The Governance of Knowledge vs. the Return on Knowing: Project 2025 and the Remaking of Texas Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Governance of Knowledge vs. the Return on Knowing: Project 2025 and the Remaking of Texas Higher Education

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

August 30, 2026

In 2024, the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) published Five Threats to Public Education in Our States and Communities: An Analysis of Project 2025, warning that Project 2025 threatened federal education funding, public schooling, civil-rights enforcement, protections against discriminatory discipline, and educational access for immigrant students (Intercultural Development Research Association [IDRA], 2024). Read two years later, the report appears remarkably prescient. Yet what has transpired in 2025–26 suggests something even larger than the dismantling IDRA anticipated.

What is taking shape is a governance of knowledge.

By this I mean an increasingly coordinated effort to determine not merely how universities are funded or administered, but who possesses authority over knowledge itself: what may be taught, which fields deserve institutional protection, which histories are legitimate, which forms of inequality government is willing to recognize, which programs survive, and who gets to participate in those decisions.

This is why Project 2025 should not be understood simply as an agenda for “smaller government.” Government has not simply retreated from education. In important respects, political authority has been redirected and concentrated.

At the federal level, President Trump's March 2025 executive order directed the secretary of education, to the extent permitted by law, to facilitate the closure of the U.S. Department of Education and return authority to states and localities. Days earlier, the department had announced a reduction in force affecting nearly half of its workforce (White House, 2025; U.S. Department of Education, 2025). By July 2026, the department had also rescinded disparate-impact provisions from its Title VI regulations, narrowing an important means through which structurally unequal outcomes can be recognized as civil-rights problems (U.S. Department of Education, 2026).

Source: Texas Border Business

Yet simultaneously, government has become more—not less—assertive in defining acceptable educational practice, DEI, accreditation, curriculum, and institutional priorities. Project 2025's significance therefore lies not simply in deregulation, but in re-regulation around a different ideological conception of education (Burke, 2023).

Texas provides perhaps the clearest example.

Senate Bill 37, enacted in 2025, fundamentally redefined shared governance at Texas public universities. Governing boards must periodically review general education curricula and may reserve authority to overturn institutional curricular decisions. Faculty senates are explicitly declared “advisory only,” while the law defines shared governance as a structure in which governing boards exercise ultimate authority and faculty participation remains consultative (Texas Legislature, 2025).

This is not a semantic change. It relocates authority.

Shared governance has never meant that faculty alone run universities. Its premise is that universities are knowledge-producing institutions and that academic expertise therefore carries distinctive authority in matters of curriculum, scholarship, academic standards, and faculty status. SB 37 turns that relationship on its head. Expertise advises; politically appointed governing authorities decide.

The consequences are already visible. PEN America has documented widespread review of syllabi and courses across Texas public institutions, accompanied by course cancellations, curricular alterations, and faculty uncertainty about discussions of race, gender, and other politically contested subjects (Carter, 2026). The American Association of University Professors consequently launched a statewide inquiry in June 2026 into what it describes as the dismantling of shared faculty governance and threats to academic freedom across Texas public universities (American Association of University Professors [AAUP], 2026).

At the University of Texas System, the May 2026 revision of Regents' Rule 31003 further consolidated presidential authority over the elimination of occupied academic positions and academic programs. Faculty retain opportunities for input, but the president determines whether programs and positions should be eliminated, subject ultimately to System approval (University of Texas System Board of Regents, 2026).

At UT-Austin, meanwhile, African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies were consolidated into the new Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, affecting programs in which more than 800 students were pursuing degrees or credentials when the restructuring was announced (Dey, 2026). 

Each development can be defended individually as governance, efficiency, accountability, curricular coherence, or institutional restructuring. What matters, however, is the cumulative pattern. As Kamola (2024) demonstrates in Manufacturing Backlash, attacks on DEI, tenure, accreditation, curriculum, and shared governance have not emerged independently. They have been promoted through networks of think tanks and political organizations that have turned dissatisfaction with higher education into a sustained legislative campaign against university autonomy and academic freedom.

The goal of manufactured backlash is therefore larger than winning an argument about DEI or a particular course. Its political power lies in changing the institutional conditions under which knowledge itself is produced, legitimized, circulated, and preserved.

And here lies the extraordinary irony of our historical moment.

As I wrote earlier this year in “Exponential Knowledge, Narrowing Worlds,” Derek J. de Solla Price's classic Little Science, Big Science demonstrated that modern scientific knowledge expands exponentially rather than linearly (Price, 1963; Valenzuela, 2026a). Subsequent bibliometric research has confirmed the extraordinary growth of scientific publication over time (Bornmann & Mutz, 2015).

Humanity is therefore living through an unprecedented expansion of knowledge.

But more knowledge does not automatically produce a more inclusive knowledge order.

As I argued in that essay, the growth curve identified by Price remains compelling, but expansion may simultaneously intensify “asymmetries of recognition, visibility, and institutional power” (Valenzuela, 2026a). An exponentially expanding knowledge system can still privilege some languages, institutions, histories, disciplines, and populations while marginalizing others.

Texas reveals a domestic political version of precisely this paradox.

At the very historical moment when knowledge is multiplying at unprecedented speed, government is becoming increasingly involved in determining which knowledge counts.

We are simultaneously experiencing an expansion of knowing and a narrowing of epistemic authority.

This development stands diametrically opposed to what I have called the Return on Knowing, or ROK (Valenzuela, 2026b).

ROK asks us to move beyond the increasingly dominant language of return on investment, or ROI, in which universities and disciplines are evaluated principally according to earnings, workforce demand, enrollment, efficiency, and immediate economic productivity. It instead asks a deeper question: What becomes possible because people know more—and what does ignorance cost us? (Valenzuela, 2026b).

The distinction is crucial.

A Return on Knowing recognizes historical, cultural, scientific, linguistic, and civic knowledge as public infrastructure. Knowing more about the peoples with whom we live, the institutions that govern us, histories that produced the present, and perspectives unlike our own strengthens judgment, professional competence, democratic literacy, institutional trust, and society's capacity to solve problems.

A governance of knowledge moves in the opposite direction.

ROK asks how we can enlarge society's capacity to know.

The governance of knowledge asks which knowledge authorities will permit institutions to sustain.

ROK treats intellectual plurality as an asset.

The governance of knowledge treats certain forms of plurality as problems requiring oversight.

ROK disperses epistemic capacity.

The governance of knowledge concentrates epistemic authority.

That distinction helps explain why shared governance matters so profoundly. The erosion of faculty authority is not simply an employment issue for professors. It alters the architecture through which societies decide what knowledge will exist.

The chilling effect follows naturally. Faculty need not be formally censored if they begin anticipating what legislators, regents, presidents, donors, or administrators might regard as objectionable. Institutions need not formally abolish fields if those fields can be consolidated, audited, deprived of autonomy, or required repeatedly to justify themselves according to politically defined measures of relevance. The most effective governance of knowledge may ultimately be the system in which universities learn to regulate themselves.

The K–12 implications identified by IDRA remain important as well. Texas enacted its private-school voucher program in 2025, moving public dollars into private educational settings, while federal retrenchment in civil-rights enforcement and the removal of disparate-impact protections potentially weaken safeguards for students experiencing systemic inequities (IDRA, 2024; Office of the Texas Governor, 2025). These developments belong to the same larger struggle over whether education is understood as a democratic public institution carrying obligations to everyone or increasingly as a collection of individual choices governed by markets and political authority.

But higher education adds another dimension because universities are among society's central institutions for producing new knowledge.

This is what makes the current moment so consequential.

The central question before Texas is no longer simply whether DEI programs should exist, whether one course is sufficiently “balanced,” whether a faculty senate should have sixty members, or whether a particular academic department should remain administratively independent.

The question is who gets to govern knowledge.

Who decides what Texans need to know? Who determines which forms of knowledge merit investment? Who decides what constitutes a legitimate discipline? Who determines whether a politically controversial subject is nevertheless academically indispensable? And what institutional protections remain when knowledge produced through scholarly inquiry conflicts with political power? Yes, lots of questions, but important ones.

Price showed us a world in which knowledge expands exponentially.

Our political challenge is to ensure that the institutions responsible for that knowledge do not simultaneously become narrower.

Because a society can possess more information than any civilization in history and still become less capable of knowing itself.

That is the danger of manufactured backlash.

And it is precisely why a Return on Knowing offers a profoundly different vision for the public university: not an institution disciplined into producing only politically approved or immediately monetizable knowledge, but one capable of expanding what society can understand, remember, imagine, and become.

References

American Association of University Professors. (2026, June 24). AAUP launches inquiry into academic freedom in Texas. AAUP inquiry

Bornmann, L., & Mutz, R. (2015). Growth rates of modern science: A bibliometric analysis based on the number of publications and cited references. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(11), 2215–2222. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23329

Burke, L. M. (2023). Department of Education. In P. Dans & S. Groves (Eds.), Mandate for leadership: The conservative promise (pp. 319–362). The Heritage Foundation.

Carter, C. (2026, May 7). Texas universities are taking censorship into their own hands. PEN America. 

Dey, S. (2026, February 12). UT-Austin to consolidate race, ethnic and gender study programs. The Texas Tribune. 

Intercultural Development Research Association. (2024). Five threats to public education in our states and communities: An analysis of Project 2025. https://www.idra.org/resource-center/five-threats-to-public-education-in-our-states-and-communities-an-analysis-of-project-2025/

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

Office of the Texas Governor. (2025, May 3). Governor Abbott signs landmark school choice legislation into law. Governor's announcement

Price, D. J. de S. (1963). Little science, big science. Columbia University Press.

Texas Legislature. (2025). S.B. 37, 89th Legislature, Regular Session. Enrolled Senate Bill 37

U.S. Department of Education. (2025, March 11). U.S. Department of Education initiates reduction in force. Department of Education release

U.S. Department of Education. (2026, July 23). U.S. Department of Education removes disparate-impact from Title VI regulations. Department of Education release

University of Texas System Board of Regents. (2026). Rule 31003: Elimination of faculty positions or academic programs. Regents' Rule 31003

Valenzuela, A. (2026a, April 28). Exponential knowledge, narrowing worlds: Justice in an unequal global order. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/04/exponential-knowledge-narrowing-worlds.html

Valenzuela, A. (2026b, July 14). The return on knowing: Why Mexican American and Latino Studies is an economic investment in our shared future. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-return-on-knowing-why-mexican.html

White House. (2025, March 20). Improving education outcomes by empowering parents, states, and communities. Executive order

How to Occupy a University, by Deena Varner, The Higher Ed Advocate, Aug. 5, 2026

Friends:

Deena Varner’s powerful essay, “How to Occupy a University,” makes an argument that deserves far more attention: the political remaking of higher education does not always arrive through dramatic legislation, mass firings, or the outright closure of universities. Sometimes it happens quietly, through the ordinary machinery of administration.

That is precisely what makes the developments at Texas Tech so troubling.

Varner shows how Chancellor Brandon Creighton’s memoranda move authority away from faculty expertise and shared governance and place it increasingly in systems of review, compliance, certification, and political oversight. The university remains open. Classes continue. Degrees are awarded. Committees still meet. But the location of authority changes—and with it, the meaning of the institution itself.

Another useful concept for understanding this process is institutional capture, a term increasingly invoked by critics to describe what happens when institutions that are supposed to exercise some degree of independent judgment are brought under the control of political actors or ideological movements. Capture does not necessarily require eliminating an institution. More often, it involves taking control of its leadership, procedures, priorities, and decision-making structures so that the institution begins serving purposes different from those for which it was established.

This is where the connection to Project 2025 becomes especially important. Project 2025 is not simply a collection of conservative policy proposals. As Varner emphasizes, it is also concerned with how political change can be made durable through personnel, supervision, organizational design, and the relocation of institutional authority. What we are witnessing in Texas higher education may be a version of that same strategy.

The goal is not necessarily to destroy the university. It is to capture it—to make the university administer its own political transformation.

That distinction matters. A university can retain its buildings, departments, students, and public identity while steadily losing the professional autonomy, faculty authority, academic freedom, and independence of judgment that make it a university in the democratic sense.

Varner gives us another powerful word for what follows from institutional capture: occupation. The two concepts work together. Institutional capture identifies the transfer of power; occupation describes the condition that results when the institution continues to function outwardly while its internal authority has been redirected toward the priorities of those who captured it.

This is also why administrative procedures deserve far more public scrutiny. The gravest threats to higher education will not always announce themselves as attacks on higher education. They may arrive as memoranda, compliance procedures, curricular reviews, reporting requirements, personnel decisions, reorganizations, and seemingly routine administrative directives. As Varner puts it, the danger is that the university’s own mechanisms can become vehicles for its political transformation.

We therefore need to pay attention not only to what universities are prohibited from doing, but also to who is acquiring the power to decide what universities may teach, study, say, and become.

That is the deeper struggle now underway in American higher education. It is not merely a fight over particular courses, programs, or words. It is a struggle over who will govern the university—and whether our public universities will remain institutions capable of independent inquiry or become instruments of political power.

Please attend tomorrow's August 12th People's Hearing at the Texas Legislature If you are desirous of speaking your truth. 

-Angela Valenzuela

How to Occupy a University
Project 2025, Texas Tech, and the Administrative Remaking of Higher Education

The Higher Ed Advocate
Aug 05, 2026

by Deena Varner

Project 2025 is often described as a plan to dismantle the administrative state. Its public reputation rests on its policy proposals, but the document itself spends an astonishing amount of time elsewhere—on administration. It explains how agencies should be organized, how political appointees should be selected and managed, how civil servants should be evaluated and eliminated if they are not ideologically aligned, how authority should move through organizations, how priorities should survive changes in personnel. Again and again, it returns to the same practical problem: how does an institution continue to implement its ideological agenda in perpetuity?

That question does not end in Washington. It appears, in a different form, in the documents now reshaping public higher education in Texas.

Public debate about higher education in Texas has focused largely on legislation—restrictions on DEI, classroom speech, curricula, and faculty governance. But laws do not reorganize universities by themselves. They establish authority in the abstract. The work of transforming an institution begins afterward, in implementation documents that rarely attract public attention because they present themselves as ordinary administration.

Brandon Creighton’s memoranda are two of those documents.

Implementation

Last year, Creighton was a Texas state senator. He authored or co-sponsored much of the state’s recent legislation aimed at making the state more hostile to minoritized students, women, and LGBTQIA+ people, and dismantling public universities as we know them. In November 2025, he was appointed the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, which serves more than 65,000 students.

One of his first acts was to implement a course content review process in which all faculty were required to disclose whether their courses mentioned gender or sexuality. If a course did mention such topics, faculty were instructed to remove any such materials unless and until they were approved by the Board of Regents—a group of political appointees whose role historically has been fiduciary. On April 9, 2026, this system of prior restraint was replaced with a permanent and near total ban on classroom instruction of topics related to gender identity and sexual orientation.

While this level of censorship is unprecedented in American history, the significance of the Creighton memoranda lies also in the university it imagines. They shift judgment away from faculty and toward administrative oversight. They treat disciplinary expertise as something to be monitored rather than trusted. Questions that once belonged primarily to departments and faculty governance are now questions of compliance, review, certification, and institutional accountability.

Creighton’s memos reorganize how the university governs itself.

Occupation

The mechanisms the memoranda use are familiar: Universities already have administrators. They already produce guidance documents. They already certify compliance with state and federal law. The Creighton memos pervert these mechanisms such that they become vehicles for a political project that Creighton himself could not accomplish in the Texas senate.

The version of Texas Senate Bill 37 that Creighton authored proposed a sweeping reorganization of higher education in the state, including far-reaching restrictions on curricula and faculty authority. Even within the extraordinarily conservative Texas legislature, several of its most expansive provisions proved impossible to enact. The questions they raised, however, did not disappear. They reappeared in a different form—not as legislation, but as administration.

While this level of censorship is unprecedented in American history, the significance of the Creighton memoranda lies also in the university it imagines. They shift judgment away from faculty and toward administrative oversight. They treat disciplinary expertise as something to be monitored rather than trusted.

Under Creighton’s regime, the ordinary machinery of the university has acquired a new purpose: ideological capture. The point is no longer simply to administer the university but to align its ordinary operations with his preferred political vision.

From the outside, little appears to have changed: students attend classes, degrees are awarded, departments meet, and committees deliberate. The transformation appears in the relocation of authority, in the definition of what a university is, whom it serves, and what its members are allowed to say and learn.

This is the institutional imagination of Project 2025. Law and policy matter, but so do the mechanisms through which they become routine. Durable political victories require institutions that reliably reproduce a governing vision, and this is accomplished through personnel, supervision, and organizational design.

Creighton has applied these lessons to one university system, and he has plans to apply them to the national system of public higher education.

The genius—and the danger—of this approach is that it does not require dramatic confrontation. No loyalty oath announces the arrival of a new political order, as it did during the McCarthy era. No public purge signals that the university has entered a different era, as it did during the Stalin era. The transformation proceeds through memoranda, implementation guidance, reporting requirements, compliance reviews, curricular certifications, and administrative procedures. In the Creighton era, each document appears technical. Together they redefine the institution.

Creighton’s defining innovation is that the institution becomes the instrument of its own destruction.

For generations, political movements have sought to discipline universities from the outside—through funding cuts, legislation, purges, or public pressure. Those tools remain. But something equally ambitious is emerging alongside them: the effort to redirect the university’s own administrative machinery toward political ends. The institution is asked to preserve its legitimacy while gradually relinquishing the traditions of professional judgment that gave that legitimacy its democratic value.

Project 2025 imagines remaking the federal bureaucracy by reorganizing its internal structures. The documents now emerging from Texas suggest a parallel ambition for higher education. They point toward a university that looks increasingly familiar from the outside while operating according to a different sovereign logic.

That is not destruction. It is occupation.

The National Stage

Public universities occupy an unusual constitutional position. They are created, funded, and governed in part by the state, yet they have never been understood as ordinary state agencies. Legislatures appropriate funds and governors appoint regents, but the work of producing and evaluating knowledge has historically rested elsewhere—in disciplinary communities, faculty governance, and professional judgment. However imperfectly realized, that division of labor and authority has long defined the relationship between public universities and democratic government.

The Eleventh Circuit’s recent decision striking down key provisions of Florida’s Stop WOKE Act reaffirmed that arrangement. In protecting faculty speech against state-imposed orthodoxy, the court did more than vindicate individual expression. It preserved the institutional conditions under which universities can exercise independent judgment. In protecting speech, First Amendment doctrine has also helped preserve the institutional arrangements through which universities exercise independent judgment.

That is not destruction. It is occupation.

That constitutional tradition leaves a practical problem for political movements seeking to reorganize higher education. If professional judgment cannot simply be displaced by legislative command, then the institution itself becomes the site of ideological struggle. The question is no longer only what the law permits the state to do. It is how the university’s own procedures can be redirected toward different ends.

Creighton’s memoranda belong to this second category. They are implementation documents, and implementation is where abstract political authority becomes institutional practice. Every review process, every certification requirement, every layer of administrative oversight answers the same question: where does judgment reside? Every implementation document answers a constitutional question disguised as an administrative one.

Universities are not unique in this respect. The press occupies a similar constitutional position. Neither governs in the ordinary sense, yet both perform a public function by producing knowledge, testing political claims, and establishing standards of credibility that governments do not control. Their legitimacy depends upon their ability to reach judgments that are not merely extensions of partisan political power.

Authoritarian movements have long sought to subordinate institutions whose authority they do not fully control, and whose commitment to free thought and expression is an obstacle to their success. The occupation of Texas Tech illustrates one way that project can proceed: not by dismantling the university from without but by redirecting the ordinary procedures by which it operates.

Creighton’s memoranda are remarkable not only for their prohibition of ideas, speech, and expression but for the administrative architecture they construct. The institution continues to teach, deliberate, certify, and govern. But these activities no longer exist primarily to create and cultivate knowledge. Instead, the work of the university is concentrated on demonstrating fidelity to the political priorities of its occupying force.

The university remains. Its sovereign logic does not.

Project 2025 imagines reorganizing the federal bureaucracy so that its ordinary operations reliably reproduce a governing vision. The political project emerging from Texas demonstrates how that same organizational logic can be extended to institutions that constitutional traditions have historically insulated from direct political control.


Deena Varner is an assistant professor of practice in the English department at Texas Tech University. She is the author of From the Courtroom to the Boardroom: Privatizing Justice in the Neoliberal United States, which examines how legal and civic rights are eroded through administrative procedures. She is writing in her capacity as a private individual and not on behalf of her employer.

The Texas SBOE’s Bible mandate is Not Religious Literacy. It is State-Sponsored,Taxpayer Funded, Religious Favoritism, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Texas SBOE’s Bible mandate is Not Religious Literacy. It is State-Sponsored, Taxpayer Funded, Religious Favoritism

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 28, 2026

Last Friday’s decision by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) to require Bible stories and Christian instruction in Texas K–12 public schools should alarm every Texan who cares about public education, religious freedom, democracy, and the constitutional separation of church and state (Yu, 2026)

This is not religious literacy. It is not a neutral study of religion. It is not a good-faith effort to help children understand the Bible’s influence on literature, history, or culture. A serious academic curriculum would introduce students to multiple religious traditions, secular traditions, Indigenous knowledge systems, and the diverse intellectual inheritance of a state where children come from every corner of the world. Instead, the SBOE has approved a state-mandated reading list and social studies framework that privileges Christianity, narrows the story of humanity, and forces teachers and students into a curriculum shaped less by scholarship than by ideology.

Let us be clear: the issue is not whether the Bible may be studied in public schools. It can be—and, in the appropriate context, should be—studied as literature, as history, and as a text with enormous cultural influence. But it should be studied alongside other sacred, philosophical, ethical, and cultural traditions. 

As a product of Texas public schools, I would have welcomed the opportunity to learn about the world’s religions in school—not in a reductive way, but in an expansive one. Indeed, if this curriculum is anything other than expansive, pluralistic, and intellectually honest, it is dead on arrival.

The real issue is whether the state should use public schools—and exorbitant taxpayer dollars—to elevate one religious tradition above others and present that tradition as the moral foundation of civic life. That is not education. That is state-sponsored religious favoritism. It is constitutionally suspect, pedagogically flawed, and morally dangerous in a state as religiously, culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse as Texas.

Ironically, this approach may also fail on its own terms. A shallow, politicized, and coercive treatment of the Bible may not deepen students’ understanding of scripture. It may turn them away from it. When sacred texts are reduced to political instruments, they lose the very depth, mystery, and moral seriousness that make them meaningful to believers and worthy of study by nonbelievers. A curriculum built on such a flawed foundation does not honor the Bible. It weaponizes it.

This is where Katherine Stewart’s work is so helpful (Stewart, 2012, 2020, 2025). Stewart reminds us that Christian nationalism is not simply a matter of private faith or religious devotion. It is a political project. It operates through donor networks, legal organizations, advocacy groups, media platforms, think tanks, and elected officials who seek to capture public institutions and bend them toward an authoritarian vision of society. 

In this sense, the SBOE’s decision is not an isolated curriculum dispute. It is part of a broader movement to remake public education in the image of Christian nationalist power.

That movement is also visible in Project 2025 and in the larger effort to weaken public institutions, centralize executive authority, privatize public goods, and subordinate democratic deliberation to ideological control (Dans & Groves, 2023). In Texas, this matters enormously because governors appoint key officials, including the Commissioner of Education, who oversees the Texas Education Agency. These appointments help shape the direction of public schooling for millions of children. Curriculum, therefore, is not merely a classroom matter. It is a governance matter. It is a democracy matter.

A democratic public school system should not be argumentative in the narrow sense of imposing one worldview on everyone else. It should be deliberative. It should teach students how to think across difference, how to ask hard questions, how to understand history in its complexity, and how to live ethically in a pluralistic society. 

The SBOE’s decision moves us in the opposite direction. It turns curriculum into a vehicle for religious and political domination.

Texas children deserve better than this. They deserve schools that respect their families, their faiths, their questions, and their futures. They deserve a curriculum capacious enough to include the Bible without turning public school into Sunday school; rigorous enough to study Christianity without privileging Christian nationalism; and democratic enough to honor the full humanity of every child in the classroom.

Recent testimony before the SBOE made this danger plain. Parents, educators, religious freedom advocates, historians, and community members warned that the proposed standards and required reading list distort education by subordinating academic integrity to a sectarian political agenda. Texas Freedom Network President Felicia Martin captured the problem forcefully:

 “The Bible isn’t a history book, public school isn’t Sunday school, and ignorance is not a Texas value.” 

That line deserves to be remembered because it names the issue exactly. Public schools belong to all children—not only Christian children, not only conservative Christian children, not only children whose families accept the state’s preferred theological worldview.

This decision also comes in the shadow of a broader restructuring of public education in Texas. We have seen attacks on books, on Ethnic and Gender Studies, on LGBTQIA+ students, on honest teaching about racism, on teachers’ professional autonomy, and on local democratic governance. 

We have seen vouchers pushed as “choice” while public schools remain underfunded. We have seen the Ten Commandments elevated in classrooms, chaplains invited into schools, and now Bible stories mandated as required reading. These are not isolated developments. They are pieces of a larger project.

That project is legible through the Seven Mountains Mandate (Boedy, 2025), a Christian dominionist framework that calls on believers to exercise influence—or dominion—over seven spheres of society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.

 Education is one of the mountains.

Government is another.

Business is another. 

Texas is now witnessing the convergence of all three: billionaire money, state power, and public school curriculum being aligned to serve a Christian nationalist vision.

Katherine Stewart’s work helps us understand what is happening. In The Power Worshippers 2020) and Money, Lies, and God (2025), Stewart shows that Christian nationalism is not primarily about private faith, prayer, or religious devotion. 

It is about power. 

It is about networks. It is about donor money, legal infrastructure, media ecosystems, political candidates, think tanks, and policy shops working together to transform democratic institutions from within. The movement does not merely want a seat at the table. It wants to own the table, write the rules, choose the curriculum, discipline dissent, and call the result “freedom.”

This is why today’s SBOE decision must be understood alongside the political influence of West Texas billionaires Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks. As I wrote previously in “Texas: Two Billionaires Want to Destroy Public Education and Replace It With Christian Schools,” the attack on public education is not incidental to their politics. It is central to it. 

As you can view and see for yourselves, CNN’s reporting made plain that former associates and critics view Dunn and Wilks as especially focused on education, with the long-term goal of replacing much of public education with private Christian schooling. Former Republican state senator Bob Deuell put it bluntly: they “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools.”

That is the context for today’s vote. This is not simply about whether a first grader hears “David and Goliath” or a high school student reads Job. It is about who controls the moral and intellectual formation of more than five million Texas public school students. It is about whether the state will honor the religious diversity of Texas families or treat non-Christian children as guests in someone else’s public school system. It is about whether teachers will be trusted as professionals or reduced to instruments of ideological compliance.

As I recently blogged (Valenzuela, 2026), supporters will say this is about “Judeo-Christian values.” That phrase, however, often functions as a political shield. It collapses Jewish traditions into a Christian nationalist story, erases the profound diversity within Christianity itself, and excludes Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Indigenous spiritual traditions, atheists, agnostics, and many others, including Jews themselves—who are also part of Texas. It also misrepresents Christianity. 

That is not what Texas has chosen.

Many of us grew up in Christian traditions rooted in social justice, humility, hospitality, care for the poor, and love of neighbor. The Christianity being smuggled into public policy today is not that faith. It is a politicized, exclusionary Christianity aligned with hierarchy, conquest, privatization, and punishment.

This is why the phrase “religious freedom” is being turned upside down. True religious freedom protects families from state-imposed religion. It protects Christian families, Jewish families, Muslim families, Hindu families, Buddhist families, Indigenous families, nonreligious families, and interfaith families alike. It means the government does not get to decide whose sacred stories become mandatory and whose traditions disappear. It means public schools do not become Sunday schools by legislative design.

The irony is painful. Texas leaders claim to be defending parents while overruling millions of parents whose religious and moral commitments do not align with the state’s preferred theology. Many, if not most, among them believe in the separation of church and state.

Let’s unmask this nefarious, anti-democratic agenda for what it is: a coordinated effort to capture public education, weaponize faith, and shrink the democratic imagination of Texas children.

They claim to support local control while imposing sweeping curriculum mandates from Austin. 

They claim to respect teachers while stripping them of professional judgment. 

They claim to strengthen history while narrowing it. 

They claim to teach freedom while modeling domination.

The damage will not fall evenly. Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian American, Muslim, Jewish, immigrant, LGBTQIA+, and nonreligious students will feel most sharply what it means to be written to the margins of the curriculum. So will Christian students whose faith teaches them that coercion is not discipleship and that the Gospel should never be reduced to a state lesson plan. 

Public schools should be places where children learn to think critically, encounter complexity, and develop civic respect across difference. 

They should not be laboratories for Christian nationalist social engineering.

Texas is a pluralistic state. It is young, multilingual, multiracial, multi-faith, and globally connected. Our curriculum should prepare children for that reality. Instead, the SBOE has chosen retreat: less world history, less diversity, less intellectual honesty, and more state-sponsored religious favoritism. This is not educational excellence. It is ideological containment.

We should refuse the false choice between faith and public education. Many people of faith support strong public schools precisely because public education is one of the few institutions where children from different backgrounds can learn together. A democracy—at least in theory—public school does not require children to abandon their faith. It protects their right to have one. It also protects their right not to have one. That is the genius of public education at its best.

The SBOE's decision moves Texas in the opposite direction. It brings us closer to the world envisioned by the Seven Mountains Mandate, where education is not a public good but a terrain to be conquered. It advances the agenda Katherine Stewart has warned about: a donor-funded, anti-democratic movement that uses the language of faith to seize institutions and the language of freedom to justify domination.

Texans should see this for what it is. The SBOE has not merely approved a reading list. It has opened the door wider to the religious capture of public education. It has placed the state’s power behind a narrow theological and political worldview. And it has done so in a state whose children deserve so much better.

This orchestrated, well-heeled “culture war” reveals what has been true all along: the struggle is not only over curriculum. It is over democracy itself. Public schools are among the last remaining civic spaces where we can still imagine and build a common good. That is precisely why they are under attack. They hold the promise of an animated, well-informed, and educated citizenry—one capable of questioning power, resisting domination, and participating fully in democratic life. 

And that is why we must defend them—with clarity, courage, and an unwavering commitment to religious freedom, educational justice, teachers’ freedom to teach, and students’ freedom to learn.

Reference

Boedy, M. (2025). The seven mountains mandate: Exposing the dangerous plan to Christianize America and destroy democracy. Westminster John Knox Press.

Dans, P., & Groves, S. (Eds.). (2023). Mandate for leadership: The conservative promise. The Heritage Foundation [pdf]. 

Stewart, K. (2012). The good news club: The Christian Right’s stealth assault on America’s children. PublicAffairs. 

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

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

Tackett, C. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B3PTuADIHQ

Valenzuela, A. (2026, June 26). When ‘Judeo-Christian’ Means Christian: The Texas State Board of Education and the Politics of Curriculum [Blog], Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/06/when-judeo-christian-means-christian.html

Yu, I. (2026, June 26). Texas becomes first state to require students read the Bible with required literary list, Austin American-Statesman. https://www.statesman.com/politics/texas/article/social-studies-overhaul-bible-christianity-22320559.php 

Rule by Crisis: Trumpism and the Attack on Democracy, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 19, 2026

Rule by Crisis: Trumpism and the Attack on Democracy

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 19, 2026

Link to article

Darrell M. West’s 2022 Brookings Institution essay, “Trump is not the only threat to democracy,” upon which I build from yesterday's blog, reads today less like a warning than a framework for understanding what has now come to fruition. 

Written in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, West’s central point was that Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy, but not the only one. The deeper danger lies in the political ecosystem—and echo chamber—that has learned from him, copied him, enabled him, and built governing machinery around authoritarian impulses (West, 2022).

West identified several interlocking threats: "copycat candidates, legal coups, a toxic information ecosystem, the decline of authoritative institutions, and the widespread prevalence of counter-majoritarianism in our political system" (West, 2022). Since Trump’s return to office, these dangers are no longer theoretical. They have become governing strategies. 

As The Washington Post reported, Trump’s first week back in power was designed to “flood the zone,” moving rapidly through executive actions, pardons, security-clearance revocations, and a detailed policy blueprint that reflected a far more organized operation than his first administration (Arnsdorf & Morse, 2025).

This is where Project 2025 matters. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership gives institutional form to this anti-democratic project. It translates grievance into governance by pairing policy proposals with personnel pipelines, executive-branch restructuring, and a theory of presidential power that would make dissent within government difficult (Dans & Groves, 2023). The level of planning is all still quite chilling.

Even as Trump and his advisers attempted during the campaign to distance themselves from it, The Washington Post reported that several top officials in the incoming administration had ties to the Project 2025 coalition, including Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Tom Homan (Arnsdorf & Morse, 2025).

What we are witnessing, then, is not simply Trump’s personal grievance politics. It is the institutionalization of those grievances into executive action, budget policy, personnel decisions, ideological discipline, and attacks on the very institutions that make democratic accountability possible.

West’s warning about “legal coups” is especially important. The danger is not always dramatic. It can arrive through emergency declarations, executive orders, manipulated funding streams, attacks on courts, and legal theories that stretch presidential power beyond democratic limits. 

Trump’s executive order attempting to restrict birthright citizenship effectively placed a long-settled constitutional guarantee under direct challenge (Sacchetti et al., 2025). The Post has also reported that emergency powers have become central to Trump’s governing style, with critics warning that the administration is invoking crises to justify extraordinary executive authority (Bendavid, 2025).

The ill-fated Iran War—as we must all surely know by now—is another manifestation of this same anti-democratic pattern. This is not simply a foreign policy issue. It is a constitutional issue. Congress, not the president alone, holds the power to declare war. 

Yet Meyer & Alfaro (2026) reported that the House passed a war powers resolution seeking to push Trump to end a conflict that Congress had not authorized, while the Senate considered similar measures amid growing impatience over the administration’s unilateral conduct of the war. Days later, the Republican-led Senate rejected a resolution that would have blocked Trump from ordering further strikes on Iran, underscoring the degree to which congressional checks on war-making power have weakened under partisan pressure (Meyer, 2026).

That matters because democracy is not only about elections. It is also about whether constitutional limits mean anything when the executive branch claims emergency authority, bypasses Congress, and then dares the other branches to stop it. 

War concentrates power. It disciplines dissent. It shifts public attention away from domestic accountability. These are useful ploys for tyrants as these can be used to rally obedience, punish critics, and normalize rule by crisis. In this sense, the Iran War fits West’s warning about legal coups and emergency powers: authoritarianism often advances not by openly abolishing democracy, but by hollowing out the institutions that restrain executive power.

The attack on higher education fits squarely within West’s concern about the decline of authoritative institutions. Universities, news organizations, nonprofits, courts, think tanks, and professional associations are essential to democratic life because they produce knowledge, preserve evidence, hold power accountable, and teach people to think critically. That is precisely why they are under attack.

Notwithstanding Trump's Compact for higher education (Austin American-Statesman Editorial Board (2025), the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against universities makes this clear. 

Columbia University’s compliance with federal demands under threat of losing $400 million in federal funding generated widespread concern over academic freedom, shared governance, student protest rights, and government intrusion into curriculum (Powers & Brown, 2025). Columbia later reached a settlement with the Trump administration: the university agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government and $21 million to resolve related employment claims, while regaining access to much of its federal research funding—a resolution critics viewed as a dangerous precedent for federal coercion of universities (Office of the President, 2025; Reuters, 2025)

Harvard, by contrast, publicly resisted federal demands that reached into governance, hiring, admissions, DEI programming, student protest policy, and the intellectual life of the university. Federal officials responded in April 2025 by freezing billions in research funds. Although U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs later ruled the freeze unlawful and the administration reinstated grants and contracts previously awarded to Harvard, the Trump administration appealed the ruling and continued its broader legal campaign against the university (Raymond, 2025; Raymond & Stempel, 2026; also see Guardian Staff and Agencies).

The Widener Library at Harvard University, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025, in Cambridge, 

Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa) via Associated Press

For those of us in Texas, none of this feels distant. We have already witnessed the state-level version of this same project through attacks on DEI, tenure, shared governance, ethnic studies, gender studies, and academic freedom. What is happening nationally under Trump is connected to what we have seen in Texas, Florida, and other states: the effort to narrow what can be taught, who can belong, which histories count, and which institutions are permitted to challenge power.

West also warned about attacks on the information ecosystem. Here, too, his concerns have been borne out. Trump’s escalating lawsuits against media organizations—including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and others—must be understood not only as legal actions, but as intimidation strategies aimed at independent journalism (Wagner & Nover, 2026). A democracy cannot function when journalists are chilled, universities are threatened, lawyers are punished, and public servants are expected to demonstrate loyalty to a person rather than to the Constitution.

The attack on law firms is similarly alarming. The Washington Post has reported on executive orders targeting major law firms, including measures affecting contracts, security clearances, and access to federal buildings. These actions strike at the independence of the legal profession and the right to representation—both foundational to the rule of law (Berman & Stein, 2026). When lawyers fear representing disfavored clients, democracy itself is weakened.

Finally, West’s point about counter-majoritarianism remains crucial. The United States already has political structures that allow minority rule: the Electoral College, the Senate, gerrymandered districts, voter suppression, and a judiciary shaped by presidents who did not always win the popular vote. Trumpism exploits these structures. It does not need majority support to govern aggressively. It needs institutional leverage, fear, disinformation, and compliance.

This is why West’s essay remains so urgent. Trump is dangerous, but Trumpism is larger than Trump. It is a political infrastructure. It is a governing style. It is a movement that seeks to discipline universities, intimidate journalists, weaken courts, punish dissent, restrict voting, erase histories, bypass Congress, and turn public institutions into instruments of ideological control.

The work before us, then, is not only electoral. It is educational, institutional, legal, cultural, and moral. We must defend academic freedom, public education, independent journalism, voting rights, civil rights, Ethnic Studies, DEI, congressional war powers, and the right to dissent. We must refuse the normalization of intimidation. And we must insist that democracy is not simply the act of voting; it is the entire ecology of institutions, rights, knowledge, and public trust that makes self-government possible.

Darrell West warned us in 2022 that Trump was not the only threat to democracy. Today, we can see the full force of that warning. The threat is not only a man. It is a machinery. And naming that machinery clearly is part of how we begin to resist it.

References

Arnsdorf, I., & Morse, C. E. (2025, January 25). Trump’s first-week strategy: “Flood the zone.” Repeat. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/25/trump-week-one-flood-the-zone/

American-Statesman Editorial Board. (2025, October 30). Trump’s compact would put UT’s academic excellence at risk, Austin American-Statesman. https://www.statesman.com/opinion/editorials/article/editorial-trump-s-compact-put-ut-s-academic-21126977.php

Bendavid, N. (2025, June 9). For Trump, seizing emergency powers has become central to governing, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/06/09/trump-emergencies-protests-deportations-tariffs/

Berman, M., & Stein, P. (2026, March 2). Justice Dept. abandons defense of orders targeting law firms. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/02/trump-law-firms-appeal/

Columbia University Office of the President. (2025, July 23). Resolution of federal investigations and restoration of the University’s research funding, Columbia University. https://president.columbia.edu/news/resolution-federal-investigations-and-restoration-universitys-research-funding

Dans, P., & Groves, S. (Eds.). (2023). Mandate for leadership: The conservative promise. Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation. https://www.mandateforleadership.org/

Guardian Staff and Agencies. (2025, April 14). Trump officials cut billions in Harvard funds after university defies demands,The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/14/trump-harvard-funding-freeze

Meyer, T. (2026, June 16). Senate rejects resolution to block Trump from further strikes on Iran, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/06/16/senate-rejects-resolution-block-trump-further-strikes-iran/

Meyer, T. & Alfaro, M. (2026, June 4). House votes to block Trump from ordering more strikes on Iran, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/06/03/house-passes-war-powers-resolution-push-trump-end-iran-war/

Powers, M., & Brown, C. (2025, March 24). Fallout from Columbia capitulation fuels fears about academic freedom, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/03/24/fallout-columbia-capitulation-fuels-fears-about-academic-freedom/

Raymond, N. (2025, December 19). US appeals Harvard court victory on $2 billion funding freeze. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-appeals-harvard-court-victory-2-billion-funding-freeze-2025-12-19/

Reuters. (2025, July 24). White House touts Columbia deal, critics see dangerous precedent. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/white-house-touts-columbia-deal-critics-see-dangerous-precedent-2025-07-24/

Sacchetti, M., Hernández, A. R., & Lamothe, D. (2025, January 20). Trump signs executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship,The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/20/trump-immigration-executive-orders/

Wagner, L. & Nover, S. (2026, January 25). Trump has ramped up lawsuits against the media. Here’s where they stand, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/01/25/trump-media-lawsuits/

West, D. M. (2022, July 25). Trump is not the only threat to democracy, Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trump-is-not-the-only-threat-to-democracy/

The Courage to Imagine Anew: Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and the Defense of Higher Learning, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Courage to Imagine Anew: Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and the Defense of Higher Learning

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

October 29, 2025

In these uncertain times, I find myself returning to the classics—not for comfort, but for clarity. They remind me that turmoil is not new, that every age must wrestle with its own angels and demons. As an English literature major and Spanish minor, I learned to live among these voices of the past and to listen for the echoes of our present in their words.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1968) is one such companion. Written in the wake of England’s failed republican experiment—after the execution of King Charles I, through the brief, flickering hope of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, and on the threshold of the restoration of the Stuart monarchy—it speaks to the ache of disillusionment and the stubborn endurance of faith. An anguished Milton wrote in the ruins of a republic that had promised liberty but delivered repression.

The poem’s power lies not just in its Biblical scope but in its political imagination: a meditation on what happens when institutions of knowledge, justice, and conscience are corrupted by ambition and fear. Satan’s rebellion against Heaven becomes a haunting allegory for power unmoored from morality—a warning about how even noble ideals can be twisted into tyranny when pride replaces principle.

We are living through a similar unraveling. Across the United States, and acutely here in Texas, the assault on higher education feels like a slow-motion reenactment of Milton’s epic fall. Legislation like Senate Bill 17 and Senate Bill 37 strip universities of their moral and intellectual autonomy—erasing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and eliminating faculty governance under the guise of “neutrality.” In truth, these policies are not about neutrality at all; they are about control. They mirror Satan’s own delusion in Paradise Lost: the belief that power justifies itself, that domination can masquerade as Divine order.

The recent waves of faculty dismissals in Texas, the silencing of critical inquiry, censorship campaigns, and the hollow rhetoric of “viewpoint diversity”—about which I have blogged (Valenzuela, 2025)—all echo Milton’s vision of a paradise undone by deceit. Yet Milton also reminds us that knowledge cannot be banished, nor truth extinguished; even in exile, the spirit of inquiry endures. It is in that spirit that we must resist—not with despair, but with the steadfast conviction that education itself is an act of freedom.

Our universities—once sanctuaries, however imperfect—for the free exchange of ideas are being recast as instruments of ideological conformity. Project 2025, with its blueprint for dismantling public institutions, bears the same logic as Milton’s fallen angels—an architecture of chaos disguised as reform, where destruction is framed as renewal and submission is sold as freedom.

And yet Paradise Lost does not end in despair, but in a quiet, hard-won grace—one that I encourage us to lean into. When Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, they do not turn against one another or the world that has cast them out; instead, they walk hand in hand, “through Eden took their solitary way.” Their loss is real and profound, but so is their potential. Exile becomes not an ending, but the beginning of a new human story:

“Some natural tears they dropp’d, but wip’d them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.” — Paradise Lost, Book XII

In that moment, Milton reminds us that exile can also be the beginning of resistance—that even as institutions crumble, new communities of conscience can rise. We, too, walk that road now. As scholars, educators, and citizens, our task is not only to lament the loss of paradise but to rebuild it—to reclaim the moral and intellectual commons that sustain democracy itself.

What is at stake in this moment is more than academic freedom—it is the survival of an educated democracy. Across states and systems, educators are rising to defend the university as a public good, not a partisan instrument. The broader defense of education is, at its heart, a defense of truth, inquiry, and the capacity for moral imagination. Like Milton, we must see beyond the ruins toward the possibility of renewal, for if paradise is lost through arrogance and deceit, it is restored through wisdom, solidarity, and an expansive vision of what a good and virtuous education can be.

In doing so, we walk in the footsteps of Milton—across centuries of struggle and renewal—and honor his enduring question: not whether paradise can be restored, but whether we have the courage to imagine it anew. For the record, whoever said a Humanities or Liberal Arts degree is esoteric—or that our Western literary canon is worthless? Hardly so, even as its exclusivity has remained an issue. It has always been about survival—about learning to think, to write, to question, and to dream our way through the darkness of despair toward the light of freedom.

In times such as these, when truth itself is politicized and education reduced to utility, the humanistic tradition reminds us that freedom begins in the mind—and that imagination, not ideology, is the truest measure of a free and open society.

References

Milton, J. (1968). Paradise lost & paradise regained, Signet.

Valenzuela, A. (2025, Aug. 26). The fight for higher education: A minority perspective on both the liberal University and President Michael Roth. Educational Equity, Politics & Policy in Texas.