National scholars of Latino studies protest elimination of the department at UT Austin, K-UT News

Friends:

Glad this rally took place yesterday at the National Latina/x/o Studies Association (LSA) meeting that is taking place currently. News of consolidation is shocking to folks coming from other campuses, a number of whom wouldn't be where they are professionally had it not been for UT Austin's Department of Mexican American and Latino Studies.

David Vazquez framed the site as a cornerstone of the profession, stressing the collective duty to preserve it. As conference participant, Professor Suhey Vega underscores, forcing these communities together creates a system in which they must compete—often with one another—for limited funding, a dynamic that is both unjust and counterproductive. 

In this light, consolidation is not merely administrative efficiency; it becomes a mechanism that redistributes scarcity downward, compelling historically marginalized fields to struggle against each other for survival rather than enabling them to collectively advance knowledge and equity.

We have no other option than to continue protesting this vigorously.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.


National scholars of Latino studies protest elimination of the department at UT Austin

KUT 90.5 | By Greta Díaz González Vázquez
Published March 27, 2026 at 12:01 PM CDT

UT professor Karma Chávez said faculty members were asked to review their curriculum and what majors will be offered in the future. Patricia Lim-K-UT News

As the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies (MALS) department at UT Austin is set to disappear, scholars from all over the country attended the national Latina/x/o Studies Association (LSA) meeting on campus this week. Researchers held a rally on Thursday outside the conference to protest changes at the College of Liberal Arts.

“This place is one of the places that is the origin points of our profession,” said David Vazquez, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and the president of LSA. “We need to be here to protect this place.”

In February, UT President Jim Davis announced seven departments, including ethnic and gender studies departments, would be consolidated into two newly created departments and said academic courses would be reviewed.

Since the announcement, UT officials have not shared any further details with the community about the consolidation. But Karma Chávez, a professor in the MALS department, says faculty have been tasked with reviewing the current majors and proposing what majors will be offered in the future.

Suhey Vega, a professor at Arizona State University, where a similar consolidation happened in 2008, says eliminating the autonomy of areas of study comes with long-lasting consequences.

“It's important to realize that in joining these communities together, especially by force, you're creating a system in which they have to fight, sometimes with each other, for funding, and that is ridiculous and unfair,” Vega said.

Vega, who grew up in Texas, said it was important for her to attend the conference to demand that Tejano history is known in the state.

Vazquez, the LSA president, said the conference was held at UT Austin to honor the history and significance its programs have had for Latino studies, and to express solidarity with faculty and students. He said over 600 academics registered for the conference, and over 700 research proposals were submitted, making it one of the biggest Latino studies conferences in the country.

Latino studies at UT began in the 1970s with the creation of the Center for Mexican American Studies. It was born out of community pressure to have a program that reflected Latina/o/x and Chicana/o/x experiences.

Since then it’s been the academic home of internationally renowned scholars, like one of the first border researchers, Américo Paredes, and Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa. MALS was created in 2014 and is now the only department in Texas and one of a few in the country to offer a Ph.D. in Latino studies.

When the consolidation was announced, Davis said UT is committed to ensuring every student has access to a balanced educational experience.

Julie Minich, a professor in UT's English department, said faculty have tried engaging with university officials to show that the work at MALS comes from a diverse point of view, but have not received a positive response.

“Efforts to justify this have been minimal because there are no justifications,” Minich said. “Eliminating our departments and telling their students that their presence at this university is not wanted tells the 40% of Latino population of the state of Texas that the public flagship [university] is not for them.”

KUT News reached out to UT Austin for comment and has not heard back.

Nikole Hannah-Jones Comes to UT Austin: History, Democracy, and the Next Generation of Truth-Tellers

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Tomorrow evening at 5:30 PM at the Bass Lecture Hall located at the LBJ School for Public Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin will host one of the most influential journalists and public intellectuals of our time. Nikole Hannah-Jones will speak at Bass Lecture Hall, bringing her powerful voice on history, democracy, and racial justice to campus at a moment when these conversations feel more urgent than ever.

Hannah-Jones is best known for creating The 1619 Project, the landmark initiative published by The New York Times that reframed the story of the United States by centering the legacy of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans to the nation’s democratic ideals. For this work, she received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020, helping spark a national conversation about history, memory, and the meaning of democracy itself.

Notably, the book associated with this project—The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story—holds a unique and troubling distinction in Texas. Under Texas Senate Bill 3, it is the only specific book referenced in statute language as material that cannot be used to fulfill curriculum requirements in Texas public schools.

At a time when books are being challenged, curricula scrutinized, and honest discussions of race and history increasingly politicized, Hannah-Jones has remained steadfast in her commitment to rigorous historical inquiry and public dialogue. Her work reminds us that democracy depends not on comfortable myths, but on our willingness to confront the past honestly.

Tomorrow’s event will also feature two powerful voices from our own community.

Joining Hannah-Jones is Cameron Samuels, a youth leader and master’s student at the LBJ School of Public Affairs whose advocacy for intellectual freedom and student rights has resonated nationally. Samuels represents a generation of young organizers who understand that the fight over knowledge—what can be taught, read, and debated—is inseparable from the future of democracy.

Also participating is Karma Chávez, chair of the Mexican American and Latino Studies Program at UT Austin and a leading scholar whose work examines migration, social movements, and rhetorical strategies of resistance. Chávez’s scholarship reminds us that the struggles over voice, belonging, and justice have always been deeply connected to the power of narrative.

Together, these three speakers—together with Jonathan Friedman of PEN America as their moderator—represent something important: the intersection of journalism, scholarship, and youth activism in the ongoing struggle over how we tell the story of this country.

Events like this matter. Universities should be places where difficult histories can be explored, debated, and understood—not silenced. They are spaces where students encounter ideas that challenge them to think more deeply about the society they inhabit and the future they hope to build.

If you are in Austin, consider attending. Conversations about democracy, truth, and historical memory are not abstract academic exercises—they are part of the living work of citizenship.

And tomorrow evening, that conversation will unfold right here on the Forty Acres.

UT Austin Is Dismantling Its Academic Core—And Calling It “Optimization,” by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

UT Austin Is Dismantling Its Academic Core—And Calling It “Optimization”

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 26, 2026

The University of Texas at Austin has announced that it is closing its Center for Teaching and Learning, along with the Office of Community Engagement, the Vick Advising Excellence Center, and the Office of Undergraduate Research.

Geez, that's a lot to come down, to get dismantled, that is.

The decision—communicated quietly, with no meaningful consultation and almost no explanation—has left faculty stunned, confused, and rightly alarmed.

According to Provost William Inboden, these closures are part of an effort to “optimize” and “streamline” operations. But stripped of administrative jargon, the reality is this: UT is eliminating the very structures that support teaching excellence, interdisciplinary collaboration, student mentoring, undergraduate research, and community engagement—at a time when faculty and students need those supports now more than ever.

As American Association of University Professors campus president Dr. Karma Chávez put it, there is no pedagogical or institutional logic for dismantling a centralized teaching center. For many faculty, the Center for Teaching and Learning was not a luxury—it was transformative. It created cross-college dialogue, supported innovative pedagogy, strengthened student learning, and allowed faculty to adapt to a rapidly changing classroom environment. For some, it was the single most meaningful professional development experience of their careers.

The administration’s claim that these functions are “rooted in colleges and schools” collapses under even minimal scrutiny. Many colleges—including the College of Liberal Arts, UT’s largest—have no teaching center at all. What this decision actually does is fragment support, deepen inequities across units, and eliminate the very spaces where interdisciplinary exchange and shared governance can occur.

Even more troubling is the broader pattern this decision fits into. The Office of Community Engagement—now being shuttered—was the last remaining remnant of UT’s once-robust Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, dismantled after Texas passed its anti-DEI law, Senate Bill 17. While these offices were not labeled “DEI,” they were grounded in the best research on how to support students, particularly those historically underserved, through advising, teaching, research access, and community connection. 

Eliminating them does not create neutrality. It creates a gaping void. And absence is not accidental. It's by design. And it's about more people losing their jobs when this is not about budgetary imperatives. Pointedly, UT Austin is not facing a financial crisis, and the provost’s email cited none. 

Nor does it make sense as cost-saving if the work is merely “redistributed” across colleges—duplicated, diluted, and stripped of the coherence it had. What is being optimized here is not efficiency, but control. What is being streamlined is not bureaucracy, but the university’s public mission.

This pattern is not unique to UT. Across the country, state laws and political pressures are eroding the capacity of universities to support students and faculty in substantive ways, not by accident but as part of a broader governance agenda that conflates equity-related work with political ideology (Sachs & Young, 2024).

At a moment when faculty are navigating political interference, curricular surveillance, and the chilling effects of state power, UT has chosen to remove the very institutions that help educators weather those storms. 

Teaching centers do not impose ideology; they defend pedagogical integrity.

Advising centers do not indoctrinate; they catch students before they fall through the cracks. 

Offices of undergraduate research do not politicize learning. They democratize access to knowledge production.

Calling this “optimization” or "streamlining" insults the intelligence of the faculty and students who know better. This is institutional subtraction masquerading as reform. And it should concern anyone who believes that a flagship public university ought to lead—not capitulate—when higher education itself is under attack.

Flagships do not hollow themselves out from the inside. When they allow it to happen, they surrender their public mission. And to whose benefit? And toward what ends? Their silence is deafening.

Reference

Sachs, J. A., & Young, J. C. (2024). America’s censored classrooms 2024: Refining the art of censorship (Report). PEN America. https://pen.org/report/americas-censored-classrooms-2024/?utm_source=chatgpt.com


UT-Austin Is Closing Its Teaching Center. Faculty Members Ask: Why?

The U. of Texas at Austin campusSergio Flores for The Washington Post, Getty Images

By Beth McMurtrieJanuary 22, 2026

The U. of Texas at Austin campusSergio Flores for The Washington Post, Getty Images

The University of Texas at Austin is shuttering its longstanding Center for Teaching and Learning at the end of the semester, part of a wave of changes announced last Friday that include the closure of the Office of Community Engagement, a campus advising center, and the Office of Undergraduate Research.

The news, which came in an email from William Inboden, the university’s provost, presented these moves as part of an effort to “optimize” and “streamline” academic operations. He wrote that resources provided by the programs would be repurposed, but offered no details.

Faculty members were stunned by the news.

“I literally cannot think of any reason why you would dismantle a centralized center for teaching and learning,” said Karma Chávez, president of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors, and a professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies. “It absolutely baffles me.”

Chávez said she had scant information — the email was sent to a small number of people on campus, including deans, she heard — but learned through conversations with colleagues who are directly affected that the “vast majority” of the staff will be laid off, more than 20 people. The teaching center is the largest of the four operations, and lists 13 staff members, along with 11 student workers, on its website.

In the email, Inboden said the changes “are designed to enhance collaboration, create new pathways for partnerships, prudently steward our resources, and strengthen existing units within our colleges and schools.”

Mike Rosen, senior director of media strategy, said in an email that the university’s commitment to undergraduate research, faculty support, advising, and student programming is unchanged. “Those functions are rooted in our colleges and schools, which are best equipped to meet their needs,” he wrote. ”Closing those particular offices will allow us to focus resources for these programs where they are most needed and most effective.”

Mary Neuburger, a history professor and chair of Slavic and Eurasian studies, said the argument that those functions are rooted in colleges and schools made little sense to her. The College of Liberal Arts, where she teaches, doesn’t even have a teaching center. “We have nothing,” she said. “And we’re one of the biggest colleges.”

Neuburger, who has taught at the university for almost 30 years, said her time working on a project with the Center for Teaching and Learning was “the single most transformative experience I’ve had at UT.” She was a Provost’s Teaching Fellow, she said, and was able to discuss teaching issues with faculty members from across the university. Now she worries that interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange of ideas will be lost.

Nina Telang, a professor of instruction in the department of electrical and computer engineering, was also a teaching fellow. The support she received at the center allowed her to build supplemental instruction into many courses in her department — not just her own — with the help of the campus tutoring center. She also developed wellness workshops for engineering students in collaboration with the campus wellness center. “Every single CTL initiative has ultimately benefited the students,” she said. “It’s all about the student.”

Josh Eyler, senior director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, who is active nationally on teaching issues, said he was surprised that UT-Austin would shutter a distinguished center with a long history, particularly at a time when the challenges facing faculty members in the classroom are growing.

“At their best,” he said, “teaching centers provide a place to advocate for faculty and to help them make it through the storm of constant changes and new technologies and new fads and new approaches that are coming down the pike.”

Professors also mourned the closure of the other offices, saying they provided special services. Every college on campus has its own advising center but the Vick Advising Excellence Center “was for students who were slipping through the cracks to get extra help,” Neuburger said. “That was part of a huge initiative to increase our graduation rates, and it was working.”

She was also confused as to why the university would eliminate the Office of Undergraduate Research when engaging students in research has been an administrative priority. That office, in particular, has helped students find opportunities to do interdisciplinary work, Chávez said.

Rosen said he did not have information on any positions eliminated. He said that Inboden was not available for an interview. Neither Molly Hatcher, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, nor Jeff Handy, director of the Vick Advising Excellence Center, responded to email requests for interviews.

Not UniqueStaffing cuts to student-facing services are certainly not unusual given the tough financial situation many colleges now find themselves in. Last year Catholic University of America eliminated 16 positions in its Center for Academic and Career Success to help address a $30-million structural deficit. And Emerson College, which has been dealing with enrollment declines, cut half of its eight full-time staff in the Office of Student Success.

But UT-Austin doesn’t have financial woes, faculty members said, and the provost’s email said nothing about needing to trim costs. Chávez said that eliminating central offices doesn’t make financial sense to her if, in fact, the administration will just be moving that work to schools and colleges, duplicating it several times over. “I’m not sure how that would be a streamlining or a cost-cutting mechanism.”

Rather, she worries that this is more about eliminating the last traces of diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus. The offices being shuttered are not practicing DEI, she said. But the best scholarship on advising, teaching, community engagement, and supporting diverse students in undergraduate research relies on that framework. She noted, too, that the Office of Community Engagement is the “last vestige” of what was once the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, which was shuttered after the state passed a law banning DEI activities. That went from a division with dozens of people to an office with two staff, doing outreach work in the community. “That’ll be gone now, too.”

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.

Faculty Governance and the Fight for Public Higher Education, by Dr. Karma R. Chavez

 Friends,

I'll provide updates on the 89th Texas Legislative Session soon that just ended here in Texas, but don't let your day go by without reading Dr. Karma Chavez' excellent AAUP Blog on the importance of faculty governance to democracy. This should be germane to higher education institutions everywhere.

-Angela Valenzuela

Faculty Governance and the Fight for Public Higher Education

Attacks on shared governance are attacks on academic freedom.

By Karma R. Chávez | Spring 2025 | AAUP Blog

In February 2022, amid the growing onslaught of attacks in both K–12 and higher education against teaching about race and racism in US history, the University of Texas at Austin Faculty Council passed a resolution defending academic freedom and, in particular, affirming the right of UT faculty to teach critical race theory, or “CRT,” as it has become known. In no time, Texas’s far-right Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick issued a public statement decrying “looney Marxist professors” and insisting that in the next legislative session he would ban CRT. He explained that this is why the legislature and right-wing donors had been pushing to create the “Liberty Institute” at UT, a proposed right-wing think tank designed to subvert ordinary faculty hiring processes and combat the gender and race ideology that supposedly dominates Texas’s universities.

Implicit in Patrick’s threat was a view that faculty should not be able to govern their own workplaces, and particularly the curriculum. Although in 2022 Patrick had not fleshed out a critique of the faculty’s role in institutional governance, that role, like “CRT” and “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion), would quickly be in his crosshairs. Before the 2025 Texas legislative session, which has now begun, Patrick already made it clear that faculty should have no role in governing Texas universities. In April 2024, in his “interim charges” on higher education for the upcoming session, Patrick singled out “faculty senates” as the first of his seven priorities. He charged the Texas Senate to “review and analyze the structures and governance in higher education, focusing on the role of ‘faculty senates,’ and like groups, in representing faculty interests to higher education institution administrations” and to “make recommendations to establish guidelines for the role and representation of faculty by ‘faculty senates,’ and like groups, at higher education institutions in Texas.”

Although Patrick’s ire was catalyzed by the faculty council’s 2022 resolution, his views in April 2024 were given shape by none other than Christopher Rufo, the architect of both “CRT” and “DEI” bans nationwide. In May 2023, Rufo argued on his Substack blog that rather than upholding the principles of “academic freedom, faculty governance, and institutional autonomy,” the university should be governed “according to the principles and priorities of voters, who elect legislators to govern state institutions in the interest of the common good.” In providing a limited summary of a debate he had with Princeton University political scientist Keith Whittington, Rufo explained that universities are not “a free marketplace of ideas” but instead represent “a state-run monopoly on education institutions” that should serve “the public good.”

Rufo’s consistent deployment of his claimed investment in the “common” or “public” good is a well-worn tactic to enshrine conservative ideology in law in the name of supposedly benign “common sense.” In my last book, The Borders of AIDS, I detail the persuasiveness of such “commonsense” appeals through an in-depth analysis of a 1987 legislative debate in which Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina advocated for a ban on all HIV-positive immigrants—this despite the fact that virtually no public health entity agreed that a ban would lead to better health outcomes in the United States. In my book, I show how Helms located his brand in a “national commonsense”: It was a matter of common sense, he claimed, that the course of action he advocated would be best for the nation. In the end, despite all the scientific and medical evidence to the contrary, Helms won the debate, and the US Senate passed a devastating ban on HIV-positive immigrants, which President Ronald Reagan signed into law and which remained in place until 2009. The case is instructive in showing how commonsense appeals are so persuasive because they are so hard to refute. Although these appeals typically lack evidence, they call into question the value of expertise, and in the absence of expertise or specifics, they appear to many as if they are self-evidently correct.

Similarly, Rufo’s appeals to the “common” or “public” good are persuasive because they assert as fact that, as publicly funded institutions, colleges and universities should be accountable to the taxpayer. I agree with this claim, though not with his understanding of what it means. My colleagues and I have been given a tremendous responsibility in educating our state’s students. I take that responsibility very seriously, and each time I step into the classroom or hold a mentoring meeting I strive to teach my students the absolute best that my fields of study have to offer. I attend to my students’ work with care, and my North Star is ensuring that their critical thinking, their analytical skills, their understanding of course materials, and their writing are the best that they can be. This is what I was trained to do, and it is what I’ve done every day of my professional life.

In February 2022, when my colleagues at UT passed the resolution affirming the right to academic freedom in teaching, they were expressing the seriousness with which they understood their responsibilities as faculty members. Our job is not to teach and carry out research on subjects that happen to be popular among the majority in our respective legislatures or with the person living in our governor’s mansion. Our job is to teach what we know to be true, and to conduct research without political influence, so that we may continue to refine our knowledge.

Faculty senates and councils provide an expert and informed infrastructure to ensure that we can provide the finest education based on the best and most recent knowledge available. Faculty senates are not apolitical entities. It is through faculty senates that fields like my own—ethnic and gender studies—have had to make the case that our knowledge is worthy of being integral to a university education. And to be clear, those fields have not earned their place without struggle. In my experience, faculty senates, which remain dominated by white, middle-class, heterosexual, and Christian faculty, continue to approach work of the kind I do with great suspicion. In fields like mine, faculty governance bodies are not always friends; more often they are the first obstacle we must overcome in proving our scholarly worth to our institutions.

Nevertheless, if I am to remain employed by a public university, I must place some level of faith in the importance of having our curriculum assessed by these entities. I do so because I recognize that, while we may differ on the specifics of research and teaching, we all share the values of faculty governance, academic freedom, and independent expertise.

I consider the assault on faculty governance one of the five pillars of the current far-right attack on higher education, along with the assaults on DEI, academic freedom, tenure, and student protest. It remains to be seen if the Texas legislature will be successful in dismantling faculty governance at our state’s public universities. Texas has already banned DEI work, severely limited the meaning of tenure, and cracked down in incredible ways on student protest. How will it curtail academic freedom and shared governance in the 2025 session?

Our current circumstances in Texas bring to mind events from a decade ago in Wisconsin, when I was a tenured faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2015, the Republican governor, Scott Walker, worked with the Republican legislature to remove from state law protections for tenure and shared faculty and student governance and further concentrate decision-making power in the hands of the board of regents. Walker and his allies were successful in this effort. I remember attending the first faculty senate meeting after the conservative board of regents adopted policies in spring 2016 that replaced the faculty’s shared role in institutional decision-making with a merely advisory role. Prior to this time, these meetings were raucous affairs, because the UW–Madison chancellor at the time, the late Rebecca Blank, couldn’t make any decisions without the agreement of the faculty. The faculty knew this, and we entered each of those meetings knowing our power. The debates were intense, and they required long deliberations to come to consensus. That spring, with the new law in place, Blank walked in with what seemed to me a new air of confidence. As faculty challenged her in their usual assertive way, Blank stood at the podium, pen in hand, jotting notes on a piece of paper. And after each faculty member spoke, she said something to the effect of, “I’ll take that under advisement.”

I do not mean to suggest that administrators like Blank shouldn’t have an important role in determining university policy. They should. There is usually a good reason why they’ve risen through the ranks. But faculty know the curriculum better than any administrator or regent ever could. It is for that reason that the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, jointly formulated by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, holds that the faculty “has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.” Without real faculty governance, there can be no academic freedom.

In Texas, we will fight for faculty governance with every resource we have available. But it is important to note that this fight is not limited to red states in the South. As the attacks on DEI have already made clear, no matter where you are, you must be willing to fight for the principles that are now under threat. If you don’t, the consequence could be not just that you might not have a job, but that the very tender bonds of this democracy—if you can even still call our country a democracy—will be shredded beyond repair. 

Karma R. Chávez is Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor and Chair in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also serves on the executive committee of the AAUP chapter. Her email address is karmachavez@gmail.com.

Corporate Logic, Political Control: The Assault on Public Universities in Texas

Friends:

Texas Republicans are moving aggressively to consolidate political control over the state’s public universities through Senate Bill 37—a sweeping and dangerous piece of legislation that would hand over key academic decisions to Governor Abbott’s appointees. 

Passed out of the House Higher Education Committee on a party-line vote, the bill would let politically appointed regents dictate core curricula, approve or reject key university hires, and even override administrative decisions. 

SB 37 opens the door to state-sanctioned censorship, with vague mandates about course content and a new ombudsman office empowered to investigate faculty based on student or staff complaints. As UT professor Karma Chávez puts it plainly. It will "'enshrine intellectual discrimination' at UT."

The bill also guts faculty governance by slashing elected representation on faculty councils and granting administrators—many of whom are deeply enmeshed in partisan politics—expanded authority over academic affairs. Courses in ethnic studies, gender studies, and the humanities are especially at risk, and faculty fear a climate of fear, self-censorship, and punitive budget cuts. 

Scholars like Adele Nelson and Andrea Gore describe widespread panic as the legislation threatens not only academic freedom but the very capacity to teach truthfully and critically. What’s unfolding in Texas is a systematic effort to dismantle higher education as a space for inquiry, dialogue, and democracy—and to replace it with a model of top-down political control.

I guess the first test of university takeovers was the New College in Florida. We're the next test case but in this case, a flagship university. My guess is that these designs will migrate to other states and their respective universities if they haven't already.

Becoming corporate means that we're in for a rough ride in Texas higher education. We need to vote these leaders who oppose democracy and actual freedom out of office and seek a SB 37 repeal bill next session lest they ruin higher education. The legislative session isn't over, so stay tuned for legislative updates.

-Angela Valenzuela

How Gov. Greg Abbott Appointees Could Take Over UT
Texas Republicans move forward with new bill attacking academic freedom By Brant Bingamon, Fri., May 23, 2025 | Austin Chronicle




Senate Bill 37 shifts power from university administrators and faculties to boards appointed by the governor (design by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images)

Texas Republicans are working to tighten their grip on the state’s public universities. Monday night, the House’s Higher Education Committee voted along party lines, 6-5, to approve Senate Bill 37, a bill that would let Republicans selected by the governor influence the courses taught at Texas universities, choose the schools’ leaders, micromanage their lower-level hires, and open investigations into their professors.

SB 37 could be approved by the full House and Senate within the next week and sent to Gov. Greg Abbott for his signature. UT-Austin professor Karma Chávez told us she and her colleagues believe that if the bill is passed it will “enshrine intellectual discrimination” at UT. “It’s indoctrination,” Chavez said. “Our leaders always say they are worried about indoctrination, but they are the ones who want to insert politics into every corner of public university education in the state.”

SB 37 makes several big changes to higher education. It shifts power over the courses that students take from the universities’ administrators and gives it to their governing boards. These boards, like UT’s Board of Regents, are composed of political appointees chosen by Gov. Greg Abbott, with the approval of the Texas Senate. SB 37 requires the governing boards to examine each university’s core curriculum – the courses that students must pass in order to graduate. The bill states that the governing boards shall ensure that courses in the curriculum do not "advocate or promote the idea that any race, sex, or ethnicity or any religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, or ethnicity or any religious belief." The bill further states that the universities have the final decision-making authority over which courses remain in the curriculum -- "under the direction of the institution's governing board.”
“It’ll be a death by a thousand cuts.”– UT Austin professor Karma Chávez

Chávez told us that UT’s core curriculum includes many courses in disciplines like history, humanities, and the arts. The courses are proposed by instructors from the different departments within the university and approved by administrators. She said the Republican claims that professors endorse particular ideologies is unfounded. She believes they don’t want students to learn about the civil rights victories that minority groups have won over the last several decades and said restricting education will help them achieve that goal.

“Those of us in the College of Liberal Arts – especially ethnic and gender studies, American Studies, those kinds of things – our classes are not going to be allowed in the core curriculum,” Chávez said. “They’re trying to make it so that no one takes our classes. And then what they’re going to do is say, 'Well, no one takes your classes, so now we’re going to slash your budget.’ It’ll be a death by a thousand cuts.”

SB 37 also changes the way universities choose their leaders, giving Abbott’s governing bodies the power to approve or deny the hiring of vice presidents, provosts, and deans. The governing boards could also approve or deny job postings for tenured faculty positions in fields other than science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. One jarringly expansive rule simply states, “The governing board of an institution of higher education may overturn any decision made by the administration of a campus under the board’s control and management.”

The bill also creates an avenue to investigate professors for violations of state law -- the Office of the Ombudsman. Under the proposal, Abbott, with the consent of the Senate, will appoint a ombudsman within the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board who will open investigations into professors after written complaints by any student, faculty member, or staff member of a university. The ombudsman will make yearly reports to Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and other state officials.

UT professor Andrea Gore said her colleagues believe the creation of the Office of the Ombudsman will encourage an avalanche of baseless accusations. “They can report on professors and then there’s going to be an investigation by this politically appointed ombudsperson,” Gore said. “It is kind of scary.”

Gore said SB 37 also undermines faculty governance, the principle that faculty members should help create and manage school policy with university leaders. The bill would greatly reduce the number of professors sitting on faculty senates at the state’s colleges and universities. It would give UT’s president – former Ken Paxton lieutenant Jim Davis – the power to appoint half of UT’s faculty council members, who are currently elected by their fellow academics. It would also allow Davis to pick which of those members sit on the faculty council’s executive board, with whom he meets weekly.

Taken as a whole, the professors we spoke with believe that SB 37 is another effort to silence voices and stifle research that Republicans take issue with. They think it will further damage the reputation of our colleges and universities.

“I’ve already lost key colleagues who have accepted positions at other institutions and will be gone this coming fall,” UT professor Adele Nelson said. “And frankly, I have no idea how I’m going to teach my classes. I can’t talk about Latin American art history without discussing race and ethnicity. And obviously, I don’t advocate for the superiority of one race or ethnicity over the other, but part of the humanities' critical thinking is understanding the perspective of other people. And I’m worried that a student will misunderstand that and I’ll be reported.

“So we’re panicked, both in how we’re going to manage our classrooms and the destruction that this will bring on UT’s departments.”

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that a university's governing board must create a review committee to evaluate school curricula. In fact, SB 37 states that a governing board may do so. It also misnamed the Office of the Ombudsman as the Office of Excellence in Higher Education. The Chronicle regrets the errors.

Texas senators propose faculty senate limits, curricula reviews. Professors want answers by Lily Kepner of the Austin American-Statesman

UT Mexican American and Latino Studies professor and UT AAUP member, Dr. Karma Chavez, said SB 37's curricular provision banning ideology would negatively impact the School of Civic Leadership, established by conservatives last session to promote liberty.

The UT SCL should totally be protesting Senate Bill 37 as they accord emphasis to the importance of open discourse that they absolutely cannot have without academic freedom. Conservatives, where is the outrage?

In any case, savor this quote by Dr. Karma Chavez, best quote of the session, I would say!

"In its about statement, it endorses several ideologies, including Western civilization, the American constitutional tradition, the Western tradition and the notion of a free society. These are all ideological and what the school that you all created endorses," Chavez said. "If what you truly value is a free society, you can't have it both ways."

This quote makes me smile not in a "gotcha' kind of way, but in a "what an astute observation" kind of way. Dr. Karma Chavez captures the contradiction and circularity of legislative animus against liberal ideologies without recognizing the harm they are poised to incur to the very ideologies they favor. No they cannot have it both ways.

This is not a snappy comeback but rather invites reflection of the kind that lingers and shapes discussions and, we trust, the nonsense that SB 37 represents. 

A big thanks to award-winning Lily Kepner, as well, for being on the education beat at the Austin American Statesman since 2023. We are so fortunate to have you with us in Texas. Thank you for being there. Your journalism is outstanding. Follow her on Twitter at @lilykepner

May all have a blessed day today!

-Angela Valenzuela

Texas senators propose faculty senate limits, curricula reviews. Professors want answers.
Lily Kepner | March 24, 2025 | Austin American Statesman



American Federation of Teachers director of political organizing for Texas Anthony Elmo speaks as educators gather to rally in support of the "Educator’s Bill of Rights" at the outdoor rotunda in the Texas Capitol Monday, March 17, 2025. Teachers met with lawmakers as a part of Texas American Federation of Teachers advocacy day, asking for reforms such as a defined work day, reliable pensions and an increase in state funding to public schools. Mikala Compton/American-Statesman

After much discussion and impassioned testimony from professors and education advocates, several proposals aimed at restricting faculty senates and regulating shared governance at public universities were left pending at the Texas Senate K-16 Education Committee's first hearing focused on higher education.

The most controversial of the proposals on the docket was Senate Bill 37 ― a Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick priority bill filed by Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who chairs the committee. The bill aims to increase oversight of faculty senates, instruct university presidents to appoint half the members, and solidify the panels' advisory roles.

It would also establish an Office of Excellence in Higher Education to investigate "matters of academic discourse" and report them to the governor, attorney general and lawmakers, Creighton said. Opponents of SB 37 argued that the new office would create a climate of fear, not accountability, and further suppress speech.

The bill was heard along with SB 452, by Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, which would allow Texas university systems' regents to approve or reject the hiring of each department head within the institutions they govern, and SB 1489, authored by Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, which states faculty councils can't have the final say on any decisions, can't conduct investigations or approve personnel decisions, must live stream their meetings, post all votes and have their proceedings open to the public.

Creighton's SB 37 would also go a step further and instruct boards of regents to establish a general education review committee at each institution to annually examine core curricula. The committee of tenured faculty members and industry partners would ensure the curricula prepares students for "civic and professional life," and does not "endorse specific public policies, ideologies, or legislation," according to the bill.

Professors and education advocates, who waited six hours for public testimony to begin, said the curricula review provision opens the door for ideological censorship and restricts courses. More generally, they said regulation of faculty senates is unnecessary, would add bureaucracy at the expense of efficiency and create a climate of fear.

In an interview with the American-Statesman after the hearing, Creighton said SB 37 seeks to codify and add accountability to faculty senates. He said the Senate K-16 Education Committee plans to consider amendments to SB 37 borne from public testimony, including adjusting a requirement in the proposal that faculty council members must be tenured. A person during public testimony pointed out that many community colleges are non-tenure institutions.

"There's a reason why three leaders in the Senate brought forward different governing related bills," Creighton said in an interview. "How I reflect on it is that we need to codify certain provisions that let our boards or regents understand what obligations and responsibilities they have as political appointees, some of them have different perspectives on what their roles are, and that's very important, because they're the top spot."

Why are Texas lawmakers examining faculty senates?

Faculty senates are governing bodies of elected faculty members who represent professors and make recommendations on matters from curricula to policy changes, but do not have final say on decisions.

Lawmakers this session are seeking to regulate faculty senates over Republican sentiment that education has become too liberal.

Sen. Royce West (D-Dallas) pushed back against the proposals, asking the authors why they were necessary. He argued that the proposals would push higher education institutions to the political right and questioned whether it was realistic to expect so much more from regents, who are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Senate.

"Why are we putting, I guess you could say, handcuffs on what (faculty senates) are able to do?" West asked.

Creighton insisted SB 37 is meant to codify the faculty councils' advisory roles and explicitly state university regents' authority over all matters. The bill also adds "guardrails" to the panels through term limits, member appointments and requiring their meetings to be open to hold them more "accountable," he said.

"We're even having concern among university professors about the conduct and actions that are taken by (faculty) representatives that sometimes create an environment where some professors don't feel welcome to weigh in," Creighton said in an interview. "As a committee working on governance for universities, our oversight and responsibility, it's not odd. If anything, I think we're behind."

Sherry Sylvester, senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Austin, said during her invited testimony that she supports SB 37 to build on the success of the state's 2023 SB 17 law, which gutted universities of diversity equity and inclusion offices, support and hiring practices.

In her support for limiting faculty senates, Sylvester accused Texas A&M faculty of "circumventing the A&M board of regents" in 2023 in the botched hiring of university professor Kathleen McElroy to direct a new journalism department at the flagship institution. The university then tried to backtrack the offer when conservative groups and some regents criticized her past diversity-focused research, according to an internal review. Texas A&M paid her a $1 million settlement. McElroy, a Black woman, is a tenured University of Texas professor and former journalist at several outlets, including the Statesman and New York Times.

"Over the last couple years, it's been clear that there are a number of misperceptions about the role of boards of regents on our campuses," Sylvester said.

Sylvester also cited statistics from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression that suggests 47% of conservative professors self-censor for fear of reaction, compared to 19% of liberal faculty members. The report also found that about 20% of professors say conservatives would "fit well" in their department.

Angie Hill Price, current speaker of the Texas A&M faculty senate, testified against the Senate bills and denied that faculty senate's limit any perspectives. The Texas A&M panel has representation of all viewpoints, she said in response to questioning.

"I would not want to constrain anybody on being able to express their opinion," Hill Price said.

Ray Bonilla, general counsel at Texas A&M University, who Bettencourt invited to testify under SB 1489, said the faculty's role in curricula is essential, but agreed with Bettencourt's codification of their advisory role.

"We want their authority, we need their authority,” Bonilla said. "We need their input on establishing the right curricula, the right majors, the right programs, research programs. ... But in terms of the decision-making authority (it's) very clear for us. The top of the pyramid is our board of regents."
University faculty, lawmaker question curricula review

The Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, which collected 50 testimonies against the bill in two days, found that one of the most concerning aspects of SB 37 was the provision seeking to regulate curricula.

Manos Papadakis, a professor of mathematics at the University of Houston who testified as an individual and identified himself as a longtime Christian conservative who voted for Bettencourt, was against the curricula review provision.

"We don't really need that because we have many layers of examining core curricula and we do that in department levels, college levels, university levels, and finally the provost,” he said. “What is the purpose of the committee outside all these loops? Is it to control political discourse?”

SB 37 does not specifically mention DEI coursework, but it comes after the Senate Higher Education subcommittee last fall reviewed an interim charge from Patrick to remove diversity, equity and inclusion from workforce curricula. Attempts in states such as Florida to legislate diversity in curricula have been roiled in legal battles, but the Florida Board of Governors voted in January to remove hundreds of classes about race and gender in its general education curricula at its 12 state universities.

Papadakis insisted lawmakers need to understand the difference between education and workforce training, as they increasingly seek to prioritize "credentials of value" that benefit the state's workforce over liberal arts education.

"This bill is missing that," he said.

Karma Chavez, a member of UT's chapter of AAUP, said the curricula provision in SB 37, which would bar ideology, would affect the new School of Civic Leadership, which conservative lawmakers created last session to focus on liberty.

"In its about statement, it endorses several ideologies, including Western civilization, the American constitutional tradition, the Western tradition and the notion of a free society. These are all ideological and what the school that you all created endorses," Chavez said. "If what you truly value is a free society, you can't have it both ways."

In an interview, David DeMatthews, associate professor in educational leadership and policy at UT, said though he agrees schools can benefit from curricular review, he does not think this bill is a "good faith effort" to get there.

"It's not like the state has set out to study 'What are the challenges confronting higher ed,' and through a thoughtful, scientific based inquiry process, they've arrived at faculty councils being the problem," DeMatthews said. "Instead, it seems like the theory of action behind the bill is that through increasing the control that the state has over the institution — elected leaders have over the institutions of higher ed — then higher ed will improve. There's no evidence to suggest anything like that."

DeMatthews added that even if it doesn't restrict the faculty council's already limited power, this bill could create a chilling effect that drives more talent out.

This story has been updated to add a gallery.

The Right-Wingification of UT: Texas targets liberal enemies within one of the top U.S. schools by Brant Bingamon, Nov. 22, 2024

Friends,

Today's piece by Brant Bingamon of the Austin Chronicle is a gem. At the heart of the critique of how the attack on DEI and curriculum are playing out at the University of Texas at Austin regards the creation of the conservative School of Civic Leadership at UT that mirrors Stanford's Hoover Institute, Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, and Princeton's James Madison Program.

Faculty's opposition is rooted in the notion of how it undermines academia by enabling state lawmakers and wealthy donors to impose political agendas. They contend UT's academic structure—where programs evolve into institutes, departments, and schools—is organically built by professors and anchored in established disciplines and research and where schools exist for a reason. Schools aren’t meant to be top-down projects driven by political or financial interests without disfiguring the mission and purpose of academia.

"They aren’t top-down enterprises created in one legislative biennium by politicians and oligarchs," Bingamon notes.

University of Texas Anthropology professor Craig Campbell argues that portraying most faculty as progressive activists is misleading, noting that professors are trained to think beyond simple left-right politics and "many are politically agnostic." He added that complaints about a lack of intellectual diversity are a "fake problem" that reflects a psychological projection from the right that works to provide "cover for ideologically committed, far-right faculty who are not intellectually honest,” he said. He adds, “Universities are a pain for extremist governments, because they’re full of people who are committed to careful exploration of the world and how things work and function – stuff that doesn’t jibe with the fantasies the politicians are trying to create or the policies they want to enact.”

Regarding faculty like Drs. Karma Chavez, Pauline Strong, Andrea Gore, Lauren Gutterman, Brian Evans, Emilio Zamora, myself, and others, I shudder to think of where we and our fellow faculty and students would be without their advocacy. It only makes our universities better. Thank God, as well, for a bold, free, and independent press—and for blogs, too! 😊

Still chewing on this piece and hope you will, too.

-Angela Valenzuela

P.S. I just donated to the Austin Chronicle. Especially for those of us in Austin, please consider it as part of your holiday giving.

The Right-Wingification of UT
Texas targets liberal enemies within one of the top U.S. schools
By Brant Bingamon, Fri., Nov. 22, 2024



Chris Rufo stood before an audience of 50 at the University of Texas in a dark suit, with a trimmed beard, appearing something like a tech bro, relaxed, faintly sneering. It was November of last year and Rufo had been invited to speak at the Salem Center, UT’s new right-wing think tank headquartered in Rowling Hall, an immaculate 458,000-square-foot building erected in 2018 at a cost of $172 million.

As he began, Rufo commanded his listeners to disbelieve their senses, to not see the wealth surrounding them, to not feel the safety of the bubble that is the University of Texas at Austin. He declared, instead, that UT and public universities throughout the country are frightening, dangerous places.

“I think people from across the political spectrum would acknowledge a sense of anxiety,” he said. “A sense of fear. A sense of foreboding. Something has gone quite wrong.”

Rufo isn’t the only right-wing culture warrior pushing this message, but he’s one of the most influential. An inspiration to Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Texas Republicans Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, and Ken Paxton, Rufo rose to prominence by innovating the campaign against critical race theory, a formerly obscure academic theory whipped into a message of white supremacy. He also fights against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and tenure.

At the Salem Center, Rufo unrolled a 30-minute attack on higher education, claiming that universities no longer prioritize the teaching of the classics, that professors no longer contemplate beauty and truth. He complained about African American studies, Latino studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies, and LGBTQ studies, saying, “If it’s got 'studies’ after it, it’s probably a pseudo-discipline.” He concluded by calling for a politically motivated assault, “a protracted siege,” of universities like the one in which he spoke.

Then he took questions. Pauline Strong, the director of UT’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Program, approached the microphone. Strong has taught at UT for 31 years. She is the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a national group founded in 1915 to support academic freedom, tenure, joint decision making between university faculty and administrators, and due process.

Strong told Rufo she believed in intellectual diversity but didn’t hear a commitment to the principle from him. She said her hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom and neutrality in higher learning. She asked if Rufo supported those values.

Rufo stiffened. The muscles in his face froze. He spoke and his words came fast, pitched a half-step higher. He said it would have been better if Dewey had never been born. He said that adhering to Dewey’s values creates “an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” He said academics like Strong who believe in Dewey, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”

Perhaps Rufo imagined he was being discreet by leaving “what’s coming” vague. But professors paying attention to Texas politics know exactly what it means. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has, over the last four years, called for the elimination of tenure, for restricting students’ free speech, and for mandating what professors can teach. Patrick has also pushed for the elimination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs at Texas’ public universities. And, in the case of these programs, “what’s coming” is already here. Texas outlawed DEI in January.

The attacks against higher education have hurt faculty morale. There is anecdotal evidence that they are beginning to damage UT’s ability to attract high-quality professors. An August survey of 950 Texas faculty conducted by the AAUP revealed that two-thirds would not recommend Texas universities to their out-of-state colleagues. More than a quarter plan to interview for jobs elsewhere this year. A similar number have already done so. Half said they have noticed fewer, and less qualified, applicants for open positions. The top reason cited by those looking to leave is the state’s political climate. Anxieties about academic freedom, DEI attacks, access to reproductive care, LGBTQ+ issues, and tenure also made the list.

Strong told us that faculty who teach African American studies, Latina/o studies, Asian American studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and LGBTQ studies are some of the most discouraged. Some have fought Dan Patrick’s attacks in previous legislative sessions and are doing so again, now that the Texas Senate is preparing to meet in January. But most faculty are staying silent, unaware of the threats or performing the equivalent of a tactical retreat. As one professor who didn’t want to be named said, “Jobs are on the line. Programs are on the line.”

So although Rufo’s speech last year was, at times, ridiculous, there was truth in his opener. There is fear at UT. There is foreboding. Something has gone quite wrong.

“There’s a great deal of anxiety among faculty, especially in the College of Liberal Arts,” Strong told us. “There is a great deal of pain. We feel that our research and teaching enterprises are under sustained attack.”

DEI & Pro-Palestinian Protests

Rufo’s talk was partly a victory lap. Six months earlier, Texas Republicans had borrowed model legislation he’d written to create Senate Bill 17, a bill abolishing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in Texas’ public universities.

The SB 17 ban went into effect in January, prohibiting universities from considering diversity in hiring decisions and from conducting DEI training. At UT, administrators dismantled the Multicultural Engagement Center, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Fearless Leadership Institute (a professional development program for African American and Hispanic women). The university also moved dozens of employees, most of them in the Division of Diversity and Campus Engagement, to non-DEI work. “We’re going to respect the law,” UT System Chairman Kevin Eltife said at the time. “We’re not going to look for loopholes.”



Republicans weren’t satisfied. In March, SB 17’s author, state Sen. Brandon Creighton, threatened to withhold state funding from the university if administrators didn’t prove they had eradicated DEI. A week later, UT’s president, Jay Hartzell, announced that he had fired dozens of employees who had previously worked at the Division of Diversity and Campus Engagement. Most of them were people of color. He later implied that the administration had gone beyond the letter of the law to satisfy Republicans, saying the “legislative climate toward higher education” was “moving.”

Andrea Gore, a pharmacology professor who has taught at UT for 22 years, believes the fired staffers were sacrificial lambs. “They were not doing DEI jobs anymore,” Gore said. “They all had new job assignments that were documented in writing. They got fired because they had done DEI jobs.”

The firings shocked faculty, but three weeks later a different controversy broke out – the university’s crackdown on students protesting Israel’s war on Palestine.

Ashanté Reese, a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, rushed to the campus on April 24 after learning that scores of state troopers, assisted by UT and Austin police, were confronting a group of about 200 students on the university’s South Lawn, in the shadow of the Tower. Reese spoke to the officers, trying to de-escalate the situation. It didn’t work. Officers in riot gear surrounded the protesters and repeatedly rammed into them, arresting 57.

Reese felt she came near being arrested herself. “I was doing, in the moment, what I thought was the right thing, and I still believe was the right thing,” she said. “But it was a really traumatic experience. It was traumatic to know that the people on the campus that pay you to do your job then also call the police on you for doing your job.”

A week later, a group calling itself Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine held a silent vigil on the steps of the Tower to support the students and protest Israel’s killing of Palestinian professors and its destruction of universities. As the vigil ended, students formed again on the South Lawn. Again, they were surrounded by police in riot gear. Another 79 were arrested.

The charges against the protesters – trespassing on their campus – were dropped by Travis County officials. UT took the opposite approach. Members of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which had organized the first protest, were threatened with suspension. One of the PSC’s leaders, Ammer Qaddumi, was suspended for a year. The group itself was banned from campus.

This summer, UT drafted new rules allowing its staff to shut down demonstrations in public areas like the South Mall “in some instances.” It also rewrote its free speech policy to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, a logical fallacy that silences anyone who would speak out on Israel’s war.

As Karma Chávez, the chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, said, “it’s very clear who is being targeted.” Chávez co-authored a summation of the DEI and protest controversies in October, urging professors to continue speaking out about the university’s actions and teaching what they deem relevant in their classes.

“We are in the fight of our lives,” she concluded. “Anything less than a principled, full-frontal response will inevitably fail.”

Faculty Lose Faith in the Administration

Many faculty denounced the firings and crackdowns: 650 of UT’s approximately 3,700 faculty signed a letter drafted by the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors expressing no confidence in President Jay Hartzell. “He has violated our trust,” the letter stated. “The University is no longer a safe and welcoming place.”

The Faculty Council also weighed in. The Faculty Council is a group of about four dozen professors elected by staff and instructors from the colleges and schools within UT. Andrea Gore, the 22-year professor at the School of Pharmacy, chaired the council from 2015-2016. Gore said that historically it has partnered with administrators to jointly make decisions on hiring and policy, a practice known as shared governance.

“We talk to them: 'Here’s what’s on our mind,’” Gore said. “They listen to us. We’ve been able to talk about important and often difficult things, and we’ve also always been involved in choosing the leaders of the university.”

The Faculty Council condemned the DEI firings as politically motivated. It passed a resolution asking the administration why it invited state troopers onto campus. It demanded UT grant amnesty to the arrested students. But some, like Gore, think the Council’s responses were too restrained.

Gore believes the restraint can be traced back to an erosion in shared governance that began with Jay Hartzell’s appointment as president by the Board of Regents in 2020. “There was no faculty input or an opportunity for due diligence,” Gore said of the appointment. “It’s unlikely the outcome would have been different, but the process of exclusion set a dangerous precedent.”



The professors we spoke with said that since Hartzell’s appointment there have been a number of poorly explained retirements and replacements in top leadership positions, from provost – basically a second-in-command to the president – to vice presidents and deans.

Soncia Reagins-Lilly resigned as the head of student affairs in January, after the DEI ban went into effect. Reagins-Lilly is one of three Black VPs who have left UT since Hartzell assumed office. No Black VPs remain.

Emily Reagan, VP of marketing and communications, resigned in August, after more than 20 communications staffers were laid off in a reorganization which Reagan described as necessary for the university to focus on “managing reputational issues and crises” – a seeming reference to negative publicity from the Palestinian protests.

Provost Sharon Wood also resigned in August, with just a week’s notice. Resignations in positions like provost are typically announced a year in advance, our sources told us, to let faculty weigh in on a replacement and provide time for a smooth transition. The professors assume that Wood was pressured into resigning and that her decision to leave immediately was a form of protest. Her departure came days after she and Hartzell were named as defendants in a lawsuit by Ammer Qaddumi.

Eve Stephens, UT’s chief of police, resigned in September. Stephens had been sworn in just a year earlier following a highly successful 24-year career at the Austin Police Department. A to Z Sports reporter Brian Davis, a former UT communications employee, reported that Stephens was pressured into resigning. Faculty speculate that her response to the Palestinian protests was not aggressive enough for UT administrators.

But for professors like Karma Chávez, the most troubling change has been that of Ann Stevens, who was told in September that she would not be allowed to serve a second term as dean of the College of Liberal Arts. COLA is the heart of UT-Austin, as liberal arts programs are at universities throughout the world. It is UT’s largest college, with 800 faculty serving a fifth of the university’s students. Its professors teach subjects that right-wingers like Chris Rufo champion – economics, English literature, European history – and it houses the centers and study programs they despise – African diaspora studies, LGBTQ studies, Mexican American and Latina/o studies, women’s studies, Native American and Indigenous studies.

Stevens is one of UT’s most highly regarded leaders. “She is a very, very, very successful dean,” Chávez said. “She’s someone that I disagreed with on the regular – we have locked horns in all sorts of ways. But she’s also a very principled leader, and I really respected her work as dean. And I think all of the department chairs felt that way.”

Stevens’ firing – which is what it’s being called – was announced by letter, something that professors say is unprecedented. Her response was equally unprecedented. Stevens explained in an email to faculty that Hartzell told her she “did not have a grand enough vision for the college,” something she disputed. Despite her restrained language and refusal to talk to the press, faculty view Stevens’ message as a protest against the university’s top-down decision making.

The recent firings and resignations have professors wondering if Texas’ right-wing politicians are dictating to Hartzell who to hire and fire. “Our understanding is basically there’s no firewall between Jay Hartzell and the governor and the chancellors,” said Craig Campbell, an anthropology professor who’s taught at UT for 15 years. “I think he’s on board with them. I think he sees himself as a part of that mission.”

As resignations and replacements have increased, a less-understood personnel change has occurred at UT’s Legal Affairs division, which handles litigation for the university and consults on policy. Since 2018, Legal Affairs has hired the majority of its attorneys straight out of the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton, regarded as the most corrupt and partisan AG in the nation.

The change began with Jim Davis, who worked as Paxton’s deputy for three years before taking the helm of Legal Affairs in 2018. Last year, Davis was promoted to senior vice president and chief operating officer, one of the top positions in the university. Amanda Cochran-McCall, who served Paxton for four years, rising to become his chief of general litigation, replaced Davis at Legal Affairs. Cochran-McCall’s second-in-command, Adam Biggs, previously worked as Paxton’s deputy for over four years. Of the 10 other employees featured on UT’s Legal Affairs web page, internet searches reveal that at least six formerly worked for Paxton.

The Trouble With Tenure

The DEI ban was one of three attacks on Texas public universities in the 2023 legislative session. Another, SB 16, was essentially a gag order prohibiting professors from teaching critical race theory. It died in the House of Representatives. The third attack, SB 18, was originally a bill to end tenure for professors at Texas universities. The version of SB 18 that got passed didn’t abolish tenure but expanded the grounds for which tenured faculty can be fired.

Tenure is essentially a lifetime appointment for a professor. It protects those who achieve it from being fired except for cause. It was introduced in U.S. universities in the early 1900s and is considered integral to academic freedom, because it allows professors to teach controversial subjects and pursue controversial research without fear of losing their jobs.

“In an ideal world, every job would have tenure attached to it, so that you were hard to fire as long as you’re doing your job,” Karma Chávez said. “In the university context, tenure means you can chase the data wherever it takes you, you can chase the primary sources wherever that takes you. You don’t have to worry about being pressured by political forces, whether that’s your department chair, your university president, or your governor.”

Research is the raw material that, when properly processed, produces facts, knowledge. The creation and transmission of knowledge is the reason universities exist. Some research creates money, the professors we spoke with said, and some creates controversy. But even controversial research is useful. For example, after each legislative session, researchers collect data on newly enacted laws – in Texas, that could be bans on abortion, or books, or health care for trans kids – to find how the laws have impacted people’s lives. The facts that are gathered hopefully inform future policymaking.

Of course, some of that research, when processed and taught, offends Republicans. “A lot of the stuff that I teach is inherently controversial,” Chávez told us, “and it inherently ruptures what students have been taught to think about themselves, about their state, about U.S. history. But I teach from peer-reviewed scholarship. I also teach thought pieces that I may or may not agree with, but that are designed to get students thinking. And with tenure, I don’t worry that some student who disagrees with the politics of a particular piece is going to be able to come after my job. So, really, tenure is integral to being able to do teaching and researching.”

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has repeatedly criticized tenure. In announcing the passage of SB 18 in 2023, he wrote that tenured Texas professors “feel immune to oversight from the legislature” and “hide behind their tenure to continue blatantly advancing their agenda.” This year, Patrick has once again instructed Republicans to study the issue. With DEI already outlawed and critical race theory not getting as much attention as in the past, some professors believe Republicans will try to end tenure in this year’s legislative session.

Lauren Gutterman, an associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, doubts that UT’s leaders will be able to effectively push back against any such attack. Gutterman lost faith in the administration’s lobbying efforts in 2023, as Republicans prepared to pass the DEI ban. “SB 16, 17, and 18 were so upsetting, so frightening, and a direct attack on us,” Gutterman said. “And I felt like the message that we were getting from the administration was, 'We have it under control and everything’s gonna be fine.’ That’s part of the reason a lot of faculty chose not to really freak out about this legislation. And the president’s silence, his refusal to communicate directly with us, was really distressing.”

Andrea Gore warns that any changes to tenure will hurt the recruitment of first-class instructors, saying she has personally heard of two candidates who turned down job offers from UT in the last year because of the changes Texas Republicans have already made to tenure, which are minor compared with what they may do in 2025.

“It will take some time to see that we’re not getting the top scholars anymore,” Gore said. “Maybe we’re getting the next tier of scholars who are willing to accept working someplace where there’s a little bit more risk, because maybe they don’t have as many options. It’s not only the scholars who are in the area of ethnic studies. We’re also going to lose the scholars who are going to the business school or the law school or the engineering school.”

Gore said that threats to tenure have already begun to lower the quality of teaching, by persuading professors to skip controversial subjects. “I have a colleague who teaches a course that doesn’t sound very controversial at all, and she said, 'I’m not going to teach these lectures anymore, because I’m wondering if they’re going to trigger some sort of reaction that is going to cause somebody to report me.’ It’s shades of the McCarthy era.”

School of Civic Leadership

“There’s lots of rumors swirling at the moment because people are scared and we have a total lack of communication from the president,” Lauren Gutterman told us. “It just breeds all these different theories.”

One of the theories we heard is that the Legislature will seek to carve up the College of Liberal Arts in the upcoming session, starve some of its programs of funding, and feed others to the Red McCombs School of Business and its School of Civic Leadership.

The School of Civic Leadership is brand-new; it began offering classes this semester. The college was created in May of 2023 to house the Civitas Institute, which, in turn, was created the year before at the behest of Dan Patrick and several far-right billionaires, including Robert Rowling and Harlan Crow, the Dallas businessman who has helped corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Patrick and others have said the School of Civic Leadership is necessary to remedy UT’s lack of “intellectual diversity” – that is, its lack of right-wing professors and programs. It’s a claim conservatives are making across the country, one that has led to the creation of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the James Madison Program at Princeton, and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, among others.

Faculty protested the creation of the new school, arguing that it violates the core tenets of academia by allowing state lawmakers and rich donors to spew their political agendas onto the campus. They say that UT’s hierarchy of instruction – its studies programs, which become institutes, which become departments, which become schools and colleges – is built from the ground up by professors, course by course, and represents identifiable disciplines and bodies of research. In other words, the schools are there for a reason. They aren’t top-down enterprises created in one legislative biennium by politicians and oligarchs.

The new dean of the School of Civic Leadership, Justin Dyer, denies the school is politically motivated and stresses it will focus on the country’s founding principles and the importance of free enterprise. A recent UT press release said it will teach the “intellectual inheritance of Western Civilization.”

“This is the way they frame it to make it palatable,” Campbell said, “which is to say, 'These are the classics. These are the great traditions. What can anyone say about Plato or Aristotle? These great thinkers have worked for us, so we need to hear them.’ That’s the bullshit candy coating. But the company they keep is damning. I mean, they’ve got John Yoo as a fellow. They’re in bed with some really fucking hideous, hideous people.”

Yoo is notorious as the attorney who wrote the so-called “Torture Memos” in 2002, providing the George W. Bush administration legal cover to torture people captured in Afghanistan and Iraq during the War on Terror. Other notorious figures associated with the School of Civic Leadership include Richard Hanania, who was employed by the school’s Salem Center in 2022 but was quietly let go after reports surfaced that he’d written extensively for white supremacist groups under a pen name. Chris Rufo is another controversial figure connected to Salem. Professor Mark Regnerus, a senior scholar at Salem, has published research arguing that gay people make poor parents. (Following one of Regnerus’ reports, 200 sociologists signed a letter questioning the integrity of the peer review process for his paper.)

Regnerus also teaches at UT’s school of sociology, which is part of the College of Liberal Arts. The faculty we spoke with say this is another problem with the School of Civic Leadership – it is redundant and will reduce funding for other schools which teach the same subjects, like economics, philosophy, and pretty much anything associated with “Western Civilization.”

“We have a classics department,” Karma Chávez said of COLA. “We have a government department that teaches classical liberalism, that teaches all of the Founding Fathers. We have a Thomas Jefferson Center. That material is already taught widely on this campus. And in fact, the original Civitas Institute was basically all populated by College of Liberal Arts faculty. Now the school is hiring its own folks, but many of them could easily be hired into the College of Liberal Arts.”

Chávez, paradoxically, teaches Chris Rufo’s material. “I think it’s important for students to see where this stuff is coming from,” she said. “If you look at Rufo’s reports, they don’t cite any peer-reviewed academic scholarship. They cite 'institute reports,’ they cite news articles, they cite himself, over and over. How’s that scholarship? How is anyone to take that seriously? So, sure, you want to bring in a controversial speaker as a conversation piece – okay. But what is the motivation behind that? Rufo has no credentials whatsoever. He is a pure ideologue. How is that a part of a university which is invested in the pursuit of knowledge?”

Campbell said it’s true there are few far-right professors at UT or on college campuses anywhere, but the idea that most are progressive activists is mistaken because professors are trained to think in more complex terms than right versus left and many are politically agnostic. Campbell added that the right’s complaint about intellectual diversity is a case of projection.

“Intellectual diversity is essentially a fake problem that is used to create cover for ideologically committed, far-right faculty who are not intellectually honest,” he said. “Universities are a pain for extremist governments, because they’re full of people who are committed to careful exploration of the world and how things work and function – stuff that doesn’t jibe with the fantasies the politicians are trying to create or the policies they want to enact.”

The End Game

Campbell has been hearing threats against the university by state Republicans ever since he arrived on campus in 2009. But this is the worst it’s ever felt.

“I remember my colleagues, the older colleagues, were always like, 'They rattle their sabers and then it all sort of works out.’ But it’s like boiling frogs. It’s been this slow degradation of programs and funding. The faculty is very unhappy, suspicious, looking to get out, disinvesting. It makes it a terrible environment. We’re not program-building, we’re just constantly trying to keep people calm.”

Campbell said the anthropology department has lost several of its top scholars in the last two years and others want to leave. But tenure has been ebbing across the country, while universities continue to churn out Ph.D.s. So the job market is tight. Tenure-track positions at good universities can attract hundreds of applicants. It’s not as easy to leave as it once was.

For faculty who aren’t leaving, it should be a simple decision to get politically active, to speak out against the attacks, even if they aren’t directly affected by them. But there are good reasons not to. Some younger professors have crushing student debt and can’t afford to endanger their jobs. Others want to protect the research they’re doing or the programs they’ve built. Many aren’t from Texas and aren’t invested. For those who don’t already have tenure it’s very risky to speak out.

And then there are the professors who love the university and love their students. And among them are some, like Lauren Gutterman, who couldn’t fade into the background if they wanted to.

“I don’t feel that I have the luxury of retreating because I do queer history, right?” Gutterman said. “And so it doesn’t matter if I’m loud or not, or visible or not. I will always be a target. So I don’t think I have anything to gain from silence.”

Gutterman is planning to once again testify at committee hearings in the Capitol. She hopes to have colleagues at her side. “We now know what SB 17 did to our campus, so we understand how this incredibly broad and vague legislation can enact real harm on our students and our campus and our peers,” she said. “So I hope and I expect that more people will be mobilized. But at the same time, fear is really powerful and I’m sure that some people will continue to feel that the best way to protect themselves is to be quiet.”

Reese told us she will testify before lawmakers this session and believes other faculty will too. “We’re trying to be in solidarity and community with as many people as possible, even if we don’t all think the same and don’t all have the same objectives or approaches to activism. At some point, at the heart of things, it’s like, 'Do I believe that what is happening is unjust? And if the answer is yes, then people are like, 'We just have to do something about it.’”

The professors we spoke with are some of the top scholars at UT. They’ve published influential papers in peer-reviewed journals, they speak at international conferences, they have secured multimillion-dollar grants for research, they are leaders in their respective departments. They have built careers and programs here and don’t want to abandon what they’ve created. “Take Karma [Chávez], you know?” Campbell said. “She’s been doing so much institution-building. So the idea that you’re gonna let the state take this over, they can fuck right off, you know?”

This fall, Chávez is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Latina/o studies department that she has put together piece by piece. The department is regarded as one of the best of its kind, if not the best, in the nation. With its recognized success, Chávez could find a job elsewhere but wants to stay in Texas. “I love it here,” she said. “I want to build my life here. I think there’s so much history and culture here. And the politics are hard, but I’m learning to live with that. And the weather, I actually love. People shit on Texas all the time, but I’m definitely not one of those.”

Chávez said her father was a union worker and she thinks of the current struggle as a labor battle. As a queer person of mixed race and a feminist, she believes she has to fight. “People like me are explicitly or implicitly the targets of a lot of these attacks, and the kind of research and teaching that I do is explicitly at the center of this. So I feel it’s important to fight. But I also feel like it starts here, and then it’s going to go elsewhere. And so it’s not just a personal investment. It’s a bigger investment into this thing called Higher Education.”

Chávez has been quoted in other publications frequently over the last couple of years. She said she speaks out because other professors won’t. “Somebody has to talk about what’s happening. Somebody has to be willing to say it out loud and not worry so much about what it’s going to mean for their job,” she said. “I’ve decided that I’ll be one of those people.”