Friends,
Kudos to Dr. Lorraine Pangle Rather for delivering a cutting critique of Senate Bill 37—the “Death Star” bill, as many in my circles call it—that threatens to destroy public higher education in Texas if passed into law. Many of us have been advocating against this legislation for weeks, along with other deeply troubling proposals like Senate Bill 12.
Of them all, SB 37 is the most dangerous. It’s the sick “prize” because it does exactly what so many authoritarian models do: centralizes control, operates preemptively to suppress dissent, restructures power to silence opposition, and erases institutional autonomy across every college and university in the state.
Make no mistake: Texas is the testing ground. If this model succeeds here, it will be exported to other states—and your public universities will be next. This is why we must stop SB 37 now. It's far too close to Stage 1 cancer. And once it metastasizes, it will be much harder to contain.
Dr. Pangle’s appeal is powerful and principled. She doesn’t reject SB 37 on partisan grounds. Instead, she urges us to resist it in the name of shared democratic values. Freedom, she reminds us, demands preparation—and liberal education, not ideological control, is what sustains a functioning democracy. The university, in her view, is not a bastion of elitism but a training ground for civic courage, ethical reasoning, and critical thought—values that reach across political divides.
These are powerful words. But the real question remains: Do those in power have the ears to hear? We can only hope so—and we must continue raising our voices in case they do.
In solidarity,
Angela Valenzuela
American universities aren’t as intellectually diverse or politically balanced as they should be. They fall short in teaching the knowledge and skills needed to sustain democracy. They aren’t defending free speech or promoting civil discourse as well as they should.
The Texas Legislature is debating a bill – Senate Bill 37 – aimed at solving these problems. It would actually do grave harm.
Our country is exceptional, and an exceptional country needs an exceptionally deep education. Liberty is an extraordinarily hard thing to use well, a hard thing to keep. Free societies need free minds, minds that are curious, skeptical, imaginative and deeply reflective about what a good life is.
Increasingly demanding pre-professional programs leave many undergraduates with little time for general education outside the 42-hour core. SB 37 insists that the core curriculum must teach only what is demonstrably useful for boosting future earnings or for citizenship.
At the University of Texas’ great books program, the Jefferson Center, we share Thomas Jefferson’s belief that the best civic education is in fact a liberal education. Students need workplace skills, and UT teaches these in abundance, but they also need to read Shakespeare to reflect on good and bad leaders, and Plato and the Bible to think about what the human soul is and what it needs to thrive. Our program won’t earn students more money, as SB 37 requires certificate programs to do. But it makes their souls richer.
SB 37 bans courses that 'require or attempt to require a student to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other.' Don’t our legislators want us to argue for our founding principles?
This law, I fear, isn’t intended to be uniformly enforced, but used only as a weapon against disfavored social and political beliefs. That’s a bad use of law. The rule of law and citizens’ trust that laws will be impartially applied are the most important glue holding a free society together. We should guard them carefully.
If we purged disfavored authors, we might train students to parrot officially approved ideas, but we wouldn’t educate them to understand ethics, economics or the problem of justice. For this, students need to read Adam Smith on economic liberty – but also Karl Marx; James Madison on religious liberty – but also Thomas Aquinas. As John Stuart Mill said, he who knows only his own side of an argument knows little of that, and is ill-equipped to defend it.
A proposed Texas House amendment would allow teaching political principles, banning only courses that 'promote the idea that any race, sex, ethnicity or ... religious belief is inherently superior to any other.' Surely we do not want indoctrination at all.
Yet teaching a book or idea well means making the case for it, pushing students to take it seriously, encouraging their questions and challenges, and then turning again to consider how an author might answer those challenges. To teach Augustine seriously means arguing for his claim that Christianity is superior to paganism. To teach American political thought seriously means reading Frederick Douglass but also the Dred Scott decision and trying to understand them both.
Good teaching is brave and provocative and probing in bringing well-chosen competing ideas into dialogue. But with the new 'ombudsman' SB 37 establishes to monitor compliance and recommend punishments, who will dare engage boldly with controversial ideas? Instead of this destructive effort to micromanage education with the blunt instrument of the law, the Legislature might instead require university presidents to report each year on what they’re doing to advance intellectual diversity, brave questioning, civil discourse and students’ understanding of liberty. That would be a good challenge, and we’d be better for the effort.
Lorraine Pangle is a government professor at the University of Texas, where she is co-director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas and chair of the Committee of Counsel on Academic Freedom and Responsibility.
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