Silence Has a Sound: Texas' SB 37, the End of Shared Governance, and the Structured Diminishment of Voice, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Silence Has a Sound: Texas' SB 37, the End of Shared Governance, and the Structured Diminishment of Voice

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 23, 2026

What if the 1963 song, “The Sounds of Silence” authored by Paul Simon and that he & Art Garfunkel sang is not only existential loneliness, but the quiet cultural condition that makes authoritarianism possible? Or might it not reflect dystopian futurity under American fascism about which Katharine Stewart writes in her New York Times best-selling book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (2025)?

I encourage you to listen to the song here. 

Listen here. 

While Paul Simon did not explicitly write the song as a critique of fascism, critical theorists—from Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt to Herbert Marcuse—have long warned that domination often advances not only through coercion, but through conformity, passivity, and the erosion of meaningful dialogue about which Simon indeed wrote.

In this vein, Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/2002) theorize how mass culture can dull critical consciousness, producing compliance rather than critique. Arendt (1951) reminds us that authoritarianism thrives where public discourse collapses and individuals retreat into isolation. 

Read in this light, the song’s haunting refrain—“people talking without speaking, people hearing without listening”—evokes not just alienation, but a hollowing out of democratic life itself. 

It has a sound. It surfaces in whispers and half-spoken cautions, in the careful recalibration of what can be said and where, in meetings where voices once carried authority but now trail off into procedural quiet. It lingers in the pauses before someone decides whether it is safe to speak, in the substitution of clarity with ambiguity, critique with compliance. It hums beneath the surface of institutional life—not loud enough to name, but present enough to shape behavior.

It's not like scholars and people, in general, have nothing to say. It's that the conditions for saying it have been quietly rearranged. It is the sound of knowledge narrowed, of questions deferred, of dissent rerouted into safer channels. It is not the spectacle of repression that defines it, but its subtlety. 

And once you learn to hear it, it is everywhere.

Contemporary scholars extend this diagnosis into our present moment. Brown (2019) argues that neoliberalism hollows out democratic institutions from within, converting them into instruments of market and political control. Henry Giroux (2022) describes the rise of “authoritarian neoliberalism,” where higher education becomes a key site for disciplining thought and narrowing dissent. He argues for critical analyses of the current, politicized context of education and the need for a collective pedagogy of resistance with social justice, freedom, and democracy as its goals.

Fraser (2019) similarly points to the entanglement of economic, political, and cultural crises that destabilize democratic publics, making them more vulnerable to reactionary capture. Building on Fraser, Stewart, outlines the history and processes of the current moment, naming it "reactionary nihilism." Together, these scholars help us see that silence is not merely absence—it is produced, structured, and weaponized.

In Texas, this “silence” is no longer metaphorical—it is being institutionalized. Under SB 37, faculty senates—the historic vehicles of shared governance—have been stripped of meaningful authority or eliminated altogether, consolidating decision-making power in governing boards and political appointees. This restructuring represents more than administrative change; it marks a profound shift in the governance of knowledge, where faculty expertise is subordinated to political oversight. 

At the same time, the law expands top-down control over curriculum, enabling the rejection, restructuring, or defunding of programs deemed ideologically suspect—developments that dovetail with ongoing efforts to marginalize or eliminate Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and related fields.

As Marcuse (1964) warned in One-Dimensional Man, advanced systems of control do not always silence through overt repression; they produce conditions in which dissent becomes increasingly difficult to articulate, let alone sustain. 

From this vantage point, the “sounds of silence” becomes newly legible as a political condition: not simply the absence of speech, but the structured diminishment of voice. It is the quieting of faculty governance, the narrowing of permissible knowledge, and the normalization of a system in which critique is not dramatically crushed, but procedurally sidelined.

This interpretation may exceed the original intent of the song’s authors. But as with much enduring art, its meaning expands in relation to historical context. In our present moment, the “sounds of silence” is not just something we hear—it is something being built.

We are not without power, however, beginning with the vote. Lest we all get turned into their not-so-grand vision of "one dimensional man"—as Iowa, per yesterday's blog, wants to do—let's run all these power players, these anti-democratic incumbents, out of office. And let's not vote new ones in.

Sí, se puede! Yes, we can!

References

Arendt, H. (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. Harcourt, Brace & Company.

Brown, W. (2019). In the ruins of neoliberalism: The rise of antidemocratic politics in the West. Columbia University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/brow19384

Fraser, N. (2019). The old is dying and the new cannot be born: From progressive neoliberalism to Trump and beyond. Verso.

Giroux, H. A. (2022). Pedagogy of resistance: Against manufactured ignorance. Bloomsbury Academic.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments (G. S. Noerr, Ed.; E. Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1944)

Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Beacon Press.

Stewart, K. (2025). Money, lies, and God: Inside the movement to destroy American democracy. Bloomsbury.

Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism

This merits a close read.  Lies in totalitarian regimes like the one that Trump envisions (we're still a democracy so far, thankfully) function to exercise complete control over followers.  Specifically, the lies function 

"...as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity."

This smacks as a form of psychological entrapment.  Author Michiko Katutani cites Levey who expresses the following.

"Arendt and others recognized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless.” "

It's called "gaslighting" today and insidiously,

"The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end---is being destroyed." (my italics)

"[B]y which we take our bearings in the real word," sounds terribly yucky to me.  Sometimes, that's all we got, our bearings.  And for that to get unmoored as the outcome of a specific intention to make this happen, to intentionally manipulate people—is downright evil.  The master of deception must get called out at this very moment, because that is what it is.  Deception—that by definition, is never as it seems.  And can even be the brightest star in the sky.

Let's call it what it is, my friends.  This is an evil spirit abounding that threatens to consume the whole.  We're not only better than that, mis querid@s.  

We are not that.  This way of knowing and being in the world is not of this land. 

Palabra!

Thanks to Dr. Teresa Cordova for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

#AbyaYala #TenemosMemoria #ResistenciaIndigena #madretierra #TurtleIsland #PachaMama
Hannah Arendt Explains How Propaganda Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Morality: Insights from The Origins of Totalitarianism  
January 24th, 2017
By Michiko Kakutani

 Image by Bernd Schwabe, via Wikimedia Commons 

At least when I was in grade school, we learned the very basics of how the Third Reich came to power in the early 1930s. Paramilitary gangs terrorizing the opposition, the incompetence and opportunism of German conservatives, the Reichstag Fire. And we learned about the critical importance of propaganda, the deliberate misinforming of the public in order to sway opinions en masse and achieve popular support (or at least the appearance of it). While Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels purged Jewish and leftist artists and writers, he built a massive media infrastructure that played, writes PBS, “probably the most important role in creating an atmosphere in Germany that made it possible for the Nazis to commit terrible atrocities against Jews, homosexuals, and other minorities.” 

 How did the minority party of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the German people so thoroughly that they would allow and participate in mass murder? Post-war scholars of totalitarianism like Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt asked that question over and over, for several decades afterward. Their earliest studies on the subject looked at two sides of the equation. Adorno contributed to a massive volume of social psychology called The Authoritarian Personality, which studied individuals predisposed to the appeals of totalitarianism. He invented what he called the F-Scale (“F” for “fascism”), one of several measures he used to theorize the Authoritarian Personality Type.

Arendt, on the other hand, looked closely at the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and their functionaries, at the ideology of scientific racism, and at the mechanism of propaganda in fostering “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member... is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders.” So she wrote in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, going on to elaborate that this “mixture of gullibility and cynicism... is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements": 

 In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. 

Why the constant, often blatant lying? For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics”---writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy---including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is.... Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.” 

 Arendt and others recognized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless.” She also recognized the function of an avalanche of lies to render a populace powerless to resist, the phenomenon we now refer to as “gaslighting”: 

 The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end---is being destroyed. 

 The epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, “from fellow traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.” 

“We too,” writes Jeffrey Isaacs at The Washington Post, “live in dark times"---an allusion to another of Arendt’s sobering analyses—“even if they are different and perhaps less dark.” Arendt wrote Origins of Totalitarianism from research and observations gathered during the 1940s, a very specific historical period. Nonetheless the book, Isaacs remarks, “raises a set of fundamental questions about how tyranny can arise and the dangerous forms of inhumanity to which it can lead.” Arendt's analysis of propaganda and the function of lies seems particularly relevant at this moment. The kinds of blatant lies she wrote of might become so commonplace as to become banal. We might begin to think they are an irrelevant sideshow. This, she suggests, would be a mistake.

Schenkkan's "Building the Wall" and the Middleman Minority Phenomenon

This Robert Schenkkan play, "Building the Wall," just got this rave review by theater critic Charles McNulty (see below) in the Los Angeles Times.  It appears to be captivating folks across the country by imagining the absolute worst in a dystopian portrayal of extreme, morally wrong immigration policy that showed recently in Los Angeles.

It shows in Austin at the University of Texas between Aug. 30-Sept. 10th. You can get pertinent information and a link to tickets here.

From what I can gather, the play sounds like a vivid nightmare I once had my first year in college.  I had been reading and learning about the horrific Japanese internment experience here in the U.S. and I dreamed that the government would do to us Mexicans what it did to the Japanese.   

The already tens of thousands experiencing roundups and deportations have already been living this nightmare—and with a ferociousness against Mexican immigrants. But my dream and this play is about everybody else, including people like myself who literally don't have anywhere else "to go back to."   I encourage you to read Dr. Roberto Rodriguez, in his Diverse Issues in Higher Education piece titled, "Mexican American or Mexican Mexicano?" It addresses the complexities of citizenship—actually, second-class citizenship—for Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and people of color, generally.

As Mexicans and Mexican Americans, we are not only home, but in our ancestral home as Tejan@s in Texas and in the Southwest, generally.  Even if our genes traveled around the globe, our people never left the continent.  We have always been here.  We supersede the very notion of "citizenship" itself, a modern construct, like "nation-state," "border," "Texas," "United States," and "race."

I gather that "Building the Wall" is a good play for considering the oppressor-oppressed relationship, both its psychology and the role of what scholarship and theorizing in sociology refers to as the "middleman [sic] minority" phenomenon. These are the colonized, minority "agents of empire," that further function symbolically to legitimate it.  Structurally, as the middle people in a class and racial hierarchy, they have a stake in the existing arrangementas direct beneficiaries.  A psychological aspect of this is termed in scholarship as either "internalized racism" or "internalized oppression" that I have written about in my own work.  

Internalized oppression occurs when minority group members come to adopt and hold those same prejudices and attitudes that the dominant group holds toward their own group to the point that they despise the "Mexican-ness" within themselves.  They drink the Kool-Aid.  They buy into the pejorative, socially-constructed myths about them, their people, and their kind. 

McNulty and the play itself wants us to consider the slippery policy slope that plummets us into a dark, immoral abyss that threatens an ultimately self-destructive cultural shift to "a banality of evil," as the late philosopher Hannah Arendt hypothesized in her controversial book, widely regarded as a journalistic triumph, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Two more related reflections.  First, I saw the War for the Planet of the Apes (2017 film) recently and "Donkey," himself a "colonized ape," becomes a brutal oppressor, doing humans' bidding toward other apes held in captivity.  And my how he oppresses them with impunity! 

Cesar, the apes’ beloved leader, openly wonders what, if anything, may be “left to save” with the likes of Donkey should the liberation of all apes occur. After all, Donkey shares a deep investment along with the dominant group in the current societal arrangements that further constructs Cesar and his "ilk" as "radicals" and "troublemakers."

I'll not give any more of this movie away that I encourage you to see, but Donkey is a perfect example of the oppressor, middleman minority.  What's important to remember here is that these are ordinary, bureaucratic roles within an otherwise highly-stratified, hierarchy and occupational structure.  In a sense, Donkey was "better off" than the rest, but his status was equally tenuous relative to his imprisoned counterparts in the long shadow of what is arguably a "bureaucracy of genocide," in Arendt's view (e.g.,  (see Bilsky, 2015).  Second, I am reading the famous text authored by Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning in Spanish (El Hombre en Busca De Sentido).  He comments on the middlemen minorities there that he refers to as the “Kapos” at Auschwitz and other camps who carried out the Nazi's genocidal work in exchange for unlimited alcohol and saving their own skins, at least for awhile…  The parallels in all of this are striking and so I had to share.  I would like to see this provocative play when it comes to UT.  It already offers a lot of food for thought.


Angela Valenzuela

c/s

Review Robert Schenkkan's 'Building the Wall,' set in Trump's America, imagines the unimaginable


Charles McNulty / May 20, 2017Theater Critic

How does darkness overtake a nation? The philosopher Hannah Arendt took up the subject in her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” which investigated the mystery of how ordinary Germans transformed into murderous Nazis.

The face of evil, Arendt discovered, wasn’t a demon lurking in the cellar but the factory supervisor in the nice house across the street. Those carrying out the orders that led to the extermination of millions of Jews along with other marginalized groups became part of the bureaucracy of genocide. This startling and still controversial insight — that the Holocaust was executed not by sadists but by conformist clerks and self-interested middle managers — inspired the famous subtitle of Arendt’s book: “A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

Robert Schenkkan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“The Kentucky Cycle”) who co-wrote the screenplay for “Hacksaw Ridge,” has a new play that explores the concept of the banality of evil in our own backyard. “Building the Wall,” which opened Saturday at the Fountain Theatre, imagines the unimaginable happening in Trump’s America.

In a program note, Schenkkan acknowledges a debt to Gitta Sereny’s “Into That Darkness.” He describes her book as “an attempt to understand the bleakest of the Nazi horrors by focusing on one ordinary man who, for a brief moment, found himself with unlimited power.”

The parallels with “Building the Wall” are clear, but the play was written expressly in response to what Schenkkan sees as the threats posed by Trump’s dangerous rhetoric and his reopening of the “authoritarian playbook,” which calls for the creation of “a constant state of crisis” and the scapegoating of “minorities with appeals to nationalism, racism and isolationism.”

The crisis in the background of this two-character play, directed with unflagging concentration by Michael Michetti, is an incident in Times Square that “irradiated” two square blocks and allowed Trump to impose martial law. The year is 2019, but “near future” might be a more accurate delineation for this terrifyingly plausible work of dystopian fiction.

Bo Foxworth, who appeared in last fall’s South Coast Repertory production of “All the Way,” Schenkkan’s Tony Award-winning drama about Lyndon B. Johnson, plays Rick, the supervisor of a private prison who has been arrested and placed in solitary confinement for crimes that take some time to be revealed. Judith Moreland portrays Gloria, an African American history professor who talks with Rick in a chilly prison meeting room (conjured in all its generic menace by set designer Se Oh). She wants to understand what motivated his actions, and in return she’ll give him an opportunity to tell his side of the story.

The play, which arrives at the Fountain in the first stop in a series of productions set to open across the country as part of the National New Play Network’s rolling world premiere program, unfolds as a conversation between a liberal professor who happens to be a black woman and a Trump supporter who can’t understand why white Christians can’t defend their identity too. The two sniff each other out, challenging ideological assumptions while finding unexpected points of connection, but Schenkkan is less interested in the psychological dance between these characters than in the events that put Rick behind bars.

It may not seem entirely credible that Rick would divulge to a stranger with antithetical political views the dark secrets he tried to keep from his wife, but Schenkkan’s writing rarely hits a false note. Rick’s confession, centering on the detention of immigrants whose legal status is in dispute, builds steadily to a terrifying climax.

The play connects the violent sentiments of political rallies with policies that find an opportunity when chaos strikes the nation. The ratcheting up of the war against terrorism permits the rounding up of immigrants, which leads to the practical problem of how to hold a swelling population that can’t entirely be repatriated. Rick, in charge of one of the detention centers, is beset with managerial problems that become human catastrophes. Harrowing descriptions of the sanitation emergency are soon eclipsed by the graphic misery of the cholera epidemic that breaks out.

The situation only degenerates from there. Step by step, Schenkkan gets us to see the way the collapse of institutions leads to the collapse of morality and the rule of law. “Building the Wall” conjures what appears to be a worst-case scenario, though who would dare presume to know what the worst-case scenario even is anymore?

The acting in this 90-minute, intermission-less production is scrupulously well observed. Moreland, delivering a magnificent performance, finds subtle ways to convey the weight of Gloria’s conscience. The character is obviously a first-class academic, but she’s hardly dispassionate. Her experience as a target of hateful prejudice informs her research.

More to the dramatic point, the depth of Gloria’s responsiveness helps her to understand political views diametrically opposed to her own. She may wince at the faults in Rick’s reasoning, but she recognizes his alienation and powerlessness.

Foxworth neither sentimentalizes nor demonizes Rick, who recounts with blasted neutrality the path from his hardscrabble youth as military brat to his patriotic enlisting in the Army after Sept. 11 to his seduction as a veteran by Trump’s law-and-order message.

Rick isn’t by nature a bad man, but that doesn’t exculpate him of the atrocities committed on his watch. As a character, he may be the incarnation of an idea in a carefully arranged dramatic argument, but Foxworth personalizes the figure just enough for us to believe in his existence — and to wonder about the extent of his complicity.

“Building the Wall,” which would benefit from a touch more variety in the writing, stays on top of the headlines with mentions of Trump’s blocked travel bans and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ favorable stand on federal use of private prisons. Schenkkan will likely have to do some tinkering to keep the play up to date in future productions. But there’s no denying that this dramatic object lesson is expertly laid out.

Even a lapse at the end into rhetoric, when Rick incongruously stutters into academic speech (“What is a wall? It’s a, a construct, a, a device, for keeping people out”), cannot mar the effectiveness of this expedited theatrical construction. “Building the Wall” should be seen and shuddered over, if only to heighten our collective vigilance.

The theater historically has provided a forum for citizens to contemplate the agonizing issues of the day, and it’s heartening to see Schenkkan and the Fountain respond with such celerity to present dangers.

Copyright © 2017, Los Angeles Times