Follow the Trustees: ACTA and the Quiet Reengineering of American Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Follow the Trustees: ACTA and the Quiet Reengineering of American Higher Education

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

September 7, 2026

Some of the most consequential changes taking place in American higher education are not the ones that make the biggest headlines. We tend to notice censorship, legislative restrictions on teaching, attacks on tenure, or the elimination of academic programs because these are highly visible. Yet universities can also be transformed much more quietly through changes in governance, funding, accreditation, presidential selection, program review, and decisions about which areas of study deserve institutional investment.

This quieter form of change deserves much more attention.

Historian Nancy MacLean helps us see why in her important AAUP report, The American Council of Trustees and Alumni: A Little-Known Driver of the Attacks on Academic Freedom and Shared Governance. Her focus is the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, or ACTA, an organization founded in 1995 that describes itself as an advocate for academic excellence, freedom, accountability, and responsible institutional governance.

MacLean (2025), however, asks us to look beyond those stated principles and examine how ACTA has sought to translate its ideas into institutional power. 

Central to that strategy are university governing boards. As she observes, ACTA has operated for decades on the premise that “Trustees are the key to changing public higher education” (p. 2).

That is worth sitting with.

Trustees certainly have legitimate responsibilities. Governing boards possess significant legal and fiduciary authority, and universities need responsible oversight. But universities are not ordinary corporations or state agencies. Their central work involves teaching, research, curriculum, peer review, and the creation and evaluation of knowledge. Those activities depend upon forms of disciplinary and professional expertise that trustees, legislators, donors, and administrators do not necessarily possess simply by virtue of holding institutional authority.

The AAUP recognized this distinction decades ago in its Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. The statement affirms the authority of governing boards while also stressing the central role of faculty in academic matters. Particularly striking today is its expectation that boards exercise “appropriate self-limitation” (American Association of University Professors [AAUP], 1966).

I keep returning to that phrase, "appropriate self-limitation."

It expresses something increasingly important in contemporary higher education. Having the legal authority to intervene in an academic matter is not the same thing as having the intellectual or disciplinary expertise to make that decision wisely. A governing board may technically possess considerable power, but the health of a university depends in part on knowing when not to exercise it.

This is where the issue becomes larger than university governance itself. What we are witnessing is also a struggle over the governance of knowledge.

Decisions about governance determine far more than organizational charts. They affect which disciplines grow, which programs are consolidated, which faculty positions are created, which areas receive donor support, which curricular requirements students encounter, and which forms of scholarship are regarded as central—or marginal—to the mission of the university.

A university does not necessarily have to ban a book or prohibit a theory to reshape its intellectual landscape. It can accomplish a great deal through budgets, faculty lines, organizational restructuring, curricular requirements, presidential appointments, accreditation standards, and definitions of institutional “excellence.”

In this sense, governance decisions eventually become knowledge decisions.

One of the most useful aspects of MacLean’s report is that she does not treat ACTA as an isolated organization. She places it within a wider conservative policy infrastructure, including ACTA’s advisory role in Project 2025 and its relationship to the State Policy Network. As recently as summer 2026, SPN continued to identify ACTA among its national partners.

Source: Bennett, Guide for Progressives: Project 2025

Isaac Kamola’s (2024) research provides an important complement to MacLean’s analysis. Kamola documented 155 bills introduced between 2021 and 2023 that targeted various dimensions of academic freedom and university autonomy and traced many of them to a larger network of conservative and libertarian policy organizations.

This broader perspective matters because it suggests that we may be looking at contemporary attacks on higher education too narrowly when we examine each controversy separately. The story is not simply one governor, one legislature, one board of regents, or one university. What deserves examination is the policy ecosystem through which ideas, money, personnel, model legislation, donor priorities, institutional strategies, and governing philosophies circulate.

Ideas become much more powerful when they acquire institutions.

That brings us directly to Texas.

In March 2025, ACTA announced that the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Civic Leadership had joined its Oases of Excellence network. At first glance, that might seem like little more than recognition of an academic program ACTA admires. But ACTA describes its Oases initiative in considerably more ambitious terms. It encourages alumni and donors to support these programs as a means of changing university culture “from the inside.”

That language deserves attention, particularly given what has happened since.

On September 24, 2026, ACTA and UT Austin’s School of Civic Leadership are scheduled to jointly host an event on religious freedom. The gathering will feature ACTA’s National Commission on American History and Civic Education and introduce A Broadside for the Nation, an initiative calling upon colleges and universities to require undergraduate coursework in American history or government. School of Civic Leadership Dean Justin Dyer and ACTA president Michael Poliakoff are scheduled to introduce the program.

Event landing page.

None of this means that ACTA “controls” the School of Civic Leadership. The evidence does not support such a claim, and collaboration between a university and an outside organization should not automatically be treated as suspicious. After all, universities work routinely with foundations, professional associations, civic groups, think tanks, institutes, philanthropists, and advocacy organizations across the ideological spectrum.

But neither should the relationship go unnoticed.

What began as ACTA recognition of the School of Civic Leadership through its Oases network has developed into an active institutional relationship around civic education and curricular priorities. Given the broader political environment surrounding higher education in Texas, that relationship deserves public awareness and scrutiny.

The institutional context makes it all the more significant.

Recent Texas Tribune reporting found that the School of Civic Leadership and the Civitas Institute had, or were expected to have, 42 tenured or tenure-track faculty members by August 2026 "nearly triple the 15 positions lawmakers proposed requiring"—against the backdrop of it first Civics Honors cohort last year of 103 students (also see UT News, 2025). 

During roughly the same period, UT consolidated seven College of Liberal Arts departments, including Mexican American and Latino Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, into two new academic units. Priest (2026) reported that some staff associated with these areas were terminated or reassigned, while finding no evidence of wholesale faculty dismissals.

I want to be careful here. The available evidence does not establish that the growth of the School of Civic Leadership caused the consolidation of Ethnic and Gender Studies. That causal claim would go beyond what we know.

But the juxtaposition raises a different and entirely legitimate question: What are UT Austin’s institutional priorities?

That question becomes especially important when we consider where substantial new investment is flowing.

A $10 million National Endowment for the Humanities grant supports 16 additional faculty positions connected to new Great Books and Strategy & Statecraft programs. The Great Books program emphasizes texts associated with Western civilization, while Strategy & Statecraft focuses on diplomatic and military history and preparation related to national security (University of Texas at Austin, 2026a).

An additional $12.5 million in philanthropic funding established the Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization and the Rosenthal-Levy Scholars program. Dean Dyer described this initiative as bringing Jewish civilization and modern Israel into the “core” of the school’s educational vision (University of Texas at Austin, 2026b). The School of Civic Leadership is also extending its reach beyond the university through a $1.8 million federal grant supporting three years of professional development for K–12 teachers in Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston centered on what the school describes as the American civic tradition.

There is nothing inherently objectionable about Great Books, Western civilization, constitutional government, Jewish intellectual traditions, religious liberty, American political history, diplomacy, or statecraft. These are entirely legitimate fields of study, and a great university should be capable of supporting serious scholarship in all of them.

My concern is not their existence.

It is the asymmetry.

If intellectual pluralism is an important enough principle to justify substantial investment in programs centered on Western civilization, then intellectual pluralism must also protect Mexican American and Latino Studies. 

If interdisciplinarity justifies the establishment and rapid growth of a School of Civic Leadership, that same logic should apply to African American and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies, American Studies, and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies.

And if academic freedom protects conservative intellectual inquiry—and it absolutely should—then it must protect with equal vigor scholarship examining racism, colonialism, gender, inequality, migration, empire, sexuality, and state power.

Otherwise, what we are defending is not academic freedom as a principle. We are defending academic freedom selectively, depending on which knowledge happens to be favored.

That is precisely why MacLean’s work is so useful. It encourages us to pay closer attention to governance itself. When trying to understand how higher education is being reshaped, we need to examine the following:

• who sits on governing boards, 
• how trustees are educated about their roles, 
• how presidential searches are conducted, 
• where donor money is flowing, 
• how accreditation is being imagined and reimagined, and 
• how supposedly neutral concepts such as “accountability,” “efficiency,” “consolidation,” “intellectual diversity,” “institutional neutrality,” “excellence,” and “civic education” become embedded in policy and institutional practice.

This is not conspiracy thinking. Quite the opposite. It is a call for careful empirical inquiry.

Words such as accountability and excellence are not inherently ideological. Neither are civic education or institutional neutrality. The question is what these concepts come to mean when they are translated into actual institutional decisions. Who benefits from a particular definition of excellence? Which programs gain resources? Which lose autonomy? What gets consolidated in the name of efficiency? Whose perspectives are recognized as evidence of viewpoint diversity? Who decides what counts as neutral?

Those are questions worth asking at any public university, regardless of the political orientation of the people involved.

Trustees, legislators, donors, presidents, faculty members, students, alumni, advocacy organizations, taxpayers, and citizens all have legitimate interests in public higher education. Public universities should be accountable to the societies that sustain them.

But accountability is not the same thing as political control over intellectual life.

That distinction is crucial.

What concerns me most is the possibility that authority is being redistributed in ways that increasingly allow some actors to determine which knowledge receives faculty lines, financial support, curricular standing, institutional legitimacy, and ultimately the opportunity to survive.

By the time a struggle over knowledge becomes publicly visible as the disappearance of a department or a controversy over curriculum, much of the consequential work may already have taken place elsewhere—in boardrooms, budgets, donor relationships, accreditation debates, organizational restructurings, presidential searches, and legislative networks.

That is perhaps MacLean’s most important lesson.

If we want to understand what is happening to higher education, we need to follow the governance.

And here in Texas, we have particularly good reason to do so.

Eyes wide open as the question I believe we should keep asking is a simple one as it reaches to the heart of the matter: Who is governing knowledge—and toward what end?

References

American Association of University Professors. (1966). Statement on government of colleges and universities. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and

American Council of Trustees and Alumni. (2025, March 12). Three programs join ACTA’s Oases of Excellence network, ACTA. https://www.goacta.org/2025/03/three-programs-join-actas-oases-of-excellence-network/

American Council of Trustees and Alumni. (2026). All possess alike liberty of conscience: Guarding our heritage of religious freedom. https://www.goacta.org/event/all-possess-alike-liberty-of-conscience/

Bennett, B. (2024, July 8). A Guide for Progressives on How to Brand Project 2025. https://navigatorresearch.org/a-guide-for-progressives-on-how-to-brand-project-2025/

Kamola, I. (2024). Manufacturing backlash: Right-wing think tanks and legislative attacks on higher education, 2021–2023. American Association of University Professors. [pdf]

MacLean, N. (2025, February 25). The American Council of Trustees and Alumni: A little-known driver of the attacks on academic freedom and shared governance (Action Report No. 4). Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, American Association of University Professors. https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/ActionReport4_ACTA.pdf

Priest, J. (2026, August 13). UT-Austin overhauling core classes but hasn’t detailed how new center relates to the courses. The Texas Tribune. https://www.kut.org/education/2026-08-14/ut-austin-overhauling-core-classes-but-hasnt-detailed-how-new-center-relates-to-the-courses

UT News. (2025, Sept. 22). School of Civic Leadership Welcomes First Cohort of Future Leaders. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2025/09/22/school-of-civic-leadership-welcomes-first-cohort-of-future-leaders/

University of Texas at Austin. (2025, May 8). Board of Regents invests $100 million in UT’s School of Civic Leadership. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2025/05/08/board-of-regents-invests-100-million-in-uts-school-of-civic-leadership/

University of Texas at Austin. (2026a, January 16). UT to launch new Strategy and Statecraft, Great Books majors with NEH grant. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2026/01/16/ut-to-launch-new-strategy-and-statecraft-great-books-majors-with-neh-grant/

University of Texas at Austin. (2026b, January 27). UT launches Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization, Rosenthal-Levy Scholars. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2026/01/27/ut-launches-ackerman-program-on-jewish-and-western-civilization-rosenthal-levy-scholars/

Who Gets to Control the University Curriculum? What's Shaping Up at the University of Iowa and Ohio University, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Who Gets to Control the University Curriculum? What's Shaping Up at the University of Iowa and Ohio University

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

August 15, 2026

University of Iowa—Main Campus

There is a development at the University of Iowa that deserves far more national attention.

The issue is not simply that the university now has a Center for Intellectual Freedom. Universities create centers all the time, including centers devoted to particular schools of thought, political traditions, and areas of intellectual inquiry.

What makes this one different is where its authority comes from and where that authority resides.

The Iowa legislature created the Center for Intellectual Freedom by law as an independent academic center under the Iowa Board of Regents. Its director reports directly to the Board of Regents rather than through the university's ordinary channels of academic leadership and governance. The director also has exclusive authority over hiring and termination within the center (Iowa General Assembly, 2025; University of Iowa, 2026).

And the state's involvement does not stop there.

Beginning with students entering in academic years on or after July 1, 2028, Iowa law requires University of Iowa undergraduates, with specified exceptions, to complete at least six credit hours in designated coursework. At the University of Iowa, the Center for Intellectual Freedom is designated as the sole academic unit responsible for offering courses that satisfy that requirement (Iowa General Assembly, 2026). 

That is not merely another educational experiment.

It represents a significant relocation of curricular power.

Universities have always been places of intellectual disagreement. Indeed, that is part of their purpose. Faculty argue over theories, methods, canons, requirements, evidence, and what constitutes an educated person. Departments disagree. Disciplines change. Students encounter ideas that excite them, unsettle them, and sometimes anger them.

But historically, those arguments have occurred primarily within the academic institution—through faculty deliberation, curriculum committees, departments, colleges, disciplinary standards, and systems of shared governance.

Iowa is moving that boundary.

The state is not simply asking universities to expose students to a wider range of ideas. It has created an academic entity through legislation, placed it under unusual governance arrangements, and guaranteed that entity a privileged position in the undergraduate curriculum.

That distinction matters.

One can strongly support intellectual pluralism—and I certainly do—while still questioning whether legislatures should determine which academic units every undergraduate must encounter in order to receive a degree.

In fact, these positions are entirely compatible.

Genuine intellectual freedom requires argument, experimentation, disagreement, dissent, and intellectual risk. It also requires institutions with sufficient independence to prevent political authorities from determining which intellectual traditions deserve institutional preference.

And Iowa is not alone.

Look at What Is Happening in Ohio.

The mechanism in Ohio is different, but the underlying shift in authority is strikingly similar.

Ohio's 2025 higher education legislation requires public universities to incorporate a state-defined conception of “intellectual diversity” into areas that reach deeply into academic decision-making. At Ohio University, institutional policy implementing the law now applies intellectual-diversity considerations to course approval, approval of general-education courses, student course evaluations, common-reading programs, departmental strategic goals, annual reviews, and student learning outcomes (Ohio Rev. Code § 3345.0217, 2025; Ohio University, 2026).

Consider the significance of that.

The state is no longer simply funding higher education, establishing broad degree requirements, or holding public institutions fiscally accountable. It has introduced a politically defined concept into the processes by which universities determine what courses should exist, what belongs in general education, how departments establish goals, and even how teaching and learning are evaluated.

Ohio law defines “intellectual diversity” in relation to differing perspectives on public-policy questions and separately identifies politically controversial matters such as climate policy, elections, foreign policy, DEI, immigration, marriage, and abortion (Ohio Rev. Code § 3345.0217, 2025).

Ohio has gone further still.

State law requires public universities to develop a three-credit American civic literacy course for students seeking bachelor's degrees. The legislature specifies substantial elements of what students must study, including the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail, writings of Adam Smith, and the American economic system and capitalism. Students must also pass a cumulative examination assessing proficiency in the prescribed materials. Institutional trustees must approve the course plan, and the state chancellor reviews the plan and may require revisions (Ohio Rev. Code § 3345.382, 2025; Ohio University, 2025).

Again, my concern is not with teaching these texts.

Students should read the Constitution. They should read the Federalist Papers and the Declaration of Independence. They should read Adam Smith and Martin Luther King Jr. They should encounter competing interpretations of democracy, capitalism, equality, freedom, citizenship, and government.

The problem is not the presence of these ideas.

It is the changing answer to the question: Who decides?

At Iowa, the state has effectively constructed a new curricular lane and directed students into it.

In Ohio, the state has moved into the rules governing the curricular road itself.

Different mechanisms. Similar direction of travel.

Both developments blur an important boundary between legitimate public oversight of public universities and direct political involvement in academic judgment.

That boundary exists for a reason.

The longstanding principles of shared governance hold that faculty bear primary responsibility for curriculum, subject matter, methods of instruction, and degree requirements precisely because these are areas requiring academic expertise and disciplinary judgment. The AAUP has argued for decades that governing boards possess important institutional responsibilities but should overturn faculty academic judgment only under exceptional circumstances (American Association of University Professors [AAUP], 1966). More recently, the AAUP has warned that the erosion of institutional autonomy and shared governance can enable governments and governing boards to exercise increasing control over academic decisions (AAUP, 2026).

This does not mean universities should be unaccountable.

Public universities are public institutions. Legislatures appropriate money. Governing boards have fiduciary responsibilities. The public has every right to demand educational quality, fiscal stewardship, transparency, and accessibility.

But public accountability and political control of knowledge are not the same thing.

And that distinction is becoming increasingly important.

The vocabulary surrounding these interventions can make the shift difficult to see.

“Intellectual freedom.”

“Viewpoint diversity.”

“Civic education.”

“Accountability.”

“Excellence.”

Each refers to something that can be genuinely valuable.

But words can also change political function.

We witness in this moment, for example, the appropriation of broadly appealing democratic language in ways that can obscure a transfer of power occurring underneath it.

Freedom begins to mean something different when the state determines where students must go to receive it.

Diversity means something different when government defines the categories through which intellectual diversity is to be measured.

And institutional autonomy begins to mean very little when outside political bodies increasingly determine which forms of knowledge receive special standing, which criteria govern course approval, and which content students must encounter.

This is not an argument against conservative scholarship, constitutional studies, Western thought, civic education, or any particular intellectual tradition.

Quite the opposite.

A university worthy of the name should be capable of accommodating—and encouraging—serious disagreements among liberal, conservative, radical, religious, secular, nationalist, internationalist, and other intellectual traditions.

But pluralism created through intellectual inquiry is different from pluralism engineered through political authority.

That difference is at the heart of what is unfolding.

And the story extends well beyond Iowa and Ohio.

For readers seeking a deeper understanding of how seemingly separate state-level interventions fit into a broader political strategy, I highly recommend Isaac Kamola’s (2024) Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023. Published by the AAUP, this important report traces the political infrastructure behind the wave of legislation targeting higher education and shows how think tanks, advocacy organizations, model legislation, and state lawmakers have worked across state lines to transform debates over DEI, academic freedom, tenure, governance, and curriculum into a coordinated legislative agenda. 

What can appear, when viewed state by state, as a series of isolated controversies looks quite different when the larger architecture is brought into view. Kamola’s analysis helps us see that Iowa, Ohio, Texas, Florida, and other states should not necessarily be understood as disconnected cases, but as sites where related ideas, legislative strategies, and political networks are being translated into policy (Kamola, 2024).

In Texas, Florida, and other states, political authorities have been altering governance structures, restricting or restructuring academic programs, regulating DEI, modifying tenure and faculty oversight, imposing curricular requirements, and redistributing authority among faculty, administrators, governing boards, and legislatures.

The particulars differ.

The larger question does not.

The struggle over American higher education is increasingly becoming a struggle over the machinery of knowledge itself: who controls academic institutions, who determines what counts as legitimate knowledge, which fields receive resources and protection, what students must learn, and who gets the final word when academics and political authorities disagree.

That is why Iowa and Ohio deserve our attention. Texas universities and other states, obviously, too—and about which I have blogged substantially.

The most important debate may ultimately not be whether our universities contain enough liberal ideas or conservative ideas.

It may be about something more fundamental:

Who gets to decide what a university is for—and who gets to control what happens inside its classrooms?

References

American Association of University Professors. (1966). Statement on government of colleges and universities. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and

American Association of University Professors. (2026, July). Extorted compliance: A threat to institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and shared governance. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/extorted-compliance-threat-institutional

Iowa General Assembly. (2025). House File 437: Center for Intellectual Freedom Act. https://www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/LGE/91/HF437.pdf

Kamola, I. (2024). Manufacturing backlash: Right-wing think tanks and legislative attacks on higher education, 2021–2023. American Association of University Professors. https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Manufacturing_Backlash_final_0.pdf

Ohio Rev. Code § 3345.0217 (2025). https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-3345.0217

Ohio Rev. Code § 3345.382 (2025). https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-3345.382

Ohio University. (2025). Report—American Civic Literacy Course Work Group.
https://www.ohio.edu/provost/projects-initiatives/advance-ohio-higher-education-work-groups/american-civics-literacy-0

Ohio University. (2026). Advance Ohio Higher Education Act compliance (Policy 18.010). https://www.ohio.edu/policy/18-010

University of Iowa. (2026, June 22). Director, Center for Intellectual Freedom (Requisition No. 75977) [Job posting]. https://jobs.uiowa.edu/faculty/view/75977

The Playbook Behind the “University Wars”—And Why It Fails on Purpose, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Playbook Behind the “University Wars”—And Why It Fails on Purpose

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Oct. 15, 2025

ILLUSTRATION BY GABRIELLA TRUJILLO

Before reading any further, take a few minutes to read the entirety of Kathryn Joyce’s eye-popping, brilliant investigative story, "The New College Gambit: The right-wing takeover of Florida's public honors college blurs the line between tragedy and farce, but attack on universities are about to get worse." It was published close to a year ago in In These Times on December 9, 2024. For your convenience, I post it below.

It is essential reading for anyone trying to understand what’s happening to higher education today. As covered in an earlier blog, it's also prescient, forecasting New College's massive decline in ranking from 76th to 135th in only two years since its takeover. 

Joyce’s reporting is meticulous, her narrative gripping, and her insights chilling. The story of the right-wing extremist takeover of New College of Florida reads like a case study in how to dismantle a public institution under the guise of “reform.”

What’s happening at New College isn’t an isolated meltdown. It’s a template. 

Start by dissolving or neutering faculty senates and concentrating power in presidential offices and partisan boards. Replace peer governance with top-down directives, and call it “reform.” Then rebrand the language of coercion as virtue, referring to it as "patriotic education," "intellectual diversity," or "institutional neutrality." This right-wing campaign weaves together speeches, op-eds, think-tank memos, policy statements, and book launches into a chorus of coordinated narratives

But the real engine of the story predates today’s culture warriors not the least of which has involved decades of a systematic defunding of higher education. Starve public higher education long enough, drive up tuition, "adjunctify" the faculty, and alienate the public—then arrive with a cure that looks suspiciously like more control and less education. What’s being sold as reform deepens the very decay it claims to cure.

Here’s the twist: even on their own terms, the new products don’t sell. As former New College professor Matt Lepinski put it, there’s no student demand for courses taught by extremists. The spectacle may grab headlines, but it doesn’t fill classrooms. Meanwhile, students lose mentors, degree paths wobble, and programs evaporate. The result is a university less capable of serving anyone—left, right, or center.

And perhaps that’s the point. As Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, observes in his May, 2024, report, failure can be the strategy. If you’re funded by people who want government to fail, then governing badly is success. In that frame, the destruction of a particular college isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It’s a deliberate step in a larger campaign to turn higher education into a patronage system—advancing loyalists, purging critics, and sidelining the public mission.

Starting to sound familiar? I hope not. But if the pattern feels eerily recognizable, it’s because the same logic is at work: dismantle trust, centralize control, and call it reform. The question, as always, is whether we’ll recognize it in time to stop it.

Consider the enrollment theater at New College: rapid recruitment of athletes as a quick way to boost headcount while cutting the academic core. This is diversity and inclusion as optics, not education. It’s also expensive, which brings us to a basic civic truth: we all pay taxes. Public universities are funded by the public. They exist to advance the public good. When governance collapses into factional control, taxpayers of every stripe—conservative, moderate, progressive—subsidize a campus that delivers less scholarship, less freedom, and fewer real opportunities.

Language matters here. The euphemisms—intellectual diversity, viewpoint balance, freedom institutes—mask a transfer of power from scholarly communities to political appointees. Strip away the branding and the structure looks familiar: it’s right-wing patronage with a campus mailing address.

So where does this leave us? For starters, there is abundant clarity. What was marketed as a renaissance is, in practice, a consolidation—of authority, budgets, and narrative. It also offers a stark warning: a system that treats dysfunction as a governing strategy will inevitably reproduce itself—unless it is confronted by organized resistance. 

It also reminds us, in the soberest of ways, that public higher education remains a public good—a cornerstone of democratic life. Most students aren’t looking for political theater; they want rigorous teaching, stable programs, meaningful credentials, and campuses where they can think freely without being drafted into someone else’s culture war.

The antidote isn’t nostalgia; it’s action leading to structural repair. We must restore shared governance; secure transparent, adequate public funding; protect academic freedom and tenure rights across the spectrum; and measure success by growth, timely completion, and meaningful student learning, not by how efficiently a board can silence a department. Even if a single campus can be “captured,” the public doesn’t have to underwrite a model built to fail.

The irony is hard to miss: even many conservatives don’t want what this model is selling. They want rigorous degrees, credible programs, and professors who teach—not propagandists who pose as educators. In that gap between the sales pitch and reality lies the opening for a different story—one in which universities serve democracy itself, not a faction; where education strengthens the public good rather than partisan power; and where language like “freedom,” “inclusion,” and “excellence” carries real meaning.

Manufactured Rage Against DEI as an Affront to Academic Freedom, University of Michigan, March 13, 2025

Manufactured Rage Against DEI as an Affront to Academic Freedom, University of Michigan, March 13, 2025

On March 13, 2025, the University of Michigan hosted a timely and urgent conversation with Dr. Isaac Kamola, Associate Professor of Political Science at Trinity College and author of Manufacturing Backlash: Right-Wing Think Tanks and Legislative Attacks on Higher Education, 2021–2023 and Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War. I include the video of his excellent presentation below that is complemented with equally excellent commentary by seasoned scholars and administrators who pushed back decisively, reminding us that it is the backlash—not DEI—that poses the real danger. 

Again, the video is a must-see. Very enlightening and very well done.

Kamola’s work exposes how today’s outrage against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives is not a spontaneous groundswell, but a strategically engineered campaign—fueled by dark money, media distortion, and political opportunism—to erode public trust in higher education.

At the heart of this manufactured backlash is a false narrative: that DEI threatens free speech and academic freedom. I does not. These orchestrated attacks aim not only to dismantle DEI efforts, but also to silence critical inquiry and maintain entrenched hierarchies of race, gender, and power.

What emerged was a shared call to reframe the conversation entirely. We must reject the false binary between DEI and academic freedom. Defending DEI is defending academic freedom. And both are essential to the public mission of the university. I can earnestly say that this is how we have treated it in our struggles here in Texas as detailed in a recent publication titled, Disrupting Colonial Logics: Transformational Resistance Against SB 17 and the Dismantling of DEI in Texas Higher Education (Valenzuela, Unda, & Mena Bernal, 2025).

Kamola put it plainly: this isn’t just about DEI or free speech—it’s about power. Who gets to speak? Who gets heard? And who benefits when institutions of higher learning become ideological battlegrounds?

In response, the charge is clear: our resistance must be collective, courageous, and rooted in long-standing struggles for educational justice. We must forge collaborative strategies within and beyond the university—building solidarity, sharing resources, and reclaiming higher education as a space for critical thought, democratic values, and public good.

The culture war is not about culture—it’s about control. And the stakes for the future of higher education could not be higher.

-Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Valenzuela, A., Unda, M. D. C., & Mena Bernal, J. (2025). Disrupting colonial logics: Transformational resistance against SB 17 and the dismantling of DEI in Texas higher education. Ethnic Studies Pedagogies, 1(1), [pp. 7-24]. https://www.ethnicstudiespedagogies.org/gallery/Volume3-Issue1-Final.pdf

Manufactured Rage Against DEI as an Affront to Academic Freedom

University of Michigan