From Women and Gender Studies to Faculty and Syllabus Surveillance at Texas A&M University, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., Jan. 31, 2026

From Women and Gender Studies to Faculty and Syllabus Surveillance at Texas A&M University

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 31, 2026

Texas A&M University has crossed a line that should deeply concern anyone who cares about public higher education. As reported by Alan Blinder in The New York Times (January 30, 2026), the university has eliminated its Women and Gender studies program and rewritten the syllabi of hundreds of courses to comply with new systemwide rules restricting how race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity may be taught. Six courses were canceled outright. 

This is not routine curriculum review. It is an extraordinary top-down intervention into the intellectual life of one of the nation’s largest public universities—one driven not by faculty governance or scholarly debate, but by political mandate.

The policies, approved by the Texas A&M System Board of Regents—all appointed by Governor Greg Abbott—bar courses from “advocating race or gender ideology.” While some classes may still address these topics, they may do so only if campus leaders deem them to have a “necessary educational purpose.” That phrase is doing enormous work. It transforms presidents and deans into ideological gatekeepers and invites widespread self-censorship.

That self-censorship is already happening. Faculty revised syllabi preemptively, uncertain where invisible lines might be drawn. Others were altered quietly. Leonard Bright, president of the AAUP chapter at Texas A&M, captured the gravity of the moment bluntly: “I have never seen anything like this.”

The elimination of Women and Gender studies marks a clear escalation. Texas A&M had already been ordered to drop its LGBTQ studies minor in 2024. Ending a full degree program—one with more than 80 enrolled students—signals that entire fields of scholarship are now politically expendable. 

Interim President Tommy Williams cited low enrollment and compliance challenges, but neither explanation withstands scrutiny. Universities regularly sustain programs with modest enrollments because they recognize their intellectual and civic value. What makes this program uniquely “difficult” is hardly a matter of the value that it adds—certainly for the 80 students enrolled—but politics.

Equally troubling is how academic freedom itself is being redefined. President Williams suggested the new policies restore “rigor” to areas where there had been “drift,” implying that scholarship on race and gender lacks seriousness or standards. This rhetorical move is familiar: delegitimize entire bodies of peer-reviewed research, then present political oversight as one of "quality control."

Regrettably, these decisions will most definitely harm Texas A&M’s reputation, despite the interim president insisting that the damage will only be temporary. Experience suggests otherwise. 

With regards to faculty recruitment alone, it's already hard to recruit top-tier researchers who in the context of job searches and interviews, express concerns about Texas policies, campus climate, and how this in turn could impact student trust, research credibility, graduate student funding, and future graduate student placements. These details, together with the enormous effort and investment it takes to hire faculty and deans are indicative of serious difficulties for our departments to rebound easily from signals that scholarly inquiry is subordinate to political approval. 

Geez, what a downer.

Perhaps the most revealing claim is that these measures “build trust in higher education.” In reality, they do the opposite. They communicate that faculty cannot be trusted to teach responsibly, that students must be shielded from complex realities, and that governing boards—not scholars—will decide what knowledge is legitimate.

It further exposes a theory of power in which trust is no longer earned through intellectual rigor, professional judgment, or faculty autonomy, but instead manufactured through surveillance, restriction, and control. Here, that power operates in explicitly gendered ways, offering a preview of how “race ideology” will be operationalized next.

When Plato’s Symposium (Sheffield, 2008) becomes suspect, when courses are canceled because professors cannot pre-script how discussion might unfold, and when entire programs are dismantled to avoid political risk, the institution is no longer governing itself as a university. It is governing itself as a compliance apparatus. As a faculty member myself at the University of Texas at Austin, it's honestly disorienting and surreal wondering when the next proverbial shoe will drop.

Texas A&M is not an outlier. New College of Florida took a similar path in 2023. Other public universities are watching closely. What is unfolding in College Station is part of a broader national effort to remake higher education through ideological control rather than scholarly judgment.

Public universities do not hollow themselves out overnight. They do so incrementally—policy by policy, exception by exception—until their public mission is reduced to whatever survives political scrutiny.

At some point, administrators must decide whether their role is merely to manage risk or to defend the conditions that make higher education worthy of public trust at all. As Professor Bright put it plainly, “When it comes to certain things, you’ve got to say no.”

The question now facing Texas A&M is not whether it has complied with regents’ mandates. It is whether it still recognizes itself as a university.

Reference

Sheffield, F. C. (Ed.). (2008). Plato: The Symposium. Cambridge University Press.

Texas A&M Ends Women’s Studies and Overhauls Classes Over Race and Gender

New policies limiting the teaching of race and gender issues led administrators and professors to change hundreds of courses. School leaders say the rules could hurt A&M’s reputation.

Texas A&M University’s new policy to limit teaching about race and gender has led to
debates on campus about academic freedom.Credit...Annie Mulligan for The New York Times

By Alan Blinder
Alan Blinder, who covers higher education, welcomes tips at nytimes.com/tips.
Jan. 30, 2026

Texas A&M University said on Friday that it would end its women’s and gender studies program, and that the syllabuses for hundreds of courses had been altered under new policies limiting how race and gender ideology may be discussed in classrooms.

The university said that six courses had been canceled entirely because of the new rules, out of the roughly 5,400 that were planned for this semester at one of the nation’s largest public universities.

The A&M system’s regents — all of them appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican — approved the restrictive policies late last year, and officials have been scrambling since then to interpret and enforce them. Supporters contend that the rules are appropriate measures to prevent political ideologies, especially those often associated with the left, from entering classrooms. Opponents say the approach encourages self-censorship and is itself ideological.

A top-down demand to scrutinize a university’s entire course catalog in so short a time is extraordinarily rare in the United States, where professors have long had sweeping control over their syllabuses.

“I have never seen anything like this,” said Leonard Bright, a professor in A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and the president of the American Association of University Professors chapter in College Station, where the A&M system has its flagship campus of more than 74,000 students.

The regents do not seem interested in the academic freedom of students and the faculty, he added, only the “freedom of their speech.”

Friday’s announcement about shutting down the university’s women’s and gender studies program went beyond the immediate repercussions that many people had anticipated.

Tommy Williams, the university’s interim president, said in a statement that he had directed the closure because of low enrollment and “the difficulty of bringing the program in compliance with the new system policies.” He said that students who were already pursuing degrees or certificates in the program would be able to complete them.

In 2024, the regents ordered A&M to drop its minor in L.G.B.T.Q. studies. But ending a full bachelor’s degree program represents a sharp escalation in the debate over what should be taught at public universities in Texas, the nation’s most populous conservative state.

Texas A&M is not the first school to drop gender studies. New College of Florida, for example, moved in 2023 to shut down its program, which had operated for decades.
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Sally Robinson, an English professor who has long taught in A&M’s women’s and gender studies program, said that the demise of the L.G.B.T.Q. studies minor had made people think the program could vanish as well, “given the political context we’re living in, especially in Texas.”

But she said she had not expected such a decision to come on Friday.

“There is a deep sense of sadness that this university is going down this path,” she said. “Whether the regents understand this or not, it’s going to have a devastating effect.”

Until Friday, discussions at A&M had often focused on how individual courses this semester would be affected by the new limits, which Mr. Williams argued in an interview this week had “restored rigor into some areas where maybe we had had some drift.”

“This has given us a transparent way to go through and make sure that what we’re advertising the course is about is actually what’s being taught,” he said on Tuesday, adding that the approach “strengthens academic integrity, it protects our academic standards and, I think, most importantly, it builds trust in higher education.”

A&M officials have nevertheless been bracing for recriminations, including possible court challenges, and for prospective students or professors to be thinking twice about heading to College Station.

“It’s been harmful to our reputation, there’s no question about that,” said Mr. Williams, a Republican former state legislator. “But I think it’s transitory.”

Mr. Williams, who previously worked for Mr. Abbott, said he had not discussed the policies with the governor. And during the interview, Mr. Williams did not mention any plans concerning the women’s and gender studies program, which currently has more than 80 students in its undergraduate major, minor and graduate certificate programs.

Under the new systemwide policies, no A&M course may “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” Certain classes that are not part of the core curriculum may include teaching about those subjects, but only if a campus president agrees that there is “a necessary educational purpose.”

Asked whether any part of him believed that the policies went too far, Mr. Williams replied, “No.” Pressed on whether deans and department heads would share that view, Mr. Williams responded, “Some would and some would not.”

For the most part, those deans and department heads have been the ones trying to navigate how far A&M should go in excising content.

“Day by day, we began to have a clearer understanding of where the line may be,” said Simon North, the interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in College Station.

Dr. North acknowledged, though, that it was impossible to know exactly how many courses had been affected because some faculty members may have modified their syllabuses themselves.

“There are actions that people took in consultation with us,” Dr. North said, “and there are actions that people may have done on their own.”

Syllabus reviews largely took place at the departmental and college levels, but some reached the interim president’s desk. As he prepared this week to weigh requests for exemptions, Mr. Williams said that “common sense is what we’re trying to use as our gauge.”

He said that A&M officials were not looking to cut material in ways that might prevent students from being competitive in the marketplace, and that opponents of the new rules had “confused what academic freedom is.”

“It doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want to in the classroom,” he said. “You have academic freedom, but it comes along with the responsibility, and part of that responsibility is to make sure that the learning outcomes are achieved and they’re done in a way that’s compliant with state and federal law and what our regents mandate us to do.”

Even before the wholesale course review, Texas A&M was debating what content was appropriate in college classrooms. In September, the university fired a lecturer for displaying a gender unicorn — which is used to explain the differences between gender expression and gender identity — during a course on children’s literature. The president of the university at the time — Mr. Williams’s predecessor — quickly stepped down.

A faculty appeals panel ruled that the university was “not justified” when it ousted the lecturer, Melissa McCoul, but A&M has refused to reinstate her.

Then the regents’ policies deepened the turmoil. One of the largest ruptures unspooled in the philosophy department, after a professor, Martin Peterson, proposed including portions of Plato’s Symposium in a contemporary moral issues course that can be used to fulfill a core curriculum requirement.

He also scheduled teaching modules covering race and gender ideology. He had discussed similar topics in the course in the past, though previous syllabuses showed that the modules had different names, like “race and gender issues.”

Kristi Sweet, the head of the philosophy department, asked him to “mitigate” the course to remove that content, or face reassignment to a different class. After the dispute became public, university officials repeatedly suggested that Dr. Peterson had constructed his syllabus as a provocation.

Dr. Peterson acknowledged that he had wanted to “test the waters,” but he said in an interview this week that he thought the Platonic passages would be less contentious than material he had assigned in the past: an excerpt from the Supreme Court ruling that recognized a right to same-sex marriage. He has since replaced the disputed modules and Plato readings with lessons about academic freedom.

Administrators note that Plato appears in the syllabuses for other classes.

“Hundreds of Aggies are reading Plato in their courses right now,” Dr. Sweet said. She added that the entirety of Plato’s Symposium was being taught in the Philosophy of Art course, and that despite a wide outcry over its handling of the Peterson class, the department’s “strategic priorities for continued excellence are untouched by current events.”

Dr. Bright, the A.A.U.P. chapter president, has faced questions about his own courses. Administrators initially flagged an article that included discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. But the dean of the Bush School, John Sherman, told Dr. Bright that administrators would support letting him use that text, “given the scholarly nature of the work and the applicability of the reading.”

Another of Dr. Bright’s courses worried administrators more.

Dr. Bright wrote that the course would examine the impact of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation and other social identities “on public policy and the professional ethical responsibilities of public servants.”

Dr. Sherman asked him how sexual orientation would be covered. After Dr. Bright responded that it was impossible to say exactly when the subject might come up in a discussion-driven course, the dean canceled the class.

“To say this gives me no pleasure is an understatement,” Dr. Sherman wrote. “To be clear, transparency does not equate to censorship.”

Dr. Bright said that university leaders had made an impossible demand about a course that is often shaped by current events.

It is rare for university governing boards to make decisions that reach so far into classrooms so quickly. Still, R. Bowen Loftin, a former A&M president, said there were few practical options available to campus officials who might disagree with the regents.


“When you become an administrator, especially at a public institution, there’s going to be limits on what you can say and what you can do, and you have to come to grips with that,” he said.

Dr. North, the arts and sciences dean, said “questions of academic freedom and academic responsibilities are really difficult,” but that he was “trying to implement these changes in a way that puts students first and supports faculty.”

Dr. Bright showed little patience with such defenses.

“When it comes to certain things, you’ve got to say no,” he said. “I don’t excuse administrators from that responsibility.”


Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
See more on: U.S. Politics

Harvard’s removal of Mary Bassett and the Remaking of Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Harvard’s removal of Mary Bassett and the Remaking of Higher Education

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 10, 2026

Writing for The Nation, Gregg Gonsalves is right to call Harvard’s removal of Mary Bassett what it is: an act of institutional cowardice. But it is also something larger—a sign of how higher education is being quietly reshaped for an authoritarian moment.

Bassett was not removed for poor leadership or scholarly failure. She was removed because her work named injustice—specifically, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza—and refused the demand for silence now imposed on universities by donors, politicians, and bad-faith actors wielding accusations of antisemitism as a political weapon. This was not compliance with law. It was anticipatory obedience.

What makes this moment dangerous is not only Harvard’s decision, but the logic behind it. Universities are increasingly sacrificing people, programs, and principles to prove their “neutrality.” In reality, there is nothing neutral about purging scholars whose work confronts racism, colonial violence, or state power. That is not risk management; it is ideological discipline.

We have already seen where this leads. At New College of Florida, political intervention openly remade an institution. Harvard’s case is more troubling precisely because no governor forced its hand. The institution chose to capitulate.

It should not go unnoticed that two of the most prominent academic casualties of this era have been Black women leaders, namely, Dr. Claudine Gay — Harvard’s first Black President—and now Mary Bassett, a globally recognized Black public health leader. When universities decide who is expendable, power speaks plainly.

If institutions of higher learning cannot tolerate scholarship that links public health to human rights, or education to democracy, they cease to be universities in any meaningful sense. They become risk-averse corporations, curating acceptable knowledge to appease those in power.

Bassett’s ouster clarifies the stakes. Higher education is being remade—not through force alone, but through fear. The question now is whether universities will continue down this path, or whether faculty, students, and the public will insist that truth-telling is not a liability, but the very reason universities exist.

Society / January 8, 2026

Harvard’s Ouster of Mary Bassett Is a Revolting Act of Cowardice

The public health icon was brutally removed from her job for one reason: her opposition to genocide in Gaza.

Gregg Gonsalves |The Nation

Mary Bassett, commissioner of the New York State Department of Health, speaks
during a health department press briefing on August 22, 2022, in New York City.
(John Lamparski / Sipa USA via AP)

We’ll come out of this. Let me tell you something. If none of us are here, if none of us are here to see it, tell your children who the cowards were.

                      —Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mary Bassett is a legend in public health. From her student years at Radcliffe College where she volunteered with the Black Panthers to provide sickle cell disease screening in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, to her work on HIV prevention when she was on the faculty of the University of Zimbabwe, to her pioneering role on AIDS care in Africa as the Rockefeller Foundation’s point person on health equity, to her tenure as the commissioner of health for both New York City and New York State, Bassett has been a visionary, sought after for her commitment to the health of the most vulnerable people in the US and around the planet.

In 2018, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health scored a coup by getting Bassett to lead the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights. Let me be clear—Dr. Bassett elevated Harvard by taking up this role, not the other way around.

Yet in mid-December of last year, the school’s dean, Andrea Baccarelli—more on him later—suddenly told Bassett that he was removing her as director of FXB. It was abrupt, unceremonious, and cruel. But cruelty is the point nowadays, isn’t it?

Harvard’s decision has sent shock waves through the international public health and academic communities. Over 2,000 colleagues have signed a petition calling for Bassett’s reinstatement. Leaders like Jocalyn Clark, international editor of The BMJ, one of the world’s most influential medical journals, called it “a shocking move,” while Martin McKee at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was appalled at what happened, asking, “What were they thinking?”

Well, what were they thinking? It’s clear that Bassett was pushed out for one reason only—her insistence on highlighting the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Her leadership of the FXB Center was singled out in a report on campus antisemitism as focused “heavily on Palestinians”—an apparent cardinal sin.

Let’s be frank about a few things. By now, many people have come to see what is happening in Gaza as an abomination—including people from within Israel and the Jewish diaspora. It is those who have refused to condemn the atrocities in Gaza—including noted Harvard bigwig and sex pest Larry Summers, who has been critical of FXB for months and months—who came gunning for Bassett.

And the charges of antisemitism are, bluntly, bullshit. The massacres by Hamas on October 7 were abhorrent in their own right, but the response from the Netanyahu government has been indefensible—his government means to wipe Gaza off the map and has taken 70,000 lives in this quest to date. The genocide has also caused one of the gravest public health crises of the 21st century, with Gaza’s entire medical system virtually wiped out and hunger and disease running rampant. In other words, the situation in Gaza couldn’t be more relevant to the work of an institution focused on health and human rights like the one Bassett ran.

To categorically frame Bassett and every single other person who refuses to give the Israeli government carte blanche and justify Netanyahu’s actions as antisemitic is just not right. Of course, there are antisemites among Israel’s critics, but plenty of Jewish people, inside and outside of Israel, are appalled by what is happening—they don’t give up claims to their Jewishness because they oppose Likud and its coalition partners’ actions. In fact, what is happening is simply a political move to crush dissent against a country’s foreign policy and military decisions. It also is a move to silence the voices of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis trying to bridge divides in their home country.

But on college campuses, Bassett’s firing is about something more. Antisemitism has been mobilized by antisemites to assert control over higher education in America. Elise Stefanik, a key architect of the ouster of Harvard’s former President Claudine Gay and others on the basis of their response to campus antisemitism, was called out by her own hometown newspaper in 2021 for her invocation of the Great Replacement theory (“How low, Ms. Stefanik?”)—she is clearly no friend to the Jews. Far-right activist Christopher Rufo willingly exposed his strategy in his use of antisemitism in an interview with Politico in January 2024, gleefully admitting he used it to bring down university presidents by cultivating allies among the liberal press who were credulous enough to take the charges he was making at face value.

And more and more influential figures among American Jews are calling all this out. In December, a letter from Joe Berman, a former top litigator for the Anti-Defamation League put it succinctly, “Jews and the fight against antisemitism are being cynically used to advance an authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda.… Make no mistake: this will not end well, especially for Jewish Americans.” And an Ipsos poll last September of over 1,000 Americans who self-identified as Jewish found that “a wide majority—by nearly a three-to-one margin—report that President Trump uses allegations of antisemitism as an ‘excuse’ to pause or cut university funding, rather than saying he ‘truly cares’ about the well-being of Jewish students.” Clearly, the game is up for many Jewish Americans. But not for Harvard.

The only reason Bassett was fired is that Harvard donors, trustees, HSPH dean Andrea Baccarelli, and President Alan Garber wanted it to happen. There are two possible reasons for this, and both are alarming at this terrible political moment in American history. One scenario is simple: they agree with the policies of the current Israeli government, and the charges hurled against colleges by the Trump administration, and are gladly squelching any dissent. That is, they are collaborators.

The second, and more likely, reason is that the leaders at Harvard are cowards. Under pressure from the White House and the far right, they thought the sacrifice of Bassett was simply worth it to appease their critics, even bad-faith ones. The quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates above is from a longer speech he gave recently, where he explicitly calls out civic leaders, including those at universities, who speak forthrightly about the importance of institutions of higher education, but yet shrink back at the moment of truth: “These institutions, rich, prestigious, cower rather than confront. They compromise their principles instead of defending justice.”

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

Baccarelli and Garber have sacrificed one of the leading public health figures of our time out of deep moral cowardice. They’ll go down with those who turned in their friends and colleagues during the blacklist in the 1950s, substituting a dubious expediency for any self-respect. And one might also ask, where is the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard on all of this? While these faculty have been noisily clamoring for free speech and viewpoint diversity on campus for years, they’ve been noticeably silent on what is clearly a purge of a fellow academic. I guess it’s free speech for me, not for thee when it comes to viewpoints they may disagree with. Cowards all.

Why does all this matter? The Trump administration is trying to reshape higher education for an authoritarian era, as has been done in other countries, at other times. You need cowards to do this: people who will sell out their colleagues and their principles to promote their own safety or advancement, even as they claim they are doing it because they have no choice. I am sure Baccarelli and Garber have also told themselves they are saving their school by making these concessions, but what is left in capitulation and collaboration’s wake?

Universities are no longer about open inquiry and debate if they are willing to close programs, shutter departments, shift away from priorities that arouse the ire of the state, and purge those who run afoul of those in power. Rebuilding academia in the image of the far right is the goal. For an example of where that leads, just look at New College of Florida. But even there, Governor Ron DeSantis forced New College’s hand. Baccarelli and Garber are lending their own hands to this project.

As for public health and medicine? This move is part of the campaign to reshape our fields as well. Bassett was fired because she spoke up on Gaza, but it is clear that her seminal work on racism and health, and her willingness to speak up about these issues, also put her on the wrong side of the Trump administration, as well as those on campus who see current discussions on race and social justice in medical school curriculums as overly woke, “promot[ing] extensive and dangerous misinformation,” and representing a form of “pedagogical malpractice.”

Baccarelli has said the “new” version of FXB will emphasize children’s health as its focus (even though FXB already has a program on this topic). One has to wonder which children will count in this new cramped vision of human rights at Harvard. If I were at Harvard, I’d also be worried about the future of FXB’s other programs on climate change and public health emergencies, on racial justice, on migrants and refugees, and the Roma program for health and human rights. This is what Baccarelli and Garber are willing to leave behind.

At this moment, the rise of authoritarianism and the backlash to Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and the fight for trans equality have begun to converge. Those on campus who want to make university life safe for misogyny, racism, and transphobia again are feeling empowered. The academics among Epstein’s men, like Larry Summers, who yearn for a past in which we all knew our place in the pecking order, see their fortunes rising. (It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the two most prominent terminations at Harvard in this era—Mary Bassett and Claudine Gay—have been two Black women.)

Making an example of Mary Bassett was a very bad move. We know who the cowards (and collaborators) are now. Bassett was at the forefront of a new public health, grounded in science and justice for all. And even as they may say they are doing no such thing, we need to realize that these men have declared war on an entire field, because their quest was not just to remove a single leader but to extirpate a set of ideas and principles fundamental to public health that their patrons find objectionable.

At least, though, we know where we stand. The contours of the struggle ahead are coming into clearer relief every day. It is bad medicine to carve out discussions of gross human rights violations, like the carnage in Gaza, of race, sexuality, and gender, and the entire panoply of social determinants of health out of our work to satisfy this regressive politics. Because in the end, it is not viruses and rogue cells alone that kill us—it is what we inflict on each other that makes us sick, leaves us dead.

Gregg Gonsalves
Nation public health correspondent Gregg Gonsalves is the codirector of the Global Health Justice Partnership and an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.

The Chaos of Compliance in Texas and Florida by Erin Gretzinger and Maggie Hicks

This is a helpful, descriptive piece on DEI implementation in Florida and Texas from the March 2024 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education,

Best,

-Angela Valenzuela

The Chaos of Compliance: How Public Colleges in Two States are Actually Responding to DEI Bans 

‘New Terrain’
By Erin Gretzinger and Maggie Hicks 

March 22, 2024

After Texas acted last year to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public colleges statewide, students like Kaitie Tolman were eager to offer the programming their institutions no longer could.

The path to doing so seemed clear: Senate Bill 17, which took effect January 1, exempted student groups from its provisions, which included the banning of DEI offices and employees. But Tolman, a fifth-year student at the University of Houston and former president of the LGBTQ student organization GLOBAL, quickly learned that students’ hopes to take up the defunct programs wouldn’t be so simple.

When Tolman and her peers tried to determine what exactly was being eliminated on their campus, they were met with vague email responses from administrators and a couple of confusing meetings. Everyone they talked to reassured the students that they would help in any way they could. But when Tolman asked for specific details, like how to organize an LGBTQ graduation ceremony, many said they weren’t able to help out of fear of legal repercussions, she said.

To Tolman, administrators appeared to “err on the side of caution” in talking with students about DEI programming at all. As a result, students were being told they could supplement programs being lost, while simultaneously being blocked from any information about what those programs were. “We very much felt the solution they came up with was, ‘Well, y’all figure it out,’” Tolman said. “‘We were happy to help you, as long as we don’t have to actually do anything.’”

Tolman and her peers aren’t the only ones left in the dark about the consequences of anti-DEI legislation. Since last year, eight states have passed laws curtailing the type of diversity initiatives state-funded colleges can offer. Yet public knowledge of the laws’ on-the-ground effects has largely been limited to sporadic local news coverage, and sometimes filtered through politically distorted channels.

To assess how colleges have changed in response to these new laws, The Chronicle surveyed public colleges in two states that have enacted them: Texas and Florida. Of the 137 colleges surveyed, about 40 percent answered, many of which offered detailed accounting of changes they have made to comply with the laws. (Several other colleges answered, but failed to address The Chronicle’s specific questions or declined to participate.)

The result is the most comprehensive portrait yet of how colleges are reshaping themselves in response to legislation targeting DEI. And it reveals that campuses are reacting inconsistently — some dramatically and others not at all.

Nearly four dozen campuses in the two states offered substantive responses to The Chronicle: Over all, 24 colleges made changes to an office or department; 23 cut or reassigned jobs; seven ended DEI training for admission or employment; two axed funding for DEI activities; and 15 eliminated other DEI-related programming. Interestingly, 19 said they were already in compliance with the law and didn’t have to alter anything.

The responses yielded a familiar aura of uncertainty as administrators grapple with what is permissible under the legislation. The changes campuses did make varied greatly. While one Texas college eliminated its multicultural center, another opened one to replace its DEI office. While some colleges in Florida have simply reassigned their DEI employees, the University of Florida recently terminated 13 of its full-time staff. Experts previously told The Chronicle that the vague, sweeping laws leave large room for interpretation. The immediate effects, spelled out here, prove just how vast that gulf is in practice.

Activists and students like Tolman said The Chronicle’s findings illustrate a loss of community on campus. Programming offered to students, like social gatherings or counseling services, could dwindle. Some also worry that while some organizations are still running, they’ll lose funding and support. Students and faculty said they received little information about how administrators came to these decisions in the first place and worry colleges could be overreacting when so much is left up for interpretation.

“These DEI bills are new terrain. There’s not all this precedent that we have in other areas of the law. Florida and Texas are the vanguard,” said Antonio L. Ingram II, a civil-rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “They’re using these overly conservative hermeneutics to really render many of these exemptions not actionable, and students and faculty are suffering as a result.”

For the laws’ advocates, questions remain about how colleges are complying — if at all. As some colleges have simply changed an office’s name or reassigned programs, they worry there is still more to be done to eliminate DEI altogether. And with some campuses opening activities to “everyone” that were traditionally catered to one group, they’re concerned administrators are creating workarounds rather than eradicating DEI completely.

“I understand why some admins are engaging in massive resistance to the idea of the colorblind merit-based system that the legislature has required and that’s because it goes against their ideological priors,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, where he co-authored model legislation that many states have used in writing anti-DEI bills. “My answer to that is: tough. You have to follow the law.”

To some extent, the rollout of these laws has left no one satisfied. And with fresh legislation being proposed each month, what’s unfolding in Florida and Texas may provide a glimpse into a messy and chaotic future.

In early 2023, conservative lawmakers began pushing to abolish DEI practices, which advocates argue help to mitigate discrimination on campus and provide support to historically marginalized communities. Among the most common targets were standalone diversity offices, mandatory diversity training, and the use of diversity statements in hiring — practices that critics called ineffective and discriminatory in their own way.

“We must ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth, not the imposition of trendy ideology,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said in a January 2023 speech that effectively kicked off his campaign to reshape public higher education in the state.

What followed was a bonanza of legislative activity taking aim at colleges’ DEI practices. Since The Chronicle started tracking the legislation last year, at least 81 bills have been introduced — including 37 this year alone — in 28 states. The bills are often modeled after proposed legislation from the Goldwater and Manhattan Institutes, two conservative think tanks.

In Texas, Senate Bill 17 banned state funding of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Following months of debate and amendments to the bill, the final version prohibited colleges from establishing a diversity, equity, and inclusion office, which it defines as a “unit of an institution” that influences hiring practices or promotes differential treatment of people based on race, color, or ethnicity. It also refers to an office that conducts training and programs on race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

The law, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott in June, also bans colleges from hiring a person to perform the duties of a DEI office, requiring diversity statements, or mandating training that refers to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation, while exempting course instruction, research, and student organizations. (Section 59 of the state’s appropriations bill also banned spending on “unconstitutional” DEI programs.)

In Florida, House Bill 931 and Senate Bill 266 prohibited “political loyalty tests” as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in hiring or promotion, and banned colleges from spending state or federal money on programs that “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism.”

The Senate bill also carved out exemptions for student organizations, stating they can still receive funding through student fees and may use college-owned facilities, as well as programs that are required to comply with federal law, necessary to obtain accreditation, or those approved by the State Board of Education or the Board of Governors. After a series of amendments, DeSantis signed both bills into law in May. In January the Board of Governors banned Florida’s 12 public campuses from using state or federal dollars toward diversity programs or activities, aligning with the law.

Now that the laws have gone into effect, the impacts have emerged piecemeal through scattered news stories, general-counsel guidance documents, and reports from political actors watching the changes take shape on the ground. The resulting landscape — and the reasoning behind campuses’ responses — has been anything but clear.

To try to establish a clear picture of how campuses have responded to the legislation, The Chronicle contacted the two states’ public colleges between late January through the beginning of March. We asked for information on any updates the colleges had made to offices, programs, jobs, training, courses, and funding efforts in order to comply. While local media reports have captured a number of the individual changes that have transpired since the laws passed, this analysis focuses solely on the responses we collected.

Some campuses took sweeping action. The University of Houston told The Chronicle it nixed more than 40 student-affairs activities along with its LGBTQ Resource Center. The university also closed its Center for Diversity and Inclusion, opening up the Center for Student Advocacy and Community in its place and moving five employees into new roles.

That exemplified what The Chronicle found across other Texas colleges: Ten institutions created a new office after eliminating one, and four colleges changed the name of an old office. Names that included the words diversity, equity, or inclusion were out, replaced by terms like “engagement,” “community,” and “belonging.” For example, the University of North Texas and Texas Woman‘s University both created new centers — the Center for Belonging and Engagement and the Center for Belonging and First-Generation Students, respectively — to replace their shuttered DEI offices.

In Florida, colleges took an even more sweeping approach, often cutting programs and offices without any mention of a replacement. Florida State University and the Universities of Florida, South Florida, and North Florida reported to The Chronicle that they had eliminated their DEI offices, and reassigned or changed the roles of any DEI staff. Florida State and the University of Florida were the only colleges across both states that reported changes to funding practices. Florida State terminated a DEI mini-grant program, memberships to DEI organizations, and subscriptions to DEI-related publications, while the University of Florida re-routed $5 million in DEI funds to a faculty-recruitment fund.

The University of Florida was the only campus that said it had fired staff as a result of new laws. Others reassigned employees or changed their roles, and a handful said they let vacant posts remain unfilled. Florida State told The Chronicle it “repurposed” two human-resources positions that focused on DEI, while another position’s DEI-related responsibilities were replaced with other tasks. At Seminole State College, the former chief DEI officer became the “Associate Vice President for Organizational Culture and Strategy/Title IX Coordinator.”

It wasn’t always clear how new offices or titles represent different missions. Some colleges specified to The Chronicle that their newly created departments would support all students, or pointed to certain services for pregnant, first-generation, and veteran students within revamped offices.

Such changes have elicited suspicion from conservative lawmakers and accusations from some DEI opponents that colleges are attempting to subvert the legislation. “The idea that these changes are cosmetic, and that the administrators at these universities have not examined their goals with DEI, is disheartening and problematic because it clearly states that improving outcomes for Texas students is not a priority for them,” said Sherry Sylvester, a fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Austin.

But DEI proponents argue that name changes are far from superficial and make it more difficult for students to find services that meet their needs. “The lack of transparency about how to find a resource that used to be obviously available, that’s a harm to students, and that’s a harm that’s due to compliance with a bill that erases DEI institutions,” said Ingram, the Legal Defense Fund attorney.

Whether these new offices, job titles, or other changes will stick remains to be seen. Already at the University of Texas at San Antonio, the college told The Chronicle that it had walked back its plans to launch a new center, the Office of Campus and Community Belonging, in place of its shuttered Office of Inclusive Excellence. It cited an “evolving understanding of SB 17 as well as continuing voluntary changes in staffing and personnel reappointments from that office.”

As colleges have taken steps to comply with the law, some campus community members say how they have gone about it has been shrouded in secrecy.

After Tolman, the University of Houston student, struggled to find information about what was being cut, she and other students filed a public-records request to get a precise answer. The list they received, which the university shared with The Chronicle, enumerated eliminations across identity-based hubs, as well as other departments such as student housing and residential life, counseling and psychological services, and university career services. A note next to nearly every program suggested that student groups could take it over — which struck Tolman as frustratingly ironic, given the resistance she had encountered in trying to do just that.

In response to The Chronicle’s inquiry, the university recognized its student-organization exemption but said it “did not go about assigning tasks/events to students,” and each student group “would need to make the decision on whether it wants to pursue any of the programming or events.” Texas A&M University had a similar response, saying that some student organizations had taken over programs that were previously organized by the Pride Center. Dallas College also pointed to its student-organization exemption in its response, noting that student groups may host a multicultural event or program, “even one that may include DEI elements.”