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
