Follow the Trustees: ACTA and the Quiet Reengineering of American Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Follow the Trustees: ACTA and the Quiet Reengineering of American Higher Education

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

September 7, 2026

Some of the most consequential changes taking place in American higher education are not the ones that make the biggest headlines. We tend to notice censorship, legislative restrictions on teaching, attacks on tenure, or the elimination of academic programs because these are highly visible. Yet universities can also be transformed much more quietly through changes in governance, funding, accreditation, presidential selection, program review, and decisions about which areas of study deserve institutional investment.

This quieter form of change deserves much more attention.

Historian Nancy MacLean helps us see why in her important AAUP report, The American Council of Trustees and Alumni: A Little-Known Driver of the Attacks on Academic Freedom and Shared Governance. Her focus is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA, an organization founded in 1995 that describes itself as an advocate for academic excellence, freedom, accountability, and responsible institutional governance.

MacLean (2025), however, asks us to look beyond those stated principles and examine how ACTA has sought to translate its ideas into institutional power. 

Central to that strategy are university governing boards. As she observes, ACTA has operated for decades on the premise that “Trustees are the key to changing public higher education” (p. 2).

That is worth sitting with.

Trustees certainly have legitimate responsibilities. Governing boards possess significant legal and fiduciary authority, and universities need responsible oversight. But universities are not ordinary corporations or state agencies. Their central work involves teaching, research, curriculum, peer review, and the creation and evaluation of knowledge. Those activities depend upon forms of disciplinary and professional expertise that trustees, legislators, donors, and administrators do not necessarily possess simply by virtue of holding institutional authority.

The AAUP recognized this distinction decades ago in its Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. The statement affirms the authority of governing boards while also stressing the central role of faculty in academic matters. Particularly striking today is its expectation that boards exercise “appropriate self-limitation” (American Association of University Professors [AAUP], 1966).

I keep returning to that phrase, "appropriate self-limitation."

It expresses something increasingly important in contemporary higher education. Having the legal authority to intervene in an academic matter is not the same thing as having the intellectual or disciplinary expertise to make that decision wisely. A governing board may technically possess considerable power, but the health of a university depends in part on knowing when not to exercise it.

This is where the issue becomes larger than university governance itself. What we are witnessing is also a struggle over the governance of knowledge.

Decisions about governance determine far more than organizational charts. They affect which disciplines grow, which programs are consolidated, which faculty positions are created, which areas receive donor support, which curricular requirements students encounter, and which forms of scholarship are regarded as central—or marginal—to the mission of the university.

A university does not necessarily have to ban a book or prohibit a theory to reshape its intellectual landscape. It can accomplish a great deal through budgets, faculty lines, organizational restructuring, curricular requirements, presidential appointments, accreditation standards, and definitions of institutional “excellence.”

In this sense, governance decisions eventually become knowledge decisions.

One of the most useful aspects of MacLean’s report is that she does not treat ACTA as an isolated organization. She places it within a wider conservative policy infrastructure, including ACTA’s advisory role in Project 2025 and its relationship to the State Policy Network. As recently as summer 2026, SPN continued to identify ACTA among its national partners.

Source: Bennett, Guide for Progressives: Project 2025

Isaac Kamola’s (2024) research provides an important complement to MacLean’s analysis. Kamola documented 155 bills introduced between 2021 and 2023 that targeted various dimensions of academic freedom and university autonomy and traced many of them to a larger network of conservative and libertarian policy organizations.

This broader perspective matters because it suggests that we may be looking at contemporary attacks on higher education too narrowly when we examine each controversy separately. The story is not simply one governor, one legislature, one board of regents, or one university. What deserves examination is the policy ecosystem through which ideas, money, personnel, model legislation, donor priorities, institutional strategies, and governing philosophies circulate.

Ideas become much more powerful when they acquire institutions.

That brings us directly to Texas.

In March 2025, ACTA announced that the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Civic Leadership had joined its Oases of Excellence network. At first glance, that might seem like little more than recognition of an academic program ACTA admires. But ACTA describes its Oases initiative in considerably more ambitious terms. It encourages alumni and donors to support these programs as a means of changing university culture “from the inside.”

That language deserves attention, particularly given what has happened since.

On September 24, 2026, ACTA and UT Austin’s School of Civic Leadership are scheduled to jointly host an event on religious freedom. The gathering will feature ACTA’s National Commission on American History and Civic Education and introduce A Broadside for the Nation, an initiative calling upon colleges and universities to require undergraduate coursework in American history or government. School of Civic Leadership Dean Justin Dyer and ACTA president Michael Poliakoff are scheduled to introduce the program.

Event landing page.

None of this means that ACTA “controls” the School of Civic Leadership. The evidence does not support such a claim, and collaboration between a university and an outside organization should not automatically be treated as suspicious. After all, universities work routinely with foundations, professional associations, civic groups, think tanks, institutes, philanthropists, and advocacy organizations across the ideological spectrum.

But neither should the relationship go unnoticed.

What began as ACTA recognition of the School of Civic Leadership through its Oases network has developed into an active institutional relationship around civic education and curricular priorities. Given the broader political environment surrounding higher education in Texas, that relationship deserves public awareness and scrutiny.

The institutional context makes it all the more significant.

Recent Texas Tribune reporting found that the School of Civic Leadership and the Civitas Institute had, or were expected to have, 42 tenured or tenure-track faculty members by August 2026 "nearly triple the 15 positions lawmakers proposed requiring"—against the backdrop of it first Civics Honors cohort last year of 103 students (also see UT News, 2025). 

During roughly the same period, UT consolidated seven College of Liberal Arts departments, including Mexican American and Latino Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, into two new academic units. Priest (2026) reported that some staff associated with these areas were terminated or reassigned, while finding no evidence of wholesale faculty dismissals.

I want to be careful here. The available evidence does not establish that the growth of the School of Civic Leadership caused the consolidation of Ethnic and Gender Studies. That causal claim would go beyond what we know.

But the juxtaposition raises a different and entirely legitimate question: What are UT Austin’s institutional priorities?

That question becomes especially important when we consider where substantial new investment is flowing.

A $10 million National Endowment for the Humanities grant supports 16 additional faculty positions connected to new Great Books and Strategy & Statecraft programs. The Great Books program emphasizes texts associated with Western civilization, while Strategy & Statecraft focuses on diplomatic and military history and preparation related to national security (University of Texas at Austin, 2026a).

An additional $12.5 million in philanthropic funding established the Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization and the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars program. Dean Dyer described this initiative as bringing Jewish civilization and modern Israel into the “core” of the school’s educational vision (University of Texas at Austin, 2026b). The School of Civic Leadership is also extending its reach beyond the university through a $1.8 million federal grant supporting three years of professional development for K–12 teachers in Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston centered on what the school describes as the American civic tradition.

There is nothing inherently objectionable about Great Books, Western civilization, constitutional government, Jewish intellectual traditions, religious liberty, American political history, diplomacy, or statecraft. These are entirely legitimate fields of study, and a great university should be capable of supporting serious scholarship in all of them.

My concern is not their existence.

It is the asymmetry.

If intellectual pluralism is an important enough principle to justify substantial investment in programs centered on Western civilization, then intellectual pluralism must also protect Mexican American and Latino Studies. 

If interdisciplinarity justifies the establishment and rapid growth of a School of Civic Leadership, that same logic should apply to African American and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies, American Studies, and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies.

And if academic freedom protects conservative intellectual inquiry—and it absolutely should—then it must protect with equal vigor scholarship examining racism, colonialism, gender, inequality, migration, empire, sexuality, and state power.

Otherwise, what we are defending is not academic freedom as a principle. We are defending academic freedom selectively, depending on which knowledge happens to be favored.

That is precisely why MacLean’s work is so useful. It encourages us to pay closer attention to governance itself. When trying to understand how higher education is being reshaped, we need to examine the following:

• who sits on governing boards, 
• how trustees are educated about their roles, 
• how presidential searches are conducted, 
• where donor money is flowing, 
• how accreditation is being imagined and reimagined, and 
• how supposedly neutral concepts such as “accountability,” “efficiency,” “consolidation,” “intellectual diversity,” “institutional neutrality,” “excellence,” and “civic education” become embedded in policy and institutional practice.

This is not conspiracy thinking. Quite the opposite. It is a call for careful empirical inquiry.

Words such as accountability and excellence are not inherently ideological. Neither are civic education or institutional neutrality. The question is what these concepts come to mean when they are translated into actual institutional decisions. Who benefits from a particular definition of excellence? Which programs gain resources? Which lose autonomy? What gets consolidated in the name of efficiency? Whose perspectives are recognized as evidence of viewpoint diversity? Who decides what counts as neutral?

Those are questions worth asking at any public university, regardless of the political orientation of the people involved.

Trustees, legislators, donors, presidents, faculty members, students, alumni, advocacy organizations, taxpayers, and citizens all have legitimate interests in public higher education. Public universities should be accountable to the societies that sustain them.

But accountability is not the same thing as political control over intellectual life.

That distinction is crucial.

What concerns me most is the possibility that authority is being redistributed in ways that increasingly allow some actors to determine which knowledge receives faculty lines, financial support, curricular standing, institutional legitimacy, and ultimately the opportunity to survive.

By the time a struggle over knowledge becomes publicly visible as the disappearance of a department or a controversy over curriculum, much of the consequential work may already have taken place elsewhere—in boardrooms, budgets, donor relationships, accreditation debates, organizational restructurings, presidential searches, and legislative networks.

That is perhaps MacLean’s most important lesson.

If we want to understand what is happening to higher education, we need to follow the governance.

And here in Texas, we have particularly good reason to do so.

Eyes wide open as the question I believe we should keep asking is a simple one as it reaches to the heart of the matter: Who is governing knowledge—and toward what end?

References

American Association of University Professors. (1966). Statement on government of colleges and universities. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and

American Council of Trustees and Alumni. (2025, March 12). Three programs join ACTA’s Oases of Excellence network, ACTA. https://www.goacta.org/2025/03/three-programs-join-actas-oases-of-excellence-network/

American Council of Trustees and Alumni. (2026). All possess alike liberty of conscience: Guarding our heritage of religious freedom. https://www.goacta.org/event/all-possess-alike-liberty-of-conscience/

Bennett, B. (2024, July 8). A Guide for Progressives on How to Brand Project 2025. https://navigatorresearch.org/a-guide-for-progressives-on-how-to-brand-project-2025/

Kamola, I. (2024). Manufacturing backlash: Right-wing think tanks and legislative attacks on higher education, 2021–2023. American Association of University Professors. [pdf]

MacLean, N. (2025, February 25). The American Council of Trustees and Alumni: A little-known driver of the attacks on academic freedom and shared governance (Action Report No. 4). Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, American Association of University Professors. https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/ActionReport4_ACTA.pdf

Priest, J. (2026, August 13). UT-Austin overhauling core classes but hasn’t detailed how new center relates to the courses. The Texas Tribune. https://www.kut.org/education/2026-08-14/ut-austin-overhauling-core-classes-but-hasnt-detailed-how-new-center-relates-to-the-courses

UT News. (2025, Sept. 22). School of Civic Leadership Welcomes First Cohort of Future Leaders. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2025/09/22/school-of-civic-leadership-welcomes-first-cohort-of-future-leaders/

University of Texas at Austin. (2025, May 8). Board of Regents invests $100 million in UT’s School of Civic Leadership. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2025/05/08/board-of-regents-invests-100-million-in-uts-school-of-civic-leadership/

University of Texas at Austin. (2026a, January 16). UT to launch new Strategy and Statecraft, Great Books majors with NEH grant. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2026/01/16/ut-to-launch-new-strategy-and-statecraft-great-books-majors-with-neh-grant/

University of Texas at Austin. (2026b, January 27). UT launches Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization, Rosenthal-Levy Scholars. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2026/01/27/ut-launches-ackerman-program-on-jewish-and-western-civilization-rosenthal-levy-scholars/

Christian Nationalism Captures Higher Education, or, On Mandatorily Managing the Mystery of the Maker, Parts One and Two, by Joshua Gunn

Friends:

I want to call readers’ attention to this provocative and important two-part essay by UT-Austin Professor Joshua Gunn in The Higher Ed Advocate, both posted below. Densely documented with links to primary documents, investigative reporting, scholarship, and the institutions’ own materials, Gunn raises questions about the transformation of Texas higher education that deserve serious public scrutiny. 

In Part One, he examines changes in the language and governance of Texas public universities, drawing particular attention to terms appearing in official UT and UT System documents—academic “integrity,” “stewardship,” “solemn covenant,” “sacred space,” “spirit of grace,” and related formulations—and argues that their cumulative significance looks different when situated within the broader political ascendancy of Christian nationalism. The language itself is not in dispute: UT Austin’s Texas Statement on Academic Integrity describes the classroom as a “sacred space” and invokes a “spirit of grace,” while the UT System’s 2026 teaching policy describes teaching as a “solemn covenant” between faculty and students. 

In Part Two, Gunn moves from rhetoric to institutional development, examining the Civitas Institute and School of Civic Leadership and the political and financial forces surrounding their emergence. That history is significant: Civitas was initially established with $12 million in state and UT System funding following documented involvement by political leaders and conservative donors, the Regents created the School of Civic Leadership in 2023, and in 2025 committed another $100 million for its permanent home.

The public should be concerned not because conservative scholars, religious scholars, or people of faith have no place in public universities—they unquestionably do. Pluralism requires their presence, too. 

The concern arises when governmental power, university governance, major private wealth, and particular ideological or religious projects begin converging in ways that can determine which fields flourish, which departments disappear, which subjects become “controversial,” which forms of knowledge receive extraordinary institutional investment, and which become administratively vulnerable. That is a fundamentally different question from whether conservative ideas deserve a hearing. They do. 

The question is whether a public university remains a genuinely pluralistic institution when the state itself increasingly participates in deciding which ideas, histories, and intellectual traditions merit institutional protection and amplification.

Read together, Gunn’s essays therefore raise a larger and more consequential question of institutional capture: Who gets to determine what counts as legitimate knowledge, which histories universities teach, which questions professors may safely ask, and ultimately what kind of citizen public education is intended to produce? I encourage readers to read Part One and Part Two for themselves, follow Gunn’s many links, examine the underlying documents, and reach their own conclusions about what these developments mean for academic freedom, church-state boundaries, shared governance, and the democratic purposes of public education.

And there is one final connection we should not miss. The University of Texas System is governed by nine regents who are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Texas Senate, serving staggered six-year terms. University governance can therefore seem distant from electoral politics, but it is not. Who Texans elect determines who appoints the people who govern our public universities—and who confirms those appointments. 

Gubernatorial and state Senate elections are higher-education elections, too. Elections matter, my friends.

-Angela Valenzuela

UT Austin’s Elimination of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies is a Betrayal of Texas, by Alfonso Ayala III

Students, Friends, and Colleagues:

Please read this Latinopia.com publication about what's playing out at UT right now. Alfonso is a doctoral student in the Mexican American & Latina/o Studies Department at UT-Austin.

-Angela Valenzuela

UT Austin’s Elimination of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies is a Betrayal of Texas

by Alfonso Ayala III, Doctoral Student

Mexican American & Latina/o Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

Latinopia.com | February 14, 2026

Many of you have now heard the deeply unsettling announcement from President Jim Davis that the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies will no longer stand as an independent department. Instead, it will be folded into a newly-created Department of Social and Cultural Analysis within the College of Liberal Arts, alongside African and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Let’s call this what it is. When The University of Texas at Austin dissolves the independent status of its Mexican American and Latina/o Studies (MALS) Department under the banner of “reorganization,” it is not administrative housekeeping. It is not streamlining. It is not “efficiency.” It is the reinscription of an already White, Eurocentric intellectual hierarchy that has long determined which knowledges are foundational and which are expendable. Stripping the department of its autonomy recenters power in traditional disciplinary structures historically shaped by Anglo-European canons and governance norms. That is not neutral restructuring. It is the restoration of hegemonic order dressed up as reform.

And in Texas of all places.

Texas is nearly 40 percent Latino. In our public schools, Latino children are the majority. In many districts, they are the future of the workforce, the electorate, and the civic life of this state. To dismantle a department devoted to the rigorous study of Mexican American and Latina/o histories, literatures, politics, and lived realities in a state demographically defined by those communities is not simply shortsighted. It is disproportionate, irresponsible, and frankly indefensible.

This is not about “identity politics.” It is about knowledge. It is about acknowledging that to be successful in any field in Texas requires an understanding of the Latino population. It is about understanding that Mexican American and Latina/o Studies doesn’t just study Latinos; it creates new ways of knowing and understanding Latinos. It is about whether a flagship public university has the intellectual courage to study the people who built and continue to build this state.

A public university has a public mission. That mission is not to sanitize knowledge to appease political pressure. It is to cultivate understanding, inquiry, and democratic capacity.

Eliminating Mexican American and Latina/o Studies in Texas is like shutting down marine science in Galveston, agricultural research at Texas A&M, or energy studies in Houston — it is the willful abandonment of scholarship about the forces that define the state and shape its future. It is nothing short of institutionalized racism.

It is an abdication of relevance. It signals that the intellectual study of the largest ethnic population in the state is somehow optional—an expendable add-on rather than foundational scholarship. How offensive.

What does it say to Latino students—many of them first-generation college students—that their histories and ways of knowing, being, and doing in the world are too controversial to sustain? What does it say to faculty whose scholarship interrogates conquest, segregation, labor exploitation, bilingual education, and racial formation in this region? It says: your knowledge can exist, but only at the margins—never with the authority or autonomy afforded to dominant traditions.

And what does it say, that the decision to close the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies is happening alongside the creation of programs like The School of Civic Leadership, The Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization, and majors in Strategy and Statecraft and Great Books?

This isn’t about efficiency or saving money or reducing redundancies; this is about determining whose knowledge matters, and whose is unnecessary. University leadership is committing epistemological violence by telling Latinos that in the great tradition of Western thought and reason, we do not belong; we have nothing to contribute. There is no place for us at the center of intellectual life—only as decorative additions to a canon we did not author and are not permitted to reshape.

In Texas, where immigration, voting rights, bilingual education, and curriculum wars are not abstract debates but live policy battlegrounds, eliminating a program uniquely equipped to analyze these issues is not neutral. It is the strategic sidelining of scholarship that interrogates power. It is the policing of racialized knowledge and intellectual sovereignty born out of struggle.

Universities do not hollow themselves out overnight. They do so incrementally—through “reorganizations,” “realignments,” and “efficiencies” that just happen to fall hardest on programs studying race, ethnicity, gender, and inequality. 

The notice from President Davis makes clear that consolidation is the first step. Then comes the “review of the curriculum of these areas to determine what majors, minors, and courses will be offered in the newly formed departments.” 

Earlier this year, the university did away with faculty senate committees, effectively stripping the only real check of power that existed on campus. Now, two men at the top—President Davis and Provost Inboden—are making hasty decisions to bow to the political pressures of the legislature, with precious little, if any, concern for the impact it will have on students, faculty, and the community.

Mexican American and Latino Studies is not a fringe specialization. Far from it. It is central to understanding the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its continuing relevance to our understanding of who we are as a state. It is central to understanding labor movements and agricultural economies, educational segregation, education policy, border governance and migration regimes, cultural production, language politics, and civic identity. Without the expansive and vital knowledge and perspectives produced through Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, any account of Texas and the country as a whole will be incomplete.

We don’t live in Maine or Alaska. This is Texas—a border state that shares 1,254 miles with Mexico, touching Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Chihuahua—the longest international border of any state in the nation. Our politics, our economy, our schools, our labor markets, our public health systems, and our culture are shaped daily by that reality. To behave as though Mexican American and Latina/o Studies is peripheral here is not just shortsighted; it is a willful denial of the very geography and history that define us.

It is staggering that Texas would retreat from sustaining a robust program in Mexican American and Latino Studies. Yet context is king. At the very moment this department is being dismantled, the School of Civic Leadership—widely understood as a signature initiative of Provost Inboden—proclaims its mission to prepare “a rising generation to advance human flourishing in our state and nation.” The contradiction is impossible to ignore. In the future The University of Texas at Austin is curating, Latinos are present as demographics—but absent as intellectual architects of the public good.

Demographic reality appears to matter less than political optics. Or, if the growing number of Latinas and Latinos in Texas does matter to the future of our state—it seems that our community of highly acclaimed scholars are not to be trusted with shaping that conversation.

To wit, we recently learned that the Civitas Institute, a conservative think tank at The University of Texas at Austin, is hosting an event on February 20th titled “America’s Latino Future.” Not a single scholar from the Latino Research Institute, the Center for Mexican American Studies, or the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies was consulted or invited to participate in an area where we are unmistakably invested. To sideline the very scholars whose life’s work centers on Latino history, policy, and lived experience in a state that is nearly 40 percent Latino is not simply ironic. It is deeply offensive.

Historical memory teaches us that Mexican American and Latina/o Studies did not appear by dint of administrative grace. It was forged through decades of student walkouts, faculty organizing, and sustained community struggle. It was demanded in the face of indifference and defended against erasure. The existence of this Department was not a gift. It was a hard-won institutional transformation secured by those who refused to accept invisibility.

The official motto of The University of Texas at Austin is “what starts here changes the world.” The struggle that led to the creation of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies began on this campus over 50 years ago. The intellectual labor of those activists, scholars, and community members has indeed changed the world—reshaping scholarship, informing policy, transforming classrooms, and expanding the democratic imagination of this state. That legacy does not disappear because an administration chooses retrenchment over courage. We are the future. We will not be erased.

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Copyrighted by Alfonso Ayala III and is printed on Latinopia with his permission. Photo of jellyfish in the public domain. All other images copyrighted by Barrio Dog Productions Inc.