Christian Nationalism Captures Higher Education, or, On Mandatorily Managing the Mystery of the Maker, Parts One and Two, by Joshua Gunn

Friends:

I want to call readers’ attention to this provocative and important two-part essay by UT-Austin Professor Joshua Gunn in The Higher Ed Advocate, both posted below. Densely documented with links to primary documents, investigative reporting, scholarship, and the institutions’ own materials, Gunn raises questions about the transformation of Texas higher education that deserve serious public scrutiny. 

In Part One, he examines changes in the language and governance of Texas public universities, drawing particular attention to terms appearing in official UT and UT System documents—academic “integrity,” “stewardship,” “solemn covenant,” “sacred space,” “spirit of grace,” and related formulations—and argues that their cumulative significance looks different when situated within the broader political ascendancy of Christian nationalism. The language itself is not in dispute: UT Austin’s Texas Statement on Academic Integrity describes the classroom as a “sacred space” and invokes a “spirit of grace,” while the UT System’s 2026 teaching policy describes teaching as a “solemn covenant” between faculty and students. 

In Part Two, Gunn moves from rhetoric to institutional development, examining the Civitas Institute and School of Civic Leadership and the political and financial forces surrounding their emergence. That history is significant: Civitas was initially established with $12 million in state and UT System funding following documented involvement by political leaders and conservative donors, the Regents created the School of Civic Leadership in 2023, and in 2025 committed another $100 million for its permanent home.

The public should be concerned not because conservative scholars, religious scholars, or people of faith have no place in public universities—they unquestionably do. Pluralism requires their presence, too. 

The concern arises when governmental power, university governance, major private wealth, and particular ideological or religious projects begin converging in ways that can determine which fields flourish, which departments disappear, which subjects become “controversial,” which forms of knowledge receive extraordinary institutional investment, and which become administratively vulnerable. That is a fundamentally different question from whether conservative ideas deserve a hearing. They do. 

The question is whether a public university remains a genuinely pluralistic institution when the state itself increasingly participates in deciding which ideas, histories, and intellectual traditions merit institutional protection and amplification.

Read together, Gunn’s essays therefore raise a larger and more consequential question of institutional capture: Who gets to determine what counts as legitimate knowledge, which histories universities teach, which questions professors may safely ask, and ultimately what kind of citizen public education is intended to produce? I encourage readers to read Part One and Part Two for themselves, follow Gunn’s many links, examine the underlying documents, and reach their own conclusions about what these developments mean for academic freedom, church-state boundaries, shared governance, and the democratic purposes of public education.

And there is one final connection we should not miss. The University of Texas System is governed by nine regents who are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Texas Senate, serving staggered six-year terms. University governance can therefore seem distant from electoral politics, but it is not. Who Texans elect determines who appoints the people who govern our public universities—and who confirms those appointments. 

Gubernatorial and state Senate elections are higher-education elections, too. Elections matter, my friends.

-Angela Valenzuela

The Vanderbilt Report and the Manufacture of Suspicion Toward the Humanities, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Vanderbilt Report and the Manufacture of Suspicion Toward the Humanities

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 25, 2026

View Report Here.

The controversy over the Vanderbilt/Washington University report on the humanities (Boghossian et al., 2026) should concern all of us who care about higher education, academic freedom, and the democratic purpose of universities. Presented as a sober defense of rigor, objectivity, and scholarly standards, the report has instead become a flashpoint in the larger struggle over who gets to define legitimate knowledge in the academy (luckyuston@gmail.com, 2026). 

At a time when humanities departments, ethnic studies, gender studies, and other justice-oriented fields are already under political attack, the report risks doing more than diagnosing a problem. It risks furnishing a vocabulary for administrative scrutiny, budgetary austerity, and ideological policing.

This is why Dwight A. McBride’s (2026) critique is so important. He asks us to consider whether the report’s anxiety about “politicized” scholarship is really anxiety about a changing academy—one in which women, scholars of color, queer scholars, Indigenous scholars, and scholars from historically excluded communities are asking questions that earlier generations either ignored or suppressed.

The irony is also evident to me in light of a face-to-face conversation I once had with Dr. Randy Diehl, a former dean of the University of Texas College of Liberal Arts. He shared that he regarded much of the work in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies as cutting-edge—a characterization that, in my view, extends equally to African American and African Diaspora Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. These are precisely the critical humanities fields now under attack. My, how things have changed.

In any case, McBride’s central question is clarifying: what if the academy did not become less scholarly when it became more diverse? What if it became more intellectually honest because new scholars brought new archives, new methods, new communities, and new moral urgencies into view (McBride, 2026)?

The report appears to rely on a nostalgic idea of the university as a place where knowledge once existed above politics, untouched by power. But that imagined university was never neutral. It was a university structured by exclusion—by who was admitted, who was hired, whose work was cited, whose languages counted, whose communities were studied, and whose experiences were dismissed as particular, emotional, or political. Fields such as Black studies, ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and postcolonial studies did not emerge as departures from scholarship. They emerged because scholarship had failed to ask whole categories of questions about power, empire, race, gender, labor, sexuality, land, and inequality.

To cast these fields as inherently suspect because they engage social justice is to confuse subject matter with scholarly failure. There is poor scholarship in every field, including fields that describe themselves as neutral, empirical, classical, or objective. But serious inquiry into racism, colonialism, sexism, inequality, or state violence is not automatically activism masquerading as scholarship. Often, it is simply scholarship refusing to avert its gaze.

The danger is not merely intellectual. The report is addressed to university leaders, and it arrives in a political climate where administrators and governing boards are already being pressured to discipline faculty, reorganize departments, restrict curriculum, and eliminate programs deemed too critical or too “political.” This is especially alarming in states like Texas and Florida, where anti-DEI laws, attacks on shared governance, and efforts to narrow the curriculum have already reshaped higher education. In such a context, even a report that claims to oppose external political interference can become useful to those who seek precisely that interference.

A report on the humanities that truly centered rigor would begin with humility. It would ask whether its own evidence is sufficient for its claims. It would engage the scholars and fields it criticizes in good faith. It would distinguish between advocacy, public scholarship, community accountability, and poor method. It would recognize that the humanities have always been contested because meaning, memory, culture, language, and history are themselves contested terrains.

Instead, the Vanderbilt/Washington University report risks laundering a political anxiety through the language of standards. It treats the diversification of questions as a decline in quality. It treats scholarship attentive to power as evidence of ideological capture. It treats the old exclusions of the academy as if they were signs of intellectual purity.

The humanities do not need to be rescued from scholars who study justice. They need to be protected from those who mistake justice-oriented inquiry for intellectual corruption. The real crisis is not that the humanities have become too political. The real crisis is that, at the very moment when democracy needs deeper historical memory, ethical imagination, cultural understanding, and critical thought, powerful actors are working to narrow what can be studied, taught, funded, and known.

That is why this report matters. Not because it settles anything, but because it reveals the terms of the struggle before us. The question is not whether scholarship should be rigorous. Of course it should. The question is who gets to decide what rigor means—and whether rigor will be used to deepen democratic inquiry or to silence the very fields that have helped us understand democracy’s unfinished promises.

References

Boghossian, P., Appiah, K. A., Fine, K., Henrich, J., Fleming, K. E., Merchant, J., Morson, G. S., Rosen, G., Rubin, A., & Wilentz, S. (2026, April 5). Report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2026/06/State-of-Scholarship_Report_Final.pdf

luckyuston@gmail.com. (2026, June 11). The Vanderbilt report: A flashpoint in the battle for the humanities, Chronicle Beat. https://chroniclebeat.com/the-vanderbilt-report-a-flashpoint-in-the-battle-for-the-humanities/

McBride, D. A. (2026, June 15). The question haunting that humanities report,  Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/06/15/question-haunting-vanderbiltwash-u-report-opinion

The Courage to Imagine Anew: Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and the Defense of Higher Learning, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Courage to Imagine Anew: Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and the Defense of Higher Learning

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

October 29, 2025

In these uncertain times, I find myself returning to the classics—not for comfort, but for clarity. They remind me that turmoil is not new, that every age must wrestle with its own angels and demons. As an English literature major and Spanish minor, I learned to live among these voices of the past and to listen for the echoes of our present in their words.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1968) is one such companion. Written in the wake of England’s failed republican experiment—after the execution of King Charles I, through the brief, flickering hope of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and on the threshold of the restoration of the Stuart monarchy—it speaks to the ache of disillusionment and the stubborn endurance of faith. An anguished Milton wrote in the ruins of a republic that had promised liberty but delivered repression.

The poem’s power lies not just in its Biblical scope but in its political imagination: a meditation on what happens when institutions of knowledge, justice, and conscience are corrupted by ambition and fear. Satan’s rebellion against Heaven becomes a haunting allegory for power unmoored from morality—a warning about how even noble ideals can be twisted into tyranny when pride replaces principle.

We are living through a similar unraveling. Across the United States, and acutely here in Texas, the assault on higher education feels like a slow-motion reenactment of Milton’s epic fall. Legislation like Senate Bill 17 and Senate Bill 37 strip universities of their moral and intellectual autonomy—erasing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and eliminating faculty governance under the guise of “neutrality.” In truth, these policies are not about neutrality at all; they are about control. They mirror Satan’s own delusion in Paradise Lost: the belief that power justifies itself, that domination can masquerade as Divine order.

The recent waves of faculty dismissals in Texas, the silencing of critical inquiry, censorship campaigns, and the hollow rhetoric of “viewpoint diversity”—about which I have blogged (Valenzuela, 2025)—all echo Milton’s vision of a paradise undone by deceit. Yet Milton also reminds us that knowledge cannot be banished, nor truth extinguished; even in exile, the spirit of inquiry endures. It is in that spirit that we must resist—not with despair, but with the steadfast conviction that education itself is an act of freedom.

Our universities—once sanctuaries, however imperfect—for the free exchange of ideas are being recast as instruments of ideological conformity. Project 2025, with its blueprint for dismantling public institutions, bears the same logic as Milton’s fallen angels—an architecture of chaos disguised as reform, where destruction is framed as renewal and submission is sold as freedom.

And yet Paradise Lost does not end in despair, but in a quiet, hard-won grace—one that I encourage us to lean into. When Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, they do not turn against one another or the world that has cast them out; instead, they walk hand in hand, “through Eden took their solitary way.” Their loss is real and profound, but so is their potential. Exile becomes not an ending, but the beginning of a new human story:

“Some natural tears they dropp’d, but wip’d them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.” — Paradise Lost, Book XII

In that moment, Milton reminds us that exile can also be the beginning of resistance—that even as institutions crumble, new communities of conscience can rise. We, too, walk that road now. As scholars, educators, and citizens, our task is not only to lament the loss of paradise but to rebuild it—to reclaim the moral and intellectual commons that sustain democracy itself.

What is at stake in this moment is more than academic freedom—it is the survival of an educated democracy. Across states and systems, educators are rising to defend the university as a public good, not a partisan instrument. The broader defense of education is, at its heart, a defense of truth, inquiry, and the capacity for moral imagination. Like Milton, we must see beyond the ruins toward the possibility of renewal, for if paradise is lost through arrogance and deceit, it is restored through wisdom, solidarity, and an expansive vision of what a good and virtuous education can be.

In doing so, we walk in the footsteps of Milton—across centuries of struggle and renewal—and honor his enduring question: not whether paradise can be restored, but whether we have the courage to imagine it anew. For the record, whoever said a Humanities or Liberal Arts degree is esoteric—or that our Western literary canon is worthless? Hardly so, even as its exclusivity has remained an issue. It has always been about survival—about learning to think, to write, to question, and to dream our way through the darkness of despair toward the light of freedom.

In times such as these, when truth itself is politicized and education reduced to utility, the humanistic tradition reminds us that freedom begins in the mind—and that imagination, not ideology, is the truest measure of a free and open society.

References

Milton, J. (1968). Paradise lost & paradise regained, Signet.

Valenzuela, A. (2025, Aug. 26). The fight for higher education: A minority perspective on both the liberal University and President Michael Roth. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas.