jobs and wages. That paper was knowingly titled “AI and Jobs: The Final Word (Until the Next One).”

This was the point Goolsbee wanted to emphasize: Economists are constrained by numbers. And numerically speaking, nothing indicates that AI has had an impact on people’s jobs. “It’s just too early,” he said.

A lack of certainty should not be mistaken for a lack of concern. The Fed’s mandate is to promote maximum employment, so the corporate pronouncements about imminent job loss have Goolsbee’s attention. But the numbers don’t add up. It’s possible that the labor market is softer than it looks, but that the softness is being absorbed within firms rather than showing up in the unemployment rate. If companies are sitting on more workers than they need, however—a phenomenon known as labor hoarding—you’d expect that to reveal itself as weak productivity growth. It’s as predictable as a hangover: too many workers, not enough work, sagging productivity. “But it’s been totally the opposite,” Goolsbee said. “Productivity growth has been really high. So I don’t know how to reconcile that.”

Productivity is the cheat code for a more prosperous society. If each worker can produce more in the same hour—more goods, better services, faster results—then the total economic pie grows, even if the number of workers doesn’t. It’s the rare efficiency gain that expands the pie rather than merely redistributing slices.

America has been on a productivity tear for the past few years. It might be temporary, the result of a onetime boost, such as the COVID-era boom in new small businesses. But with the special joy of someone paid to complicate everything, Goolsbee pointed out that general-purpose technologies such as electricity and computing can create lasting productivity gains, the kind that make whole societies wealthier.

Whether AI is one of those technologies will only become clear over time. How long before we’ll know? “Years,” Goolsbee said.

In the meantime, there’s another complication. The immediate risk to employment may not be AI itself, but the way companies, seduced by its promise, overinvest before they understand what it can actually do. Goolsbee reached back to the internet bubble, when companies spent wildly on laying fiber cables and building capacity. “In 2001, when we found out that the growth rate of the internet is not going to be 25 percent a year, but merely 10 percent—which is still a pretty great growth rate—it meant we had way too much fiber, and there was a collapse of business investment,” Goolsbee said. “And a bunch of people were thrown out of work the old-fashioned way.”

A similar crash in AI investment, if it comes, would likely look familiar: painful, destabilizing, and accompanied by surges of CNBC rants and recriminations. But it would amount to a financial reset, not a technological reversal—the kind of outcome economists are especially good at recognizing, because it resembles a thing that’s happened before.

This is the paradox of economics. To understand how fast the present is hurtling us into the future, you need a fixed point, and the fixed points are all in the past. It’s like driving while looking only at the rearview mirror—plenty dangerous if the road stays straight, catastrophic if it doesn’t.

David Autor and Daron Acemoglu are among the most accomplished rearview drivers. Both are at MIT, and both excel at understanding previous economic disruptions. Acemoglu, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024, studies inequality; Autor focuses on labor. But both insist that the story of AI and its consequences will depend mostly on speed—not because they assume lost jobs will automatically be replaced, but because a slower rate of change leaves societies time to adapt, even if some of those jobs never come back.

Labor markets have a natural rate of adjustment. If, over the course of 30 years, 3 percent of employees in a profession retire or have their jobs eliminated annually, you’d barely notice. Yet a decade later, a third of the jobs in those professions would be gone. Elevator operators and tollbooth attendants went through this slow fade to obsolescence with no damage to the economy. “When it happens more rapidly,” Autor told me, “things become problematic.”

Autor is most famous for his work on the China shock. In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization; six years later, 13 percent of U.S. manufacturing jobs—about 2 million—had disappeared. The China shock took a disproportionate toll on small-scale manufacturing—textiles, toys, furniture—concentrated primarily in the South. “Many of the workers in those places still haven’t recovered,” Autor said, “and we’re obviously living with the political consequences.”

But AI isn’t a trade policy. It’s software. Even if it hits some professions and places first—a lawyer in a large urban firm, say, may feel the impact years before a worker in a less digitized industry—the technology won’t be constrained by geography. Eventually, everyone will be affected.

All of this sounds foreboding, until you remember the most important thing about software: People hate it, almost as much as they hate change.

This is what gives many economists confidence that the AI asteroid is still at least a decade away. “These tech CEOs want us to believe that the market for automation is preordained, and that it will all happen smoothly and profitably,” Acemoglu said. He then made a disdainful noise from his Nobel Prize–winning bullshit detector. “History tells us it’s actually going to happen much slower.”

The argument goes like this: Before AI can transform a company, it has to access the company’s data and be woven into existing systems—which sounds easy, provided you’re not a chief technology officer. A trade secret of most Fortune 500 companies is that they still run many critical functions on lumbering, industrial-strength mainframe computers that almost never break down and therefore can never be replaced. Mainframes are like Christopher Walken: They’ve been going nonstop since the 1960s, they’re fantastic at performing peculiar roles (processing payments, safeguarding data), and nobody alive really understands how they work.

Integrating legacy tech with modern AI means navigating hardware, vendors, contracts, ancient coding languages, and humans—every one of whom has a strong opinion about the “right” way to make changes. Months pass, then years; another company holiday party comes and goes; and the CEO still can’t understand why the miracle of AI isn’t solving all of their problems.

Every new general-purpose technology is, for a time, held hostage by the mess of what already exists. The first electric-power stations opened in the 1880s, and no one debated whether they were superior to steam engines. But factories had been built with steam engines in their basements, powering overhead shafts that ran the length of the buildings, with belts and pulleys carrying power to individual machines. To adopt electricity, factory owners didn’t just need to buy motors—they needed to demolish and rebuild their entire operations. Some did. Most just waited for their infrastructure to wear out, which explains why the major economic gains from electrification didn’t show up for 40 years.

NONE of this is reassuring enough for the economist Anton Korinek. He’s “super worried,” he told me. He thinks that America will see major job losses—“a very noticeable labor-market effect”—as soon as this year.

“And then those economists you’ve been talking to, they’re going to say, ‘I see that in the data!’ ” Korinek paused. “Let’s not joke about it, because it’s too serious.”

Korinek is a professor and the faculty director of the Economics of Transformative AI Initiative at the University of Virginia. Last year, Time magazine put him on its list of the most influential people in AI. But he did not set out to become an economist. He grew up in an Austrian mountain village, writing machine code in 0s and 1s—the least glamorous form of programming, and the most unforgiving. It teaches you where instructions bottleneck, where systems jam, and what breaks first when pushed too hard.

He’d kept a close watch on developments in AI since the deep-learning breakthroughs of the early 2010s, even as his doctoral work focused on the prevention of financial crises. When he got his first demo of a large language model, in September 2022, it took “about five seconds” before he considered its consequences for the future of work, starting with his own.

We met for breakfast in Charlottesville in the fall. Korinek is youthful and slender, with delicate wire-frame glasses and a faintly red beard. My overall impression was of someone who’d rather be customizing Excel tabs than prophesizing doom. Still, here he was, saying the five words economists disdain the most: This time may be different.