UT Austin’s Elimination of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies is a Betrayal of Texas, by Alfonso Ayala III

Students, Friends, and Colleagues:

Please read this Latinopia.com publication about what's playing out at UT right now. Alfonso is a doctoral student in the Mexican American & Latina/o Studies Department at UT-Austin.

-Angela Valenzuela

UT Austin’s Elimination of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies is a Betrayal of Texas

by Alfonso Ayala III, Doctoral Student

Mexican American & Latina/o Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

Latinopia.com | February 14, 2026

Many of you have now heard the deeply unsettling announcement from President Jim Davis that the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies will no longer stand as an independent department. Instead, it will be folded into a newly-created Department of Social and Cultural Analysis within the College of Liberal Arts, alongside African and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

Let’s call this what it is. When The University of Texas at Austin dissolves the independent status of its Mexican American and Latina/o Studies (MALS) Department under the banner of “reorganization,” it is not administrative housekeeping. It is not streamlining. It is not “efficiency.” It is the reinscription of an already White, Eurocentric intellectual hierarchy that has long determined which knowledges are foundational and which are expendable. Stripping the department of its autonomy recenters power in traditional disciplinary structures historically shaped by Anglo-European canons and governance norms. That is not neutral restructuring. It is the restoration of hegemonic order dressed up as reform.

And in Texas of all places.

Texas is nearly 40 percent Latino. In our public schools, Latino children are the majority. In many districts, they are the future of the workforce, the electorate, and the civic life of this state. To dismantle a department devoted to the rigorous study of Mexican American and Latina/o histories, literatures, politics, and lived realities in a state demographically defined by those communities is not simply shortsighted. It is disproportionate, irresponsible, and frankly indefensible.

This is not about “identity politics.” It is about knowledge. It is about acknowledging that to be successful in any field in Texas requires an understanding of the Latino population. It is about understanding that Mexican American and Latina/o Studies doesn’t just study Latinos; it creates new ways of knowing and understanding Latinos. It is about whether a flagship public university has the intellectual courage to study the people who built and continue to build this state.

A public university has a public mission. That mission is not to sanitize knowledge to appease political pressure. It is to cultivate understanding, inquiry, and democratic capacity.

Eliminating Mexican American and Latina/o Studies in Texas is like shutting down marine science in Galveston, agricultural research at Texas A&M, or energy studies in Houston — it is the willful abandonment of scholarship about the forces that define the state and shape its future. It is nothing short of institutionalized racism.

It is an abdication of relevance. It signals that the intellectual study of the largest ethnic population in the state is somehow optional—an expendable add-on rather than foundational scholarship. How offensive.

What does it say to Latino students—many of them first-generation college students—that their histories and ways of knowing, being, and doing in the world are too controversial to sustain? What does it say to faculty whose scholarship interrogates conquest, segregation, labor exploitation, bilingual education, and racial formation in this region? It says: your knowledge can exist, but only at the margins—never with the authority or autonomy afforded to dominant traditions.

And what does it say, that the decision to close the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies is happening alongside the creation of programs like The School of Civic Leadership, The Ackerman Program on Jewish and Western Civilization, and majors in Strategy and Statecraft and Great Books?

This isn’t about efficiency or saving money or reducing redundancies; this is about determining whose knowledge matters, and whose is unnecessary. University leadership is committing epistemological violence by telling Latinos that in the great tradition of Western thought and reason, we do not belong; we have nothing to contribute. There is no place for us at the center of intellectual life—only as decorative additions to a canon we did not author and are not permitted to reshape.

In Texas, where immigration, voting rights, bilingual education, and curriculum wars are not abstract debates but live policy battlegrounds, eliminating a program uniquely equipped to analyze these issues is not neutral. It is the strategic sidelining of scholarship that interrogates power. It is the policing of racialized knowledge and intellectual sovereignty born out of struggle.

Universities do not hollow themselves out overnight. They do so incrementally—through “reorganizations,” “realignments,” and “efficiencies” that just happen to fall hardest on programs studying race, ethnicity, gender, and inequality. 

The notice from President Davis makes clear that consolidation is the first step. Then comes the “review of the curriculum of these areas to determine what majors, minors, and courses will be offered in the newly formed departments.” 

Earlier this year, the university did away with faculty senate committees, effectively stripping the only real check of power that existed on campus. Now, two men at the top—President Davis and Provost Inboden—are making hasty decisions to bow to the political pressures of the legislature, with precious little, if any, concern for the impact it will have on students, faculty, and the community.

Mexican American and Latino Studies is not a fringe specialization. Far from it. It is central to understanding the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its continuing relevance to our understanding of who we are as a state. It is central to understanding labor movements and agricultural economies, educational segregation, education policy, border governance and migration regimes, cultural production, language politics, and civic identity. Without the expansive and vital knowledge and perspectives produced through Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, any account of Texas and the country as a whole will be incomplete.

We don’t live in Maine or Alaska. This is Texas—a border state that shares 1,254 miles with Mexico, touching Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Chihuahua—the longest international border of any state in the nation. Our politics, our economy, our schools, our labor markets, our public health systems, and our culture are shaped daily by that reality. To behave as though Mexican American and Latina/o Studies is peripheral here is not just shortsighted; it is a willful denial of the very geography and history that define us.

It is staggering that Texas would retreat from sustaining a robust program in Mexican American and Latino Studies. Yet context is king. At the very moment this department is being dismantled, the School of Civic Leadership—widely understood as a signature initiative of Provost Inboden—proclaims its mission to prepare “a rising generation to advance human flourishing in our state and nation.” The contradiction is impossible to ignore. In the future The University of Texas at Austin is curating, Latinos are present as demographics—but absent as intellectual architects of the public good.

Demographic reality appears to matter less than political optics. Or, if the growing number of Latinas and Latinos in Texas does matter to the future of our state—it seems that our community of highly acclaimed scholars are not to be trusted with shaping that conversation.

To wit, we recently learned that the Civitas Institute, a conservative think tank at The University of Texas at Austin, is hosting an event on February 20th titled “America’s Latino Future.” Not a single scholar from the Latino Research Institute, the Center for Mexican American Studies, or the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies was consulted or invited to participate in an area where we are unmistakably invested. To sideline the very scholars whose life’s work centers on Latino history, policy, and lived experience in a state that is nearly 40 percent Latino is not simply ironic. It is deeply offensive.

Historical memory teaches us that Mexican American and Latina/o Studies did not appear by dint of administrative grace. It was forged through decades of student walkouts, faculty organizing, and sustained community struggle. It was demanded in the face of indifference and defended against erasure. The existence of this Department was not a gift. It was a hard-won institutional transformation secured by those who refused to accept invisibility.

The official motto of The University of Texas at Austin is “what starts here changes the world.” The struggle that led to the creation of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies began on this campus over 50 years ago. The intellectual labor of those activists, scholars, and community members has indeed changed the world—reshaping scholarship, informing policy, transforming classrooms, and expanding the democratic imagination of this state. That legacy does not disappear because an administration chooses retrenchment over courage. We are the future. We will not be erased.

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Copyrighted by Alfonso Ayala III and is printed on Latinopia with his permission. Photo of jellyfish in the public domain. All other images copyrighted by Barrio Dog Productions Inc.

When “Rigor” Becomes a Weapon: The Ideological Attack on 'the Studies' Fields at the University of Texas at Austin, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

When “Rigor” Becomes a Weapon: The Ideological Attack on the 'Studies' Fields at the University of Texas at Austin

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

November 10, 2025

Christopher Schorr’s recent report, Are the “Studies” Worth Studying?, claims to measure academic rigor at the University of Texas at Austin. What it actually does is recycle a familiar political attack on ethnic and gender studies under the pretense of social science method. From its title forward, the report manufactures its conclusion first and hunts for data later.

Geez—beginning with a slur, “the Studies,” Schorr collapses a wide range of intellectually distinct departments into a single caricature. He then proceeds to compare them with STEM and social science programs using cherry-picked data drawn from a questionable time period that overlaps with the upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is a portrait of academic life so distorted that it tells us far more about the author’s ideology than about the university itself. 

For the record, “the Studies” appear nowhere in scholarly classification, allowing Schorr to dismiss diverse intellectual traditions as a single ideological bloc. The centerpiece of the analysis is a crude equation of grade distributions with “rigor.” If a department awards more A’s, Schorr concludes, it must be less rigorous. That logic collapses under the weight of even introductory research-methods standards. Grades are not standardized across disciplines; they reflect different epistemologies, pedagogies, and assessment practices.

What Schorr calls evidence of “low rigor” is, in fact, a misunderstanding of how different disciplines assess learning. Departments such as Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and African and African Diaspora Studies rely on research, writing, and critical engagement with lived experience—not multiple-choice exams or lab problems. To equate fewer B’s and C’s with higher standards is to misread diversity of method as deficiency.

Measuring a laboratory course by the same yardstick as an ethnographic field study makes about as much sense as evaluating engineers and poets with the same exam. It would be just as absurd as measuring aerospace engineering programs by how well they rate on cultural competence—or judging literature departments by their mastery of thermodynamics.

Rigor is not a matter of how many students get A’s. It is demonstrated through valid and reliable assessments of learning—clear rubrics, demanding capstones, peer review, and measurable intellectual growth. Instructors who grade on mastery rather than competition are not “inflating” grades; they are honoring learning as a developmental process rather than a ranking contest.

The report’s methods are as careless as its premises. It pools data from pandemic-era semesters (2020–2024), when universities across the country temporarily altered grading policies to accommodate extraordinary disruptions. It flattens UT Austin’s plus-minus grading system into whole letters, artificially raising GPAs. It treats small seminars with 10 students as equally representative as 900-seat lecture courses. And it controls for nothing: not student preparation, prior GPA, or instructor variation—variables every social-science graduate student learns to include before drawing conclusions.

When the statistics crumble, the ideology shows through. Schorr’s citations rely heavily on polemics, RateMyProfessors blurbs, and the so-called “grievance studies” hoax. He conflates community-engaged scholarship and decolonial inquiry with “activism,” ignoring half a century of peer-reviewed research demonstrating their rigor and social impact.

The report concludes with a call to abolish entire departments—an act it euphemistically calls “improving rigor.” In truth, it proposes an intellectual purge, one that would silence precisely the fields that interrogate race, gender, power, and the structures of exclusion in our society. This is not the defense of truth the author claims; it is a narrowing of truth to fit an ideology.

If Schorr truly cared about academic rigor, he would advocate for transparent rubrics, common assessment frameworks across institutions, and longitudinal studies that track actual learning gains. Instead, he offers a polemic that undermines the very academic freedom he pretends to defend.

The real crisis in higher education isn’t grade inflation. It’s the corrosion of public trust through weaponized statistics and bad-faith scholarship. Reports like this one sow suspicion of faculty, delegitimize entire fields of study, and mislead the public about what crucially important segments of the academy actually do, namely, teach students when and how to question power and to think critically about the world they are poised to shape.

Universities deserve honest inquiry, not political theater dressed up as "data." If we care about rigor, let’s start by demanding it from those who claim to measure it.

Reference

Schorr, C. (2025). Are the ‘Studies’ worth studying? A cross-department comparison of academic rigor at the University of Texas at Austin. America First Policy Institute. https://www.americafirstpolicy.com/issues/are-the-studies-worth-studying-a-cross-department-comparison-of-academic-rigor-at-the-university-of-texas-at-austin

ARE THE 'STUDIES' WORTH STUDYING? A CROSS-DEPARTMENT COMPARISON OF ACADEMIC RIGOR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Christopher Schorr, Ph.D. | May 8, 2025 | America First Policy Institute

INTRODUCTION

In competitive environments, a common dictum holds: “They can’t all be winners.” University grading seems to defy this rule. During the last three decades, grade point averages (GPA) rose 17% at four-year public universities and 16% at private non-profit universities (Nam, 2024). Grade inflation diminishes the value of grades as repositories of information pertaining to academic quality. This, in turn, harms universities’ pedagogical and professional missions. When excellent students are indistinguishable from merely competent students, student achievement wanes, and universities (e.g., graduate admissions officers) and prospective employers are forced to evaluate applicants by other means (Arum & Roksa, 2011; Nickolaus, 2024; Cerullo, 2023).

Student migration into less rigorous courses and disciplines contributes to grade inflation (Hernandez-Julian & Looney, 2016). Several notoriously lax-grading disciplines, collectively known as “the Studies,” have well-earned reputations for prioritizing activism over scholarship (Bawer, 2023). As described in this report, the Studies’ strong ideological and activist commitments could contribute to lax grading by creating alternatives to traditional assessments of academic quality. Increased enrollment in the Studies would, therefore, tend to harm overall (university-wide) grading rigor (hereafter, “rigor”). 

This report investigates this possibility at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), a large public university. It presents findings from an analysis of 10 semesters of grades obtained from 21 disciplines spanning three fields of study: the Studies, the social sciences, and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). It finds the Studies to be considerably less rigorous than comparison fields. When considered alongside longstanding concerns regarding the limited intellectual merits of these disciplines, these findings raise serious doubts as to the value of continuing to host these disciplines. This report concludes with several recommendations for improving rigor in higher education.

RIGOR AND GRADE INFLATION

What does an “A” grade signify in a university setting? How does it differ from a “B” or a “C,” for instance? Universities sometimes provide official answers to these questions; however, most students and faculty know grading rigor often differs by course, department, and field. 

Academic rigor is closely related to grade inflation, the tendency for grades to increase over time. Grades have been likened to a currency in that, much as the value of the dollar depreciates overtime due to increases in the money supply, the value of a given grade (e.g., an “A”) and high GPAs depreciate overtime due to the proliferation of higher grades. The primary culprit for grade inflation appears to be increasingly lax grading in response to “consumer demand” from students and parents; however, changes in student quality and student self-selection into easier-grading courses are contributing factors as well (Rojstaczer, 2023; Hernandez-Julian & Looney, 2016).

Rigor describes the setting and maintaining of high standards to preserve the value of grades against inflationary pressures.[1] The failure to maintain rigor undermines the usefulness of grades as signals of academic quality—i.e., subject matter mastery, diligence, and skill. The proliferation of “A” grades in undergraduate settings complicates efforts by employers and graduate admissions officers to separate the academic wheat from chaff, forcing them to rely on other metrics (Nickolaus, 2024; Cerullo, 2023). 

Failing to maintain rigor also reduces student learning by removing a key impetus for course mastery. As described in an internal Yale University memo, compromising rigor results in “students who do exceptional work [being] lumped together with those who have merely done good work, and in some cases with those who have done merely adequate work” (Mayhew, 1993). Students appear to be studying and learning less than in years past, yet grades continue to rise year-over-year (Babcock & Marks, 2010; Arum & Roksa, 2011). This paradox suggests the failure to maintain rigor has harmed student learning while also distorting the economy of academic grading. 

Most research in this area addresses declining rigor over time (grade inflation); however, removing the time dimension can help to illuminate other important factors. For example, the natural sciences and math are typically more rigorous than the social sciences, which, in turn, are more rigorous than the humanities (Achen & Courant, 2009; Rojstaczer & Healy, 2010). Students appear to recognize this pattern insofar as self-selection into less rigorous disciplines is among the drivers of grade inflation (Hernandez-Julian & Looney, 2016).

THE STUDIES 

One field of study—the Studies—deserves special attention. The Studies are a collection of relatively new academic disciplines such as “Women and Gender Studies,” “African American Studies,” “Mexican-American / Latin(o/a/x) Studies,” and so on.[2] The Studies have been criticized for prioritizing political and social activism over rigorous scholarship (Ginsberg, 2025; Schalin 2025). 

As discussed further below, this reputation makes the Studies a presumptive target for investigations of rigor and/or grade inflation. The Studies often fare poorly in cross-department comparisons. For example, “Afroamerican and African Studies” and “Women’s Studies” ranked 14th and 21st out of 25 departments respectively in terms of rigor at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007 (Achen & Courant, 2009). More recently, an internal Yale College report uncovered that “Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies” awarded “A” grades to 92% of students in introductory courses.[3]“African American Studies” (82.2% “A”), “Regional Studies” (82.7% “A”), “Ethnicity, Race, and Migration” (85.4% “A”), and “Education Studies” (85.8% “A”) followed closely behind (Fair, 2023).[4] 

Figure 1: Bachelor of Arts Degrees Awarded by "Studies" Departments, 2000-2023