Who Belongs? The Pushout of LGBTQIA+ Students in Texas Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. and Sherri Castillo, Ph.D.

Who Belongs? The Pushout of LGBTQIA+ Students in Texas Higher Education

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. and Sherri Castillo, Ph.D.

Let’s be honest about what’s at stake. We are witnessing the systematic dismantling of resources, relationships, and rights that LGBTQIA+ students, faculty, and staff have long relied upon—not only to succeed in higher education but to survive. For many LGBTQIA+ students, higher education is the first place they begin to feel like themselves, but the passage and implementation of Senate Bill 17 in Texas has created a climate of fear, confusion, and deep harm. It is a policy born of cruelty, not concern.

The LGBTQIA+ Campus Climate Report (Equality Texas, 2024) documents what so many of us already know in our bones: This law is not about neutrality or fairness—it’s about erasure. It bans Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices, prohibits training and outreach, and punishes institutions that dare to affirm the dignity of marginalized students. The language of SB 17 is

Read report here.

 intentionally vague enough to prompt institutions towards preemptive compliance, closing multicultural centers and college-sponsored LGBTQIA+ events. It has led to layoffs, surveillance, and self-censorship, all while those in power pretend this is a matter of bureaucratic housekeeping. It is not.

According to the report, nearly 80 percent of LGBTQIA+ students interviewed said they’ve considered leaving Texas. Over half have considered leaving their university. Students have lost access to everything from gender-affirming clothing exchanges to mentorship programs, mental health support, safe campus spaces, and visible symbols of allyship. In their place, students have been forced to fill the void themselves—organizing events, building community, and advocating for their peers—all while navigating academic and social systems that tell them they do not belong.

LGBTQIA+ students and their families pay taxes like everyone else. Isn’t it reasonable to expect that public institutions, funded by those very dollars, provide support—not exclusion—for all students? What, then, do they have to show for their investment in a system that is actively pushing them out? This is not sustainable. It is not just. And it is not who we should be as a state or a society.

Faculty and staff are feeling the strain, too. Three-quarters of LGBTQIA+ educators and university workers report negative impacts from SB 17. Many no longer feel safe or supported. Some have already left; others are preparing to go. As tensions increase in Texas following debate over bills that limit academic freedom, research funding, and further alienate marginalized people, we must ask ourselves what kind of future are we building when those who serve and mentor our students are driven out by ideological intimidation?

Private universities, while not subject to the law, are hardly immune. The chilling effect of SB 17 has reached their campuses too—students there report rising hostility, minimal institutional support, and growing concern about whether their campuses will follow suit in censoring DEI work under pressure.

Let us not be fooled: this is part of a larger project to control education, rewrite history, and suppress the lives and knowledge of entire communities. When the state dictates which identities can be acknowledged, which truths can be told, and which students can feel safe—it is not neutrality. It is structural violence.

And let us not forget: LGBTQIA+ students—particularly transgender and nonbinary youth—are at heightened risk for mental health challenges. According to national data, nearly 40% of transgender and gender-expansive college students have seriously considered suicide. That number alone should give any policymaker pause. Instead, we see performative cruelty disguised as policy, and political theater masquerading as governance.

But we are not powerless. We must call this moment what it is—an attack on young people, on educational integrity, and on the very idea of a public university that serves all Texans. Generation Z and Generation Alpha are set to be the most racially, ethnically, and gender-diverse age-generation cohort in recorded American history (Castillo, Valenzuela, & Hinds, 2025; Twenge, 2023). We must affirm life, not erasure. It is our moral and civic responsibility to ensure that these students are not only protected, but fully supported, celebrated, and empowered to thrive in the institutions that claim to serve them.

We say this as educators, as individuals who have devoted our lives and careers to nurturing critical consciousness and inclusive learning spaces. I, Angela, say this as a mother, a grandmother, and someone who has marched, testified, and fought alongside students. The state of policy protections for transgender and non-binary people in Texas should alarm researchers and citizens alike. When states like Texas ban conversations about sexuality and gender identity, remove books from libraries, and restrict access to medical care, they attempt to erase the existence of trans people alongside other minoritized communities. And I say this as a Texan who believes we can and must do better.

We need to protect academic freedom. We need to invest in student support systems, not gut them. And we need to make clear that all students—regardless of gender, race, or identity—deserve to learn in an environment of dignity and respect.

If we lose this fight, we don’t just lose DEI offices. We lose lives. We lose potential. We lose a generation of thinkers, leaders, and changemakers. But if we stand together—if we organize, testify, vote, and refuse to be silent—we can still turn this tide. Let us honor our students not by explaining away injustice, but by challenging it. Let us make Texas a place where all students are free to become who they are.

                                                      References

Castillo, S., Valenzuela, A., & Hinds, C. (2025). Organizing and youth resistance: The fight for trans rights in Texas. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2025.2502060

Equality Texas. (2024). LGBTQIA+ campus climate report: Perspectives on campus climate and the effects of SB 17’s DEI ban from LGBTQIA+ students, staff, and faculty at Texas colleges and universities. https://www.equalitytexas.org

Twenge, J. M. (2023). Generations: The real differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and what they mean for America’s future. Atria Books.

Dr. Angela Valenzuela is a professor in the College of Education at the University of Texas-Austin.

Dr. Sherri Castillo is an education policy scholar and former public school teacher dedicated to advancing equity and inclusion for LGBTQIA+ people in K-12 and higher education. 

WHY IS THE TEXAS LEGISLATURE PUSHING TO REMOVE DEI AND CRT? by NAACP President & Civil Rights Attorney Gary Bledsoe

Friends,

I encourage all to view this short video featuring NAACP President GaryBledsoe from a talk he delivered at UT during the 2023 Texas legislative session. He explains why the Texas State Legislature planned to remove Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices and initiatives from higher education and how this aligns with the earlier legislation against Critical Race Theory (CRT) in Texas K-12 classrooms. Put simply, legislators are responding to the fact that Texas is 59 percent minority and 41 percent white and they shudder at the thought that their own children—together, of course, with children of color—might actually learn the truths of history and inequality in our country.

NAACP Pres. Gary Bledsoe, Esq.

Their "solution" is to make sure as much as possible that every student that comes through our K-12 schools and our state's higher education institutions emerges from them as politically conservative.

I don't see that happening whatever they do, even if a number falls prey. Our state has always been conservative and has always met resistance. That is not going to go away no matter what.

Plus, our youth are so smart and have access to greater knowledge and information than has ever been available in the history of our country.  Admittedly, it can be hit and miss, but the fact that our Gen Z youth trend progressive is what's lighting up conservatives. This isn't random, by the way. We birthed this generation and taught them well.

Great job, Gary! What a treat to listen to this today.

-Angela Valenzuela

What is Fascism? It's "Government by the Few and For the Few" and this is Deeply Concerning

A day doesn't seem go by that I don't think of creeping fascism in the U.S. Glad to see renowned scholar Dr. Heather Cox Richardson giving this some ink—in historical perspective.

I'm disgusted, for example, at the Texas Legislature's multiple power grabs, most notably, the one aimed at Harris County. The lege is basically giving control over elections to a single Republican state official that involves completely eliminating the Elections Administrator office. Read Texas Republicans single out one blue county as they push election bills that captures this struggle over voting in the last regular legislative session, illuminating well why reigning in Harris County is important to Texas Republicans.

Relatedly, I just got a message from Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo who is raising funds to fight this anti-democratic attack that she refers to as a "murder-suicide plot against us ALL." Chip in, if you can, at linahidalgo.co/20230608?t=TNFJq to help in the struggle.

There is a glimmer of hope from today's SCOTUS ruling that suggests the Voting Rights Act still lives (read: Supreme Court: Alabama’s voting maps unfair to Black residents). It was a 5-4 decision where Chief Justices John Roberts Jr. and Brett Kavanaugh joined with the court's 3 liberals, namely, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. 

In light of today's court ruling, I'm hoping that they're noticing that not supporting minorities' voting rights is either fascist, or paves the way for it. Regardless, this is indeed a much-welcomed surprise.

-Angela Valenzuela

Letters from an American

May 29, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON MAY 30

Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”

On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!” 

“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”

Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.” 

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said. 

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.” 

Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.” 

Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”

The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques: 

First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”

Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.” 

Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”

It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.” 

The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.

“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.” And if “we want to make certain that fascism does not come to America, we must make certain that it does not thrive anywhere in the world.” 

Seventy-eight years after the publication of “FASCISM!” with its program for recognizing that political system and stopping it from taking over the United States, President Joe Biden today at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, honored those who gave their lives fighting to preserve democracy. “On this day, we come together again to reflect, to remember, but above all, to recommit to the future our fallen heroes fought for, …a future grounded in freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, opportunity, and…justice.”

“[T]he truest memorial to their lives,” the president said, is to act “every day to ensure that our democracy endures, our Constitution endures, and the soul of our nation and our decency endures.”

—

Notes:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=armytalks

War Department, “Army Talk 64: FASCISM!” March 24, 1945, at https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/05/29/remarks-by-president-biden-at-the-155th-national-memorial-day-observance/

https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/1663379851716198400

The Return of the Emerging Democratic Majority? by By Eric Levitz

Interesting—and indeed, hopeful—analysis of how the vote is trending across generations. Key quote:

 "If Republicans do not reconcile themselves to a more modern set of cultural values (and/or less plutocratic set of economic policies), generational churn will eventually make it very difficult for them to compete in national elections."

With the Texas Republican party in mind, the irony is that they see their cultural values and plutocratic economic policies as the very tools through which they can preserve their incumbencies, allowing them to use elective office for power hoarding and personal, as opposed to civic, gain.

In light of these trends, they would do well to re-think their strategy.

Angela Valenzuela

#GenZ #2024election

The Return of the Emerging Democratic Majority? 

by By Eric Levitz

Photo: SOPA Images/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett

The 2022 election was strange. Historically, the president’s party tends to suffer large losses in midterms, as its base grows complacent and swing voters indulge their fetish for divided government. And there was little reason to believe that last year would be an exception.

After all, last November, Joe Biden was a historically unpopular president presiding over exceptionally high inflation. Polls showed widespread disapproval of the Democratic administration in general and its economic management in particular. A “red wave” appeared to be cresting.

And yet that wave ebbed before it touched the nation’s most highly contested races: Even as Republicans won the two-party national vote for House control by a 51 to 49 percent margin in 2022, Democrats won 40 of the 64 races that were deemed very competitive by the Cook Political Report.

And in the closest Senate and gubernatorial races, the outcomes were even more odd. In the contests that Cook deemed either “toss-ups” or merely “leaning” toward one party, Democrats won 51 percent of the two-party vote — a higher share than they had secured in such races in 2020 — while claiming victories in 13 of 18 elections.

Altogether, this increased the Democratic Party’s power in the Senate and at the state level while leaving Republicans with a relatively meager nine-vote majority in the House. Had a few thousand more votes (in very specific places) shifted from Republicans to Democrats, Biden’s party would have retained full control of the federal government. As is, it still mounted one of the strongest midterm performances for an in-power party in modern American history.

By now, election analysts have produced plenty of compelling explanations for how this came to be. One is that the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade scrambled conventional midterm dynamics. Major policy changes often spur short-term electoral backlashes. This is one reason why the president’s party has often struggled in midterm elections, which frequently follow ambitious legislative sessions. But in 2022, even though a Democrat was in the White House, Republicans delivered the year’s most disruptive policy change. Thus, in purple states where abortion policy was a live issue, swing voters in general (and women in particular) gave Democrats unusually strong support.

Another explanation for the red ripple was Donald Trump’s singularly bad taste in general-election candidates. In various competitive Senate and gubernatorial races, Republican primary voters nominated MAGA extremists at Trump’s request. This predictably rendered the party less competitive.

But a new analysis from the Democratic-data firm Catalist points to another critical factor: the political ascendance of millennials and zoomers.

America’s youngest adult generations had been integral to the 2018 blue wave. Millennials saw their turnout rate surge from 22 percent in the 2014 midterm to 42 percent four years later. In 2018, the oldest zoomers became eligible to vote in a midterm for the first time. And they cast ballots at a higher rate than millennials or Gen-Xers had in their respective first midterms. Critically, zoomers and millennials collectively cast more than 60 percent of their votes for Democrats, helping the party win the national House vote by a landslide margin.

This was an ominous development for the GOP. Still, Republican operatives could comfort themselves with a pair of thoughts. First, while America’s rising generations might turn out in historically high numbers to rebuke President Trump, their participation was bound to fall sharply once politics grew more banal. And second, though millennials and zoomers were currently the least Republican generations that America had produced since Lincoln’s time, they would surely age into a more ordinary partisan distribution.

The 2022 results were not kind to such wishful thinking. As Catalist’s analysis of voter-file data reveals, millennial and Gen-Z voters collectively comprised 26 percent of the 2022 electorate, up from 23 percent in 2018. This was partly a function of aging. More zoomers were eligible to vote last year than in 2018. But turnout among eligible voters was also a factor. Nationally, millennials and zoomers turned out at a rate comparable to their historically high 2018 mark, and in highly contested races, the two generations actually voted at a higher rate than they had in such races in 2018.

This is a big long-term problem for the Republican Party. With each passing election cycle, zoomers and millennials will become more likely to vote. As this chart from Catalist illustrates, generations tend to grow more and more electorally influential until they reach their mid-70s and then start aging out of the electorate owing to illness or death. Boomers have already passed their political peak. Millennials will be building toward theirs for a long time to come.

Graphic: Catalist

It is not surprising that millennials have retained their exceptionally strong Democratic lean even as they’ve exited their youth. Although cohorts do tend to grow a bit more conservative when (or if) they have children and buy a home, most voters’ political affiliations are cemented in adolescence and early adulthood, when myriad other aspects of their identities are forged. Millennials spent their formative years watching George W. Bush preside over catastrophic wars and an economic disaster while his party embraced soon-to-be-discredited social crusades (such as opposition to gay marriage). And millennials were also raised by parents who were markedly more socially liberal than the boomers’ forebears. It is therefore unsurprising that the generation has proven durably hostile to a Republican Party that refuses to abandon the cultural commitments of America’s white Evangelical minority.

The durability of birth cohorts’ political leanings means that generational churn by itself can remake our politics. There are many reasons why Barack Obama’s first midterm was a political disaster for the Democratic Party while Biden’s was a relative success. But one is that boomers constituted 69 percent of the electorate in 2010 but only 48 percent of it in 2022.

To this point, Republicans have managed to weather the rise of millennials and zoomers just fine. This is largely because America’s older generations have all shaded to the right since 2012. As a result, the political divide between millennials and zoomers on the one hand, and their elders on the other, has never been more stark:

Graphic: @williamjordann/Twitter

Further, the GOP’s historically high support from non-college-educated white voters — combined with the overrepresentation of those voters in the Senate and Electoral College battlegrounds — has enabled the party to win power in excess of its popular support.

Both of these factors are likely to attenuate the GOP’s millennial problem in the near term. For one thing, Generation X is a right-leaning cohort that came of age during the Reagan recovery and is about to enter its prime voting years.

But Gen X is also a small generation. And the boomers are growing smaller with each passing year. If Republicans do not reconcile themselves to a more modern set of cultural values (and/or less plutocratic set of economic policies), generational churn will eventually make it very difficult for them to compete in national elections.

Here, three other quick takeaways from the Catalist report:

Women were critical to Democratic success. Female voters backed Democrats nationally at levels comparable to 2020, and in highly competitive Senate and gubernatorial elections, Democrats actually won a slightly higher share of women’s ballots than they had in similar races two years earlier (winning 57 percent, up from 55 percent in 2020). Resiliently strong support among white college-educated women helped to compensate for a sharp drop in Democratic voting among white college-educated men, who gave Democrats 51 percent of their votes in 2020 but only 44 percent two years later.

In competitive races, education polarization eased. Beyond America’s generational cleavage, a growing “diploma divide” between college-educated and working-class voters has been one of the defining dynamics of U.S. politics in recent years. This gap remains vast, but in 2022 it declined a bit from its Trump-era peak, particularly in competitive races. In such contests, Democrats gained four points of support among non-college-educated white voters, relative to 2020, while losing two points of support among college-educated ones.

Democrats’ performance with non-white voters was suboptimal in 2022. In last year’s midterm, Democrats lost seven points of support among both college-educated and non-college-educated Asian American and Pacific Islander voters relative to 2020. Their performance with Hispanic voters was largely unchanged from the Biden-Trump race with the party winning 62 percent of that demographic. In 2016 and 2012, however, the party had won upwards of 70 percent of Hispanic voters.

Black voters, meanwhile, remained overwhelmingly Democratic. But both their turnout rate and support for Democrats declined slightly from previous midterms. In 2018, Black voters represented 12 percent of the electorate; in 2022, they comprised 10 percent. In 2020, Black voters delivered 91 percent of their votes to Democrats — two years later, they gave just 88 percent of them to Biden’s party.

A Texas Trilogy of Anti-DEI, Tenure Bills by Ryan Quinn

 Sharing this obviously outrageous attack on higher education. 

-Angela Valenzuela

April 14, 2023

A Texas Trilogy of Anti-DEI, Tenure Bills

Three Texas bills would end tenure, force universities to fire professors who “attempt to compel” certain beliefs and ban what the legislation defines as diversity, equity and inclusion programming. The State Senate has already passed one.

By  Ryan Quinn

Three bills targeting tenure and other issues are moving through the Texas Senate.

capitol.texas.gov

Texas senators are advancing three bills that would end tenure for future professors; ban what the legislation defines as diversity, equity and inclusion activities; and force colleges and universities to fire professors who “attempt to compel a student” to adopt a belief that any “social, political or religious belief is inherently superior to any other.”

All three only affect public institutions.

That third bill, Senate Bill 16, passed the Senate 18 to 12 Wednesday and is now in the House of Representatives. All Democrats voted against it, all present Republicans voted for it and one Republican senator, Phil King, was absent.

The other two bills, Senate Bill 17, on DEI, and 18, banning tenure, have already passed the Senate Education Committee.

None of the bills’ original lead sponsors returned requests for comment Thursday. The Texas Tribune, which has been reporting on the bills, said the University of Texas at Austin didn’t respond to a question about its interpretation of the legislation’s impact if it passes.

Florida has garnered much attention for Republicans’ targeting of DEI there, but Texas’s recent legislation reinforces that another large Southern state is putting it in the crosshairs.

Antonio Ingram, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said, “It’s important to look at these bills in the context of what they would be doing as a trifecta.” He called them an attack on “multiracial democracy” in a state that has become majority minority.

He also noted the severity of the bills’ punishments.

SB 16’s required firing for attempts to “compel” beliefs would be despite tenure for any newly contracted professors—and SB 18 would bar tenure for professors anyway if they don’t have it by Sept. 1, 2023. SB 17, which bars what the legislation defines as DEI programming and training, would render a university ineligible for state money for a whole fiscal year if the state auditor determined it had “spent state money in violation.”

Senate Bill 16 includes this:

A faculty member of an institution of higher education may not compel or attempt to compel a student enrolled at the institution to adopt a belief that any race, sex or ethnicity or social, political or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity or belief.

It then says,

If an institution of higher education determines that a faculty member of the institution has violated this section, the institution shall discharge the faculty member.

“It could be you have a student who is disgruntled with their grade,” Ingram said. “And they report to, you know, their school, ‘My professor is compelling me to believe certain topics, I want to bring a grievance.’ The only remedy for violating Senate Bill 16 is termination. There are no progressive penalties.”

Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said “removing tenure is an extraordinary penalty.”

“I think that there’s little doubt that the state can take measures to protect freedom of conscience, but they should be listening to stakeholders to do it carefully, with proportional consequences,” Cohn said. He said “reasonable people” could disagree on whether SB 16’s consequence, and it being a one-strike offense, is proportional.

He said SB 16 would be strengthened if lawmakers changed it to say, more specifically, that professors couldn’t compel students to “personally express” a belief that those students don’t hold.

SB 18 is the simplest bill, saying, “An institution of higher education may not grant an employee of the institution tenure or any type of permanent employment status” after Sept. 1.

It would allow universities to establish “an alternate system of tiered employment status for faculty members, provided that the system clearly defines each position and requires each faculty member to undergo an annual performance evaluation.” It doesn’t specify further how that could work.

Cohn urged the rejection of this legislation.

“I think the state should be extremely hesitant to end tenure moving forward,” he said. “You know, academic freedom is the lifeblood of higher education, and institutions of higher education can’t thrive in an environment where faculty don’t have strong academic freedom rights. FIRE has never taken the position that tenure is the only way to protect faculty’s academic freedom, but the state hasn’t proposed anything else to fill the void.”

“They’re just revoking tenure,” he said. “And in our experience, tenure has been one of the most important tools to defend the free speech and academic freedom rights of faculty who have disfavored views. And legislators who are concerned about the shrinking number of conservative voices in the academy should be wary about stripping one of the most effective protections that has prevented the academy from screening out dissenters.”

Jeff Blodgett, president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, said, “Tenure is critical for preserving academic freedom, and the one mistake that some of the legislators make … is that they seem to think that faculty are not evaluated every year, and they are.”

Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow in higher education reform at the Heritage Foundation, has supported SB 18. He said Thursday that “tenure is this awful cliff” that effectively limits academic freedom.

He provided his testimony in support of SB 18 late last month to senators.

“Tenure is a make-or-break, all-or-nothing decision made first of all by their colleagues in their academic department,” Kissel said of junior faculty members. “If a junior scholar fails to earn tenure within about seven years, he is normally expected to leave the institution. As a result, junior faculty walk on eggshells for years. If they are too successful, they risk the jealousy of colleagues. If they are too innovative in their scholarship, they risk alienating their colleagues. If they are too outspoken about anything, or if they do not mimic their colleagues’ political and social views, junior faculty risk alienating the people who are going to vote on their future.”

SB 17 would ban “influencing hiring or employment practices at the institution with respect to race, sex, color or ethnicity, other than through the use of color-blind and sex-neutral hiring processes in accordance with any applicable state and federal antidiscrimination laws.”

It would also ban “promoting differential treatment of or providing special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, color or ethnicity” and “conducting trainings, programs or activities designed or implemented in reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation, other than trainings, programs or activities developed by an attorney and approved in writing by the institution ’s general counsel and the office of the attorney general for the sole purpose of ensuring compliance with any applicable court order or state or federal law.”

That bill generally says the ban doesn’t apply if federal law requires something.

“DEI fundamentally has a remedial aspect,” Ingram said.

He said the University of Texas at Austin “didn’t let in Black undergraduate students until the 1950s, and so when you have that legacy of … state-sponsored exclusions, of course there are still gross disparities in Black and brown faculty on campus today, and in order to remediate those disparities you have to be intentional.”

Cohn said FIRE is generally neutral on that bill. He said it supports a section banning soliciting DEI statements in hiring.

“I think the state would be better off talking about, you know, how they should avoid compelling applicants or faculty who are up for promotion from being compelled to issue statements on any” political or ideological subject, he said.

“What you don’t want in your legislation is to fight political litmus tests by imposing your own, signaling … one and only one point of view,” he said.