A Funeral for Academic Freedom at UT: Five Videos from a Day of Grief, Witness, and Resistance, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

A Funeral for Academic Freedom at UT: Five Videos from a Day of Grief, Witness, and Resistance

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 22, 2026

There are moments when symbolic action captures the truth of a political moment more powerfully than any policy memo, hearing, or institutional statement ever could.

The UT Funeral for Academic Freedom, held on this week on May 20, 2026 of the UT System Board of Regents meeting, was one such moment.

I recorded five videos on my iPhone that day, each documenting a different part of this powerful public action. Together, they offer record of grief, protest, analysis, and collective witness in response to the ongoing attacks on faculty governance, academic freedom, Ethnic Studies, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the broader intellectual life of the public university.

There is, indeed, a great deal to grieve in the current moment.

Hats off to Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) for organizing and carrying out these horse-drawn carriage funerals in three Texas cities: first at Texas Tech University, second at The University of Texas at Austin, and third at the University of North Texas in Denton. These are striking, disciplined, and morally clear actions—ones that make visible the stakes of what is being lost when political power seeks to discipline knowledge, silence dissent, and restructure universities from above.

Below are the five videos I recorded from the UT event.

Video 1: A Short Walk from the UT Tower to the Horse Drawn Carriage on Inner-Campus Drive

The first video captures the solemnity and symbolism of the funeral procession itself. The horse-drawn carriage made visible what too many institutional actors continue to obscure: academic freedom is not an abstract principle. It is foundational—together with faculty governance and tenure rights and protections. It is a living condition of democratic education. When it is weakened, faculty lose the ability to teach and research honestly, students lose access to critical knowledge, and the public loses one of its most important democratic institutions.

Video 2: Mourning What Is Being Taken

The second video documents the atmosphere of collective mourning. This was not performative grief, but a solemn recognition that the current assault on higher education is already producing real consequences: self-censorship, faculty departures, weakened shared governance, attacks on DEI, threats to curriculum, and the chilling of intellectual inquiry.

Do listen to SEAT co-founder and leader Cameron Samuels’ eloquent eulogy, delivered before the horse-drawn carriage, as faculty and students place banned books into the hearse alongside the urn of ashes symbolizing the death of academic freedom. It is a haunting and powerful moment—one that captures both the sorrow and moral clarity of this public action. The ritual makes visible what too many official statements obscure: when books are banned, expertise is discredited, and faculty are politically constrained, the university’s democratic purpose itself is placed in jeopardy.

Video 3: Students, Faculty, and Community in Public Witness

The third video shows the horse-drawn carriage and mourners passing in front of the UT Tower and proceeding along Guadalupe Street—a powerful public procession meant to raise awareness about the crisis now facing higher education. As I note in the video, universities are increasingly being pushed toward censorship, surveillance, and political control. The broader public, including Texas taxpayers, needs to know that this is happening in their name and with their public dollars.

Students, faculty, staff, and community members gathered to insist that the university belongs to the people—not to political appointees, donors, ideologues, or governing boards that disregard the expertise and labor of those who make the university what it is.

I also underscored an important point: we do not indoctrinate. Indoctrination presupposes a closed system—an echo chamber in which one only hears, repeats, and promotes what already exists within it. That is the opposite of what teaching requires. Indoctrination is anathema to the work that we do in the classroom. 

I elaborate here that education demands questioning, growth, evidence, dialogue, and the willingness to revise one’s assumptions. Faculty members are themselves always learning, reading, rethinking, and “re-tooling”—engaging new literatures, theoretical frameworks, histories, and areas of study so that we can better understand the world and help students do the same. That is not indoctrination. That is education. And we do it well! 

Thank you very much! Time to stand up and take a bow? 😃

Let's move on.

Video 4: Dr. Nic Ramos on the Attack on Expertise

This fourth video is one of my favorites—second only to the press conference itself, captured in video five—because it features a wonderful conversation with UT American Studies professor Dr. Nic Ramos, who names something crucial: the attack on UT faculty is also an attack on expertise.

This point cannot be overstated. What is unfolding in Texas higher education is not merely a disagreement over administrative structure or campus policy. It is part of a broader campaign to delegitimize the knowledge, judgment, and professional authority of faculty—particularly those whose research and teaching address race, gender, colonialism, inequality, public memory, and democratic accountability.

Dr. Ramos makes the insightful point that Copernicus, who claimed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, would not be able to teach at UT Austin under such conditions because of how radical that perspective was in its own time, pushing real academic boundaries of thought that our university system rejects. 

He tells his students that “research expertise, by its very definition, means that we push boundaries,” and that scholarly arguments are designed to “innovate change,” to foster debate and discussion. This, he says, is why he “serves steak, not soup” in his classroom. 

Love it. Steak, not soup.💗

It is a vivid and memorable metaphor. “Soup” suggests something pre-digested, blended together, and easy to consume. “Steak,” by contrast, requires students to chew, wrestle, question, and develop their own intellectual strength. 

Moreover, for the record, I interject here that Ethnic Studies and Women and Gender Studies are often misrepresented as an attack on the traditional canon or a curriculum centered on “great white men.” It is not about erasing canonical thinkers or dismissing their contributions. We're not anti-civics or anti-cannon. Instead, we seek a fuller, more complete civics where democracy has been made by all—women, civil rights leaders, immigrants, students, communities of color and so on.

Rather, these areas of study expand the frame by bringing more histories, voices, and perspectives into view. Doing so gives students a fuller and more honest understanding of civic life in a democracy.

Dr. Ramos helps us see that the struggle before us is not only about protecting individual faculty members or specific departments. It is about defending the very conditions under which knowledge can be produced, debated, revised, and shared in the public interest—and in the ongoing development of knowledge itself.

Video 5: The Press Conference

The fifth and final video is the 45-minute press conference, where I and others offered public statements about the significance of this moment. The press conference brought together multiple voices, each speaking to the harms already underway and the urgent need for organized resistance.

We spoke in defense of academic freedom, shared governance, Mexican American and Latino Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and the democratic purpose of public higher education. We also spoke against the normalization of political interference in curriculum, faculty governance, and the intellectual life of the university.

This is a time for clarity. We must refuse the language of “efficiency,” “restructuring,” "balancing," "consolidation," and “compliance” when these terms mask deeper efforts to narrow the scope of knowledge and weaken democratic participation inside Texas public institutions.

The funeral was symbolic, yes—but it was also diagnostic. It named the bankrupt logic of policies that seek to silence, erase, intimidate, and control. At the same time, the gathering itself was evidence that academic freedom is not dead so long as students, faculty, staff, and communities continue to organize in its defense.

I am grateful to SEAT, AAUP-UT Austin, Austin SDS, the Latino Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, Texas AFT, the Texas Association for Mexican American Chambers of Commerce, and all allied organizations and individuals who continue to show up in this struggle. The work ahead is immense, but this action reminded us that grief can become testimony, testimony can become organizing, and organizing can become power.

Academic freedom is worth defending—not as a privilege of educators, but as a public good.

And in Texas, the struggle continues.