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 By July 2026, the department had also rescinded disparate-impact provisions from its Title VI regulations, narrowing an important means through which structurally unequal outcomes can be recognized as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

The Return on Knowing: Why the Value of Mexican American and Latino Studies Exceeds ROI, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., August 21, 2026

The Return on Knowing: Why the Value of Mexican American and Latino Studies Exceeds ROI

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 14, 2026*

Updated August 21, 2026

I encourage readers to learn about Jim Estrada’s compelling and accessible book, The ABCs and Ñ of America’s Cultural Evolution: A Primer on the Growing Influence of Hispanics, Latinos, and mestizos on the USA.

Estrada approaches Latino history and culture partly from the perspective of a corporate marketing professional who spent decades advising institutions about Latino communities. His central argument is that widespread ignorance about Latino history, identity, language, cultural diversity, and economic participation is not merely a social or educational deficiency. It is an economic liability—a consequential gap in knowledge and understanding.

Latinos are consumers, workers, students, taxpayers, entrepreneurs, professionals, and voters. Their growing presence shapes education, employment, health care, public finance, consumer markets, and virtually every major institution in the country. Estrada therefore argues that schools and universities should cultivate the historical knowledge and cultural competence necessary to function effectively in an increasingly diverse society (Estrada, 2013).

His argument is especially useful when placed in conversation with Texas leaders’ growing emphasis on the “return on investment,” or ROI, of higher education curricula and degree programs. On its face, asking whether public institutions use resources responsibly is reasonable. The problem arises when ROI is defined too narrowly—as though the value of education can be reduced to a graduate’s first salary, the immediate labor-market demand for a major, or the direct revenue generated by a particular academic program.

Such calculations tell us something, but not nearly enough.

A more appropriate framework would be what I call the Return on Knowing, or ROK.

ROK asks what students, institutions, communities, and the nation gain when people understand the histories, cultures, languages, experiences, and contributions of the populations with whom they live and work. It recognizes knowledge itself as a form of public infrastructure. Just as roads, schools, health systems, and communications networks make social and economic life possible, cultural and historical knowledge equips people to navigate an increasingly diverse democracy.

ROI asks, “How much money does this degree produce?”

ROK asks, “What becomes possible because people know more—and what does ignorance cost us?”

ROK includes economic benefits, but it extends well beyond them. It includes improved judgment, stronger public institutions, more effective professional practice, better communication, greater historical understanding, and the capacity to work across cultural and linguistic differences. It also includes the avoidance of costly mistakes that arise when institutions misunderstand the communities they serve.

This distinction also requires some care with the concept of efficiency itself. Fallace and Fantozzi (2013) caution against treating “social efficiency” as a historically coherent educational doctrine with a single ideological meaning. Efficiency has always depended upon the purposes against which educational outcomes are judged. The more important question, therefore, is not whether a university is efficient, but efficient at producing what—and according to whose conception of educational value?

To move in this direction, we must open a conceptual space between ROI as an instrumental metric and the normative framework that determines what counts as an efficient or valuable educational outcome in the first place. A university could conceivably be “efficient” at cultivating civic understanding, cultural knowledge, democratic capacity, intellectual discovery, critical inquiry, or human development—if these are recognized as legitimate forms of return. 

The difficulty arises when ROI is defined almost exclusively through earnings, enrollment demand, program costs, completion rates, or labor-market outcomes. At that point, ROI ceases to function as a neutral measure and begins to operate as a theory of educational value, privileging some forms of knowledge while rendering others expendable. 

The metric does not simply measure what universities produce; it increasingly helps determine what universities should produce, which fields deserve institutional support, and which forms of knowledge are permitted to survive. This is precisely the dynamic now unfolding across Texas public universities, where questions of enrollment, workforce alignment, program productivity, and economic return are increasingly being invoked to determine which fields warrant institutional support.

Employers, educators, health professionals, public officials, journalists, and nonprofit leaders who understand Latino histories and experiences are less likely to rely on stereotypes, design ineffective programs, misread demographic change, alienate workers or customers, or make decisions based on incomplete information. Cultural competence is therefore not a decorative addition to professional preparation. It is part of what makes institutions capable, responsive, and effective.

Seen through the lens of ROK, Estrada's The ABCs and Ñ also reveals the limitations of evaluating higher education solely through individual earnings. The return from investing in Latino students includes greater financial security for graduates and their families, but it also includes a more highly educated workforce, increased tax revenues, greater entrepreneurship, stronger public institutions, improved organizational decision-making, and professionals better prepared to serve the communities around them.

Conversely, what does the nation lose when it fails to educate students about Latino communities?

It loses talent when Latino students are underserved or pushed out of higher education. It loses institutional effectiveness when professionals are culturally unprepared. It loses economic opportunities when businesses misunderstand major consumer markets. It loses democratic capacity when the histories and contributions of large segments of the population are excluded from public knowledge. And it loses trust when students and families enter institutions that do not recognize their experiences or regard their histories as worthy of study.

This is why Mexican American Studies, Latino Studies, Ethnic Studies, bilingual education, and culturally sustaining curricula should not be dismissed as peripheral expenses. They are investments in professional preparation, institutional effectiveness, social understanding, democratic participation, and the nation’s economic future.

They also benefit students of every background. Latino Studies is not only for Latino students, just as African American history is not only for Black students and women’s history is not only for women. These fields provide all students with the knowledge necessary to understand the society they inhabit. They help prepare graduates to teach, govern, practice medicine, conduct research, build organizations, serve clients, manage workplaces, and participate intelligently in public life.

ROK is therefore not a rejection of economic accountability. It is a more complete form of accountability. It asks policymakers to count benefits that narrow ROI calculations often ignore: knowledge, cultural competence, institutional trust, democratic literacy, social cohesion, and the prevention of costly errors.

It also requires us to acknowledge that not everything of public value can be captured in an immediate financial metric. Education prepares people not only to earn a living, but also to interpret the world, understand one another, evaluate evidence, remember history, and participate in democratic life.

Estrada’s work helps us see that ignorance has a price. Institutions pay that price through failed outreach, ineffective policies, cultural misunderstanding, lost markets, weakened trust, and poor decision-making. Communities pay it through misrepresentation, exclusion, and educational neglect.

The relevant policy question, then, is not simply whether Mexican American Studies or Latino Studies produces an acceptable financial return. It is whether Texas—and the nation—can afford the consequences of not knowing.

References

ASU News. (2014, February 7). Latino author makes economic case for teaching ethnic studies in schools. https://news.asu.edu/content/latino-author-makes-economic-case-teaching-ethnic-studies-schools

Estrada, J. (2013). The ABCs and Ñ of America’s cultural evolution: A primer on the growing influence of Hispanics, Latinos, and mestizos on the USA. Tate Publishing & Enterprises.

Fallace, T., & Fantozzi, V. (2013). Was There Really a Social Efficiency Doctrine? The Uses and Abuses of an Idea in Educational History. Educational Researcher, 42(3), 142-150. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X13484509

Latino author makes economic case for teaching ethnic studies in schools

February 07, 2014

Making an economic case for teaching ethnic studies in America’s schools and universities is the focus of a book talk presented from noon to 1 p.m., Feb. 11, by ASU’s School of Transborder Studies. Author Jim Estrada, a corporate marketing consultant and former San Diego television journalist, suggested there is a substantial information gap about the nation’s largest non-white European populations that could negatively impact the United States economy.

Estrada’s book, "The ABCs and Ñ of America’s Cultural Evolution: A Primer on the Growing Influence of Hispanics, Latinos, and mestizos on the USA," offers important insights into today’s 53 million U.S. Hispanics – including how their history and culture are influencing the nation.

The author said that he believes sharing accurate, non-subjective information about America’s Latinos, their histories and their contributions to our nation will lead to better understanding of their growing influence as consumers, students, taxpayers, voters and members of the workforce.

Registration for the lecture in Interdisciplinary Building B, B161-B, on ASU’s Tempe campus is required. RSVP to Lillian.Ruelas@asu.edu.

According to ASU’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy, Latinos constitute Arizona’s most rapidly growing ethnicity and could represent more than 50 percent of the state’s population by mid-century. Its 2012 report, Arizona’s Emerging Latino Vote, noted in particular the state’s disproportionate growth in young Latino citizens. “The ramifications will be profound, with major impacts to be felt in the health care industries, at all levels of education, the workforce population and in state budgeting – just to cite a few,” the report stated.

“There are many thoughts on how to create cultural competence,” Estrada said. “The logical place to start is in educational institutions, which are charged with expanding the knowledge base that affects our personal and organizational missions, goals and objectives.

“So it’s really up to our schools to address this critical need for ethnic studies. For students entering the marketplace, it will enable them to adapt successfully to a changing world.”

Estrada is owner of Estrada Communications Group, based in Austin, Texas. He has worked with major corporations, such as AT&T, Anheuser-Busch and McDonald’s, advising them on outreach strategies to Latino consumers for the past three decades. He said every few years, as his client contacts would change, he would need to re-orient their staffs about the Latino market: “My job was to help them avoid making mistakes, cultural faux pas, in their marketing communications.”

After many years, Estrada realized that what he was teaching marketing clientele could benefit a broader audience if compiled in a book. The primer’s 10 short chapters are a collection of essays about different aspects of Latino culture and history, from the Spanish conquest of Mexico to Latino voting rights. A book review by National Hispanic News noted that topics range from language, cultural diversity and history to relationships with the dominant majority, law enforcement and each other.

“Each of these chapters touches on historical and cultural tidbits neither likely to be known by the average non-Hispanic nor by the segment of Latinos themselves who lack exposure to their own contributions to society, or who know little of their place in U.S. history,” the critic observed.

Estrada said the media and entertainment industries are also responsible for projecting a less than positive image of Latinos, as well as those of other non-white, racial, ethnic and immigrant groups. He explained that for decades, mass media have misrepresented Latinos to the nation’s mainstream Eurocentric society through acts of “commission,” use of stereotypic portrayals in media and acts of “omission,” failing to provide factual information about the many Latino contributions to America, and even by historical revisionism.

“Creating cultural awareness and competency takes time and cannot be too daunting a task,” Estrada said. “Providing readers with basic facts, or the ABCs, together with a rudimentary understanding of the influence Hispanics, Latinos and mestizos are having on them and their personal interests can create a sense of ease about learning.”


The School ofTransborder Studies is an academic unit in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.