I want to call readers’ attention to an important and deeply concerning piece by Austin American-Statesman higher education reporter Lily Kepner, published August 24, 2026, documenting the histories—and now the disappearance as independent academic units—of four longstanding fields at the University of Texas at Austin: Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Together, these departments encompassed 62 professors, six undergraduate majors, four graduate programs, and eight minors and certificates.
Kepner’s reporting is especially important because it documents the hugely successful People's Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom reminding us of what can easily be obscured by the bureaucratic language of “consolidation.” These departments did not simply appear on an organizational chart. They grew out of decades of student activism, community struggle, intellectual labor, institution-building, and demands that the university recognize histories and bodies of knowledge long excluded from the academy. As students returned to campus this fall, however, those independent departments ceased to exist, folded into the new Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.
That should concern all of us who care about academic freedom, intellectual diversity, shared governance, and the public mission of the university. Kepner’s piece helps us understand not only what UT has dismantled, but what generations of students, faculty, and community members had fought so hard to build.
-Angela Valenzuela
Stories behind UT’s now-closed ethnic and gender studies departmentsBy Lily Kepner,Staff WriterAug 24, 2026
Recent University of Texas graduate Dezaree Walker speaks on the second panel of invited speakers at the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman
As Longhorns return to campus Monday, decades-old ethnic and gender studies departments will no longer exist.
Six months ago, University of Texas President Jim Davis announced that the university would consolidate ethnic and gender studies programs in the College of Liberal Arts into the new Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. This summer, the department names were scraped from their glass doors, chairs lost their titles and supporting staff were relocated or let go.
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| University of Texas professor of educational leadership and policy Angela Valenzuela listens to the first panel of speakers at the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026. |
The consolidation angered some faculty and students who believe the shift ignores the decades-long history of the departments and the value they offer students and the city of Austin. Faculty fear it will make it harder to hire, limit courses and resources and restrain the fields of study.
The four closed departments — Mexican American and Latina/o Studies; African and African Diaspora Studies; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and American Studies — encompassed 62 professors, six majors, four graduate programs, and eight minors and certificates. Last year, the departments had a combined 307 students enrolled in undergraduate majors, according to UT data. Dozens more pursued minor, graduate and doctoral programs, according to records used by the consolidation committee.
Davis has said the university is not cutting faculty or resources as part of the consolidation. But he recently announced sweeping changes to strictly define the core curriculum that all UT students have to take. Previously, courses in the closed departments counted toward the core, but under Davis’s changes, social and cultural analysis offerings may no longer be eligible, limiting student enrollment.
The core curriculum changes and the consolidation could affect the future of gender and ethnic studies as the university invests in fields favored by conservatives.
The American-Statesman spent the last several months talking to the consolidated departments’ founders, faculty and students to understand the role they had in teaching and producing knowledge in the state. What emerged was the story of four departments born out of successful student activism and distinguished by a connection to the local community, small class sizes and interdisciplinary work and research.
Martha Cotera, a founder of UT Center For Mexican American Studies, at her home in Austin on Tuesday, March 24, 2026. Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
Mexican American and Latina/o Studies
During UT’s spring break, Martha Cotera, 88, stacked nonperishable food and old books in a bin by her front door for UT’s Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Department.
She would take those donations to the department’s food pantry at its UT home in the Gordon White Building. There, the department housed a library, research institute and center that worked with community activists like Cotera to study pressing problems affecting the Chicano community in Austin, from a lack of healthcare options to affordability.
Cotera began advocating for the department as an activist and Texas librarian in the 1960s. There hasn’t been a month in the nearly six decades since when she’s lost touch with the field’s advocates on campus.
It grew from an idea that student advocates had in 1968 to become a department, research institute and center offering graduate and undergraduate degrees with 14 professors on staff. As UT folds it into a larger academic unit, Cotera fears all those resources could be at risk.
In the 1960s, without a dedicated center, department or faculty to study Mexican-American life, Latinos were only spoken about at UT in relation to folklore, Cotera said. The history of Mexicans and Latinos was excluded from other fields like history, education and sociology. The lack of research and education affected Mexican Americans in Austin who didn’t have access to in-depth information about the policies and biases that affected their lives, Cotera said.
“We were always going to be stuck in that corner,” Cotera said. “It was very important that we get out of the folklore realm into multi-disciplinary studies in a serious way by looking at our community, by doing research in our community.”
Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, white Texans made up the majority of students at UT. When more Mexican American and Black students enrolled, student activists began pushing for classes and research that reflected their experiences.
In the late 1960s, UT responded by creating an ethnic studies program. By 1970, the university launched centers dedicated to Mexican American Studies and African American Studies.insert Diosa
The Mexican American Studies center had an impact across the university. After the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action at UT in 1996, David Montejano, the center’s former director, advocated for a race-neutral approach to improving student diversity. He and other center faculty met with state senators. Their efforts were key in drafting the top 10% rule, which gave all Texas high schoolers in the top 10% of their class admission to any state university.
Cotera served on the center’s board, which invested in researching Latino communities in Austin, developing a research archive in the Benson Latin American Collection at UT libraries, an archive of Mexican veterans and an annual conference for Latino scholars. Even as research from center-affiliated faculty grew, advocates continued to push for a department, which would allow the university to hire full-time professors and dedicate more funding.
In 2014, Cotera got her wish, and UT launched the Mexican American and Latino/a Studies Department. The new status allowed program offerings to grow with an undergraduate major and doctoral program.
Paul Del Bosque, 44, recalls hearing about the center’s legacy before he joined the department as a student.
“As a child, I remember hearing about the legendary faculty and the scholarship that was coming out of Chicano studies at UT,” said Del Bosque, who later pursued his master’s and doctoral degrees in the department.
Now in his fifth year of his doctorate program, he researches how hurricanes impact high-poverty communities in South Texas and on the border, contributing Texas-focused scholarship to a Latino community. When he finishes his dissertation in 2028, he plans to pursue a tenure-track job teaching Texas history or environmental humanities.
Reflecting on her beloved department closing, Cotera wiped away tears as she thought about students and the ongoing research into policing, the border and history that could be at risk without UT resources.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said.
Two days after the consolidation was announced, the Civitas Institute, UT’s conservative think tank created by the Texas Legislature in 2021, hosted a symposium titled “America’s Latino Future.” UT’s Mexican American and Latino/a Studies Department, located across the street from where the institute is housed, was not invited to participate, its former chair confirmed.
Cotera attended the event and listened as researchers discussed the economic importance of Latinos and the need for more research into Latino communities.
“I said ‘Thank you very much, you made the case,’” she said.
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Ever since the department changes were announced, community activists have gathered at Cotera’s house to discuss how to preserve Mexican American history and education in Austin and fight the administration’s “erasure” of the field at UT.
The founders of the Mexican American center have stayed together in an informal coalition for the past five decades to ensure it remains funded and supported by UT and to help students find internships and housing, Cotera said. That work will continue.
“This is a grassroots effort. Cut it off at the top,” Cotera said. “The roots will remain.”
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| Attendees listen at the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman |
UT’s African and African Diaspora Studies Department was the largest Black studies department in the nation.
With 26 faculty, an institute for urban policy research and analysis, a research center, a doctoral program, two majors and art galleries, the department was a national leader.
When it became a department in 2010, it was part of then-President William C. Power’s vision to expand education about diverse topics across campus, grow its enrollment of nonwhite students, meet community demand and elevate the national prominence of the university, said Cherise Smith, a former department chair.
The faculty were successful in living up to that vision: The department is known across the country and world, attracting international students and serving as a model for Stanford University when it built its own department, Smith said. UT’s faculty researched education and the relationship between slavery and capitalism while having a special focus on African American art and performance.
For 50 years the field has grown and blossomed at UT, attracting students who also study fashion, natural sciences, engineering, business and education, Smith said.
“There was always an assumption that we would be training all of the students who came to UT,” Smith said. “Not a particular racial or ethnic group.”
It took a while to get to that point. After a UT student petition advocating for classes that reflected the Black experience attracted more than 1,300 signatures, the first class in Black history was offered in 1968, according to Texas archives. The university launched an ethnic studies program the following year.
In 1970, the university opened the center now known as the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, which pioneered research and new academic avenues for students. In response to student advocacy in 2002, UT began offering a certificate in Yoruba Studies, an indigenous African language that students feared would go extinct without continued education and preservation.
The local community has been central to the center’s mission. Faculty researched why Black Austinites were leaving the city and the impact of historic segregation in Austin, Smith said. They also created public resources like a KUT podcast called “Black Austin Matters” that highlights prominent community members, including Talib Abdullahi, the founder of Black History Bike Ride, and Chi Ndika, founder of Luv Fats Ice Cream.
Faculty have also studied how African heritage intersects with a variety of fields, from art — a particular strength of the department — to sports, incarceration and queer communities and share their results in community talks open to all through the Warfield Center.
“I don’t just research out of intellectual curiosity, I research to change the world,” said Ashanté Reese, a professor of anthropology in the department.
Classes are grounded in faculty expertise and contemporary subjects, such as a course on power and money in U.S. education policy taught by Kevin Foster, a professor who serves as a trustee for the Austin Independent School District.
Though the courses, programs and degrees will remain in the new social analysis department, the decision to consolidate without consulting professors felt like an effort to control “whose history gets told, and how and when,” not an honest reevaluation of resources, Reese said.
“We might be a different name. We might need to reimagine and dream,” Reese said. But it will continue, she said. “Black Studies was never about institutional recognition.”
American Studies
University of Texas Professor Lauren Gutterman, the former chair of UT's American Studies Department, smiles as she greets fellow educators at the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman
UT has offered American Studies courses since 1941, when a founding scholar of the field began teaching at the Forty Acres, said Lauren Gutterman, the former department chair. The field focuses on “cultural, social and intellectual life” in the U.S. through a variety of lenses, including economic, political, historical and environmental research.
American Studies has operated as its own department at UT since 1998, also supporting an Urban Studies major, in which students study the history and creation of urban life. UT’s department — one of 150 in the nation and 28 that offer a doctoral program — is known for having UT’s first Pulitzer Prize-winning history faculty member in 1967.
There were more than 130 undergraduate students and 30 doctoral students in American Studies at UT last spring, Gutterman said. Students take classes on American sports and culture, North American borders, the history of religion and digital cultures.
“What students find in American Studies is an opportunity to think about what the United States is, what it means to be a part of this nation, who we’re taught belongs here, who we’re taught does not belong,” Gutterman said.
Opponents have found flaws with the field for being overly critical of the country. Though not addressing the department by name, UT Provost William Inboden wrote in a 2025 National Affairs essay that American history courses offer an “imbalanced” view of the U.S.
Gutterman said, however, that American Studies serves a crucial role, allowing students to explore any aspect of American history, culture and politics through a wide range of methodologies, from mapping to digital archives.
“Critical engagement with American history and culture actually helps students to become better citizens,” Gutterman said. “You (learn about) contemporary issues that are happening and to take action about the issues.”
Alumni include Pulitzer Prize winner and book critic Gail Caldwell and former Austin Mayor Pro Tem Kathy Tovo, as well as doctors, attorneys, professors and college presidents like Laura Cawley, who leads Bethany College, a liberal arts school in Kansas. Both honors programs in the College of Liberal Arts are led by American Studies professors.
Still, as UT reorganizes its core curriculum requirements and pours resources into Western civilization and civic education, department officials say American Studies is being sidelined. The department is already bracing to lose faculty in the coming year.
American Studies professor Iván Chaar López, whose research is critical of U.S. border surveillance, was denied tenure by a presidential committee last year without an explanation. Because of an up-or-out policy that forces professors denied tenure to leave UT, he will depart the Forty Acres in 2027.
No other professor in the four consolidated departments was up for tenure last year, but the denial made Gutterman fearful that the university is overlooking the merits of her field.
This year, faculty will continue teaching courses like Oceanic Histories, Jews of the U.S., Canada and Latin America, Urban Unrest and Asian Americans in the South, she said.
“Even if our department is closed by the university, American Studies as a field, our research, our teaching and the intellectual, personal community that we have built is not going away,” Gutterman said.
Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
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Rep. Lulu Flores, D-Austin, asks questions of the first panel of invited speakers the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman
The newest department of the four consolidated, the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, formed in 2023 after operating as a center since 1979. Its near 50-year history began with students pushing for an education that included all people.
In more than a dozen interviews with alumni, current students, professors and recent staff hires, the women’s and gender studies community defended the program as far-reaching and skills-based, leading students to meaningful careers and lives.
Faculty and courses have focused on preserving untold history and examining how key issues from health to literature and information studies affect people differently based on sexuality, race, disability and gender.
“Gender studies, ethnic studies are actual disciplines born out of the need that wasn’t necessarily being met,” said Nicole Ramsey, a women’s and gender studies professor. “If you are to have knowledge about the world, it doesn’t make sense to only do that through certain frameworks that don’t include everybody. It could just never work.”
Alumni — including a nonprofit founder, therapist, professor and a Rhodes Scholar — said their courses helped them empathetically engage with people with different opinions and personal backgrounds. Department courses on women’s reproductive health, LGBTQ history and literature written by women gave them critical thinking skills and new perspectives that shaped their careers.
“It feels like it’s radical knowledge,” said Neha Yawalkar, who graduated from UT in 2025 with a women’s and gender studies minor.
Yawalkar said her minor taught her how gender affects marketing, engineering and healthcare. A fertility and reproduction course helped her see how she could pursue her passions through healthcare while her South Asian migration course taught her to “critique and read with nuance.” An LGBTQ course showed her how queer people historically struggled to find inclusive care.
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University of Texas Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies coordinator Jackie Salcedo, left, department manager Grayson Hunt, freshman student Sofia Gomez and director Lisa Moore in Burdine Hall, Feb. 18, 2026 after UT President Jim Davis announced plans to consolidate ethnic and gender studies into a new department.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman
Isaac James, who graduated in 2022 with a minor in LGBTQ studies and major in government, said the program showed him how he could serve his community beyond politics and taught him about the rights queer people have fought for. He cofounded OutVote in 2024, an organization focused on engaging LGBTQ youth in politics, after seeing his peers feel unrepresented in government.
“I really do think without LGBTQ studies, I would not have been able to obtain the same professional and academic success,” said James, who became a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford after graduation.
Becoming a department gave women’s and gender studies the ability to hire full-time faculty, a chair to speak directly to the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and more money for events, marketing and staff. But three years after the department’s founding, Davis’ consolidation announcement eliminated the department’s standalone status as conservative state lawmakers exerted pressure on university leaders to tamp down on courses focused on gender or LGBTQ topics.
Lisa Moore, a former chair of the department, began her career at UT in the 1990s as an English and women’s and gender studies professor. She fears she will end it labeled as a professor of “social and cultural analysis” — a field she doesn’t think has merit outside of UT.
Moore said Davis has not responded to her messages inviting the UT president to her classes or to meet with her about the department. She knows that the field she’s spent more than 30 years studying has “already transformed” the country’s understanding of itself.
“What happens in our classrooms is something that I would love our harshest critics to be able to witness,” Moore said.
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Lily Kepner
Higher Education Reporter
Lily Kepner started at the American-Statesman in October 2023. She has appeared on BBC, NPR and Texas Standard to talk about her coverage, which has spanned the impact of state laws and politics on the University of Texas, pro-Palestinian protests, free speech, the anti-DEI ban, LGBTQ student belonging and more. Kepner graduated with honors from Boston University's College of Communication in 2023, where she received the college's highest awards for writing and journalism leadership and led the award-winning student newspaper as Editor-in-Chief. In her time with the American-Statesman, she contributed to reporting that won an Edward R Murrow Award for breaking news, won the School Bell Award for Outstanding Feature from Texas State Teachers Association, and Critics Choice for Best of Austin in the Austin Chronicle. Previously, she has been published in USA Today, The Boston Globe, The National Catholic Reporter and GBH. Kepner is passionate about accountability and service journalism and encourages anyone to reach out to her to tell their story or share a tip.
With 26 faculty, an institute for urban policy research and analysis, a research center, a doctoral program, two majors and art galleries, the department was a national leader.
When it became a department in 2010, it was part of then-President William C. Power’s vision to expand education about diverse topics across campus, grow its enrollment of nonwhite students, meet community demand and elevate the national prominence of the university, said Cherise Smith, a former department chair.
The faculty were successful in living up to that vision: The department is known across the country and world, attracting international students and serving as a model for Stanford University when it built its own department, Smith said. UT’s faculty researched education and the relationship between slavery and capitalism while having a special focus on African American art and performance.
For 50 years the field has grown and blossomed at UT, attracting students who also study fashion, natural sciences, engineering, business and education, Smith said.
“There was always an assumption that we would be training all of the students who came to UT,” Smith said. “Not a particular racial or ethnic group.”
It took a while to get to that point. After a UT student petition advocating for classes that reflected the Black experience attracted more than 1,300 signatures, the first class in Black history was offered in 1968, according to Texas archives. The university launched an ethnic studies program the following year.
In 1970, the university opened the center now known as the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, which pioneered research and new academic avenues for students. In response to student advocacy in 2002, UT began offering a certificate in Yoruba Studies, an indigenous African language that students feared would go extinct without continued education and preservation.
The local community has been central to the center’s mission. Faculty researched why Black Austinites were leaving the city and the impact of historic segregation in Austin, Smith said. They also created public resources like a KUT podcast called “Black Austin Matters” that highlights prominent community members, including Talib Abdullahi, the founder of Black History Bike Ride, and Chi Ndika, founder of Luv Fats Ice Cream.
Faculty have also studied how African heritage intersects with a variety of fields, from art — a particular strength of the department — to sports, incarceration and queer communities and share their results in community talks open to all through the Warfield Center.
“I don’t just research out of intellectual curiosity, I research to change the world,” said Ashanté Reese, a professor of anthropology in the department.
Classes are grounded in faculty expertise and contemporary subjects, such as a course on power and money in U.S. education policy taught by Kevin Foster, a professor who serves as a trustee for the Austin Independent School District.
Though the courses, programs and degrees will remain in the new social analysis department, the decision to consolidate without consulting professors felt like an effort to control “whose history gets told, and how and when,” not an honest reevaluation of resources, Reese said.
“We might be a different name. We might need to reimagine and dream,” Reese said. But it will continue, she said. “Black Studies was never about institutional recognition.”
American Studies
University of Texas Professor Lauren Gutterman, the former chair of UT's American Studies Department, smiles as she greets fellow educators at the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman
UT has offered American Studies courses since 1941, when a founding scholar of the field began teaching at the Forty Acres, said Lauren Gutterman, the former department chair. The field focuses on “cultural, social and intellectual life” in the U.S. through a variety of lenses, including economic, political, historical and environmental research.
American Studies has operated as its own department at UT since 1998, also supporting an Urban Studies major, in which students study the history and creation of urban life. UT’s department — one of 150 in the nation and 28 that offer a doctoral program — is known for having UT’s first Pulitzer Prize-winning history faculty member in 1967.
There were more than 130 undergraduate students and 30 doctoral students in American Studies at UT last spring, Gutterman said. Students take classes on American sports and culture, North American borders, the history of religion and digital cultures.
“What students find in American Studies is an opportunity to think about what the United States is, what it means to be a part of this nation, who we’re taught belongs here, who we’re taught does not belong,” Gutterman said.
Opponents have found flaws with the field for being overly critical of the country. Though not addressing the department by name, UT Provost William Inboden wrote in a 2025 National Affairs essay that American history courses offer an “imbalanced” view of the U.S.
Gutterman said, however, that American Studies serves a crucial role, allowing students to explore any aspect of American history, culture and politics through a wide range of methodologies, from mapping to digital archives.
“Critical engagement with American history and culture actually helps students to become better citizens,” Gutterman said. “You (learn about) contemporary issues that are happening and to take action about the issues.”
Alumni include Pulitzer Prize winner and book critic Gail Caldwell and former Austin Mayor Pro Tem Kathy Tovo, as well as doctors, attorneys, professors and college presidents like Laura Cawley, who leads Bethany College, a liberal arts school in Kansas. Both honors programs in the College of Liberal Arts are led by American Studies professors.
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| Iván Chaar López, a University of Texas scholar on border surveillance, in his office in Austin, Wednesday, July 15, 2026. Amid concerns UT is quieting controversial fields, Chaar López fears the president violated his academic freedom in denying him tenure.Mikala Compton/Austin American-Statesman. |
Still, as UT reorganizes its core curriculum requirements and pours resources into Western civilization and civic education, department officials say American Studies is being sidelined. The department is already bracing to lose faculty in the coming year.
American Studies professor Iván Chaar López, whose research is critical of U.S. border surveillance, was denied tenure by a presidential committee last year without an explanation. Because of an up-or-out policy that forces professors denied tenure to leave UT, he will depart the Forty Acres in 2027.
No other professor in the four consolidated departments was up for tenure last year, but the denial made Gutterman fearful that the university is overlooking the merits of her field.
This year, faculty will continue teaching courses like Oceanic Histories, Jews of the U.S., Canada and Latin America, Urban Unrest and Asian Americans in the South, she said.
“Even if our department is closed by the university, American Studies as a field, our research, our teaching and the intellectual, personal community that we have built is not going away,” Gutterman said.
Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Rep. Lulu Flores, D-Austin, asks questions of the first panel of invited speakers the People’s Hearing on Threats to Diversity and Academic Freedom in Higher Education, a hearing organized by activists for the Texas Legislative Progressive Caucus to hear from students and educators about policies impacting higher education at the Robert E. Johnson Conference Center in Austin, Aug. 12, 2026.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman
The newest department of the four consolidated, the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department, formed in 2023 after operating as a center since 1979. Its near 50-year history began with students pushing for an education that included all people.
In more than a dozen interviews with alumni, current students, professors and recent staff hires, the women’s and gender studies community defended the program as far-reaching and skills-based, leading students to meaningful careers and lives.
Faculty and courses have focused on preserving untold history and examining how key issues from health to literature and information studies affect people differently based on sexuality, race, disability and gender.
“Gender studies, ethnic studies are actual disciplines born out of the need that wasn’t necessarily being met,” said Nicole Ramsey, a women’s and gender studies professor. “If you are to have knowledge about the world, it doesn’t make sense to only do that through certain frameworks that don’t include everybody. It could just never work.”
Alumni — including a nonprofit founder, therapist, professor and a Rhodes Scholar — said their courses helped them empathetically engage with people with different opinions and personal backgrounds. Department courses on women’s reproductive health, LGBTQ history and literature written by women gave them critical thinking skills and new perspectives that shaped their careers.
“It feels like it’s radical knowledge,” said Neha Yawalkar, who graduated from UT in 2025 with a women’s and gender studies minor.
Yawalkar said her minor taught her how gender affects marketing, engineering and healthcare. A fertility and reproduction course helped her see how she could pursue her passions through healthcare while her South Asian migration course taught her to “critique and read with nuance.” An LGBTQ course showed her how queer people historically struggled to find inclusive care.
University of Texas Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies coordinator Jackie Salcedo, left, department manager Grayson Hunt, freshman student Sofia Gomez and director Lisa Moore in Burdine Hall, Feb. 18, 2026 after UT President Jim Davis announced plans to consolidate ethnic and gender studies into a new department.Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman
Isaac James, who graduated in 2022 with a minor in LGBTQ studies and major in government, said the program showed him how he could serve his community beyond politics and taught him about the rights queer people have fought for. He cofounded OutVote in 2024, an organization focused on engaging LGBTQ youth in politics, after seeing his peers feel unrepresented in government.
“I really do think without LGBTQ studies, I would not have been able to obtain the same professional and academic success,” said James, who became a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford after graduation.
Becoming a department gave women’s and gender studies the ability to hire full-time faculty, a chair to speak directly to the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and more money for events, marketing and staff. But three years after the department’s founding, Davis’ consolidation announcement eliminated the department’s standalone status as conservative state lawmakers exerted pressure on university leaders to tamp down on courses focused on gender or LGBTQ topics.
Lisa Moore, a former chair of the department, began her career at UT in the 1990s as an English and women’s and gender studies professor. She fears she will end it labeled as a professor of “social and cultural analysis” — a field she doesn’t think has merit outside of UT.
Moore said Davis has not responded to her messages inviting the UT president to her classes or to meet with her about the department. She knows that the field she’s spent more than 30 years studying has “already transformed” the country’s understanding of itself.
“What happens in our classrooms is something that I would love our harshest critics to be able to witness,” Moore said.
Lily Kepner
Higher Education Reporter
Lily Kepner started at the American-Statesman in October 2023. She has appeared on BBC, NPR and Texas Standard to talk about her coverage, which has spanned the impact of state laws and politics on the University of Texas, pro-Palestinian protests, free speech, the anti-DEI ban, LGBTQ student belonging and more. Kepner graduated with honors from Boston University's College of Communication in 2023, where she received the college's highest awards for writing and journalism leadership and led the award-winning student newspaper as Editor-in-Chief. In her time with the American-Statesman, she contributed to reporting that won an Edward R Murrow Award for breaking news, won the School Bell Award for Outstanding Feature from Texas State Teachers Association, and Critics Choice for Best of Austin in the Austin Chronicle. Previously, she has been published in USA Today, The Boston Globe, The National Catholic Reporter and GBH. Kepner is passionate about accountability and service journalism and encourages anyone to reach out to her to tell their story or share a tip.
