UT Didn’t Just Reject a $100,000 Endowment. It Entrenched Discrimination
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
January 9, 2026
The University of Texas at Austin didn’t just turn down a $100,000 endowment for Hispanic scholars. It chose fear over law, optics over mission, and political compliance over institutional integrity.
As reported by Lily Kepner in the Austin American-Statesman, Daniel Acosta—a former UT Pharmacy professor, founding director of the College of Pharmacy, former dean, and senior federal scientist—offered to endow a scholarship to support Hispanic doctoral students and help address UT’s persistent underrepresentation of Hispanic faculty.
He pledged $40,000 himself; the College of Pharmacy reportedly raised the remaining $60,000 because it believed in the goal. Then UT and Texas Exes quietly shut it down.
The excuse was Texas Senate Bill 17. But here’s the truth UT doesn’t want to say aloud: SB 17 does not apply to Texas Exes. There was no legal barrier. Employment law experts confirmed it. This was not compliance—it was appeasement of the governor, the Legislature’s far-right bloc, and a political movement determined to purge diversity from public life.
And appeasement has consequences.
Latinas and Latinos now make up more than 40% of the state, yet their representation among the faculty at UT remains stuck at 10.5%, with even deeper underrepresentation in elite research fields like pharmacy.
Acosta himself was only the second Hispanic professor in the College of Pharmacy when he joined UT in the 1970s. Fifty years later, UT still hasn’t fixed the pipeline—and when a Loyal Longhorn offers to help with private dollars, the university recoils.
As UT professor Liliana Garces warns, so-called “color-blind” policies don’t end discrimination—they entrench it. By refusing to acknowledge race at all, institutions simply preserve unequal structures while pretending neutrality. UT’s decision does exactly that.
Let’s stop pretending this is about the law. UT has already gone far beyond what SB 17 requires, erasing race-conscious efforts not because they’re illegal, but because administrators are afraid. Afraid of politicians. Afraid of headlines. Afraid of defending the very principles they once celebrated when diversity was politically safe.
This is not leadership. It is institutional cowardice.
UT didn’t lose a donation. It lost moral authority. It told Hispanic students and future scholars that representation is expendable, belonging is conditional, and equity is negotiable. In a state whose future is unmistakably Latino, that message is not just wrong—it is reckless.
And appeasement has consequences. It raises the question of how many other equity-focused gifts have been quietly blocked or abandoned—and whether UT has imposed an unofficial ban on lawful donor initiatives. That question demands public disclosure and independent oversight, not silence.
But flagships don’t drift with political tides. Flagships lead. They set a course rooted in mission, not fear. They confront the hard challenges of their state, refuse to shrink from serving all its people, and uphold equity and inclusion as central to educational excellence—not as optional extras.
UT’s stated values include leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility to serve as a catalyst for positive change (see Mission and Values statement). Yet in refusing a donor-funded initiative to expand representation at a time when the state’s demographics are shifting and UT’s faculty remains far from representative, the university revealed how far it has strayed from that mission. What was once a flagship of bold ideas and public purpose now appears content to avoid controversy rather than champion justice.
And they're dragging the future of public higher education in Texas with it.
After years trying to create a scholarship at UT's College of Pharmacy for Hispanic scholars, Texas Exes denied it because of its diversity focus, a donor said.
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Daniel Acosta, former UT Pharmacy professor, sits in the living room of his home in Central Austin on Monday, Jan 5, 2026. Acosta's recent attempt to establish an endowment to help Hispanic graduate students and address the lack of diversity in the pharmacy faculty at the University of Texas at Austin was denied amid DEI scares. Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman |
Daniel Acosta was the top pharmacy class graduate at the University of Texas in 1968. After pursuing his doctorate in Kansas, he returned to the Forty Acres as the inaugural director of the College of Pharmacy. He taught from 1974 to 1996 as the college's second Hispanic professor and went on to become a dean at the University of Cincinnati and the deputy director of the Federal Drug Administration’s Toxicology Center.
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Daniel Acosta, former UT Pharmacy professor, looks through emails in his home in Central Austin on Monday, Jan 5, 2026. Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman |
The rejection of Acosta’s endowment, funded by his own $40,000 donation and another $60,000 he said was raised by the College of Pharmacy, is the latest casualty of an increasingly anti-DEI climate fostered by President Donald Trump and conservative Texas leaders, which has jeopardized programs designed to counter decades of unequal access to education and wealth.
UT spokesperson Mike Rosen confirmed that Senate Bill 17, a 2023 anti-DEI Texas law, prevents the university from accepting such scholarships because a provision that prohibits any “special benefit” conferred based on race, sexual orientation or gender.
But the law does not apply to the alumni-group Texas Exes, which has worked with Acosta since March 2025 and had sent him an agreement for a named scholarship to be awarded to a doctoral student in pharmacology or toxicology from a “diverse or underrepresented background.”
A Texas Exes spokesperson declined to comment. The board has not adopted an official policy on accepting — or denying — new race-based scholarships. The nonprofit still offers dozens of specialty scholarships, including some based on race, region, interests, sexuality, academic interest and network membership, according to its website.
Although conservative politicians say diversity, equity and inclusion practices illegally discriminate against white individuals, Kell Simon, an employment lawyer who specializes in anti-discrimination law, said there is no legal reason he knows of that would block the Texas Exes from accepting the scholarship.
The Trump administration has made diversity, equity and inclusion, a “boogeyman,” in part through executive orders that declare the practices “illegal,” Simon said. But Simon’s office fields almost no hiring complaints related to such practices, he said.
“In my line of work, I do not see DEI policies or practices hurting anybody,” Simon said. “From a legal perspective, it’s nothing more than an ideology. I don’t think there’s any law that would say, ‘No, you can’t establish a scholarship.’”
‘It all unraveled’
The percentage of Hispanic faculty at UT has increased in the last decade and currently sits at 10.5%, exceeding the national average and other research public universities of comparable size. Hispanic people are now the largest demographic group in Texas, making up more than 40% of its population and roughly one-third of Austin's population.
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A photo of the UT tower is displayed in the home office of Daniel Acosta, former UT Pharmacy professor, in his home in Central Austin on Monday, Jan 5, 2026. Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman |
Four UT System institutions were founding members of the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities in 2022, promising to grow opportunities for Hispanic students and scholars. UT received the Seal of Excelencia, a designation awarded nationally for an institution’s commitment to Hispanic students, in 2020, 2021 and 2023, but it was not recertified after the university took steps to comply with Texas’s anti-DEI law.
“Back then diversity was a good word,” said Acosta. “Now, it’s a bad one.”
Acosta and DEI proponents say faculty and the student body should reflect the population of Texas, and he worries that the College of Pharmacy’s majority-white faculty composition will discourage future scholars like himself from seeing themselves in the field.
Wanting to help with his own resources, Acosta approached the college more than four years ago about a scholarship for Hispanic doctoral students who wanted to continue as professors at UT. He already had established a graduate fellowship fund at UT’s College of Pharmacy to help fund travel for research and wanted a new initiative specifically to improve faculty diversity.
He said the college was initially enthusiastic about the idea. While Acosta planned to contribute $40,000 to the endowment, he said the College of Pharmacy told him the school found private donors to fund the last $60,000, believing in his vision of a more diverse faculty.
The college did not respond to requests for comment on the $60,000, but emails reviewed by the Statesman show that officials were in communication with Acosta over several years.
In 2024, Acosta said, he and the college were ready to sign an agreement with UT.
“That’s when it all unraveled,” he said.
SB 17 — pitched as a bill to end DEI in hiring, programs and offices — took effect Jan. 1, 2024. In implementing its measures, officials froze or changed at least 131 scholarships across UT System and Texas A&M University System institutions, which could no longer have race or gender criteria, the Dallas Morning News reported.
But the law only impacted public universities, not nonprofits. The Texas Exes, which administers $4.6 million in scholarships at UT each year, held meetings with Acosta and drafted an agreement to accept his endowment with diversity as part of the criteria, Acosta said. Emails between the Texas Exes and Acosta support that account.
At their first meeting in March 2025, still nervous about the scholarship’s future, he drafted questions to ensure the nonprofit could accept his funds and diversity requirements without fear of repercussions. Acosta said he was reassured.
“Texas Exes was our savior,” he said.
At that time, Texas conservatives urged universities to follow the letter and “spirit” of SB 17 in letters and posts on X. Some threatened presidents’ jobs and the funding of their institutions if schools were out of compliance with the law. The pressure campaign intensified nationally when Trump returned to the White House last January, seeking to end DEI practices in one of his first executive actions.
Although Acosta received an agreement from Texas Exes over the summer, he did not hear from them for several months. Multiple emails show Acosta going back and forth with Texas Exes officials over the details before then. In late November, College of Pharmacy officials asked to meet with him.
“I thought I was signing the papers,” he said. But instead, the officials told Acosta that Texas Exes was taking a break from accepting new race-based scholarships, and his proposal would not proceed, Acosta said.
“They’re scared,” he said. “They didn’t know what to do.”
What UT will miss
Simon says DEI practices and diversity scholarships are “entirely legal,” despite increasing political pressure to end them and the fall of affirmative action, which applies to how race is used in college admissions. But Texas Exes isn’t alone in avoiding DEI-related activities. A December Pro-Publica report found that more than 1,000 nonprofits erased language from diversity, equity and inclusion in their tax filings this year, presumably to avoid unwanted scrutiny or attention.
MORE: ‘This was politics’: How UT slashing its DEI programs crushed careers, halted a life’s work
Liliana Garces, a UT professor who studies educational inequities and policy, said all students benefit from a diversity of perspectives, and a diverse faculty body helps bring students of color “a sense of belonging for their experiences and validation.” In studying the impact of SB 17 on Texas, she has seen “more restrictive” compliance standards than what the law mandates, such as removing mention of race at all.
But the resulting color-blind policies ignore discrimination, she said, and result in “entrenching discrimination as opposed to addressing it.”
“We’ve grown up in a society that is entrenched by so many different barriers to opportunity on the basis of race, and these are policies that help address those differential opportunities for students so that they can come and be more fully included in our campus and be able to contribute,” Garces said. “And what we know from decades of research is that when we have those very different perspectives and backgrounds and experiences in the classroom is that it enriches everyone’s education.”
Acosta ultimately decided to fold his donation into his current endowment funding that supports travel for any college of pharmacy PhD student, having already donated half of his pledge and unsure if and when his diversity focused scholarship would be considered.
“I’m holding out hope that it won’t be permanent,” Acosta said about the pause. He still counts himself a “Loyal Longhorn,” his home office complete with a photograph of the lit-up UT Tower.
Acosta thinks of young people like himself, who are just starting out, but facing more barriers than he did as tuition and selectivity in higher education admissions increases. He thinks of them asking, “It’s there a place for me? Is it still the same way it was 50 years ago? Shall I even try?”
“I’d like to think we can do better and encourage young people,” Acosta said. “That’s my hope.”
Lily Kepner started at the American-Statesman in October 2023. She has appeared on BBC, NPR and Texas Standard to talk about her coverage, which has spanned the impact of state laws and politics on the University of Texas, pro-Palestinian protests, free speech, the anti-DEI ban, LGBTQ student belonging and more. Kepner graduated with honors from Boston University's College of Communication in 2023, where she received the college's highest awards for writing and journalism leadership and led the award-winning student newspaper as Editor-in-Chief. In her time with the American-Statesman, she contributed to reporting that won an Edward R Murrow Award for breaking news, won the School Bell Award for Outstanding Feature from Texas State Teachers Association, and Critics Choice for Best of Austin in the Austin Chronicle. Previously, she has been published in USA Today, The Boston Globe, The National Catholic Reporter and GBH. Kepner is passionate about accountability and service journalism and encourages anyone to reach out to her to tell their story or share a tip.
