The Theology of Power Behind the Anti-DEI Movement: What Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer Help Us See, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Theology of Power Behind the Anti-DEI Movement:
What Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer Help Us See          

by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 10, 2026

Today's anti-DEI movement does not merely invoke the language of neutrality; it weaponizes it. Its appeals to “colorblind equality,” “individual responsibility,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “freedom from coercion” provide moral cover for a coordinated effort to dismantle the institutional commitments that make multiracial and multiethnic democracy possible.

A Manhattan Institute (2023) policy brief by Christopher Rufo, Ilya Shapiro, and Matt Beienburg makes this clear. The document calls for state legislatures to abolish DEI offices, end mandatory diversity training, prohibit diversity statements, and eliminate identity-conscious policies in public universities. It even supplies model legislative language for states to adopt. In other words, it does not merely criticize DEI. It operationalizes a political project.

What would Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer help us see in this document and in the broader movement from which it emerges? At the risk of oversimplifying the work of these formidable researchers and thinkers—or failing to fully acknowledge the many conceptual overlaps among them—I offer the following reading. Each illuminates a different dimension of the same political project: Stewart helps us understand the religious-nationalist drive for power; MacLean reveals the anti-democratic political economy beneath it; and Mayer follows the money and institutional networks that make such ideas actionable.

Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers and Money, Lies, and God, would
likely urge us not to mistake this for a simple “culture war.” Christian nationalism, in her analysis, is not merely about religious belief. Nor is it reducible to debates over prayer, abortion, sexuality, or school curricula. It is a political movement seeking power over the institutions of democracy. Its aim is not pluralism, but control. From this perspective, attacks on DEI, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, and public education are not side issues. They are part of a larger attempt to define whose knowledge counts, whose histories matter, and whose presence in public institutions is legitimate.

Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains, would likely locate this effort within a longer history of anti-democratic political economy. Her work shows how radical-right, neoliberal thinkers and donors have sought to constrain majority rule, weaken public institutions, privatize public goods, and insulate concentrated wealth from democratic accountability. Seen through MacLean’s lens, anti-DEI legislation is not only a cultural backlash. It is also a governance strategy. It

narrows what public universities can do, what faculty can say, what students can learn, and what communities can demand of taxpayer-supported institutions.

Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, would likely follow the money. She would ask: Who funds the think tanks, advocacy organizations, litigation networks, media campaigns, and policy shops that produce these “model bills”? Who benefits when public institutions are weakened? Who gains when democracy is recast as “coercion,” equity as “orthodoxy,” and civil rights as “preference”? 

Mayer’s work helps us see that ideas rarely move on their own. They are carried, amplified, and institutionalized through networks of wealth, influence, litigation, media, and policy advocacy. In higher education, this influence can become especially consequential when donor support comes with expectations—whether explicit or implicit—that shape curricula, research priorities, faculty appointments, or public-facing programs. When private wealth gains this kind of leverage over academic life, it does more than fund ideas; it helps determine which ideas become legitimate, visible, and powerful. The result is a serious threat to academic freedom, shared governance, and the integrity of universities as public-serving institutions.

Together, these three writers help us understand that the attack on DEI is not simply about administrative offices or training sessions. It is about the future of democracy itself.

John Oliver’s recent and timely Last Week Tonight segment on New College of Florida gives us a concrete glimpse of what this project looks like when theory becomes governance. New College was not merely criticized as “woke”; it was politically captured and remade through state power. 

Board appointments, administrative upheaval, the elimination of gender studies, numerous faculty departures, escalating costs, and an aggressive campaign to rebrand the institution all became part of a larger effort to transform a distinctive honors public liberal arts college into a showcase for ideological control. Put plainly, New College was not simply reformed; it was targeted. Its transformation should be understood as an intentional and orchestrated attack—one that other states, especially those already moving in this direction, should heed as a warning.

Oliver’s satire makes the story accessible, but the implications are grave: New College reveals how appeals to freedom, neutrality, and anti-indoctrination can become instruments for narrowing intellectual life and subordinating public education to political spectacle.

Link to John Oliver's show on New College

What happened at New College of Florida should therefore be read not as an isolated Florida story, but as a warning about a broader national strategy—one that has already taken legislative form in Texas through SB 17 and related efforts to discipline public higher education.

This is especially clear in higher education. Public universities are among the few institutions where young people can still encounter histories, literatures, theories, and communities that challenge inherited hierarchies. They are places where students learn that inequality is not natural, that democracy is unfinished, and that knowledge can serve justice. This is precisely why they have become targets.

The anti-DEI movement tells us that it seeks neutrality. But there is nothing neutral or apolitical about banning the vocabulary of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, power, privilege, or structural inequality from public life. 

There is nothing neutral or apolitical about using state power to restrict how universities support historically excluded students. There is nothing neutral about turning “colorblindness” into a weapon against the very communities whose labor, taxes, cultures, and struggles built the state.

Nor is there anything Christian, in the deepest moral sense, about denying the dignity of the vulnerable, erasing histories of suffering and resistance, or consolidating power in the hands of the already powerful. The Christianity rooted in justice that many of us recognize speaks to humility, justice, love, mercy, and care for the stranger. Christian nationalism, by contrast, cloaks hierarchy in sacred authority. It baptizes domination. It transforms—and disfigures—a faith tradition into an instrument of political control.

This is why Stewart’s analysis matters. She helps us see how religious language can be marshaled to justify anti-democratic power. This is why MacLean’s analysis matters. She helps us see how democracy is weakened not always by dramatic coups, but by slow institutional redesign. And this is why Mayer’s analysis matters. She helps us see how concentrated wealth builds the infrastructure that makes these transformations possible.

The struggle over DEI, then, is not a narrow dispute over campus bureaucracy. It is a struggle over whether public institutions will continue to serve a multiracial democracy or whether they will be remade to protect hierarchy under the banner of freedom.

For those of us in Texas, this is not abstract. Under SB 17, we have seen how anti-DEI laws chill speech, restructure universities, eliminate offices, threaten programs, and place entire fields of study under suspicion. We have seen how Mexican American Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and other knowledge traditions become vulnerable when political leaders decide that democracy itself has become too diverse, too demanding, and too honest.

The answer is not despair. It is clarity.

We should name the movement accurately. We should refuse the false innocence of its language. We should defend academic freedom, shared governance, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, civil rights, and public education as essential democratic goods. 

And we should insist that pluralism is not a threat to democracy. Pluralism is democracy.

The future being offered by Christian nationalism and its allied political networks is a narrowed one: fewer rights, fewer histories, fewer voices, fewer protections, fewer public goods. The future we must defend is broader, deeper, and more humane: a democracy capacious enough to tell the truth, educate all children, honor all communities, and build institutions worthy of the public trust.

That is the real choice before us.

Reference

Last Week Tonight. (2026, June 8). New College of Florida: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFMc07F1UUU

Manhattan Institute. (2023, January 18). New issue brief: Abolish DEI bureaucracies and restore colorblind equality in public universities [Press release]. https://manhattan.institute/article/new-issue-brief-abolish-dei-bureaucracies-and-restore-colorblind-equality-in-public-universities

MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Penguin Press.

Mayer, J. (2016). Dark money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right. Anchor.

Stewart, K. (2020). The power worshippers: Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Stewart, K. (2025). Money, lies, and God: Inside the movement to destroy American democracy. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Civil Rights, Reversed: When “Equality” Masks Inequality, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 Civil Rights, Reversed: When “Equality” Masks Inequality

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 28, 2026

There is a through line connecting two arguments that, at first glance, may appear distinct but are in fact deeply aligned. One, advanced by Christopher Rufo, calls for a “colorblind” reinterpretation of civil rights law—one that would prohibit any consideration of race, even for remedial purposes. The other, emerging from more radical libertarian circles, goes further: it claims that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 itself is an illegitimate infringement on freedom of association and suggests it should be dismantled altogether. 

What links these positions is not merely their skepticism of race-conscious policy, but a shared project of narrowing—if not undoing—the legal architecture of civil rights itself. For a revealing articulation of this trajectory, see Ross Douthat’s interview with Rufo in The New York Times (Douthat, 2025).

Taken together, these positions mark not a debate over policy nuance, but a coordinated redefinition of civil rights. One narrows its meaning to the point of inversion. The other seeks its outright elimination. Both rest on the same premise: that efforts to address inequality are themselves the problem.

Let us begin with the “colorblind” argument. Its appeal lies in its simplicity: no advantages or disadvantages based on ancestry; no consideration of race in admissions, hiring, or public policy. Equality, in this view, is achieved by ignoring history and the politics of difference altogether.

Digital graphic by Angela Valenzuela

But this formulation depends on a false premise—that we are operating on a level playing field. We are not. 

What this argument ultimately masks is not neutrality, but grievance politics reframed as principle. Under the banner of “colorblind equality,” what is being advanced is a narrative of injury—that white Americans, and particularly those aligned with dominant institutional power, are now the true victims of discrimination. This is not a legal argument so much as a political one. It converts historically grounded efforts at remedy into perceived acts of injustice, recasting inclusion as exclusion and equity as unfairness. 

Digital graphic by Angela Valenzuela

In doing so, it mobilizes resentment while disavowing it, presenting grievance as constitutional fidelity. But grievance politics, however carefully dressed in the language of rights, does not resolve inequality—it obscures it. And in the current Texas context, it provides the affective fuel for policies like anti-DEI Senate Bill 17 and Senate Bill 37 where the rhetoric of neutrality legitimates the restructuring of institutions in ways that ultimately consolidate, rather than challenge, existing hierarchies.

The United States did not arrive at inequality by accident. It was produced through centuries of law and policy: enslavement, segregation, exclusion from housing and employment, and systematic disinvestment. The Jim Crow laws were not merely social customs; they were legal regimes that structured access to opportunity. The Civil Rights Act was enacted precisely to dismantle those regimes and, crucially, to enable remedies where their effects persisted.

To collapse race-conscious remedies into “racial favoritism,” as Rufo does, is to erase this history. It is to treat corrective measures as equivalent to the harms they were designed to address. This is not legal reasoning; it is what I would call policy theater—a reframing of institutional retrenchment as moral clarity.

We see the consequences of this reframing most clearly in Texas.

With SB 17, the state has effectively banned DEI initiatives across public universities, invoking the language of neutrality while triggering widespread anticipatory compliance. Programs have been dismantled, trainings canceled, and academic units reorganized in ways that extend well beyond the statute’s text. At the University of Texas at Austin, the consolidation of departments focused on race, ethnicity, and gender signals not simply administrative efficiency, but a reorientation of institutional priorities.

SB 37 builds on this foundation by weakening faculty governance and centralizing authority, reducing the capacity of academic communities to respond collectively to these changes. The result is not a neutral landscape, but a managed one—where the boundaries of permissible knowledge are increasingly shaped by political directives.

This is the paradox of the “colorblind” project: in the name of limiting the role of the state, it invites a different kind of state intervention—one that withdraws protections while actively restructuring institutions.

Digital graphic by Angela Valenzuela

The libertarian argument takes this logic to its endpoint. If any government mandate for nondiscrimination is an infringement on liberty, then civil rights law itself must be dismantled. Businesses, employers, and institutions should be free to associate—or refuse to associate—on any basis, including race.

At first glance, this may appear as a principled defense of freedom. In reality, it rests on a deeply flawed understanding of both freedom and history.

Freedom of association has never been absolute, particularly in the public sphere. Once an entity opens itself to the public—whether a restaurant, a university, or an employer—it becomes part of a broader civic infrastructure. The rules that govern that space are not arbitrary constraints; they are conditions that make participation possible.

Without such protections, “freedom” becomes asymmetrical. Those with power retain the freedom to exclude, while those without it bear the consequences.

This is not a hypothetical concern. It is a historical fact.

Prior to the Civil Rights Act, discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and education was not episodic—it was systemic. Entire populations were excluded from the basic institutions of public life. To suggest that market forces alone would have corrected these injustices is to ignore the depth and durability of structural inequality.

Here, the libertarian argument converges with the “colorblind” one. Both assume that inequality is either no longer significant or irrelevant to the question of justice. Both prioritize formal neutrality over substantive fairness. And both, in doing so, risk entrenching the very inequalities they claim to transcend.

As Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has argued, colorblind ideology functions by masking structural inequality, allowing it to persist under the guise of neutrality (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). And as Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us, civil rights law has always been contested terrain—expanded through struggle, and vulnerable to retrenchment (Crenshaw, 1988).

What we are witnessing now is a moment of such retrenchment.

The language of civil rights is being repurposed to constrain remedy. The concept of freedom is being narrowed to exclude considerations of equity. And the institutions tasked with fostering knowledge and opportunity are being reshaped accordingly.

The stakes are not abstract.

They are visible in classrooms where faculty hesitate to engage certain topics. In departments that are merged or dissolved. In students who find fewer spaces where their histories and experiences are taken seriously as objects of study. In a broader climate where the line between policy and politics grows increasingly difficult to discern.

The question before us is not whether we believe in equality. It is what kind of equality we are willing to defend.

Digital graphic by Angela Valenzuela

Is it an equality that ignores history, overlooks power, and quietly reproduces existing hierarchies? It is an equality that recognizes the unfinished work of democracy—one that understands that justice requires more than neutrality—one that requires attending to the conditions that make inequality endure?

In Texas, this question is no longer theoretical. It is legislative. It is institutional. And it is unfolding in real time.

The answer we choose will determine not only the future of civil rights law, but the meaning of freedom itself.

References

Bonilla-Silva, E. (2018). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.

Crenshaw, K. (1988). Race, reform, and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in antidiscrimination law. Harvard Law Review, 101(7), 1331–1387.

Douthat, R. (2025, March 7). The anti-D.E.I. crusader who wants to dismantle the Department of Education. The New York Times.

The Playbook Behind the “University Wars”—And Why It Fails on Purpose, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Playbook Behind the “University Wars”—And Why It Fails on Purpose

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Oct. 15, 2025

ILLUSTRATION BY GABRIELLA TRUJILLO

Before reading any further, take a few minutes to read the entirety of Kathryn Joyce’s eye-popping, brilliant investigative story, "The New College Gambit: The right-wing takeover of Florida's public honors college blurs the line between tragedy and farce, but attack on universities are about to get worse." It was published close to a year ago in In These Times on December 9, 2024. For your convenience, I post it below.

It is essential reading for anyone trying to understand what’s happening to higher education today. As covered in an earlier blog, it's also prescient, forecasting New College's massive decline in ranking from 76th to 135th in only two years since its takeover. 

Joyce’s reporting is meticulous, her narrative gripping, and her insights chilling. The story of the right-wing extremist takeover of New College of Florida reads like a case study in how to dismantle a public institution under the guise of “reform.”

What’s happening at New College isn’t an isolated meltdown. It’s a template. 

Start by dissolving or neutering faculty senates and concentrating power in presidential offices and partisan boards. Replace peer governance with top-down directives, and call it “reform.” Then rebrand the language of coercion as virtue, referring to it as "patriotic education," "intellectual diversity," or "institutional neutrality." This right-wing campaign weaves together speeches, op-eds, think-tank memos, policy statements, and book launches into a chorus of coordinated narratives

But the real engine of the story predates today’s culture warriors not the least of which has involved decades of a systematic defunding of higher education. Starve public higher education long enough, drive up tuition, "adjunctify" the faculty, and alienate the public—then arrive with a cure that looks suspiciously like more control and less education. What’s being sold as reform deepens the very decay it claims to cure.

Here’s the twist: even on their own terms, the new products don’t sell. As former New College professor Matt Lepinski put it, there’s no student demand for courses taught by extremists. The spectacle may grab headlines, but it doesn’t fill classrooms. Meanwhile, students lose mentors, degree paths wobble, and programs evaporate. The result is a university less capable of serving anyone—left, right, or center.

And perhaps that’s the point. As Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, observes in his May, 2024, report, failure can be the strategy. If you’re funded by people who want government to fail, then governing badly is success. In that frame, the destruction of a particular college isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It’s a deliberate step in a larger campaign to turn higher education into a patronage system—advancing loyalists, purging critics, and sidelining the public mission.

Starting to sound familiar? I hope not. But if the pattern feels eerily recognizable, it’s because the same logic is at work: dismantle trust, centralize control, and call it reform. The question, as always, is whether we’ll recognize it in time to stop it.

Consider the enrollment theater at New College: rapid recruitment of athletes as a quick way to boost headcount while cutting the academic core. This is diversity and inclusion as optics, not education. It’s also expensive, which brings us to a basic civic truth: we all pay taxes. Public universities are funded by the public. They exist to advance the public good. When governance collapses into factional control, taxpayers of every stripe—conservative, moderate, progressive—subsidize a campus that delivers less scholarship, less freedom, and fewer real opportunities.

Language matters here. The euphemisms—intellectual diversity, viewpoint balance, freedom institutes—mask a transfer of power from scholarly communities to political appointees. Strip away the branding and the structure looks familiar: it’s right-wing patronage with a campus mailing address.

So where does this leave us? For starters, there is abundant clarity. What was marketed as a renaissance is, in practice, a consolidation—of authority, budgets, and narrative. It also offers a stark warning: a system that treats dysfunction as a governing strategy will inevitably reproduce itself—unless it is confronted by organized resistance. 

It also reminds us, in the soberest of ways, that public higher education remains a public good—a cornerstone of democratic life. Most students aren’t looking for political theater; they want rigorous teaching, stable programs, meaningful credentials, and campuses where they can think freely without being drafted into someone else’s culture war.

The antidote isn’t nostalgia; it’s action leading to structural repair. We must restore shared governance; secure transparent, adequate public funding; protect academic freedom and tenure rights across the spectrum; and measure success by growth, timely completion, and meaningful student learning, not by how efficiently a board can silence a department. Even if a single campus can be “captured,” the public doesn’t have to underwrite a model built to fail.

The irony is hard to miss: even many conservatives don’t want what this model is selling. They want rigorous degrees, credible programs, and professors who teach—not propagandists who pose as educators. In that gap between the sales pitch and reality lies the opening for a different story—one in which universities serve democracy itself, not a faction; where education strengthens the public good rather than partisan power; and where language like “freedom,” “inclusion,” and “excellence” carries real meaning.

Faculty Governance and the Fight for Public Higher Education, by Dr. Karma R. Chavez

 Friends,

I'll provide updates on the 89th Texas Legislative Session soon that just ended here in Texas, but don't let your day go by without reading Dr. Karma Chavez' excellent AAUP Blog on the importance of faculty governance to democracy. This should be germane to higher education institutions everywhere.

-Angela Valenzuela

Faculty Governance and the Fight for Public Higher Education

Attacks on shared governance are attacks on academic freedom.

By Karma R. Chávez | Spring 2025 | AAUP Blog

In February 2022, amid the growing onslaught of attacks in both K–12 and higher education against teaching about race and racism in US history, the University of Texas at Austin Faculty Council passed a resolution defending academic freedom and, in particular, affirming the right of UT faculty to teach critical race theory, or “CRT,” as it has become known. In no time, Texas’s far-right Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick issued a public statement decrying “looney Marxist professors” and insisting that in the next legislative session he would ban CRT. He explained that this is why the legislature and right-wing donors had been pushing to create the “Liberty Institute” at UT, a proposed right-wing think tank designed to subvert ordinary faculty hiring processes and combat the gender and race ideology that supposedly dominates Texas’s universities.

Implicit in Patrick’s threat was a view that faculty should not be able to govern their own workplaces, and particularly the curriculum. Although in 2022 Patrick had not fleshed out a critique of the faculty’s role in institutional governance, that role, like “CRT” and “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion), would quickly be in his crosshairs. Before the 2025 Texas legislative session, which has now begun, Patrick already made it clear that faculty should have no role in governing Texas universities. In April 2024, in his “interim charges” on higher education for the upcoming session, Patrick singled out “faculty senates” as the first of his seven priorities. He charged the Texas Senate to “review and analyze the structures and governance in higher education, focusing on the role of ‘faculty senates,’ and like groups, in representing faculty interests to higher education institution administrations” and to “make recommendations to establish guidelines for the role and representation of faculty by ‘faculty senates,’ and like groups, at higher education institutions in Texas.”

Although Patrick’s ire was catalyzed by the faculty council’s 2022 resolution, his views in April 2024 were given shape by none other than Christopher Rufo, the architect of both “CRT” and “DEI” bans nationwide. In May 2023, Rufo argued on his Substack blog that rather than upholding the principles of “academic freedom, faculty governance, and institutional autonomy,” the university should be governed “according to the principles and priorities of voters, who elect legislators to govern state institutions in the interest of the common good.” In providing a limited summary of a debate he had with Princeton University political scientist Keith Whittington, Rufo explained that universities are not “a free marketplace of ideas” but instead represent “a state-run monopoly on education institutions” that should serve “the public good.”

Rufo’s consistent deployment of his claimed investment in the “common” or “public” good is a well-worn tactic to enshrine conservative ideology in law in the name of supposedly benign “common sense.” In my last book, The Borders of AIDS, I detail the persuasiveness of such “commonsense” appeals through an in-depth analysis of a 1987 legislative debate in which Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina advocated for a ban on all HIV-positive immigrants—this despite the fact that virtually no public health entity agreed that a ban would lead to better health outcomes in the United States. In my book, I show how Helms located his brand in a “national commonsense”: It was a matter of common sense, he claimed, that the course of action he advocated would be best for the nation. In the end, despite all the scientific and medical evidence to the contrary, Helms won the debate, and the US Senate passed a devastating ban on HIV-positive immigrants, which President Ronald Reagan signed into law and which remained in place until 2009. The case is instructive in showing how commonsense appeals are so persuasive because they are so hard to refute. Although these appeals typically lack evidence, they call into question the value of expertise, and in the absence of expertise or specifics, they appear to many as if they are self-evidently correct.

Similarly, Rufo’s appeals to the “common” or “public” good are persuasive because they assert as fact that, as publicly funded institutions, colleges and universities should be accountable to the taxpayer. I agree with this claim, though not with his understanding of what it means. My colleagues and I have been given a tremendous responsibility in educating our state’s students. I take that responsibility very seriously, and each time I step into the classroom or hold a mentoring meeting I strive to teach my students the absolute best that my fields of study have to offer. I attend to my students’ work with care, and my North Star is ensuring that their critical thinking, their analytical skills, their understanding of course materials, and their writing are the best that they can be. This is what I was trained to do, and it is what I’ve done every day of my professional life.

In February 2022, when my colleagues at UT passed the resolution affirming the right to academic freedom in teaching, they were expressing the seriousness with which they understood their responsibilities as faculty members. Our job is not to teach and carry out research on subjects that happen to be popular among the majority in our respective legislatures or with the person living in our governor’s mansion. Our job is to teach what we know to be true, and to conduct research without political influence, so that we may continue to refine our knowledge.

Faculty senates and councils provide an expert and informed infrastructure to ensure that we can provide the finest education based on the best and most recent knowledge available. Faculty senates are not apolitical entities. It is through faculty senates that fields like my own—ethnic and gender studies—have had to make the case that our knowledge is worthy of being integral to a university education. And to be clear, those fields have not earned their place without struggle. In my experience, faculty senates, which remain dominated by white, middle-class, heterosexual, and Christian faculty, continue to approach work of the kind I do with great suspicion. In fields like mine, faculty governance bodies are not always friends; more often they are the first obstacle we must overcome in proving our scholarly worth to our institutions.

Nevertheless, if I am to remain employed by a public university, I must place some level of faith in the importance of having our curriculum assessed by these entities. I do so because I recognize that, while we may differ on the specifics of research and teaching, we all share the values of faculty governance, academic freedom, and independent expertise.

I consider the assault on faculty governance one of the five pillars of the current far-right attack on higher education, along with the assaults on DEI, academic freedom, tenure, and student protest. It remains to be seen if the Texas legislature will be successful in dismantling faculty governance at our state’s public universities. Texas has already banned DEI work, severely limited the meaning of tenure, and cracked down in incredible ways on student protest. How will it curtail academic freedom and shared governance in the 2025 session?

Our current circumstances in Texas bring to mind events from a decade ago in Wisconsin, when I was a tenured faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2015, the Republican governor, Scott Walker, worked with the Republican legislature to remove from state law protections for tenure and shared faculty and student governance and further concentrate decision-making power in the hands of the board of regents. Walker and his allies were successful in this effort. I remember attending the first faculty senate meeting after the conservative board of regents adopted policies in spring 2016 that replaced the faculty’s shared role in institutional decision-making with a merely advisory role. Prior to this time, these meetings were raucous affairs, because the UW–Madison chancellor at the time, the late Rebecca Blank, couldn’t make any decisions without the agreement of the faculty. The faculty knew this, and we entered each of those meetings knowing our power. The debates were intense, and they required long deliberations to come to consensus. That spring, with the new law in place, Blank walked in with what seemed to me a new air of confidence. As faculty challenged her in their usual assertive way, Blank stood at the podium, pen in hand, jotting notes on a piece of paper. And after each faculty member spoke, she said something to the effect of, “I’ll take that under advisement.”

I do not mean to suggest that administrators like Blank shouldn’t have an important role in determining university policy. They should. There is usually a good reason why they’ve risen through the ranks. But faculty know the curriculum better than any administrator or regent ever could. It is for that reason that the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, jointly formulated by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, holds that the faculty “has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.” Without real faculty governance, there can be no academic freedom.

In Texas, we will fight for faculty governance with every resource we have available. But it is important to note that this fight is not limited to red states in the South. As the attacks on DEI have already made clear, no matter where you are, you must be willing to fight for the principles that are now under threat. If you don’t, the consequence could be not just that you might not have a job, but that the very tender bonds of this democracy—if you can even still call our country a democracy—will be shredded beyond repair. 

Karma R. Chávez is Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor and Chair in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves on the executive committee of the AAUP chapter. Her email address is karmachavez@gmail.com.

The Right-Wingification of UT: Texas targets liberal enemies within one of the top U.S. schools by Brant Bingamon, Nov. 22, 2024

Friends,

Today's piece by Brant Bingamon of the Austin Chronicle is a gem. At the heart of the critique of how the attack on DEI and curriculum are playing out at the University of Texas at Austin regards the creation of the conservative School of Civic Leadership at UT that mirrors Stanford's Hoover Institute, Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, and Princeton's James Madison Program.

Faculty's opposition is rooted in the notion of how it undermines academia by enabling state lawmakers and wealthy donors to impose political agendas. They contend UT's academic structure—where programs evolve into institutes, departments, and schools—is organically built by professors and anchored in established disciplines and research and where schools exist for a reason. Schools aren’t meant to be top-down projects driven by political or financial interests without disfiguring the mission and purpose of academia.

"They aren’t top-down enterprises created in one legislative biennium by politicians and oligarchs," Bingamon notes.

University of Texas Anthropology professor Craig Campbell argues that portraying most faculty as progressive activists is misleading, noting that professors are trained to think beyond simple left-right politics and "many are politically agnostic." He added that complaints about a lack of intellectual diversity are a "fake problem" that reflects a psychological projection from the right that works to provide "cover for ideologically committed, far-right faculty who are not intellectually honest,” he said. He adds, “Universities are a pain for extremist governments, because they’re full of people who are committed to careful exploration of the world and how things work and function – stuff that doesn’t jibe with the fantasies the politicians are trying to create or the policies they want to enact.”

Regarding faculty like Drs. Karma Chavez, Pauline Strong, Andrea Gore, Lauren Gutterman, Brian Evans, Emilio Zamora, myself, and others, I shudder to think of where we and our fellow faculty and students would be without their advocacy. It only makes our universities better. Thank God, as well, for a bold, free, and independent press—and for blogs, too! 😊

Still chewing on this piece and hope you will, too.

-Angela Valenzuela

P.S. I just donated to the Austin Chronicle. Especially for those of us in Austin, please consider it as part of your holiday giving.

The Right-Wingification of UT
Texas targets liberal enemies within one of the top U.S. schools
By Brant Bingamon, Fri., Nov. 22, 2024



Chris Rufo stood before an audience of 50 at the University of Texas in a dark suit, with a trimmed beard, appearing something like a tech bro, relaxed, faintly sneering. It was November of last year and Rufo had been invited to speak at the Salem Center, UT’s new right-wing think tank headquartered in Rowling Hall, an immaculate 458,000-square-foot building erected in 2018 at a cost of $172 million.

As he began, Rufo commanded his listeners to disbelieve their senses, to not see the wealth surrounding them, to not feel the safety of the bubble that is the University of Texas at Austin. He declared, instead, that UT and public universities throughout the country are frightening, dangerous places.

“I think people from across the political spectrum would acknowledge a sense of anxiety,” he said. “A sense of fear. A sense of foreboding. Something has gone quite wrong.”

Rufo isn’t the only right-wing culture warrior pushing this message, but he’s one of the most influential. An inspiration to Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Texas Republicans Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, and Ken Paxton, Rufo rose to prominence by innovating the campaign against critical race theory, a formerly obscure academic theory whipped into a message of white supremacy. He also fights against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and tenure.

At the Salem Center, Rufo unrolled a 30-minute attack on higher education, claiming that universities no longer prioritize the teaching of the classics, that professors no longer contemplate beauty and truth. He complained about African American studies, Latino studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies, and LGBTQ studies, saying, “If it’s got 'studies’ after it, it’s probably a pseudo-discipline.” He concluded by calling for a politically motivated assault, “a protracted siege,” of universities like the one in which he spoke.

Then he took questions. Pauline Strong, the director of UT’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Program, approached the microphone. Strong has taught at UT for 31 years. She is the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a national group founded in 1915 to support academic freedom, tenure, joint decision making between university faculty and administrators, and due process.

Strong told Rufo she believed in intellectual diversity but didn’t hear a commitment to the principle from him. She said her hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom and neutrality in higher learning. She asked if Rufo supported those values.

Rufo stiffened. The muscles in his face froze. He spoke and his words came fast, pitched a half-step higher. He said it would have been better if Dewey had never been born. He said that adhering to Dewey’s values creates “an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” He said academics like Strong who believe in Dewey, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”

Perhaps Rufo imagined he was being discreet by leaving “what’s coming” vague. But professors paying attention to Texas politics know exactly what it means. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has, over the last four years, called for the elimination of tenure, for restricting students’ free speech, and for mandating what professors can teach. Patrick has also pushed for the elimination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs at Texas’ public universities. And, in the case of these programs, “what’s coming” is already here. Texas outlawed DEI in January.

The attacks against higher education have hurt faculty morale. There is anecdotal evidence that they are beginning to damage UT’s ability to attract high-quality professors. An August survey of 950 Texas faculty conducted by the AAUP revealed that two-thirds would not recommend Texas universities to their out-of-state colleagues. More than a quarter plan to interview for jobs elsewhere this year. A similar number have already done so. Half said they have noticed fewer, and less qualified, applicants for open positions. The top reason cited by those looking to leave is the state’s political climate. Anxieties about academic freedom, DEI attacks, access to reproductive care, LGBTQ+ issues, and tenure also made the list.

Strong told us that faculty who teach African American studies, Latina/o studies, Asian American studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and LGBTQ studies are some of the most discouraged. Some have fought Dan Patrick’s attacks in previous legislative sessions and are doing so again, now that the Texas Senate is preparing to meet in January. But most faculty are staying silent, unaware of the threats or performing the equivalent of a tactical retreat. As one professor who didn’t want to be named said, “Jobs are on the line. Programs are on the line.”

So although Rufo’s speech last year was, at times, ridiculous, there was truth in his opener. There is fear at UT. There is foreboding. Something has gone quite wrong.

“There’s a great deal of anxiety among faculty, especially in the College of Liberal Arts,” Strong told us. “There is a great deal of pain. We feel that our research and teaching enterprises are under sustained attack.”

DEI & Pro-Palestinian Protests

Rufo’s talk was partly a victory lap. Six months earlier, Texas Republicans had borrowed model legislation he’d written to create Senate Bill 17, a bill abolishing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in Texas’ public universities.

The SB 17 ban went into effect in January, prohibiting universities from considering diversity in hiring decisions and from conducting DEI training. At UT, administrators dismantled the Multicultural Engagement Center, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Fearless Leadership Institute (a professional development program for African American and Hispanic women). The university also moved dozens of employees, most of them in the Division of Diversity and Campus Engagement, to non-DEI work. “We’re going to respect the law,” UT System Chairman Kevin Eltife said at the time. “We’re not going to look for loopholes.”



Republicans weren’t satisfied. In March, SB 17’s author, state Sen. Brandon Creighton, threatened to withhold state funding from the university if administrators didn’t prove they had eradicated DEI. A week later, UT’s president, Jay Hartzell, announced that he had fired dozens of employees who had previously worked at the Division of Diversity and Campus Engagement. Most of them were people of color. He later implied that the administration had gone beyond the letter of the law to satisfy Republicans, saying the “legislative climate toward higher education” was “moving.”

Andrea Gore, a pharmacology professor who has taught at UT for 22 years, believes the fired staffers were sacrificial lambs. “They were not doing DEI jobs anymore,” Gore said. “They all had new job assignments that were documented in writing. They got fired because they had done DEI jobs.”

The firings shocked faculty, but three weeks later a different controversy broke out – the university’s crackdown on students protesting Israel’s war on Palestine.

Ashanté Reese, a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, rushed to the campus on April 24 after learning that scores of state troopers, assisted by UT and Austin police, were confronting a group of about 200 students on the university’s South Lawn, in the shadow of the Tower. Reese spoke to the officers, trying to de-escalate the situation. It didn’t work. Officers in riot gear surrounded the protesters and repeatedly rammed into them, arresting 57.

Reese felt she came near being arrested herself. “I was doing, in the moment, what I thought was the right thing, and I still believe was the right thing,” she said. “But it was a really traumatic experience. It was traumatic to know that the people on the campus that pay you to do your job then also call the police on you for doing your job.”

A week later, a group calling itself Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine held a silent vigil on the steps of the Tower to support the students and protest Israel’s killing of Palestinian professors and its destruction of universities. As the vigil ended, students formed again on the South Lawn. Again, they were surrounded by police in riot gear. Another 79 were arrested.

The charges against the protesters – trespassing on their campus – were dropped by Travis County officials. UT took the opposite approach. Members of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which had organized the first protest, were threatened with suspension. One of the PSC’s leaders, Ammer Qaddumi, was suspended for a year. The group itself was banned from campus.

This summer, UT drafted new rules allowing its staff to shut down demonstrations in public areas like the South Mall “in some instances.” It also rewrote its free speech policy to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, a logical fallacy that silences anyone who would speak out on Israel’s war.

As Karma Chávez, the chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, said, “it’s very clear who is being targeted.” Chávez co-authored a summation of the DEI and protest controversies in October, urging professors to continue speaking out about the university’s actions and teaching what they deem relevant in their classes.

“We are in the fight of our lives,” she concluded. “Anything less than a principled, full-frontal response will inevitably fail.”

Faculty Lose Faith in the Administration

Many faculty denounced the firings and crackdowns: 650 of UT’s approximately 3,700 faculty signed a letter drafted by the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors expressing no confidence in President Jay Hartzell. “He has violated our trust,” the letter stated. “The University is no longer a safe and welcoming place.”

The Faculty Council also weighed in. The Faculty Council is a group of about four dozen professors elected by staff and instructors from the colleges and schools within UT. Andrea Gore, the 22-year professor at the School of Pharmacy, chaired the council from 2015-2016. Gore said that historically it has partnered with administrators to jointly make decisions on hiring and policy, a practice known as shared governance.

“We talk to them: 'Here’s what’s on our mind,’” Gore said. “They listen to us. We’ve been able to talk about important and often difficult things, and we’ve also always been involved in choosing the leaders of the university.”

The Faculty Council condemned the DEI firings as politically motivated. It passed a resolution asking the administration why it invited state troopers onto campus. It demanded UT grant amnesty to the arrested students. But some, like Gore, think the Council’s responses were too restrained.

Gore believes the restraint can be traced back to an erosion in shared governance that began with Jay Hartzell’s appointment as president by the Board of Regents in 2020. “There was no faculty input or an opportunity for due diligence,” Gore said of the appointment. “It’s unlikely the outcome would have been different, but the process of exclusion set a dangerous precedent.”



The professors we spoke with said that since Hartzell’s appointment there have been a number of poorly explained retirements and replacements in top leadership positions, from provost – basically a second-in-command to the president – to vice presidents and deans.

Soncia Reagins-Lilly resigned as the head of student affairs in January, after the DEI ban went into effect. Reagins-Lilly is one of three Black VPs who have left UT since Hartzell assumed office. No Black VPs remain.

Emily Reagan, VP of marketing and communications, resigned in August, after more than 20 communications staffers were laid off in a reorganization which Reagan described as necessary for the university to focus on “managing reputational issues and crises” – a seeming reference to negative publicity from the Palestinian protests.

Provost Sharon Wood also resigned in August, with just a week’s notice. Resignations in positions like provost are typically announced a year in advance, our sources told us, to let faculty weigh in on a replacement and provide time for a smooth transition. The professors assume that Wood was pressured into resigning and that her decision to leave immediately was a form of protest. Her departure came days after she and Hartzell were named as defendants in a lawsuit by Ammer Qaddumi.

Eve Stephens, UT’s chief of police, resigned in September. Stephens had been sworn in just a year earlier following a highly successful 24-year career at the Austin Police Department. A to Z Sports reporter Brian Davis, a former UT communications employee, reported that Stephens was pressured into resigning. Faculty speculate that her response to the Palestinian protests was not aggressive enough for UT administrators.

But for professors like Karma Chávez, the most troubling change has been that of Ann Stevens, who was told in September that she would not be allowed to serve a second term as dean of the College of Liberal Arts. COLA is the heart of UT-Austin, as liberal arts programs are at universities throughout the world. It is UT’s largest college, with 800 faculty serving a fifth of the university’s students. Its professors teach subjects that right-wingers like Chris Rufo champion – economics, English literature, European history – and it houses the centers and study programs they despise – African diaspora studies, LGBTQ studies, Mexican American and Latina/o studies, women’s studies, Native American and Indigenous studies.

Stevens is one of UT’s most highly regarded leaders. “She is a very, very, very successful dean,” Chávez said. “She’s someone that I disagreed with on the regular – we have locked horns in all sorts of ways. But she’s also a very principled leader, and I really respected her work as dean. And I think all of the department chairs felt that way.”

Stevens’ firing – which is what it’s being called – was announced by letter, something that professors say is unprecedented. Her response was equally unprecedented. Stevens explained in an email to faculty that Hartzell told her she “did not have a grand enough vision for the college,” something she disputed. Despite her restrained language and refusal to talk to the press, faculty view Stevens’ message as a protest against the university’s top-down decision making.

The recent firings and resignations have professors wondering if Texas’ right-wing politicians are dictating to Hartzell who to hire and fire. “Our understanding is basically there’s no firewall between Jay Hartzell and the governor and the chancellors,” said Craig Campbell, an anthropology professor who’s taught at UT for 15 years. “I think he’s on board with them. I think he sees himself as a part of that mission.”

As resignations and replacements have increased, a less-understood personnel change has occurred at UT’s Legal Affairs division, which handles litigation for the university and consults on policy. Since 2018, Legal Affairs has hired the majority of its attorneys straight out of the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton, regarded as the most corrupt and partisan AG in the nation.

The change began with Jim Davis, who worked as Paxton’s deputy for three years before taking the helm of Legal Affairs in 2018. Last year, Davis was promoted to senior vice president and chief operating officer, one of the top positions in the university. Amanda Cochran-McCall, who served Paxton for four years, rising to become his chief of general litigation, replaced Davis at Legal Affairs. Cochran-McCall’s second-in-command, Adam Biggs, previously worked as Paxton’s deputy for over four years. Of the 10 other employees featured on UT’s Legal Affairs web page, internet searches reveal that at least six formerly worked for Paxton.

The Trouble With Tenure

The DEI ban was one of three attacks on Texas public universities in the 2023 legislative session. Another, SB 16, was essentially a gag order prohibiting professors from teaching critical race theory. It died in the House of Representatives. The third attack, SB 18, was originally a bill to end tenure for professors at Texas universities. The version of SB 18 that got passed didn’t abolish tenure but expanded the grounds for which tenured faculty can be fired.

Tenure is essentially a lifetime appointment for a professor. It protects those who achieve it from being fired except for cause. It was introduced in U.S. universities in the early 1900s and is considered integral to academic freedom, because it allows professors to teach controversial subjects and pursue controversial research without fear of losing their jobs.

“In an ideal world, every job would have tenure attached to it, so that you were hard to fire as long as you’re doing your job,” Karma Chávez said. “In the university context, tenure means you can chase the data wherever it takes you, you can chase the primary sources wherever that takes you. You don’t have to worry about being pressured by political forces, whether that’s your department chair, your university president, or your governor.”

Research is the raw material that, when properly processed, produces facts, knowledge. The creation and transmission of knowledge is the reason universities exist. Some research creates money, the professors we spoke with said, and some creates controversy. But even controversial research is useful. For example, after each legislative session, researchers collect data on newly enacted laws – in Texas, that could be bans on abortion, or books, or health care for trans kids – to find how the laws have impacted people’s lives. The facts that are gathered hopefully inform future policymaking.

Of course, some of that research, when processed and taught, offends Republicans. “A lot of the stuff that I teach is inherently controversial,” Chávez told us, “and it inherently ruptures what students have been taught to think about themselves, about their state, about U.S. history. But I teach from peer-reviewed scholarship. I also teach thought pieces that I may or may not agree with, but that are designed to get students thinking. And with tenure, I don’t worry that some student who disagrees with the politics of a particular piece is going to be able to come after my job. So, really, tenure is integral to being able to do teaching and researching.”

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has repeatedly criticized tenure. In announcing the passage of SB 18 in 2023, he wrote that tenured Texas professors “feel immune to oversight from the legislature” and “hide behind their tenure to continue blatantly advancing their agenda.” This year, Patrick has once again instructed Republicans to study the issue. With DEI already outlawed and critical race theory not getting as much attention as in the past, some professors believe Republicans will try to end tenure in this year’s legislative session.

Lauren Gutterman, an associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, doubts that UT’s leaders will be able to effectively push back against any such attack. Gutterman lost faith in the administration’s lobbying efforts in 2023, as Republicans prepared to pass the DEI ban. “SB 16, 17, and 18 were so upsetting, so frightening, and a direct attack on us,” Gutterman said. “And I felt like the message that we were getting from the administration was, 'We have it under control and everything’s gonna be fine.’ That’s part of the reason a lot of faculty chose not to really freak out about this legislation. And the president’s silence, his refusal to communicate directly with us, was really distressing.”

Andrea Gore warns that any changes to tenure will hurt the recruitment of first-class instructors, saying she has personally heard of two candidates who turned down job offers from UT in the last year because of the changes Texas Republicans have already made to tenure, which are minor compared with what they may do in 2025.

“It will take some time to see that we’re not getting the top scholars anymore,” Gore said. “Maybe we’re getting the next tier of scholars who are willing to accept working someplace where there’s a little bit more risk, because maybe they don’t have as many options. It’s not only the scholars who are in the area of ethnic studies. We’re also going to lose the scholars who are going to the business school or the law school or the engineering school.”

Gore said that threats to tenure have already begun to lower the quality of teaching, by persuading professors to skip controversial subjects. “I have a colleague who teaches a course that doesn’t sound very controversial at all, and she said, 'I’m not going to teach these lectures anymore, because I’m wondering if they’re going to trigger some sort of reaction that is going to cause somebody to report me.’ It’s shades of the McCarthy era.”

School of Civic Leadership

“There’s lots of rumors swirling at the moment because people are scared and we have a total lack of communication from the president,” Lauren Gutterman told us. “It just breeds all these different theories.”

One of the theories we heard is that the Legislature will seek to carve up the College of Liberal Arts in the upcoming session, starve some of its programs of funding, and feed others to the Red McCombs School of Business and its School of Civic Leadership.

The School of Civic Leadership is brand-new; it began offering classes this semester. The college was created in May of 2023 to house the Civitas Institute, which, in turn, was created the year before at the behest of Dan Patrick and several far-right billionaires, including Robert Rowling and Harlan Crow, the Dallas businessman who has helped corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Patrick and others have said the School of Civic Leadership is necessary to remedy UT’s lack of “intellectual diversity” – that is, its lack of right-wing professors and programs. It’s a claim conservatives are making across the country, one that has led to the creation of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the James Madison Program at Princeton, and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, among others.

Faculty protested the creation of the new school, arguing that it violates the core tenets of academia by allowing state lawmakers and rich donors to spew their political agendas onto the campus. They say that UT’s hierarchy of instruction – its studies programs, which become institutes, which become departments, which become schools and colleges – is built from the ground up by professors, course by course, and represents identifiable disciplines and bodies of research. In other words, the schools are there for a reason. They aren’t top-down enterprises created in one legislative biennium by politicians and oligarchs.

The new dean of the School of Civic Leadership, Justin Dyer, denies the school is politically motivated and stresses it will focus on the country’s founding principles and the importance of free enterprise. A recent UT press release said it will teach the “intellectual inheritance of Western Civilization.”

“This is the way they frame it to make it palatable,” Campbell said, “which is to say, 'These are the classics. These are the great traditions. What can anyone say about Plato or Aristotle? These great thinkers have worked for us, so we need to hear them.’ That’s the bullshit candy coating. But the company they keep is damning. I mean, they’ve got John Yoo as a fellow. They’re in bed with some really fucking hideous, hideous people.”

Yoo is notorious as the attorney who wrote the so-called “Torture Memos” in 2002, providing the George W. Bush administration legal cover to torture people captured in Afghanistan and Iraq during the War on Terror. Other notorious figures associated with the School of Civic Leadership include Richard Hanania, who was employed by the school’s Salem Center in 2022 but was quietly let go after reports surfaced that he’d written extensively for white supremacist groups under a pen name. Chris Rufo is another controversial figure connected to Salem. Professor Mark Regnerus, a senior scholar at Salem, has published research arguing that gay people make poor parents. (Following one of Regnerus’ reports, 200 sociologists signed a letter questioning the integrity of the peer review process for his paper.)

Regnerus also teaches at UT’s school of sociology, which is part of the College of Liberal Arts. The faculty we spoke with say this is another problem with the School of Civic Leadership – it is redundant and will reduce funding for other schools which teach the same subjects, like economics, philosophy, and pretty much anything associated with “Western Civilization.”

“We have a classics department,” Karma Chávez said of COLA. “We have a government department that teaches classical liberalism, that teaches all of the Founding Fathers. We have a Thomas Jefferson Center. That material is already taught widely on this campus. And in fact, the original Civitas Institute was basically all populated by College of Liberal Arts faculty. Now the school is hiring its own folks, but many of them could easily be hired into the College of Liberal Arts.”

Chávez, paradoxically, teaches Chris Rufo’s material. “I think it’s important for students to see where this stuff is coming from,” she said. “If you look at Rufo’s reports, they don’t cite any peer-reviewed academic scholarship. They cite 'institute reports,’ they cite news articles, they cite himself, over and over. How’s that scholarship? How is anyone to take that seriously? So, sure, you want to bring in a controversial speaker as a conversation piece – okay. But what is the motivation behind that? Rufo has no credentials whatsoever. He is a pure ideologue. How is that a part of a university which is invested in the pursuit of knowledge?”

Campbell said it’s true there are few far-right professors at UT or on college campuses anywhere, but the idea that most are progressive activists is mistaken because professors are trained to think in more complex terms than right versus left and many are politically agnostic. Campbell added that the right’s complaint about intellectual diversity is a case of projection.

“Intellectual diversity is essentially a fake problem that is used to create cover for ideologically committed, far-right faculty who are not intellectually honest,” he said. “Universities are a pain for extremist governments, because they’re full of people who are committed to careful exploration of the world and how things work and function – stuff that doesn’t jibe with the fantasies the politicians are trying to create or the policies they want to enact.”

The End Game

Campbell has been hearing threats against the university by state Republicans ever since he arrived on campus in 2009. But this is the worst it’s ever felt.

“I remember my colleagues, the older colleagues, were always like, 'They rattle their sabers and then it all sort of works out.’ But it’s like boiling frogs. It’s been this slow degradation of programs and funding. The faculty is very unhappy, suspicious, looking to get out, disinvesting. It makes it a terrible environment. We’re not program-building, we’re just constantly trying to keep people calm.”

Campbell said the anthropology department has lost several of its top scholars in the last two years and others want to leave. But tenure has been ebbing across the country, while universities continue to churn out Ph.D.s. So the job market is tight. Tenure-track positions at good universities can attract hundreds of applicants. It’s not as easy to leave as it once was.

For faculty who aren’t leaving, it should be a simple decision to get politically active, to speak out against the attacks, even if they aren’t directly affected by them. But there are good reasons not to. Some younger professors have crushing student debt and can’t afford to endanger their jobs. Others want to protect the research they’re doing or the programs they’ve built. Many aren’t from Texas and aren’t invested. For those who don’t already have tenure it’s very risky to speak out.

And then there are the professors who love the university and love their students. And among them are some, like Lauren Gutterman, who couldn’t fade into the background if they wanted to.

“I don’t feel that I have the luxury of retreating because I do queer history, right?” Gutterman said. “And so it doesn’t matter if I’m loud or not, or visible or not. I will always be a target. So I don’t think I have anything to gain from silence.”

Gutterman is planning to once again testify at committee hearings in the Capitol. She hopes to have colleagues at her side. “We now know what SB 17 did to our campus, so we understand how this incredibly broad and vague legislation can enact real harm on our students and our campus and our peers,” she said. “So I hope and I expect that more people will be mobilized. But at the same time, fear is really powerful and I’m sure that some people will continue to feel that the best way to protect themselves is to be quiet.”

Reese told us she will testify before lawmakers this session and believes other faculty will too. “We’re trying to be in solidarity and community with as many people as possible, even if we don’t all think the same and don’t all have the same objectives or approaches to activism. At some point, at the heart of things, it’s like, 'Do I believe that what is happening is unjust? And if the answer is yes, then people are like, 'We just have to do something about it.’”

The professors we spoke with are some of the top scholars at UT. They’ve published influential papers in peer-reviewed journals, they speak at international conferences, they have secured multimillion-dollar grants for research, they are leaders in their respective departments. They have built careers and programs here and don’t want to abandon what they’ve created. “Take Karma [Chávez], you know?” Campbell said. “She’s been doing so much institution-building. So the idea that you’re gonna let the state take this over, they can fuck right off, you know?”

This fall, Chávez is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Latina/o studies department that she has put together piece by piece. The department is regarded as one of the best of its kind, if not the best, in the nation. With its recognized success, Chávez could find a job elsewhere but wants to stay in Texas. “I love it here,” she said. “I want to build my life here. I think there’s so much history and culture here. And the politics are hard, but I’m learning to live with that. And the weather, I actually love. People shit on Texas all the time, but I’m definitely not one of those.”

Chávez said her father was a union worker and she thinks of the current struggle as a labor battle. As a queer person of mixed race and a feminist, she believes she has to fight. “People like me are explicitly or implicitly the targets of a lot of these attacks, and the kind of research and teaching that I do is explicitly at the center of this. So I feel it’s important to fight. But I also feel like it starts here, and then it’s going to go elsewhere. And so it’s not just a personal investment. It’s a bigger investment into this thing called Higher Education.”

Chávez has been quoted in other publications frequently over the last couple of years. She said she speaks out because other professors won’t. “Somebody has to talk about what’s happening. Somebody has to be willing to say it out loud and not worry so much about what it’s going to mean for their job,” she said. “I’ve decided that I’ll be one of those people.”