The UT System’s New ‘Controversial Topics’ Policy Is About Policing Knowledge
When politically appointed regents and administrators determine which topics are “germane,” academic freedom quietly shifts into political compliance.
n a recent classroom conversation, a student asked whether it was still “allowed” to talk about immigration policy in relation to Texas history. He did not ask because the topic was abstract. He asked because his family lives at the center of it.
That question should concern all of us.
The University of Texas System’s new policy limiting the discussion of “controversial topics” is being framed as a safeguard—an effort to restore “trust,” ensure “balance,” and prevent faculty from engaging in advocacy. But beneath that language lies something far more troubling: a restructuring of who gets to decide what counts as legitimate knowledge.
And in Texas, that decision is not neutral.
Calls for “both sides” and “non-advocacy” may sound reasonable on the surface. For generations, women of color have shown that “neutrality” is often a way to police whose stories matter and whose expertise counts. Knowledge rooted in lived experience is repeatedly framed as political, while dominant perspectives are treated as universal.
When faculty are told to avoid “controversial” material not explicitly listed in a syllabus, who decides what qualifies? When politically appointed regents and administrators—not disciplinary experts—determine which topics are “germane,” academic freedom quietly shifts into political compliance.
We have seen this pattern before.
Scholarship that challenges white supremacy, colonialism, or state violence is labeled as divisive. Programs rooted in Indigenous, Latinx, and Black knowledge are consolidated, put under review, or dismantled. The result is not balance—it is containment. And nowhere is this containment more stark than in the erasure of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies.
In the UT system nearly 46 percent of the population is Latino. And where Latino students are the majority in public schools, calling the histories, literatures, and political realities of these communities “controversial” is not about neutrality. It is about deciding whose knowledge is expendable.
You cannot teach Texas history honestly without confronting conquest, segregation, labor exploitation, border regimes, and racialized policymaking. You cannot “balance” away genocide or dispossession. To pretend otherwise is not rigor—it is refusal.
But perhaps the most troubling defense of this policy is the claim that it protects students.
On the other hand, feminism teaches us something different: Silence is the tool of the oppressor.
Our students are not encountering these issues for the first time in a classroom. They are living them. Immigration raids do not pause because a syllabus avoids the topic. Gender violence does not disappear because a professor is told to “remain neutral.” Racism, economic precarity, and state surveillance shape students’ daily lives long before they ever raise a hand in class.
To label the conditions of students’ lives as “controversial” is to tell them their realities are inconvenient. That their truths are risky. That power—not integrity—decides what can be named.
That is not care. That is control.
And it raises a deeper, more difficult question—one we can no longer avoid: Do we continue to fight for our stories to be included in the curriculum at UT System institutions that repeatedly prove themselves hostile toward Indigenous, Latinx, and Black communities? Or do we take this moment to reimagine higher education outside of white supremacy?
What if, instead of fighting to be included in an exclusionary system, we shifted our emphasis from institutional approval to the power of collective consciousness shared among us? What if the work before us is not simply reform, but refusal?
Chicana feminism has always understood that liberation does not come from proximity to power, but from transforming how knowledge is produced, shared, and lived. It asks us not only how institutions exclude us, but how we might begin to unlink—physically and spiritually—from colonial logics altogether.
Audre Lorde reminded us that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Texas higher education is showing us, once again, the limits of trying to dismantle white supremacy from within institutions built to preserve it.
So perhaps the question is not only how we defend academic freedom inside universities like UT—but how we build spaces of critical consciousness beyond them.
We already have blueprints. Martha Cotera, a Chicana/o civil rights activist, showed us what it looks like to create our own intellectual homes when institutions refuse to hold us. In Austin, that legacy lives in projects like Jacinto Treviño College—a reminder that higher education does not have to be tethered to colonial governance, political surveillance, or white validation to be rigorous, transformative, and rooted in community.
Public universities may continue to hollow themselves out—incrementally, bureaucratically, and quietly. But our knowledge does not disappear when institutions turn away from it.
It migrates. It reorganizes. It builds elsewhere.
What is being labeled “controversial” today is the very knowledge Texas will need to survive tomorrow. Whether universities choose to honor that responsibility—or abandon it—communities will continue doing what they have always done: creating spaces where truth is not feared, but cultivated.
The question is no longer whether higher education can be saved as it is.
The question is whether we are ready to imagine—and build—what comes next.
María Del Carmen Unda is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas. Her research examines education policymaking and access in K–12 schools through higher education, with a focus on the experiences of students of color.
