Academic Freedom Is Civil Rights Infrastructure: What UT's Dismantling of Ethnic and Gender Studies Costs Us, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. [A LULAC Statement]

Academic Freedom Is Civil Rights Infrastructure: What UT's Elimination of Ethnic and Gender Studies Costs Us

A LULAC Statement prepared by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., Education Committee Chair in preparation for the September 19, 2026 convening of the board in Galveston, Texas, 

Academic freedom is usually defended as a professional courtesy—a protection professors enjoy—an internal matter for faculty senates and accreditors. That framing is a mistake, and it is a mistake civil rights organizations cannot afford to repeat.

For LULAC, academic freedom is infrastructure. It is the machinery that produces the evidence our advocacy runs on. Take it apart and our work does not merely become harder in some abstract sense. It becomes unprovable.

Our committee writes with new urgency. On September 17, 2026, UT Austin's provost eliminated the undergraduate majors in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women and Gender Studies (Cordova, 2026). Not consolidated. Eliminated.

Every Victory Rested on Somebody's Research

Consider how our tradition actually won.

When Delgado v. Bastrop ISD ended the de jure segregation of Mexican American children in Texas schools in 1948, it rested on documentation of how districts sorted children and on what basis. When Hernandez v. Texas reached the Supreme Court in 1954, the case turned on demonstrated patterns—decades of jury exclusion in Jackson County, the social facts of a community treated as a class apart. 

When school finance litigation exposed the chasm between property-rich and property-poor districts, the argument was built from data somebody had to collect, analyze, and publish. When voting rights cases have tested Texas redistricting, they have depended on demographers and political scientists willing to put their findings on the record under oath.

None of that evidence fell from the sky. It came from scholars who were free to ask questions the state of Texas would have preferred nobody ask, and free to publish answers that embarrassed powerful institutions.

That is the relationship: researchers produce the record, advocates convert the record into remedy. Break the first half and the second half collapses. And it is intentionally "getting collapsed."

What Was Built, and How Long It Took

The Center for Mexican American Studies was established at UT in 1970, "born of the civil rights movement," with Américo Paredes among its principal founders and its first director (Center for Mexican American Studies, n.d.). In 2014, UT created the first academic department in the United States devoted comprehensively to Mexican American and Latina/o life, and the university announced it with pride: President Bill Powers said the new department would ensure "that UT is the best place for Latino studies in the United States" (University of Texas at Austin, 2014).

Fifty-six years of institution-building. A national first. A major that no longer exists.

How It Was Dismantled

The elimination did not arrive out of nowhere. It is the final step in a sequence that this blog and the public record now documents clearly (Ayala, 2026; Valenzuela, 2026).

Senate Bill 17 took effect January 1, 2024, closing the Multicultural Education Center, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Monarch Program serving immigrant students. By April, roughly 60 staff who had worked in those programs were terminated—half of whom were Black and half of whom were Latino, and the majority, women. 

Senate Bill 37, adopted in June 2025, curtailed shared governance—faculty senates now exist only at a governing board's pleasure, presidents appoint half their membership, and a new ombudsman may recommend withholding state funds from noncompliant institutions.

In August 2025, UT abolished its Faculty Council outright, going beyond what SB 37 required. In October 2025, the Graduate Student Assembly was blocked from even considering resolutions opposing SB 17 and SB 37.

In February 2026, UT announced the closure of seven departments in the College of Liberal Arts, folding Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies into a single unit, the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. The consolidation was originally slated for Fall 2027; the timeline was accelerated by a full year.

In September 2026, seven months after that merger and weeks into the accelerated implementation, the majors were eliminated. Yes, gone.

The sequence matters. The very bodies that might have questioned, resisted, or demanded accountability for these decisions had already been dismantled before the decisions were announced. That was not incidental; it was structural. In work I have described elsewhere (Valenzuela, 2024), the mechanisms of internal deliberation and resistance are weakened first, clearing the way for consequential decisions to proceed with diminished scrutiny. The result is not merely organizational change, but profound institutional disruption, with significant human costs, including trauma and harm to faculty, students, and communities (Zamora & Valenzuela, 2023; Valenzuela, 2024).

The Condition of the "New Department"

What replaced these departments deserves description, because it tells you what the merger was for.

According to Dr. Cary Cordova, an American Studies professor at UT who gave a first-person account to The Higher Ed Advocate, the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis began the fall semester without an operating budget for the academic year, and her colleagues could not obtain keys to their buildings (Cordova, 2026).

Faculty have simultaneously been told they must resubmit courses they have taught for years for approval against the university's rewritten core curriculum, on a two-week turnaround. Courses not submitted in time are automatically removed from the core. As Cordova describes the standard being applied: "no SCA courses—no matter the topic—will be included in the core without a new approval" (Cordova, 2026).

Who conducts that review matters. "We are not being reviewed by our peers," Cordova writes, "but by AI and people who hold our scholarship in deep disregard" (Cordova, 2026). She further reports that the dean declined to advance African American Women's History and Native American Women's History as even worthy of consideration for the core, and draws the conclusion herself: "the message is very clear: women of color are not welcome at this university" (Cordova, 2026).

Set that beside where the university has been investing. The Civitas Institute was founded in 2022 with $6 million and the backing of the lieutenant governor's office. The School of Civic Leadership created to house it now carries 44 faculty and is launching degree programs in Civics Honors, Great Books Honors, and Strategy & Statecraft. The rewritten core curriculum against which our colleagues' courses are now being judged was designed by a committee heavy with School of Civic Leadership faculty, and narrows general education toward Western civilization and U.S. history (Valenzuela, 2026).

One department cannot get keys. Another is conferring new degrees. The resources did not vanish in a budget crisis. They were redirected.

A Department Is Not a Course List—and a Major Is Not a Course List Either

In February, the university's defense was that nothing had been eliminated: the courses would persist and the faculty would remain employed. Seven months later, the majors are gone. Any future assurance from this administration should be evaluated against that record.

We should still be precise about what remains at risk, because precision is what the university is counting on us to lack. Courses may survive the core review. Faculty remain on payroll. But a major is the structure that lets a student declare a field, be advised in it, complete a coherent sequence in it, and graduate credentialed in it. Without the major, there is no pipeline—no undergraduates entering the field, therefore fewer graduate students, therefore fewer scholars, therefore less research and an intentionally impoverished field.

And a department is the structure that controls hiring lines, tenure standards, and the internal argument about what counts as significant scholarship. Merge four fields into one unit and you manufacture a permanent competition for a shrinking pool of lines. Remove the major, and the field loses the enrollment numbers it would need to justify those lines in the first place.

The attrition from here will be gradual, and it will be attributed to student demand. That is how a field is ended without anyone having to announce its end—except that this time, someone did announce it.

What This Costs Our Communities

Texas Latinos are not a minor constituency awaiting occasional study. According to the Texas Demographic Center's 2023 estimates, Hispanic Texans constitute 39.8% of the state's population, compared with 38.7% for non-Hispanic White Texans—the largest population group in Texas (Texas Demographic Center, 2025). The crossover is not an artifact of one estimation method; Census Bureau estimates placed Hispanic Texans at 40.2% against 39.8% non-Hispanic Whites as of July 2022, a plurality—meaning the largest share—rather than the majority that headline coverage claimed (Asch, 2023).

By either accounting, the flagship has eliminated the undergraduate major devoted to studying the state's largest population group, in the very years that group became the largest.

The infrastructure being dismantled is where knowledge about our schooling, our labor, our health, our neighborhoods, our political representation, and our histories has been produced.

When it goes, the consequence is concrete. The next time a district's discipline data shows our children being pushed out, the next time a redistricting map dilutes our vote, the next time a bilingual program is defunded or a colonia goes without water, the scholar who would have documented it will hold a position in another state, and the dissertation that would have established the pattern will never have been written.

No data, no case. No case, no remedy.

That is not a side effect of these decisions. For anyone who would prefer our conditions to remain undocumented, it is the entire benefit.

What LULAC Calls For

Restore the majors. This is the immediate demand, and it is specific: reinstate the undergraduate degree programs in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women and Gender Studies, with their advising structures and graduation pathways intact.

Extend the two-week deadline and disclose the review. Faculty are being asked to justify years of curriculum in a fortnight, against criteria they did not set, before reviewers whose identity and methods have not been disclosed. If artificial intelligence is being used to evaluate whether courses belong in the core, the university should say so publicly, name the system, and publish the criteria. A public institution owes the public that much.

Allow faculty to submit appeals for rejected courses. To not do so would make the review process effectively one-sided, leaving faculty with no meaningful opportunity to correct errors, challenge inconsistent applications of the criteria, or respond to judgments that could remove long-standing courses from the core curriculum. Any process consequential enough to determine what students may count toward their core education should include a transparent and timely mechanism for reconsideration.

Fund the department it created. A unit operating a semester into the year without a budget or building access is not being administered. It is being starved.

Restore the faculty's role in academic decisions. No degree program at a public university should be eliminated without a recorded vote of the faculty who teach in it. We call on the Board of Regents to reconstitute an elected faculty governance body at UT Austin with guaranteed consultation rights over program closure, and on the Legislature to revisit SB 37, which made this year's decisions possible by removing everyone with standing to object.

Protect the people. Staff, untenured faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students in these fields are the most exposed and the least able to speak without professional risk. Organizations with institutional standing like Texas LULAC should be the ones speaking.

Sustain the scholars while we fight for the programs. Restoring the majors is the goal, and it will not happen this semester. In the meantime, the people who do this research need somewhere to keep working. We call on foundations, professional associations, and Latino-serving institutions across Texas to fund fellowships, research partnerships, and publication support for scholars of Mexican American and Latina/o life whose institutional footing has been cut out from under them. LULAC councils will make our own records, our testimony, and our community's knowledge available to that work.

LULAC has always understood that power prefers our conditions to stay invisible, and that making them visible is the first act of every campaign we have ever won. Defending academic freedom is not a detour from that work. It is that work, at the point where it begins.

References

Asch, S. (2023, June 23). Texas is officially majority Hispanic, according to the Census Bureau. Texas Standard. https://texasstandard.org/stories/texas-population-majority-latino-census-bureau-update/

Ayala, A., III. (2026, February 14). UT Austin’s elimination of Mexican American and Latina/o studies is a betrayal of Texas. Latinopia.com. http://latinopia.com/latino-literature/latinopia-guest-blog/guest-blog-alfonso-ayala-iii-elimination-of-mexican-american-studies-and-latina-o-studies/

Center for Mexican American Studies. (n.d.). About. The University of Texas at Austin, College of Liberal Arts. Retrieved September 18, 2026, from https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/cmas/about.html

Cordova, C. (2026, September 17). Breaking: UT Austin eliminates ethnic and gender studies majors. The Higher Ed Advocate. https://higheredadvocate.substack.com/p/breaking-ut-austin-eliminates-ethnic

Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. (n.d.). About. The University of Texas at Austin, College of Liberal Arts. Retrieved September 18, 2026, from https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/mals/about/

Texas Demographic Center. (2025, July 2). Texas population: Trends and characteristics [Presentation slides]. https://demographics.texas.gov/Resources/TDC/Presentations/88837d2e-786a-4c0a-a0d3-55fd7d54cef8/20250702_TexasWorkforceCommission.pdf

University of Texas at Austin. (2014, September 10). New groundbreaking department to focus on Latino, Mexican American experience. UT News. https://news.utexas.edu/2014/09/10/new-groundbreaking-department-to-focus-on-latino-mexican-american-experience/

Valenzuela, A. (2026, September 7). The political transformation of UT. Texas Education Equity. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-political-transformation-of-ut.html

Valenzuela, A. (2024, December 20). Monopoly tycoons in a game of Jenga: The censorship of bodies, protest, and speech at UT-Austin. Texas Observer. https://www.texasobserver.org/censorship-ut-austin-professor-angela-valenzuela/ 

Zamora, E., & Valenzuela, A. (2023, February 13). Anti-DEI law implementation has been a disaster. Texas Observer. https://www.texasobserver.org/anti-dei-law-implementation-has-been-a-disaster/

@TexasLULAC @LULAC #LULAC #AcademicFreedom #LatinoCivilRights #HigherEd #CensorshipHurtsUs #NuestraHistoria

Christian Nationalism Captures Higher Education, or, On Mandatorily Managing the Mystery of the Maker, Parts One and Two, by Joshua Gunn

Friends:

I want to call readers’ attention to this provocative and important two-part essay by UT-Austin Professor Joshua Gunn in The Higher Ed Advocate, both posted below. Densely documented with links to primary documents, investigative reporting, scholarship, and the institutions’ own materials, Gunn raises questions about the transformation of Texas higher education that deserve serious public scrutiny. 

In Part One, he examines changes in the language and governance of Texas public universities, drawing particular attention to terms appearing in official UT and UT System documents—academic “integrity,” “stewardship,” “solemn covenant,” “sacred space,” “spirit of grace,” and related formulations—and argues that their cumulative significance looks different when situated within the broader political ascendancy of Christian nationalism. The language itself is not in dispute: UT Austin’s Texas Statement on Academic Integrity describes the classroom as a “sacred space” and invokes a “spirit of grace,” while the UT System’s 2026 teaching policy describes teaching as a “solemn covenant” between faculty and students. 

In Part Two, Gunn moves from rhetoric to institutional development, examining the Civitas Institute and School of Civic Leadership and the political and financial forces surrounding their emergence. That history is significant: Civitas was initially established with $12 million in state and UT System funding following documented involvement by political leaders and conservative donors, the Regents created the School of Civic Leadership in 2023, and in 2025 committed another $100 million for its permanent home.

The public should be concerned not because conservative scholars, religious scholars, or people of faith have no place in public universities—they unquestionably do. Pluralism requires their presence, too. 

The concern arises when governmental power, university governance, major private wealth, and particular ideological or religious projects begin converging in ways that can determine which fields flourish, which departments disappear, which subjects become “controversial,” which forms of knowledge receive extraordinary institutional investment, and which become administratively vulnerable. That is a fundamentally different question from whether conservative ideas deserve a hearing. They do. 

The question is whether a public university remains a genuinely pluralistic institution when the state itself increasingly participates in deciding which ideas, histories, and intellectual traditions merit institutional protection and amplification.

Read together, Gunn’s essays therefore raise a larger and more consequential question of institutional capture: Who gets to determine what counts as legitimate knowledge, which histories universities teach, which questions professors may safely ask, and ultimately what kind of citizen public education is intended to produce? I encourage readers to read Part One and Part Two for themselves, follow Gunn’s many links, examine the underlying documents, and reach their own conclusions about what these developments mean for academic freedom, church-state boundaries, shared governance, and the democratic purposes of public education.

And there is one final connection we should not miss. The University of Texas System is governed by nine regents who are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Texas Senate, serving staggered six-year terms. University governance can therefore seem distant from electoral politics, but it is not. Who Texans elect determines who appoints the people who govern our public universities—and who confirms those appointments. 

Gubernatorial and state Senate elections are higher-education elections, too. Elections matter, my friends.

-Angela Valenzuela

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.

A Report from UT’s College of Education, by Noah De Lissovoy and Deb Kelt, The Higher Ed Advocate June 3, 2026

Friends:

I am proud of my UT-Austin College of Education fellow colleagues, Dr. Deb Kelt and Dr. Noah De Lissovoy, for this powerful and timely The Higher Ed Substack Advocate post. Writing as educators, scholars, and members of our university community, they remind us that the struggle over academic freedom is not only a struggle over content, curriculum, or political ideology. It is also a struggle over pedagogy itself—over the conditions that allow teaching and learning to be intellectually honest, socially meaningful, and grounded in care, rigor, and relationships.

What Deb and Noah make especially clear is that these attacks do not remain confined to a single college, building, department, or program. In the College of Education, restrictions on teaching ripple outward into Texas classrooms through the teachers, counselors, principals, superintendents, and education leaders we prepare. In Liberal Arts, the consolidation of fields rooted in Ethnic Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical interdisciplinary inquiry similarly affects the future of knowledge production, civic understanding, and democratic engagement. In both cases, what is at stake is not simply institutional rearrangement. It is the university’s public mission.

Their post invites us to recognize the courage, solidarity, and clarity already emerging across campus. I am grateful to Deb and Noah for naming what so many of us know to be true: when we defend open and critical inquiry, affirming classroom relationships, and the knowledge traditions that speak to the lives of diverse students and communities, we are defending teaching itself.

May such reports from the front lines of our university continue to illuminate the stakes, strengthen our resolve, and remind us that defending education is a collective calling.

-Angela Valenzuela

A Report from UT’s College of Education

by Noah De Lissovoy and Deb Kelt, Members, AAUP@UT Chapter

In the field of education, we know something about what works in teaching. From this vantage point, the current attack on critical inquiry in higher education in Texas is not just ideological—it is also pedagogical.

Restrictions on academic freedom and on teaching about “controversial” topics (including race, gender, and sexuality) are not just a matter of moving the ideological center of gravity in the classroom; they fundamentally undermine teaching that starts from any perspective, since they make it difficult for teachers to explore with students the full scope of a subject and its social context and implications. But the current conservative attack is not just limited to these aspects of teaching. This attack also makes it hard to make connections between students’ lived experiences and class content, and to create a robust learning community that is grounded on care and solidarity. These pedagogical principles are supported by decades of research on K-12 and higher education teaching.

It should be no surprise then that even as legislators and university administrators in Texas seek to reorganize curriculum and teaching across the university, they have also turned their attention to colleges of education. Like our colleagues in other fields, faculty in education have felt pressure to self-censor and to limit the scope of classroom discussions. (Interestingly, in teacher education spaces, this pressure is felt doubly, since faculty are teaching about the pedagogy that they seek at the same time to embody.) And alongside our UT colleagues, we await the results of a shadowy curriculum audit connected to the passage of Senate Bill 37.

In addition, our College of Education dean, who has been dedicated to supporting faculty and reimagining education to better serve the state and its many communities, was not renewed in his contract despite broad faculty support and remarkable success. The search for his replacement, by a committee with limited faculty representation, has been shrouded in secrecy. At the same time, right-wing news outlets have vilified the college and called out specific courses and staff. A recent successful tenure-track faculty search was blocked at the last minute by the university for reasons that remain obscure to faculty. In the context of these developments, faculty are anxious for themselves and their students.

It is important to recognize that any move to compromise our freedom to teach -- and our students’ freedom to learn -- will not stay contained in the Sánchez Building on UT’s campus. Our students leave to teach in Texas and across the United States, mentoring children with care and rigor in numerous content areas. In this way, our graduates prepare young people for all professions. As teachers of teachers, we know that censoring our work ripples like a rock tossed in a pond: If our UT students receive a compromised education, so will their future students. When one considers the various departments in our college, we can see how the damage compounds further. Stellar superintendents and principals graduate from our programs, as do special education experts, health science specialists, and school counselors. Any move to stymie the work done in these departments will, undoubtedly, cause broad harm.

It is important to recognize that any move to compromise our freedom to teach -- and our students’ freedom to learn -- will not stay contained in the Sánchez Building on UT’s campus.

As educators and scholars dedicated to creating a better world for all people, we have organized to push back against the current challenges. Sixty tenured and professional track faculty in the college signed a letter of concern regarding the non-renewal of Dean Charles Martinez. (Neither the President nor the Provost responded.) We have grown our membership in AAUP in recent months, and we have met as a new college-based group to strategize against interference regarding our right to teach and research. We attend rallies, speak at state school board meetings, and network with like-minded colleagues across UT. We are also working to strengthen relationships with the community, as many of us have long histories with public school teachers here in Austin.

Our group knows the stakes are high for students, staff, and faculty. Though this work of resistance sometimes keeps us up at night, we don’t see any alternative. We have always advocated for our students, for their future students, and for schools in Texas and beyond. The times are certainly different – with aggressive forces working harder than ever to muzzle us -- but we are steadfast in our calling to serve.

Both the recent pressure applied to colleges of education and the resistance to it show that how we understand and organize the process of pedagogy is deeply consequential. This struggle is a reminder to faculty across the university that as we fight for content and courses that are critical and relevant to diverse students we are also fighting for enlivening and affirming classroom relationships, community, and collaboration– that is, for teaching itself.