by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
May 22, 2026
There are moments when symbolic action captures the truth of a political moment more powerfully than any policy memo, hearing, or institutional statement ever could.
The UT Funeral for Academic Freedom, held on this week on May 20, 2026 of the UT System Board of Regents meeting, was one such moment.
I recorded five videos on my iPhone that day, each documenting a different part of this powerful public action. Together, they offer record of grief, protest, analysis, and collective witness in response to the ongoing attacks on faculty governance, academic freedom, Ethnic Studies, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the broader intellectual life of the public university.
There is, indeed, a great deal to grieve in the current moment.
Hats off to Students Engaged in Advancing Texas (SEAT) for organizing and carrying out these horse-drawn carriage funerals in three Texas cities: first at Texas Tech University, second at The University of Texas at Austin, and third at the University of North Texas in Denton. These are striking, disciplined, and morally clear actions—ones that make visible the stakes of what is being lost when political power seeks to discipline knowledge, silence dissent, and restructure universities from above.
Below are the five videos I recorded from the UT event.
The first video captures the solemnity and symbolism of the funeral procession itself. The horse-drawn carriage made visible what too many institutional actors continue to obscure: academic freedom is not an abstract principle. It is foundational—together with faculty governance and tenure rights and protections. It is a living condition of democratic education. When it is weakened, faculty lose the ability to teach and research honestly, students lose access to critical knowledge, and the public loses one of its most important democratic institutions.
Video 2: Mourning What Is Being Taken
Do listen to SEAT co-founder and leader Cameron Samuels’ eloquent eulogy, delivered before the horse-drawn carriage, as faculty and students place banned books into the hearse alongside the urn of ashes symbolizing the death of academic freedom. It is a haunting and powerful moment—one that captures both the sorrow and moral clarity of this public action. The ritual makes visible what too many official statements obscure: when books are banned, expertise is discredited, and faculty are politically constrained, the university’s democratic purpose itself is placed in jeopardy.
Video 3: Students, Faculty, and Community in Public Witness
Students, faculty, staff, and community members gathered to insist that the university belongs to the people—not to political appointees, donors, ideologues, or governing boards that disregard the expertise and labor of those who make the university what it is.
I also underscored an important point: we do not indoctrinate. Indoctrination presupposes a closed system—an echo chamber in which one only hears, repeats, and promotes what already exists within it. That is the opposite of what teaching requires. Indoctrination is anathema to the work that we do in the classroom.
Video 4: Dr. Nic Ramos on the Attack on Expertise
This point cannot be overstated. What is unfolding in Texas higher education is not merely a disagreement over administrative structure or campus policy. It is part of a broader campaign to delegitimize the knowledge, judgment, and professional authority of faculty—particularly those whose research and teaching address race, gender, colonialism, inequality, public memory, and democratic accountability.
Dr. Ramos makes the insightful point that Copernicus, who claimed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, would not be able to teach at UT Austin under such conditions because of how radical that perspective was in its own time, pushing real academic boundaries of thought that our university system rejects.
It is a vivid and memorable metaphor. “Soup” suggests something pre-digested, blended together, and easy to consume. “Steak,” by contrast, requires students to chew, wrestle, question, and develop their own intellectual strength.
Video 5: The Press Conference
The fifth and final video is the 45-minute press conference, where I and others offered public statements about the significance of this moment. The press conference brought together multiple voices, each speaking to the harms already underway and the urgent need for organized resistance.
We spoke in defense of academic freedom, shared governance, Mexican American and Latino Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and the democratic purpose of public higher education. We also spoke against the normalization of political interference in curriculum, faculty governance, and the intellectual life of the university.
This is a time for clarity. We must refuse the language of “efficiency,” “restructuring,” "balancing," "consolidation," and “compliance” when these terms mask deeper efforts to narrow the scope of knowledge and weaken democratic participation inside Texas public institutions.
The funeral was symbolic, yes—but it was also diagnostic. It named the bankrupt logic of policies that seek to silence, erase, intimidate, and control. At the same time, the gathering itself was evidence that academic freedom is not dead so long as students, faculty, staff, and communities continue to organize in its defense.
I am grateful to SEAT, AAUP-UT Austin, Austin SDS, the Latino Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, Texas AFT, the Texas Association for Mexican American Chambers of Commerce, and all allied organizations and individuals who continue to show up in this struggle. The work ahead is immense, but this action reminded us that grief can become testimony, testimony can become organizing, and organizing can become power.
Academic freedom is worth defending—not as a privilege of educators, but as a public good.
And in Texas, the struggle continues.
