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

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

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

September 7, 2026

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

This quieter form of change deserves much more attention.

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

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

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

That is worth sitting with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this sense, governance decisions eventually become knowledge decisions.

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

Source: Bennett, Guide for Progressives: Project 2025

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

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

Ideas become much more powerful when they acquire institutions.

That brings us directly to Texas.

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

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

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

Event landing page.

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

But neither should the relationship go unnoticed.

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

The institutional context makes it all the more significant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My concern is not their existence.

It is the asymmetry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That distinction is crucial.

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

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

That is perhaps MacLean’s most important lesson.

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Theology of Power Behind the Anti-DEI Movement: What Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer Help Us See, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Theology of Power Behind the Anti-DEI Movement:
What Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer Help Us See          

by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 10, 2026

Today's anti-DEI movement does not merely invoke the language of neutrality; it weaponizes it. Its appeals to “colorblind equality,” “individual responsibility,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “freedom from coercion” provide moral cover for a coordinated effort to dismantle the institutional commitments that make multiracial and multiethnic democracy possible.

A Manhattan Institute (2023) policy brief by Christopher Rufo, Ilya Shapiro, and Matt Beienburg makes this clear. The document calls for state legislatures to abolish DEI offices, end mandatory diversity training, prohibit diversity statements, and eliminate identity-conscious policies in public universities. It even supplies model legislative language for states to adopt. In other words, it does not merely criticize DEI. It operationalizes a political project.

What would Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer help us see in this document and in the broader movement from which it emerges? At the risk of oversimplifying the work of these formidable researchers and thinkers—or failing to fully acknowledge the many conceptual overlaps among them—I offer the following reading. Each illuminates a different dimension of the same political project: Stewart helps us understand the religious-nationalist drive for power; MacLean reveals the anti-democratic political economy beneath it; and Mayer follows the money and institutional networks that make such ideas actionable.

Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers and Money, Lies, and God, would
likely urge us not to mistake this for a simple “culture war.” Christian nationalism, in her analysis, is not merely about religious belief. Nor is it reducible to debates over prayer, abortion, sexuality, or school curricula. It is a political movement seeking power over the institutions of democracy. Its aim is not pluralism, but control. From this perspective, attacks on DEI, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, and public education are not side issues. They are part of a larger attempt to define whose knowledge counts, whose histories matter, and whose presence in public institutions is legitimate.

Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains, would likely locate this effort within a longer history of anti-democratic political economy. Her work shows how radical-right, neoliberal thinkers and donors have sought to constrain majority rule, weaken public institutions, privatize public goods, and insulate concentrated wealth from democratic accountability. Seen through MacLean’s lens, anti-DEI legislation is not only a cultural backlash. It is also a governance strategy. It

narrows what public universities can do, what faculty can say, what students can learn, and what communities can demand of taxpayer-supported institutions.

Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, would likely follow the money. She would ask: Who funds the think tanks, advocacy organizations, litigation networks, media campaigns, and policy shops that produce these “model bills”? Who benefits when public institutions are weakened? Who gains when democracy is recast as “coercion,” equity as “orthodoxy,” and civil rights as “preference”? 

Mayer’s work helps us see that ideas rarely move on their own. They are carried, amplified, and institutionalized through networks of wealth, influence, litigation, media, and policy advocacy. In higher education, this influence can become especially consequential when donor support comes with expectations—whether explicit or implicit—that shape curricula, research priorities, faculty appointments, or public-facing programs. When private wealth gains this kind of leverage over academic life, it does more than fund ideas; it helps determine which ideas become legitimate, visible, and powerful. The result is a serious threat to academic freedom, shared governance, and the integrity of universities as public-serving institutions.

Together, these three writers help us understand that the attack on DEI is not simply about administrative offices or training sessions. It is about the future of democracy itself.

John Oliver’s recent and timely Last Week Tonight segment on New College of Florida gives us a concrete glimpse of what this project looks like when theory becomes governance. New College was not merely criticized as “woke”; it was politically captured and remade through state power. 

Board appointments, administrative upheaval, the elimination of gender studies, numerous faculty departures, escalating costs, and an aggressive campaign to rebrand the institution all became part of a larger effort to transform a distinctive honors public liberal arts college into a showcase for ideological control. Put plainly, New College was not simply reformed; it was targeted. Its transformation should be understood as an intentional and orchestrated attack—one that other states, especially those already moving in this direction, should heed as a warning.

Oliver’s satire makes the story accessible, but the implications are grave: New College reveals how appeals to freedom, neutrality, and anti-indoctrination can become instruments for narrowing intellectual life and subordinating public education to political spectacle.

Link to John Oliver's show on New College

What happened at New College of Florida should therefore be read not as an isolated Florida story, but as a warning about a broader national strategy—one that has already taken legislative form in Texas through SB 17 and related efforts to discipline public higher education.

This is especially clear in higher education. Public universities are among the few institutions where young people can still encounter histories, literatures, theories, and communities that challenge inherited hierarchies. They are places where students learn that inequality is not natural, that democracy is unfinished, and that knowledge can serve justice. This is precisely why they have become targets.

The anti-DEI movement tells us that it seeks neutrality. But there is nothing neutral or apolitical about banning the vocabulary of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, power, privilege, or structural inequality from public life. 

There is nothing neutral or apolitical about using state power to restrict how universities support historically excluded students. There is nothing neutral about turning “colorblindness” into a weapon against the very communities whose labor, taxes, cultures, and struggles built the state.

Nor is there anything Christian, in the deepest moral sense, about denying the dignity of the vulnerable, erasing histories of suffering and resistance, or consolidating power in the hands of the already powerful. The Christianity rooted in justice that many of us recognize speaks to humility, justice, love, mercy, and care for the stranger. Christian nationalism, by contrast, cloaks hierarchy in sacred authority. It baptizes domination. It transforms—and disfigures—a faith tradition into an instrument of political control.

This is why Stewart’s analysis matters. She helps us see how religious language can be marshaled to justify anti-democratic power. This is why MacLean’s analysis matters. She helps us see how democracy is weakened not always by dramatic coups, but by slow institutional redesign. And this is why Mayer’s analysis matters. She helps us see how concentrated wealth builds the infrastructure that makes these transformations possible.

The struggle over DEI, then, is not a narrow dispute over campus bureaucracy. It is a struggle over whether public institutions will continue to serve a multiracial democracy or whether they will be remade to protect hierarchy under the banner of freedom.

For those of us in Texas, this is not abstract. Under SB 17, we have seen how anti-DEI laws chill speech, restructure universities, eliminate offices, threaten programs, and place entire fields of study under suspicion. We have seen how Mexican American Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and other knowledge traditions become vulnerable when political leaders decide that democracy itself has become too diverse, too demanding, and too honest.

The answer is not despair. It is clarity.

We should name the movement accurately. We should refuse the false innocence of its language. We should defend academic freedom, shared governance, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, civil rights, and public education as essential democratic goods. 

And we should insist that pluralism is not a threat to democracy. Pluralism is democracy.

The future being offered by Christian nationalism and its allied political networks is a narrowed one: fewer rights, fewer histories, fewer voices, fewer protections, fewer public goods. The future we must defend is broader, deeper, and more humane: a democracy capacious enough to tell the truth, educate all children, honor all communities, and build institutions worthy of the public trust.

That is the real choice before us.

Reference

Last Week Tonight. (2026, June 8). New College of Florida: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFMc07F1UUU

Manhattan Institute. (2023, January 18). New issue brief: Abolish DEI bureaucracies and restore colorblind equality in public universities [Press release]. https://manhattan.institute/article/new-issue-brief-abolish-dei-bureaucracies-and-restore-colorblind-equality-in-public-universities

MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Penguin Press.

Mayer, J. (2016). Dark money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right. Anchor.

Stewart, K. (2020). The power worshippers: Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism. Bloomsbury Publishing.

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

Proving the Value of Higher Education Requires Defending It, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 3, 2026

Proving the Value of Higher Education Requires 

Defending It

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 3, 2026

Allison Schrager’s recent Bloomberg Opinion column posted below, “Colleges Face a Choice: Prove Their Value or Risk Losing Students,” responds to Yale University’s report on public trust in higher education by arguing that colleges and universities must restore public confidence by demonstrating clearer value to students and families (Schrager, 2026). On the surface, this is a reasonable concern. Higher education is expensive. Admissions practices can be opaque. Students and parents worry about debt, employment, and whether a degree is worth the investment. Universities should take these concerns seriously.

But the problem with Schrager’s framing is that it treats mistrust as if it were primarily an institutional failure of higher education itself. That is only part of the story. As I argued in my earlier TexasEdEquity critique of the Yale report on this blog, the crisis we are facing is not simply a crisis of trust in higher education. It is a restructuring of higher education itself (Valenzuela, 2026). 

The question is not only whether universities can prove their value to the public. The question is whether the public will still be allowed to have universities worthy of trust.

Schrager writes that colleges need to prove their value or risk losing students. She is especially concerned about first-generation students who may already be uncertain about whether college is worth the time, money, and risk. That concern is real. As someone who has spent my career focused on educational equity, Mexican American and Latina/o schooling, and the public mission of universities, I share it. First-generation students deserve institutions that support them, challenge them, graduate them, and prepare them for meaningful lives and livelihoods.

Yet a narrow “return on investment” framing can unintentionally reinforce the very forces that are diminishing higher education’s democratic purpose. If the value of college is reduced to wages alone, then fields that cultivate historical understanding, critical thought, civic imagination, ethical judgment, cultural knowledge, and democratic participation become vulnerable to attack. If universities are judged only by immediate labor-market outcomes, then education becomes training, students become consumers, faculty become service providers, and the public university becomes a credentialing arm of the economy.

That is too small a vision. And not at all becoming of the University of Texas at Austin, one of only two of the state's flagship institutions.

The value of higher education is not simply that it helps people get jobs, though it often does. Its deeper value is that it helps people navigate complexity in an ever-changing world. It teaches students to read closely, reason carefully, evaluate evidence, ask better questions, understand historical context, communicate across difference, and participate in democratic life. These are not luxuries. They are survival skills for a society facing climate disruption, artificial intelligence, democratic backsliding, economic inequality, racial conflict, public health crises, and disinformation at scale.

Indeed, employers themselves continue to say that they value precisely these capacities. The Association of American Colleges and Universities has repeatedly found that employers want graduates who can think critically, communicate effectively, adapt, solve complex problems, and work across difference (Finley, 2023, 2025). These are not narrow technical competencies. They are liberal learning outcomes. They are also democratic capacities.

So when Schrager suggests that “less elite” schools may need to become “less academic” and provide more job training, we should pause. Students from working-class, first-generation, rural, Black, Brown, Indigenous, and immigrant communities do not deserve a thinner education than students at Yale. They do not deserve only training while elites receive philosophy, history, literature, political theory, art, science, and critical debate. That would reproduce the very hierarchy higher education should challenge: broad intellectual formation for the privileged, narrow workforce preparation for everyone else.

The problem is not that public universities are too academic. The problem is that they are being pressured to abandon their academic and democratic missions in order to survive political attack, austerity, and market discipline (Valenzuela, 2026; also see Wray, 2024).

This is where Schrager’s institutional affiliation matters. Schrager is identified as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. That does not disqualify her from writing about higher education, nor does it mean every point she makes is wrong. But it does require context. 

The Manhattan Institute is not a neutral observer of higher education’s trust crisis. It has been directly involved in campaigns to reshape public universities, including through model legislation aimed at abolishing DEI bureaucracies, ending mandatory diversity training, restricting diversity statements, and eliminating identity-based preferences (Manhattan Institute, 2023). Inside Higher Ed reported that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-DEI higher education agenda drew from Manhattan Institute model legislation developed with Christopher Rufo and others (Moody, 2023).

This matters because the language of “restoring trust,” “rigor,” so-called “viewpoint diversity,” and “academic excellence” can operate in two very different ways. It can be a good-faith call for better universities. Or it can be a political vocabulary used to justify state intervention, program elimination, curricular control, anti-DEI laws, donor influence, and the disciplining of faculty and students whose work challenges inequality.

We are seeing the latter across the country.

In Texas, Senate Bill 17 eliminated DEI offices in public universities. Senate Bill 37 has expanded state authority over curriculum, governance, and faculty life. Programs in Mexican American and Latino Studies, African American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and related fields have been threatened, consolidated, renamed, or politically scrutinized. Across the country, public higher education is being told to prove its value while the very conditions that make it valuable—academic freedom, shared governance, critical inquiry, inclusive access, intellectual breadth—are being undermined.

That is why the Yale report, while useful, is incomplete. Others have similarly noted that the report gets some things right—especially around institutional effectiveness, public confidence, transparency, and the need for universities to respond more seriously to legitimate public concerns (Rudawsky, 2026). It names real concerns: costs, admissions, grade inflation, administrative growth, free speech, and public skepticism. 

However from the vantage point of Texas, the deeper issue is power.

Higher education is not simply being misunderstood. It is being remade. And much of that remaking is being carried out by political actors, ideological organizations, donors, and think tanks that have long viewed universities as sites to be captured or disciplined.

Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains helps us understand this longer history. MacLean traces how radical libertarian networks, including those associated with Charles Koch, sought to limit democratic capacity by reshaping law, policy, education, labor, taxation, and public institutions in ways that protect concentrated wealth from democratic demands (MacLean, 2017). One does not have to accept every claim in MacLean’s book to see the relevance: higher education has long been a battleground over whether democracy will serve the public or be constrained on behalf of market power.

Katherine Stewart’s work is equally illuminating. In Money, Lies, and God, Stewart documents an anti-democratic movement that brings together Christian nationalists, billionaire networks, disinformation campaigns, and far-right organizations seeking to transform American democracy from within (Stewart, 2025). Her reporting shows that the assault on public institutions is not random. It is organized, funded, and ideologically motivated. Universities, public schools, libraries, school boards, courts, and state legislatures are all part of the same terrain.

Seen in this light, Schrager’s question—how can colleges prove their value?—needs to be turned around. Higher education should absolutely be accountable to students, families, taxpayers, and the public. But we must also ask: Who is defining value? Who benefits when value is reduced to salary? Who gains when the humanities, Ethnic Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical social sciences are framed as politically suspect or economically wasteful? Who profits when public universities are weakened and privatized? Who gains when democratic education is replaced by workforce sorting?

A university’s value cannot be measured only by wages or return on investment. A university also proves its value when it helps students recognize propaganda, understand history, analyze policy, question authority, read the law, evaluate scientific evidence, work across difference, and imagine alternatives. It proves its value when it prepares students not only to enter the economy, but to shape it. It proves its value when it produces teachers, nurses, engineers, artists, organizers, lawyers, scientists, public servants, writers, parents, neighbors, and citizens capable of democratic judgment.

This is why Ethnic Studies is central, not peripheral, to the university’s value. Mexican American Studies, African American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and related fields teach students to understand how power works historically and structurally. They connect knowledge to community, memory, identity, policy, and justice. They help students see that democracy is not only a set of institutions, but a practice of belonging, critique, participation, and repair.

In a state like Texas, this is especially urgent. Texas is young, diverse, multilingual, and multiracial. Its future depends on students who can navigate complexity, understand multiple histories, communicate across communities, and participate in democratic life. To dismantle or weaken the very fields that prepare students for this future is not academic reform. It is civic disinvestment.

To be clear, universities should not dismiss public concerns. They should address affordability, debt, student support, admissions transparency, administrative growth, uneven teaching quality, and ideological narrowness where it exists. They should strengthen academic rigor and protect open inquiry. They should make clearer to students and families what a college education offers.

But they should not accept a market-only definition of value. Nor should they allow organizations that are actively working to narrow public higher education to present themselves as neutral arbiters of trust.

If higher education wants to regain public trust, it must do more than prove its economic payoff. It must tell a better truth about what it is for.

Higher education is for work, yes. But it is also for democracy. It is for complexity. It is for memory. It is for ethical judgment. It is for public reason. It is for learning how to live with others in a plural society. It is for asking not only, “What job will this get me?” but also, “What kind of world are we building, who benefits from it, who is harmed by it, and how might it be otherwise?”

The crisis, then, is not simply that universities have lost public trust. It is that trust is being weaponized by forces that want to shrink the democratic mission of higher education. The answer is not to make universities less academic for most students and more intellectually expansive for elites. The answer is to make the full promise of higher education available to all students.

That means defending affordability, access, academic freedom, shared governance, Ethnic Studies, the humanities, the sciences, professional education, and the civic purposes of the university together.

Colleges do need to prove their value. But their value cannot be proven by surrendering to the very forces that are trying to undercut them.

Their value will be proven by defending the university as a democratic public good.

References

Association of American Colleges and Universities. (2025, December 11). New national survey finds strong employer confidence in higher education: Findings show clear alignment between liberal education outcomes and evolving workforce needs, AAC&U. https://www.aacu.org/newsroom/new-national-survey-finds-strong-employer-confidence-in-higher-education

Finley, A. P. (2023). The career-ready graduate: What employers say about the difference college makes. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/research/the-career-ready-graduate-what-employers-say-about-the-difference-college-makes

Finley, A. P. (2025). The agility imperative: How employers view preparation for an uncertain future. Association of American Colleges and Universities. https://www.aacu.org/research/the-agility-imperative

MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Viking.

Manhattan Institute. (2023, January 18). New issue brief: Abolish DEI bureaucracies and restore colorblind equality in public universities. https://manhattan.institute/article/new-issue-brief-abolish-dei-bureaucracies-and-restore-colorblind-equality-in-public-universities

Moody, J. (2023, February 6). DeSantis debuts a new conservative playbook for ending DEI. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/academic-freedom/2023/02/06/desantis-debuts-new-conservative-playbook-ending-dei

Rudawsky, D. (2026, April 28). What Yale got right, and what the trust crisis still demands, Institutional Effectiveness Weekly, 37. https://donrudawsky.substack.com/p/what-yale-got-right-and-what-the

Schrager, A. (2026, May 4). Colleges face a choice: Prove their value or risk losing students, Bloomberg Opinion. https://www.statesman.com/opinion/columns/article/universities-trust-enrollment-decline-opinion-22232350.php

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

Valenzuela, A. (2026, April 28). The wrong crisis: What the Yale report misses in the age of manufactured mistrust. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-wrong-crisis-what-yale-report.html

Wray, A. (2024, March 27). How these 10 states’ anti-DEI laws will impact college campuses, Reckon.
https://www.reckon.news/justice/2024/03/how-these-9-states-anti-dei-laws-will-impact-college-campuses.html

Yale University. (2026). Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Yale University.

Colleges face a choice: Prove their value or risk losing students 

By Allison Schrager, Bloomberg Opinion | Austin American-Statesman, May 4, 2026


University of Texas students walk through campus last year. If the U.S. values economic mobility, the whole system of higher education needs to regain the trust of the public, Allison Schrager writes.

Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman

Last week Yale University took the first step on the road to recovery: It admitted it had a problem. That problem is a lack of trust — and the damage that Yale and other top schools have done isn’t to themselves, it is to the entire system of U.S. higher education.

But if universities want to offer a truly rigorous education that is open to good-natured debate, students and faculty of different political backgrounds will need to feel more welcome. Without substantial change, U.S. universities may squander what little trust they have — and the country will be worse off.

America’s elite universities, which produce world-class research and attract top scholars from around the globe, should be a source of pride. But most Americans mistrust the U.S. higher education system, and last year Yale’s president assigned a committee to study the reasons why. The resulting report identifies several culprits: high tuition costs, opaque admissions practices, a politically monolithic culture, and a weak commitment to academic rigor and open debate.These perceptions, the report concedes, are not entirely wrong. The irony here is that even if Yale does nothing to change, it will probably be fine. Elite students and scholars will still want to go there. Donors will still give them money. The consequences will redound for people who go to schools not named Yale or Harvard.

Anyone who would consider a top school like Yale won’t decide against college altogether because of the flaws and excesses detailed in this report. I worry more about the first-generation students who are ambivalent about going to college in the first place, uncertain about whether the investment is worth it and whether they can stick with it.

RELATED: If UT wants to restore public trust, leaders must earn it

In the last 60 years, getting a college degree became part of the American Dream. Technology and the economy changed in ways that rewarded graduates with higher earnings. The result was that many more people — not just the children of the elite but first-generation students too — went to college.

In the last few years, however, this trend has started to reverse. Now about 62% of high school graduates enroll in college or university, down from 70% several years ago.

There is no single reason Americans have turned on higher education, although one big one is that a degree does not pay off like it used to. If you graduate from a four-year degree program at most schools, the odds are still very good that your degree will confer higher earnings over your lifetime. But it is no longer a sure thing. And as tuition got more expensive after 2000, the college wage premium also stagnated. It seems like college is no longer such a good deal.

Still, given the positive expected value, economics alone can’t explain falling enrollments. One reason could be that the mission of many elite universities is muddled. Back when only a small fraction of the population went to college, it could be just a place to read great books, have fun, and stay up late in your dorm room debating Marxism. When it was over, you got a job in banking or law. Elite universities were especially good at providing that experience, and graduates were rewarded with higher pay.

ALSO READ: UT’s restructuring blurs rich differences into a single ‘Other’

But once more people started going to college, the experience had to provide more transparent economic value. In theory, less elite schools could have become more like trade schools, but this didn't happen (perhaps because the less elite schools are largely staffed by graduates of elite schools). Also the incentives were never there to change because the U.S. subsidizes all college degrees, even if some pay off more than others.

What if the mission was just academic excellence? In that case, almost all universities — and especially elite ones — failed. Most students don’t go to elite universities, but these schools get outsized attention. So it’s hard not to notice how the supposedly best and brightest students don’t care about their classes, don’t get real grades, and often seem comically immature when trying to be taken seriously. Then students had the nerve to demand the government forgive their loans, an unpopular stance with many Americans.

If these elite schools can’t deliver on their most basic mission, what does that say about the system as a whole? The financial returns to a degree have been falling for years, but the decline in enrollments and erosion of trust is relatively recent, and coincides with many of the controversies that have erupted on elite campuses.

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America’s higher education system is already shrinking and will probably shrink further, especially if it continues to be hard for graduates to find jobs. Some colleges are closing, and universities are focused on degrees that offer a higher earning potential and are cutting departments that are less popular.

These falling enrollments may well be justified. At the same time, for all its problems, college remains an important contributor to economic mobility. It still usually produces higher earnings, and it brings together people from different economic backgrounds.

If the U.S. values economic mobility, the whole system of higher education needs to regain the trust of the public. If more marginal schools want to survive, they will need to be less academic and provide more training in skills that translate into jobs. More elite schools can restore trust by returning to a focus on academic excellence rather than trying to solve all of society’s problems.

Yale’s report does have some good ideas that other universities are also trying, such as curbing grade inflation, making admissions more transparent, reforming university governance and cutting administrative bloat. Fixing the perception of political bias will be harder, especially since most academics lean left.

But if universities want to offer a truly rigorous education that is open to good-natured debate, students and faculty of different political backgrounds will need to feel more welcome. Without substantial change, U.S. universities may squander what little trust they have — and the country will be worse off.


Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

Manufacturing “Cancel Culture” at UT: Crisis Discourse, Governance, and the Politics of Academic Freedom in Texas Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Manufacturing “Cancel Culture” at UT: Crisis Discourse, Governance, and the Politics of Academic Freedom 

in Texas Higher Education

You may listen to a recording of this here.

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 1, 2026

Something remarkable has happened at the University of Texas at Austin—and
throughout Texas higher education. In a state with a long history of suppressing Mexican American Studies, resisting desegregation, and policing the boundaries of public knowledge, we are now told that Women and Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies are the true threat to free speech.

Accordingly, the American Association of University Professors (2024) warns that increasing legislative interference in curriculum and governance poses a direct threat to academic freedom by subordinating professional judgment to political authority.

Let all of this sink in.

Fields devoted to studying power, inequality, race, gender, and colonialism are being framed as authoritarian. And yet it is this very scholarship—probing injustice, exposing exploitation, imagining alternatives—that equips us to confront democratic backsliding and planetary crisis.

And the state is intervening—ostensibly to protect liberty.

This narrative did not arise from faculty misconduct findings, accreditation failures, or scholarly scandal. It was constructed. It was amplified. And under SB 17 (2023) and SB 37 (2025), it has now been operationalized into law.

To understand what is happening in Texas higher education, we must call this what it is: a governance transformation justified through crisis discourse.

Wilson and Kamola (2023) show how selective campus incidents are magnified through coordinated media ecosystems and donor networks into "evidence" of systemic institutional failure. What might otherwise remain a local disagreement becomes proof of a national emergency. 

The cycle is predictable: identify controversy, amplify outrage, declare ideological capture, legislate reform.

In Texas, crisis preceded cure.

Before SB 17 dismantled DEI infrastructures, DEI was framed as coercive orthodoxy. Before SB 37 weakened shared governance, faculty senates were portrayed as partisan strongholds. The ground was prepared rhetorically long before it was altered legislatively.

Nancy MacLean (2017) reminds us that institutional transformation rarely occurs through dramatic abolition. It happens through procedural redesign. Authority shifts quietly. Governance structures are recalibrated. The institution remains standing—but its operating logic changes.

That is what SB 37 represents.

I have been at UT Austin for decades. I have seen intense disagreements over public positions faculty have taken. I have watched colleagues disagree sharply about theory, about politics, about pedagogy. That was not dysfunction. That was shared governance in action. 

What I had never seen—until now—was the systematic restructuring of governance itself through state mandate.

The American Association of University Professors has been clear for over eighty years: academic freedom is not merely an individual right. It is a structural condition sustained by shared governance (AAUP, 1940/2015; AAUP, 1966/2015). Faculty bear primary responsibility for curriculum and instruction precisely because disciplinary expertise—not political expediency—should determine academic content.

When faculty senates are weakened or replaced with advisory bodies responsive to political oversight, the architecture changes. Authority moves upward and outward.

And here is the inversion: this restructuring is justified in the name of protecting free speech.

Let us pause.

The disciplines most frequently labeled “propaganda”—Women and Gender Studies, Black Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Indigenous Studies—operate through peer review, accreditation standards, and national scholarly associations. They assign canonical texts. They demand evidence-based argumentation. They expose students to intellectual traditions spanning centuries.

Critique is not cancellation. 

The irony is staggering. It's the powers that be that are doing all the canceling.

In fact, what these disciplines do—systematically—is analyze power. They interrogate racial hierarchy, gender stratification, settler colonialism, capitalism, and state formation. They ask who benefits, who is excluded, and how institutions reproduce inequality.

That analytic posture is not authoritarian.

It is foundational to the liberal arts.

The deeper issue is authority. Who decides what counts as legitimate knowledge?

The AAUP has repeatedly warned that legislative interference in curricular matters displaces professional judgment and produces chilling effects even in the absence of explicit speech bans (AAUP, 1940/2015; AAUP, 1966/2015). When lawmakers define entire areas of inquiry as suspect, scholars internalize risk. Research agendas narrow. Hiring patterns shift. Students receive the message.

The language of neutrality becomes the mechanism of control.

Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation have advanced national reform blueprints targeting DEI, curriculum, and governance structures. These agendas do not typically call for closing universities. They call for recalibrating them—redefining academic freedom as compliance with politically supervised neutrality.

When these reform agendas converge with state legislation like SB 17 and SB 37, the result is not isolated policy disagreement. It is structural realignment.

And here is where Texas history matters.

This state has long wrestled with who controls knowledge production—from textbook battles to bilingual education fights to Mexican American Studies bans in K–12. The current moment is not an anomaly. It is a continuation of a longer struggle over narrative authority.

What is new is the scale of governance redesign.

If shared governance erodes, if faculty expertise is subordinated to political oversight, if entire domains of inquiry are stigmatized through law, the university does not collapse. It shifts.

The liberal arts tradition conservatives claim to defend depends on contestation—from Plato’s dialogues to Du Bois’s sociological interventions to contemporary critical theory. A university that cannot sustain rigorous analysis of race and gender is not defending liberal education. It is curating it.

The question before Texas is not whether one agrees with every argument advanced in Women and Gender Studies or Ethnic Studies.

The question is whether academic legitimacy will continue to be determined by scholarly communities within shared governance structures—or by political actors invoking crisis.

Free speech does not erode because students argue.

It erodes when governance systems are redesigned to align inquiry with state-defined boundaries.

SB 17 and SB 37 are not cultural skirmishes. They are governance interventions. And governance is the backbone of academic freedom.

If we allow that backbone to weaken while congratulating ourselves for defending free speech, we should be honest about what is happening.

We are not rescuing the liberal arts. We are redefining them in the image of political oversight.

History teaches us that when authority over knowledge production shifts from scholarly communities to political power, the effects rarely remain confined to a single department. Such shifts tend to expand, normalizing intervention and narrowing the boundaries of acceptable inquiry across the institution. Once the precedent is set—that legislatures may define which fields are suspect, which governance structures are dispensable, and which scholarly frameworks are legitimate—the logic does not easily contain itself.

The question, then, is not whether one program is next. It is whether the university itself—its autonomy, its governing norms, its capacity for independent judgment—can withstand sustained political encroachment.

At moments like this, institutional repair requires more than rhetorical defense. It requires civic action. If governance structures have been weakened through legislation, they must be restored through legislation. If academic freedom has been narrowed by those in power, then the democratic remedy is clear: voters must hold those officials accountable and elect leaders committed to institutional autonomy and the public mission of higher education.

If we are to truly live in a free society, the defense of the university must be understood as inseparable from the defense of democracy itself.

References

American Association of University Professors. (1940/2015). 1940 statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and

American Association of University Professors. (1966/2015). Statement on government of colleges and universities. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and

MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Penguin Press.

Wilson, J. K., & Kamola, I. (2023). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.

The Back Door to Authoritarian Rule to Put Our Fragile Democracy in Chains: Article V and the Far Right’s Constitutional Play

The Back Door to Authoritarian Rule to Put Our Fragile Democracy in Chains: Article V and the Far Right’s Constitutional Play

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Across the country, state legislatures dominated by hard-right majorities are quietly advancing resolutions to trigger an Article V constitutional convention. On the surface, these measures are framed as efforts to impose fiscal restraint or enact term limits. Yet as Nancy MacLean (2017/2023) warns in the updated edition of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, the real goal is far more sweeping: to exploit a little-known constitutional loophole to rewrite the very rules of American democracy itself.

Article V outlines two routes for amending the Constitution. Most Americans are familiar with the path requiring two-thirds approval in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states. Less well-known is the provision that allows two-thirds of state legislatures to call a constitutional convention with the power to propose sweeping amendments without congressional involvement (U.S. National Archives, n.d.). 

For MacLean, this obscure second route represents the “back door” through which today’s ultra-conservative movement hopes to hardwire minority rule into the nation’s foundational charter.

The risks of such a convention are not speculative. As Common Cause warned in its June 2025 reporting on Ohio, the state has become a flashpoint for outside interests pressing hard to pass resolutions that would make it the next domino to fall. 

National figures such as former Senator Rick Santorum and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis have appeared in Ohio to support resolutions, while advocates have cautioned that once called, a convention would operate without clear guardrails, raising the possibility of a free-for-all rewrite of the Constitution (Tebben, 2025). 

Texas Congressman Jodey Arrington (2022) has called for an Article V Constitutional Convention, as well. Critics going back to James Madison (1788) have underscored that such conventions are inherently risky precisely because of their lack of regulation once convened.

James Madison

By concentrating their efforts at the state level, rather than in Congress, reactionary operatives believe they can engineer a convention that would be less transparent, less accountable, and more insulated from public debate. Such a process, MacLean argues, could enable authoritarian actors to push forward constitutional changes—gutting voting rights, curtailing academic freedom, weakening checks and balances, and insulating elites from accountability—for generations to come. 

She traces these strategies back to the coldly calculating and deeply ideological economist James Buchanan, whose theories of limiting democracy and constraining majority rule have become the intellectual blueprint for today’s assault on democratic institutions (MacLean, 2017/2023).

Importantly, MacLean notes that these designs have not gone unnoticed. She highlights the vital work of Common Cause, a nonpartisan democracy watchdog, which has tracked and exposed the stealth campaign for an Article V convention. Through state-by-state monitoring, public reports, and grassroots mobilization, Common Cause has revealed how dark money networks and partisan operatives cloak their agenda under the language of “fiscal responsibility” or “term limits.” 

Their Ohio findings add urgency. Beneath the surface of what looks like incremental reform lies a coordinated effort to tilt power permanently toward wealthy elites. By bringing these hidden strategies into public view, Common Cause has become an essential counterweight, mobilizing citizens to resist what MacLean describes as nothing less than an attempt to put “democracy in chains.”

What can you do? First, educate yourself about this stealth agenda. Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains (2023 updated edition, also available as an audiobook) is a great place to start. Stay informed by following Common Cause’s updates on Article V, and if you are able, consider donating to support their vital work defending democracy. Contact your state representatives to make your concerns about an Article V convention clear. 

Remember that phrases like “fiscal restraint” and “term limits” may sound reasonable on the surface, but they are often used as Trojan horses to advance a much broader agenda of weakening democratic institutions and consolidating power in the hands of a few. This is not just a theoretical debate—it is an active campaign unfolding in state legislatures across the country. Our responsibility is to stay vigilant, informed, and engaged so that we can protect the Constitution from being rewritten in secret.

References

Arrington, J. (2022, July 20). Arrington introduces legislation calling for a Convention of States to propose a fiscal responsibility amendment to U.S. Constitution [Press release]. U.S. Representative Jodey Arrington. https://arrington.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=782

Common Cause. (n.d.). Article V constitutional convention. https://www.commoncause.org/our-work/amending-constitution/article-v/

MacLean, N. (2017/2023). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America (Updated ed.). Penguin. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533763/democracy-in-chains-by-nancy-maclean/

Madison, J. (1788, November 2). Letter to George Lee Turberville. In W. T. Hutchinson & W. M. E. Rachal (Eds.), The Papers of James Madison (Vol. 11). University of Chicago Press. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-11-02-0243

Tebben, S. (2025, June 12). Ohio ‘state to watch’ for U.S. constitutional convention measures, concerned advocates say.Ohio Capital Journal. https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/06/12/ohio-state-to-watch-for-u-s-constitutional-convention-measures-concerned-advocates-say/

U.S. National Archives. (n.d.). Constitutional amendment process. https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution.