Silence Has a Sound: Texas' SB 37, the End of Shared Governance, and the Structured Diminishment of Voice, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Silence Has a Sound: Texas' SB 37, the End of Shared Governance, and the Structured Diminishment of Voice

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 23, 2026

What if the 1963 song, “The Sounds of Silence” authored by Paul Simon and that he & Art Garfunkel sang is not only existential loneliness, but the quiet cultural condition that makes authoritarianism possible? Or might it not reflect dystopian futurity under American fascism about which Katharine Stewart writes in her New York Times best-selling book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (2025)?

I encourage you to listen to the song here. 

Listen here. 

While Paul Simon did not explicitly write the song as a critique of fascism, critical theorists—from Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt to Herbert Marcuse—have long warned that domination often advances not only through coercion, but through conformity, passivity, and the erosion of meaningful dialogue about which Simon indeed wrote.

In this vein, Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/2002) theorize how mass culture can dull critical consciousness, producing compliance rather than critique. Arendt (1951) reminds us that authoritarianism thrives where public discourse collapses and individuals retreat into isolation. 

Read in this light, the song’s haunting refrain—“people talking without speaking, people hearing without listening”—evokes not just alienation, but a hollowing out of democratic life itself. 

It has a sound. It surfaces in whispers and half-spoken cautions, in the careful recalibration of what can be said and where, in meetings where voices once carried authority but now trail off into procedural quiet. It lingers in the pauses before someone decides whether it is safe to speak, in the substitution of clarity with ambiguity, critique with compliance. It hums beneath the surface of institutional life—not loud enough to name, but present enough to shape behavior.

It's not like scholars and people, in general, have nothing to say. It's that the conditions for saying it have been quietly rearranged. It is the sound of knowledge narrowed, of questions deferred, of dissent rerouted into safer channels. It is not the spectacle of repression that defines it, but its subtlety. 

And once you learn to hear it, it is everywhere.

Contemporary scholars extend this diagnosis into our present moment. Brown (2019) argues that neoliberalism hollows out democratic institutions from within, converting them into instruments of market and political control. Henry Giroux (2022) describes the rise of “authoritarian neoliberalism,” where higher education becomes a key site for disciplining thought and narrowing dissent. He argues for critical analyses of the current, politicized context of education and the need for a collective pedagogy of resistance with social justice, freedom, and democracy as its goals.

Fraser (2019) similarly points to the entanglement of economic, political, and cultural crises that destabilize democratic publics, making them more vulnerable to reactionary capture. Building on Fraser, Stewart, outlines the history and processes of the current moment, naming it "reactionary nihilism." Together, these scholars help us see that silence is not merely absence—it is produced, structured, and weaponized.

In Texas, this “silence” is no longer metaphorical—it is being institutionalized. Under SB 37, faculty senates—the historic vehicles of shared governance—have been stripped of meaningful authority or eliminated altogether, consolidating decision-making power in governing boards and political appointees. This restructuring represents more than administrative change; it marks a profound shift in the governance of knowledge, where faculty expertise is subordinated to political oversight. 

At the same time, the law expands top-down control over curriculum, enabling the rejection, restructuring, or defunding of programs deemed ideologically suspect—developments that dovetail with ongoing efforts to marginalize or eliminate Ethnic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and related fields.

As Marcuse (1964) warned in One-Dimensional Man, advanced systems of control do not always silence through overt repression; they produce conditions in which dissent becomes increasingly difficult to articulate, let alone sustain. 

From this vantage point, the “sounds of silence” becomes newly legible as a political condition: not simply the absence of speech, but the structured diminishment of voice. It is the quieting of faculty governance, the narrowing of permissible knowledge, and the normalization of a system in which critique is not dramatically crushed, but procedurally sidelined.

This interpretation may exceed the original intent of the song’s authors. But as with much enduring art, its meaning expands in relation to historical context. In our present moment, the “sounds of silence” is not just something we hear—it is something being built.

We are not without power, however, beginning with the vote. Lest we all get turned into their not-so-grand vision of "one dimensional man"—as Iowa, per yesterday's blog, wants to do—let's run all these power players, these anti-democratic incumbents, out of office. And let's not vote new ones in.

Sí, se puede! Yes, we can!

References

Arendt, H. (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. Harcourt, Brace & Company.

Brown, W. (2019). In the ruins of neoliberalism: The rise of antidemocratic politics in the West. Columbia University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/brow19384

Fraser, N. (2019). The old is dying and the new cannot be born: From progressive neoliberalism to Trump and beyond. Verso.

Giroux, H. A. (2022). Pedagogy of resistance: Against manufactured ignorance. Bloomsbury Academic.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment: Philosophical fragments (G. S. Noerr, Ed.; E. Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1944)

Marcuse, H. (1964). One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Beacon Press.

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

I like this piece by Umair Haque as it works well with my earlier post on the Allure of Fascism. Of course fascists never think they are what they actually are. Haque is an economist and not a psychologist, but he takes a good stab at at least some of the dynamics that undergird fascism.

To this, I would add the work of T. W. Adorno (2019) of the Frankfurt School. He wrote a widely-read book in the wake of Nazi Germany titled, The Authoritarian Personality. In that text, he writes of individuals who are uniquely predisposed toward fascist ideologies in that they are rule-governed, conformist, and aggressive. Gordon Allport's classic book on The Nature of Prejudice, also comes to mind.

The short of it is that they have authoritarian personalities that make them vulnerable to leaders that are themselves authoritarian. While still touching the surface here, my friends, I think we all know people like this, right? Plus, the alignment across these two posts caught my attention.

-Angela Valenzuela

References

Adorno, T. (2019). The authoritarian personality. Verso Books.

Allport, G. (1954). The nature of prejudice. New York: Addison-Wesley. 

Why Fascists Never Think They’re Fascists — But Victims and Heroes

The Psychology of the New Global Wave of Fascism

umair haque

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“I’m not a fascist! They’re the real fascists!! The students, the leftists, the woke mob, the anti-fascists, the teachers, the LGBTQ! They’re putting me in danger! They’re taking away my rights! My rights matter most of all! I’m being persecuted, violently and viciously!! I have a right to be heard — and what I have to say is that I’m superior, and they’re inferior! And if you don’t allow me this view — then you’re the real fascist!!”

LOL — do you see how funny and warped all this is the moment you think about it?

Needless to say, what makes a person a “fascist,” at least in terms of beliefs, is pretty straightforward. That some people are biologically inferior, inherently less valuable, hence need to be dehumanized, and cleansed away from society, their personhood, livelihoods, socio-cultural existences, and possibly even lives, removed. Nobody on the left is saying any of that to the kind of person I’m describing — and so quite obviously, the “real fascist” is the one who believes these crackpot theories of inherent supremacy, and then desires political “solutions” to the “problems” of people who are not human. The question we are answering today is: why would anyone believe in such obviously false notions, to begin with? Why would they need so desperately to?

Let’s start at the beginning — I’ll try to really explain the psychology of the new wave of fascism. You can judge for yourself whether it carries any water — I’ll only say this much: if you see these traits in yourself, you should stop and yourself: “Wait, am I what he’s describing?”

Fascists never think they are fascists. A fascist never thinks of himself or herself as a “fascist”, anything at all carrying a negative or malicious connotation. They think of themselves, first, as victims. Victims of great and grand conspiracies — the Great Replacement, the LGBTQ+ destroying them, women murdering babies as birth control, woke teachers indoctrinating their kids, immigrants out to destroy their culture, the liberals want to drink the blood of kids, the Jews are doing this, the Muslims are doing that, blah blah, and on and on the insanity goes.

To the fascist, those behind these conspiracies are not regular people — they are especially cunning and vicious especially greedy and unscrupulous, especially seditious and slothful, especially bad. They are especially powerful, in other words. They have the power to completely destroy the way of the life, the whole existence, of the person being victimized.