UT is becoming the face of Texas’ higher education failures. That must change. The Daily Texan Editorial Board October 11, 2024

Friends,

I want to call attention to this important Daily Texan editorial, “UT is becoming the face of Texas’ higher education failures. That must change.” Though published in 2024, it reads today less like a warning than a record of a crisis already unfolding at The University of Texas at Austin.

The student editorial board rightly centered faculty concerns over academic freedom, tenure, shared governance, DEI, and the chilling effects of state legislation like SB 17 and SB 18. Their point was simple and powerful: a university cannot claim excellence while ignoring the conditions under which faculty teach, research, mentor, and serve. Faculty well-being is not a private employment matter. It is fundamental to the academic mission of the university.

In this context, former President Jay Hartzell’s stated goal of attracting “more elite faculty and students” raises an uncomfortable question: if this is not an indictment of, or even an insult to, the faculty and students already here, what exactly does it mean? UT Austin is already home to extraordinary faculty, staff, and students.

The crisis is not that they are insufficiently elite; it is that university and state leaders are undermining the very conditions that brought them here and would keep them here: academic freedom—the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn; tenure rights and protections; shared governance; the intellectual diversity that Ethnic and Women and Gender Studies brings; and respect for the communities that make Texas what it is.

Since then, these concerns have only deepened. UT Austin has witnessed layoffs, program consolidations, diminished shared governance, and an increasingly constrained environment for teaching and research on race, gender, inequality, and democracy itself. These are not isolated administrative decisions. They are part of a broader political project to narrow what can be studied, taught, debated, and imagined in public higher education.

At times, it feels like a slow-moving train headed toward disaster, or toward some dystopian vision that refuses to see the very diversity before our eyes, while authoritarian forms of censorship become increasingly normalized.

The Daily Texan editorial board understood what many leaders still refuse to acknowledge: students lose when faculty are silenced, intimidated, or driven away. Texas loses when its flagship university becomes a place where scholars must look over their shoulders before doing the work that public universities exist to do.

UT Austin should be a beacon of intellectual courage, democratic inquiry, and public purpose. Instead, it is being made into a cautionary tale. That must change.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

UT is becoming the face of Texas’ higher education failures. That must change.

by The Daily Texan Editorial Board

October 11, 2024




The recent publication of a survey of Texas faculty is as clear-cut as it is concerning.

According to a Sept. 5 American Association of University Professors (AAUP) survey, Texas faculty are dissatisfied with the conditions and direction of higher education in Texas. 61% of those surveyed would not recommend Texas for a faculty position to out-of-state colleagues, and 26.3% plan to interview elsewhere next year. Top concerns for faculty include the state’s political climate, academic freedom, salary, and diversity, equity and inclusion issues.

As one of Texas’ flagship institutions and a top 10 public university, UT represents the Texas education system internationally. UT can’t afford to neglect its faculty without risking long-term damage to its reputation and academic standing. At the time of publication, UT did not respond to a request for comment.

In his Sept. 18 State of the University Address, President Jay Hartzell said he, the provost and the deans will be working on “how, across the entire academic enterprise, we attract more elite faculty and students.”

Faculty is essential to the success of any university. But as it stands, we are failing ours. If UT wants to recruit and retain top-tier faculty, UT must prioritize their satisfaction and address key issues impacting their success. UT has a responsibility to protect academic freedom, and this begins with protecting faculty well-being.

According to the AAUP survey, the failure to address faculty concerns may result in a decreased retention of faculty, loss of academic talent and damage to the quality of higher education.

“These findings serve as a wake-up call for policymakers, administrators, employers, and other concerned citizens, emphasizing the urgent need to address the concerns raised by faculty members,” the survey said.

Intellectual debate and dialogue allow students and faculty to build upon each other’s independent analysis and critical thinking. State legislation constantly challenges the boundaries of academic freedom. Increasing limitations on academic freedom can have hefty implications not just on our education but on our political structure.

“(Faculty) are worried that people outside the University are going to be telling us what we can and can’t teach, what we have to say and what we can’t say in the classroom,” said Daniel Brinks, a professor in the School of Law and chair of the government department. “That will be a problem for students’ ability to learn, faculty’s ability to teach and do research, and the University’s ability to be an authentic academic institution.”

Senate Bill 17 has had lasting impacts on faculty perceptions of academic freedom. The University’s over-compliance with SB 17, including firing certain staff members without justification, raises concerns about UT’s commitment to faculty well-being amid the enactment of legislative changes.

“There’s a chilling effect … with Senate Bill 17, which banned DEI programs and practices, but it also put in there some pretty severe penalties,” said Brian Evans, president of the Texas Conference of AAUP. “If you are a faculty member perceived to be giving a training on diversity, equity and inclusion, you can face disciplinary action, including being terminated or dismissed.”

Additionally, SB 18 was intended to ban tenure at Texas public universities. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick proposed the bill because he felt professors at UT use the stability their tenure provides to “poison the minds of our next generation,” as he wrote in a Feb. 18, 2022 statement.

“These professors claim ‘academic freedom’ and hide behind their tenure to continue blatantly advancing their agenda of societal division,” Patrick wrote in a statement released April 20, 2023.

The bill was modified to keep tenured professors — with caveats. However, they can still be let go at the University’s discretion.

SB 18 may disproportionately impact untenured faculty who speak publicly on identity-related issues. The bill instills fear, making professors weary that a progressive curriculum would get them fired. If UT wants professors to continue to foster discourse in their classrooms, they must actively seek to protect tenure and ensure the stability of faculty.

“(AAUP) felt that SB 18 would potentially erode the protections of tenure … the whole reason there’s tenure is to protect academic freedom,” said Andrea Gore, a professor in the College of Pharmacy and Vice President of UT Austin’s chapter of AAUP. “If we didn’t have something that told us our jobs are going to be secure if we tackle difficult topics, we might not tackle those topics, and that would be a huge disservice to the students of the state of Texas.”

Forums exist for faculty to air their grievances, including the Faculty Council, but rarely does faculty input result in actual change. For example, the Council released a July 12 report criticizing UT’s handling of pro-Palestian demonstrations, and the council openly condemned President Hartzell’s mass layoffs following SB 17, which they said were made “without consultation of Faculty Council Leadership or other faculty leaders, in violation of shared governance practices, and without due process.”

In neither case did UT change or reverse its course of action despite callouts from faculty. If faculty cannot make change at UT, they may look for employment somewhere they can.

“Faculty Council, to me, is mostly a propaganda machine … it gives a veneer of a democratically-run institution,” said Stuart Reichler, an associate professor of practice in the College of Natural Sciences. “The reality is that the President and the other top administrators at the University decide what does and doesn’t happen.”

UT does have a requirement to adjust its practices according to the Texas legislature, but it also has a responsibility to recognize and act on the pleas of those it employs. If we can’t provide the basic protections our faculty deserves, how can we expect to attract and retain faculty members who contribute so to the prestige of UT Austin?

The University will soon become the face of Texas’ higher education failures unless it starts truly listening to its faculty.

The editorial board is composed of associate editors Tenley Jackson, Tanya Narwekar, Ava Saunders and Anjali Shenoy and editor-in-chief McKenzie Henningsen.

Academic freedom should not be for sale The Daily Texan Editorial Board October 16, 2025

Friends:

I want to commend The Daily Texan’s Editorial Board for its courage, clarity, and moral conviction in publishing this powerful statement. At a time when political pressure threatens to distort the very mission of higher education, these student journalists are modeling what integrity and ethical leadership look like. Their defense of academic freedom and free inquiry reminds us that democracy depends not on compliance, but on conscience.

It is deeply heartening to see the next generation of writers, scholars, and public thinkers stand up for the university’s highest ideals: truth, intellectual honesty, and the freedom to ask hard questions without fear or favor. The Daily Texan It is once again doing what the best journalism does: telling the truth when it is inconvenient, and standing up for principle when it matters most. No, not ever, should academic freedom be for sale. It has no price.

— Angela Valenzuela

Academic freedom should not be for sale

The Daily Texan Editorial Board

October 16, 2025

President Trump sent a letter to nine colleges, including UT, on Oct. 1, inviting them to sign a “compact for excellence in higher education.” The compact would offer preferential federal funding to universities in exchange for fulfilling a slew of requests, including freezing tuition for five years and limiting speech that antagonizes conservative values. On Oct. 14, he extended the invitation to all American universities. Trump said the compact will eliminate “anti-American ideology” from universities and usher the United States into a “golden age of academic excellence.” 

The compact’s goals clearly attempt to limit discussion on topics that do not align with conservative values. If staff and students fail to alter course discussions accordingly, they are at risk of ambiguous, institutionally defined punishments.

While Kevin Eltife, UT System Board of Regents Chair, said in a statement to the Texas Tribune that the system was “honored” to receive the letter, both faculty and staff have expressed concern. The Daily Texan received two open letters, one from an anonymous group of students and another from the UT chapter of the Association of American University Professors, or AAUP, calling on the Board of Regents to reject the compact. 

The compact asks universities to compromise their First Amendment rights for financial compensation. UT has an obligation to its students and faculty to reject this offer, which undermines academic freedom and politicizes higher education.

“Academic freedom is fundamental to both teaching and research to consider multiple, including controversial, points of view, work at the forefront of our fields and help students understand cutting-edge ideas,” said Pauline Strong, past president of the AAUP chapter at UT. 

While the compact claims to protect civil discourse, its vague language does the opposite. By restricting how students engage with diverse perspectives and how faculty disseminate their full breadth of expertise, higher education loses its very purpose: to challenge, question and expand understanding.

“Speech that offends, criticizes or belittles views is not violence and that conflation between words and violence really undermines free speech and efforts to combat actual, real threats,” said Tyler Coward, lead counsel for government affairs at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. 

Political pressure from state governments is nothing new for public colleges, especially in Texas, where the governor directly appoints members to the Board of Regents. This compact implements similar political pressure on a federal level. The close tie between UT and our state government could expand nationally as the compact builds a deeper relationship between universities and the federal government. 

“This is crucial to faculty having freedom to make choices in their teaching, their scholarship and the dissemination of ideas,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkley Law, in an email. “This is the federal government trying to exercise unprecedented control over universities and impose a conservative political ideology on them. No presidential administration — liberal or conservative — ever has attempted to do this.” 

Universities are being asked not just to accommodate, but to champion specific partisan values. For example, the compact demands universities to “transform or abolish institutional units” that “punish, belittle and spark violence against conservative ideas,” but it does not offer similar protections for ideas on other parts of the political spectrum, making it ideologically biased and violating the principle of content neutrality. 

“Treating conservative ideas differently from liberal ones clearly violates the First Amendment,” Chemerinsky said. “There is a First Amendment right to belittle or criticize any idea.”

Moreover, signing the compact would jeopardize UT’s national prestige in academia. By limiting our faculty, students, curriculum and the scope of our research, we would miss critical opportunities for our students to evolve with contemporary issues. 

“It lowers our moral prestige if we’re willing to give in — to sacrifice — the mission of education,” said Max Hubbard, political science freshman at Dartmouth, one of the other nine universities originally offered the compact. “Blindly submitting to this agreement and allowing continual incursions on what we’re allowed to study defies (critical) thinking.”

Brown, MIT, the University of Southern California and the University of Pennsylvaniahave rejected the compact. If we stray from the precedent of esteemed universities by accepting the compact’s requests, we will divide UT from other prestigious institutions. 

Despite drawbacks to accepting these changes, UT would get privileged federal funding, a scarce resource for other public universities. However, UT is part of the University of Texas System, which ranks No. 3 in the United States for largest university endowment for the 2021 Fiscal Year and No. 1 in public university endowments. Therefore, excess federal funding would be unnecessary at the expense of constraining our academic freedom. 

In recent years, UT has already implemented similar legislation, including campus neutrality, international student limitations, mandated standardized testing and frozen tuition funding, making the transition easier if we were to comply. 

However, convenience is not worth sacrificing academic freedom. Allowing a political entity to control education by bribing administration is reprehensible enough to warrant a complete rejection of the compact, despite some aspects already applying. This openness to government overreach could lead to the complete partisan control of education, bordering on indoctrination.

UT must preserve the free speech rights of its students and faculty by rejecting this compact and opposing its political overreach into higher education.

The Editorial Board is composed of associate editors Tenley Jackson, Tiffany Lam, Tanya Narwekar, Belle Xu and editor-in-chief Ava Saunders.

Texas Legislators Don't Fear Indoctrination. They Fear Education. Editorial Board, Daily Texan

Diane Guo

Friends:

Note that for this post, I am using the title of the print version that appeared on April 8th (the longer, online piece is titled "Another legislative session. Another attack on higher education.")

To keep abreast of the legislative attack on higher education, I encourage you to read AAUP's regularly updated statement, Higher Ed Bills in the 2025 Texas Legislature.

Senator Creighton's horrific Senate Bill 37 (SB 37 alongside Shaheen's HB 4499), if passed, will be a self-inflicted death knell to Texas higher education. It's why I like the print version title, it is, after all, actual education that teaches critical race facts, among others, that they fear. 

This is such a backward agenda. These folks need to go back to college to fill in their own gaps in knowledge or at least sensitize them to how they are willfully and preemptively seeking to create gaps in knowledge.

Geez, in today’s rapidly evolving global landscape, the role of education has become increasingly pivotal. As societies grapple with complex challenges and transformative technological advancements, including AI and as I just learned, "AGI," artificial general intelligence, the demand for critical thinking has never been higher. Nor has the need for innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration ever been greater. 

At a juncture in human history characterized by the unprecedented acceleration of knowledge production, educational institutions must not only disseminate information but also cultivate the intellectual agility required to navigate and shape an uncertain future. Why isn't this compelling?! It most certainly should be.

Legislators need to cease and desist and take care of real issues like poverty, the environment, access to quality healthcare, protecting immigrants' and asylum seekers' rights, protecting animal life, and ensuring well-funded and PK-20 equitable education for all communities, particularly considering the recent dismantling of the federal Department of Education. Though important to challenge, bills like SB 37 and so many others, these bogus "culture wars" amount to weapons of mass distraction so that we don't actually focus on what is actually important to Texans.

-Angela Valenzuela


Texas Legislators Don't Fear Indoctrination. They Fear Education.
Senate Bill 37 is the latest attempt to exert government control over our classrooms.

The Daily Texan Editorial Board
April 8, 2025

Where do the attacks on higher education end? Not in this legislative session, apparently. Texas Senate Bill 37, written by State Sen. Brandon Creighton, passed in committee on Thursday. If passed in both chambers, it would create an Office of Excellence in Higher Education. The office, led by a governor appointee, would be responsible for investigating claims by the legislature that colleges have broken state laws or university policies.

After sending a letter to the governing boards of Texas public universities, Creighton filed the bill, claiming several instances of Texas universities breaching recent anti-DEI legislation. In the letter, he threatened to suspend funding if universities did not comply with the ban. 

Under SB 37, university governing boards, selected by the Texas governor, have the power to appoint members of UT’s leadership. These boards have the final say in hiring vice presidents, provosts and deans, which raises concerns about outside influence thrust upon the University.

This legislation represents a thinly veiled attempt to control universities by allowing the proposed Office of Excellence in Higher Education to dictate what can and cannot be taught in classrooms, a dangerous overreach that could result in intellectual suppression in higher education institutions.

“This bill would make censorship more possible,” said Pauline Strong, president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “We don’t know what kind of agenda an official in that capacity would have, but we do know that there are attempts currently to narrow the range of topics that students learn and the range of perspectives that faculty offer.”

Topics that do not align with the Governor’s ideology, including those related to race, gender and cultural studies, will undoubtedly be first on the chopping block. Relevant curriculum created by qualified professors will take a backseat to conservative propaganda and political agendas.

For students to form independent opinions, they must be exposed to uncomfortable truths. Restricting scholarly discourse undermines the well-rounded education that students attend this University to obtain.

“We have to be quite wary of when the state is trying to tell professors and students what they can teach, what they can learn, especially in this context,” said Antonio Ingram II, senior counsel for the Legal Defense Fund. “These students could go to war, they could fight for the country, and they can’t learn about systemic racism.”

The bill states that this office will directly link curriculum content and overview to the Board of Regents, which will set a precedent that undermines professors’ positions at universities across Texas. How can the Board of Regents, most of whom lack experience in academia, understand how university courses should be taught and structured better than professors?

“SB 37 requires that all decisions at core curriculum and academic programs have to be approved by an office that would be headed by an appointee of the governor,” Strong said. “That is a violation of the principle of academic freedom and could really limit the creativity and the innovation in the curriculum. I think it would damage the education that students receive.”

Gov. Greg Abbott has heavily influenced the University of Texas System through his appointments to the Board of Regents. Texas Senate Bill 17, which banned diversity, equity and inclusion offices and practices, already limits ideological dissent outside of academic settings. SB 37 reiterates the tightening grip of conservatism in Texas education, particularly in response to a curriculum that includes critical discussions of race, gender and systemic inequality.

“The state is putting itself in a position to say what is appropriate to teach and what is not appropriate to teach in a way that runs afoul of centuries of constitutional precedent around the First Amendment,” Ingram II said.

If SB 37 passes, it would compromise the Texas Council Faculty of Senates, a federation of faculty from various Texas public universities who advise on higher education. The bill infringes on the council’s authority to act as a self-governing body.

“Senate Bill 37 takes any kind of decision-making authority away from faculty, explicitly and legally, saying that there’s no authority granted to faculty governance,” said Joseph Velasco, president of the Texas Council of Faculty Senates.

SB 37 would advance a partisan agenda for higher education in Texas, discouraging high-quality educators from coming — or staying — to teach at UT. From attempting to eliminate tenure to restricting faculty councils, Texas officials continue to demonstrate little interest in the opinion of those this bill would directly impact.

“Faculty want to teach in an environment in which they have academic freedom,” Strong said. “They want the freedom to research and to teach in the areas of their expertise, without government censorship. So, the more government censorship there is in Texas, the less motivation there will be for faculty to teach here.”

The bill infringes on universities’ current responsibilities, but its wording remains vague and fails to clarify several key details.

For instance, the bill prohibits course content that “endorses” specific policies, ideologies or legislation. However, what constitutes an endorsement isn’t explained anywhere in the text. Despite referring to the office’s responsibility to investigate several times, there is no explanation of what these investigations might entail or what the breadth of the office’s authority may be.

The legislation’s ambiguity could result in self-imposed censorship, as faculty will feel forced to conform to new standards. Ingram II describes the potential repercussions of this lack of clarity.

“When a law like this becomes enacted, if it were to pass, it’s what we call a ‘chilling effect,’” Ingram II said. “It means professors will be afraid to teach. They’ll be afraid to fully have curriculum that reflects empirical, data-based information for fear of enforcement.”

This fearful environment undermines critical thinking and intellectual exploration, both key values in higher education. Professors and administrators in charge of building curriculum will feel the political pressure to abide by a filtered version of academic discussion.

“Schools must focus on fundamentals of education, not indoctrination,” Abbott said in an X post in January.

The hypocrisy written into this bill is clear. While pushing against alleged indoctrination, Texas lawmakers are attempting to change our system to enforce their own.


The editorial board is composed of associate editors Emily Harrison, Tenley Jackson, Tanya Narwekar, Ava Saunders, Anjali Shenoy and editor-in-chief McKenzie Henningsen.