Rule by Crisis: Trumpism and the Attack on Democracy, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 19, 2026

Rule by Crisis: Trumpism and the Attack on Democracy

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 19, 2026

Link to article

Darrell M. West’s 2022 Brookings Institution essay, “Trump is not the only threat to democracy,” upon which I build from yesterday's blog, reads today less like a warning than a framework for understanding what has now come to fruition. 

Written in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, West’s central point was that Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy, but not the only one. The deeper danger lies in the political ecosystem—and echo chamber—that has learned from him, copied him, enabled him, and built governing machinery around authoritarian impulses (West, 2022).

West identified several interlocking threats: "copycat candidates, legal coups, a toxic information ecosystem, the decline of authoritative institutions, and the widespread prevalence of counter-majoritarianism in our political system" (West, 2022). Since Trump’s return to office, these dangers are no longer theoretical. They have become governing strategies. 

As The Washington Post reported, Trump’s first week back in power was designed to “flood the zone,” moving rapidly through executive actions, pardons, security-clearance revocations, and a detailed policy blueprint that reflected a far more organized operation than his first administration (Arnsdorf & Morse, 2025).

This is where Project 2025 matters. Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership gives institutional form to this anti-democratic project. It translates grievance into governance by pairing policy proposals with personnel pipelines, executive-branch restructuring, and a theory of presidential power that would make dissent within government difficult (Dans & Groves, 2023). The level of planning is all still quite chilling.

Even as Trump and his advisers attempted during the campaign to distance themselves from it, The Washington Post reported that several top officials in the incoming administration had ties to the Project 2025 coalition, including Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and Tom Homan (Arnsdorf & Morse, 2025).

What we are witnessing, then, is not simply Trump’s personal grievance politics. It is the institutionalization of those grievances into executive action, budget policy, personnel decisions, ideological discipline, and attacks on the very institutions that make democratic accountability possible.

West’s warning about “legal coups” is especially important. The danger is not always dramatic. It can arrive through emergency declarations, executive orders, manipulated funding streams, attacks on courts, and legal theories that stretch presidential power beyond democratic limits. 

Trump’s executive order attempting to restrict birthright citizenship effectively placed a long-settled constitutional guarantee under direct challenge (Sacchetti et al., 2025). The Post has also reported that emergency powers have become central to Trump’s governing style, with critics warning that the administration is invoking crises to justify extraordinary executive authority (Bendavid, 2025).

The ill-fated Iran War—as we must all surely know by now—is another manifestation of this same anti-democratic pattern. This is not simply a foreign policy issue. It is a constitutional issue. Congress, not the president alone, holds the power to declare war. 

Yet Meyer & Alfaro (2026) reported that the House passed a war powers resolution seeking to push Trump to end a conflict that Congress had not authorized, while the Senate considered similar measures amid growing impatience over the administration’s unilateral conduct of the war. Days later, the Republican-led Senate rejected a resolution that would have blocked Trump from ordering further strikes on Iran, underscoring the degree to which congressional checks on war-making power have weakened under partisan pressure (Meyer, 2026).

That matters because democracy is not only about elections. It is also about whether constitutional limits mean anything when the executive branch claims emergency authority, bypasses Congress, and then dares the other branches to stop it. 

War concentrates power. It disciplines dissent. It shifts public attention away from domestic accountability. These are useful ploys for tyrants as these can be used to rally obedience, punish critics, and normalize rule by crisis. In this sense, the Iran War fits West’s warning about legal coups and emergency powers: authoritarianism often advances not by openly abolishing democracy, but by hollowing out the institutions that restrain executive power.

The attack on higher education fits squarely within West’s concern about the decline of authoritative institutions. Universities, news organizations, nonprofits, courts, think tanks, and professional associations are essential to democratic life because they produce knowledge, preserve evidence, hold power accountable, and teach people to think critically. That is precisely why they are under attack.

Notwithstanding Trump's Compact for higher education (Austin American-Statesman Editorial Board (2025), the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against universities makes this clear. 

Columbia University’s compliance with federal demands under threat of losing $400 million in federal funding generated widespread concern over academic freedom, shared governance, student protest rights, and government intrusion into curriculum (Powers & Brown, 2025). Columbia later reached a settlement with the Trump administration: the university agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government and $21 million to resolve related employment claims, while regaining access to much of its federal research funding—a resolution critics viewed as a dangerous precedent for federal coercion of universities (Office of the President, 2025; Reuters, 2025)

Harvard, by contrast, publicly resisted federal demands that reached into governance, hiring, admissions, DEI programming, student protest policy, and the intellectual life of the university. Federal officials responded in April 2025 by freezing billions in research funds. Although U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs later ruled the freeze unlawful and the administration reinstated grants and contracts previously awarded to Harvard, the Trump administration appealed the ruling and continued its broader legal campaign against the university (Raymond, 2025; Raymond & Stempel, 2026; also see Guardian Staff and Agencies).

The Widener Library at Harvard University, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025, in Cambridge, 

Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa) via Associated Press

For those of us in Texas, none of this feels distant. We have already witnessed the state-level version of this same project through attacks on DEI, tenure, shared governance, ethnic studies, gender studies, and academic freedom. What is happening nationally under Trump is connected to what we have seen in Texas, Florida, and other states: the effort to narrow what can be taught, who can belong, which histories count, and which institutions are permitted to challenge power.

West also warned about attacks on the information ecosystem. Here, too, his concerns have been borne out. Trump’s escalating lawsuits against media organizations—including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and others—must be understood not only as legal actions, but as intimidation strategies aimed at independent journalism (Wagner & Nover, 2026). A democracy cannot function when journalists are chilled, universities are threatened, lawyers are punished, and public servants are expected to demonstrate loyalty to a person rather than to the Constitution.

The attack on law firms is similarly alarming. The Washington Post has reported on executive orders targeting major law firms, including measures affecting contracts, security clearances, and access to federal buildings. These actions strike at the independence of the legal profession and the right to representation—both foundational to the rule of law (Berman & Stein, 2026). When lawyers fear representing disfavored clients, democracy itself is weakened.

Finally, West’s point about counter-majoritarianism remains crucial. The United States already has political structures that allow minority rule: the Electoral College, the Senate, gerrymandered districts, voter suppression, and a judiciary shaped by presidents who did not always win the popular vote. Trumpism exploits these structures. It does not need majority support to govern aggressively. It needs institutional leverage, fear, disinformation, and compliance.

This is why West’s essay remains so urgent. Trump is dangerous, but Trumpism is larger than Trump. It is a political infrastructure. It is a governing style. It is a movement that seeks to discipline universities, intimidate journalists, weaken courts, punish dissent, restrict voting, erase histories, bypass Congress, and turn public institutions into instruments of ideological control.

The work before us, then, is not only electoral. It is educational, institutional, legal, cultural, and moral. We must defend academic freedom, public education, independent journalism, voting rights, civil rights, Ethnic Studies, DEI, congressional war powers, and the right to dissent. We must refuse the normalization of intimidation. And we must insist that democracy is not simply the act of voting; it is the entire ecology of institutions, rights, knowledge, and public trust that makes self-government possible.

Darrell West warned us in 2022 that Trump was not the only threat to democracy. Today, we can see the full force of that warning. The threat is not only a man. It is a machinery. And naming that machinery clearly is part of how we begin to resist it.

References

Arnsdorf, I., & Morse, C. E. (2025, January 25). Trump’s first-week strategy: “Flood the zone.” Repeat. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/25/trump-week-one-flood-the-zone/

American-Statesman Editorial Board. (2025, October 30). Trump’s compact would put UT’s academic excellence at risk, Austin American-Statesman. https://www.statesman.com/opinion/editorials/article/editorial-trump-s-compact-put-ut-s-academic-21126977.php

Bendavid, N. (2025, June 9). For Trump, seizing emergency powers has become central to governing, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/06/09/trump-emergencies-protests-deportations-tariffs/

Berman, M., & Stein, P. (2026, March 2). Justice Dept. abandons defense of orders targeting law firms. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/02/trump-law-firms-appeal/

Columbia University Office of the President. (2025, July 23). Resolution of federal investigations and restoration of the University’s research funding, Columbia University. https://president.columbia.edu/news/resolution-federal-investigations-and-restoration-universitys-research-funding

Dans, P., & Groves, S. (Eds.). (2023). Mandate for leadership: The conservative promise. Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation. https://www.mandateforleadership.org/

Guardian Staff and Agencies. (2025, April 14). Trump officials cut billions in Harvard funds after university defies demands,The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/14/trump-harvard-funding-freeze

Meyer, T. (2026, June 16). Senate rejects resolution to block Trump from further strikes on Iran, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/06/16/senate-rejects-resolution-block-trump-further-strikes-iran/

Meyer, T. & Alfaro, M. (2026, June 4). House votes to block Trump from ordering more strikes on Iran, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/06/03/house-passes-war-powers-resolution-push-trump-end-iran-war/

Powers, M., & Brown, C. (2025, March 24). Fallout from Columbia capitulation fuels fears about academic freedom, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/03/24/fallout-columbia-capitulation-fuels-fears-about-academic-freedom/

Raymond, N. (2025, December 19). US appeals Harvard court victory on $2 billion funding freeze. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-appeals-harvard-court-victory-2-billion-funding-freeze-2025-12-19/

Reuters. (2025, July 24). White House touts Columbia deal, critics see dangerous precedent. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/white-house-touts-columbia-deal-critics-see-dangerous-precedent-2025-07-24/

Sacchetti, M., Hernández, A. R., & Lamothe, D. (2025, January 20). Trump signs executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship,The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/20/trump-immigration-executive-orders/

Wagner, L. & Nover, S. (2026, January 25). Trump has ramped up lawsuits against the media. Here’s where they stand, The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/01/25/trump-media-lawsuits/

West, D. M. (2022, July 25). Trump is not the only threat to democracy, Brookings Institution. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trump-is-not-the-only-threat-to-democracy/

The Theology of Power Behind the Anti-DEI Movement: What Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer Help Us See, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Theology of Power Behind the Anti-DEI Movement:
What Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer Help Us See          

by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 10, 2026

Today's anti-DEI movement does not merely invoke the language of neutrality; it weaponizes it. Its appeals to “colorblind equality,” “individual responsibility,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “freedom from coercion” provide moral cover for a coordinated effort to dismantle the institutional commitments that make multiracial and multiethnic democracy possible.

A Manhattan Institute (2023) policy brief by Christopher Rufo, Ilya Shapiro, and Matt Beienburg makes this clear. The document calls for state legislatures to abolish DEI offices, end mandatory diversity training, prohibit diversity statements, and eliminate identity-conscious policies in public universities. It even supplies model legislative language for states to adopt. In other words, it does not merely criticize DEI. It operationalizes a political project.

What would Katherine Stewart, Nancy MacLean, and Jane Mayer help us see in this document and in the broader movement from which it emerges? At the risk of oversimplifying the work of these formidable researchers and thinkers—or failing to fully acknowledge the many conceptual overlaps among them—I offer the following reading. Each illuminates a different dimension of the same political project: Stewart helps us understand the religious-nationalist drive for power; MacLean reveals the anti-democratic political economy beneath it; and Mayer follows the money and institutional networks that make such ideas actionable.

Stewart, author of The Power Worshippers and Money, Lies, and God, would
likely urge us not to mistake this for a simple “culture war.” Christian nationalism, in her analysis, is not merely about religious belief. Nor is it reducible to debates over prayer, abortion, sexuality, or school curricula. It is a political movement seeking power over the institutions of democracy. Its aim is not pluralism, but control. From this perspective, attacks on DEI, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, and public education are not side issues. They are part of a larger attempt to define whose knowledge counts, whose histories matter, and whose presence in public institutions is legitimate.

Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains, would likely locate this effort within a longer history of anti-democratic political economy. Her work shows how radical-right, neoliberal thinkers and donors have sought to constrain majority rule, weaken public institutions, privatize public goods, and insulate concentrated wealth from democratic accountability. Seen through MacLean’s lens, anti-DEI legislation is not only a cultural backlash. It is also a governance strategy. It

narrows what public universities can do, what faculty can say, what students can learn, and what communities can demand of taxpayer-supported institutions.

Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, would likely follow the money. She would ask: Who funds the think tanks, advocacy organizations, litigation networks, media campaigns, and policy shops that produce these “model bills”? Who benefits when public institutions are weakened? Who gains when democracy is recast as “coercion,” equity as “orthodoxy,” and civil rights as “preference”? 

Mayer’s work helps us see that ideas rarely move on their own. They are carried, amplified, and institutionalized through networks of wealth, influence, litigation, media, and policy advocacy. In higher education, this influence can become especially consequential when donor support comes with expectations—whether explicit or implicit—that shape curricula, research priorities, faculty appointments, or public-facing programs. When private wealth gains this kind of leverage over academic life, it does more than fund ideas; it helps determine which ideas become legitimate, visible, and powerful. The result is a serious threat to academic freedom, shared governance, and the integrity of universities as public-serving institutions.

Together, these three writers help us understand that the attack on DEI is not simply about administrative offices or training sessions. It is about the future of democracy itself.

John Oliver’s recent and timely Last Week Tonight segment on New College of Florida gives us a concrete glimpse of what this project looks like when theory becomes governance. New College was not merely criticized as “woke”; it was politically captured and remade through state power. 

Board appointments, administrative upheaval, the elimination of gender studies, numerous faculty departures, escalating costs, and an aggressive campaign to rebrand the institution all became part of a larger effort to transform a distinctive honors public liberal arts college into a showcase for ideological control. Put plainly, New College was not simply reformed; it was targeted. Its transformation should be understood as an intentional and orchestrated attack—one that other states, especially those already moving in this direction, should heed as a warning.

Oliver’s satire makes the story accessible, but the implications are grave: New College reveals how appeals to freedom, neutrality, and anti-indoctrination can become instruments for narrowing intellectual life and subordinating public education to political spectacle.

Link to John Oliver's show on New College

What happened at New College of Florida should therefore be read not as an isolated Florida story, but as a warning about a broader national strategy—one that has already taken legislative form in Texas through SB 17 and related efforts to discipline public higher education.

This is especially clear in higher education. Public universities are among the few institutions where young people can still encounter histories, literatures, theories, and communities that challenge inherited hierarchies. They are places where students learn that inequality is not natural, that democracy is unfinished, and that knowledge can serve justice. This is precisely why they have become targets.

The anti-DEI movement tells us that it seeks neutrality. But there is nothing neutral or apolitical about banning the vocabulary of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, power, privilege, or structural inequality from public life. 

There is nothing neutral or apolitical about using state power to restrict how universities support historically excluded students. There is nothing neutral about turning “colorblindness” into a weapon against the very communities whose labor, taxes, cultures, and struggles built the state.

Nor is there anything Christian, in the deepest moral sense, about denying the dignity of the vulnerable, erasing histories of suffering and resistance, or consolidating power in the hands of the already powerful. The Christianity rooted in justice that many of us recognize speaks to humility, justice, love, mercy, and care for the stranger. Christian nationalism, by contrast, cloaks hierarchy in sacred authority. It baptizes domination. It transforms—and disfigures—a faith tradition into an instrument of political control.

This is why Stewart’s analysis matters. She helps us see how religious language can be marshaled to justify anti-democratic power. This is why MacLean’s analysis matters. She helps us see how democracy is weakened not always by dramatic coups, but by slow institutional redesign. And this is why Mayer’s analysis matters. She helps us see how concentrated wealth builds the infrastructure that makes these transformations possible.

The struggle over DEI, then, is not a narrow dispute over campus bureaucracy. It is a struggle over whether public institutions will continue to serve a multiracial democracy or whether they will be remade to protect hierarchy under the banner of freedom.

For those of us in Texas, this is not abstract. Under SB 17, we have seen how anti-DEI laws chill speech, restructure universities, eliminate offices, threaten programs, and place entire fields of study under suspicion. We have seen how Mexican American Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and other knowledge traditions become vulnerable when political leaders decide that democracy itself has become too diverse, too demanding, and too honest.

The answer is not despair. It is clarity.

We should name the movement accurately. We should refuse the false innocence of its language. We should defend academic freedom, shared governance, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, civil rights, and public education as essential democratic goods. 

And we should insist that pluralism is not a threat to democracy. Pluralism is democracy.

The future being offered by Christian nationalism and its allied political networks is a narrowed one: fewer rights, fewer histories, fewer voices, fewer protections, fewer public goods. The future we must defend is broader, deeper, and more humane: a democracy capacious enough to tell the truth, educate all children, honor all communities, and build institutions worthy of the public trust.

That is the real choice before us.

Reference

Last Week Tonight. (2026, June 8). New College of Florida: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFMc07F1UUU

Manhattan Institute. (2023, January 18). New issue brief: Abolish DEI bureaucracies and restore colorblind equality in public universities [Press release]. https://manhattan.institute/article/new-issue-brief-abolish-dei-bureaucracies-and-restore-colorblind-equality-in-public-universities

MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Penguin Press.

Mayer, J. (2016). Dark money: The hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right. Anchor.

Stewart, K. (2020). The power worshippers: Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism. Bloomsbury Publishing.

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

Manufacturing “Cancel Culture” at UT: Crisis Discourse, Governance, and the Politics of Academic Freedom in Texas Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Manufacturing “Cancel Culture” at UT: Crisis Discourse, Governance, and the Politics of Academic Freedom 

in Texas Higher Education

You may listen to a recording of this here.

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 1, 2026

Something remarkable has happened at the University of Texas at Austin—and
throughout Texas higher education. In a state with a long history of suppressing Mexican American Studies, resisting desegregation, and policing the boundaries of public knowledge, we are now told that Women and Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies are the true threat to free speech.

Accordingly, the American Association of University Professors (2024) warns that increasing legislative interference in curriculum and governance poses a direct threat to academic freedom by subordinating professional judgment to political authority.

Let all of this sink in.

Fields devoted to studying power, inequality, race, gender, and colonialism are being framed as authoritarian. And yet it is this very scholarship—probing injustice, exposing exploitation, imagining alternatives—that equips us to confront democratic backsliding and planetary crisis.

And the state is intervening—ostensibly to protect liberty.

This narrative did not arise from faculty misconduct findings, accreditation failures, or scholarly scandal. It was constructed. It was amplified. And under SB 17 (2023) and SB 37 (2025), it has now been operationalized into law.

To understand what is happening in Texas higher education, we must call this what it is: a governance transformation justified through crisis discourse.

Wilson and Kamola (2023) show how selective campus incidents are magnified through coordinated media ecosystems and donor networks into "evidence" of systemic institutional failure. What might otherwise remain a local disagreement becomes proof of a national emergency. 

The cycle is predictable: identify controversy, amplify outrage, declare ideological capture, legislate reform.

In Texas, crisis preceded cure.

Before SB 17 dismantled DEI infrastructures, DEI was framed as coercive orthodoxy. Before SB 37 weakened shared governance, faculty senates were portrayed as partisan strongholds. The ground was prepared rhetorically long before it was altered legislatively.

Nancy MacLean (2017) reminds us that institutional transformation rarely occurs through dramatic abolition. It happens through procedural redesign. Authority shifts quietly. Governance structures are recalibrated. The institution remains standing—but its operating logic changes.

That is what SB 37 represents.

I have been at UT Austin for decades. I have seen intense disagreements over public positions faculty have taken. I have watched colleagues disagree sharply about theory, about politics, about pedagogy. That was not dysfunction. That was shared governance in action. 

What I had never seen—until now—was the systematic restructuring of governance itself through state mandate.

The American Association of University Professors has been clear for over eighty years: academic freedom is not merely an individual right. It is a structural condition sustained by shared governance (AAUP, 1940/2015; AAUP, 1966/2015). Faculty bear primary responsibility for curriculum and instruction precisely because disciplinary expertise—not political expediency—should determine academic content.

When faculty senates are weakened or replaced with advisory bodies responsive to political oversight, the architecture changes. Authority moves upward and outward.

And here is the inversion: this restructuring is justified in the name of protecting free speech.

Let us pause.

The disciplines most frequently labeled “propaganda”—Women and Gender Studies, Black Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, Indigenous Studies—operate through peer review, accreditation standards, and national scholarly associations. They assign canonical texts. They demand evidence-based argumentation. They expose students to intellectual traditions spanning centuries.

Critique is not cancellation. 

The irony is staggering. It's the powers that be that are doing all the canceling.

In fact, what these disciplines do—systematically—is analyze power. They interrogate racial hierarchy, gender stratification, settler colonialism, capitalism, and state formation. They ask who benefits, who is excluded, and how institutions reproduce inequality.

That analytic posture is not authoritarian.

It is foundational to the liberal arts.

The deeper issue is authority. Who decides what counts as legitimate knowledge?

The AAUP has repeatedly warned that legislative interference in curricular matters displaces professional judgment and produces chilling effects even in the absence of explicit speech bans (AAUP, 1940/2015; AAUP, 1966/2015). When lawmakers define entire areas of inquiry as suspect, scholars internalize risk. Research agendas narrow. Hiring patterns shift. Students receive the message.

The language of neutrality becomes the mechanism of control.

Organizations such as the Heritage Foundation have advanced national reform blueprints targeting DEI, curriculum, and governance structures. These agendas do not typically call for closing universities. They call for recalibrating them—redefining academic freedom as compliance with politically supervised neutrality.

When these reform agendas converge with state legislation like SB 17 and SB 37, the result is not isolated policy disagreement. It is structural realignment.

And here is where Texas history matters.

This state has long wrestled with who controls knowledge production—from textbook battles to bilingual education fights to Mexican American Studies bans in K–12. The current moment is not an anomaly. It is a continuation of a longer struggle over narrative authority.

What is new is the scale of governance redesign.

If shared governance erodes, if faculty expertise is subordinated to political oversight, if entire domains of inquiry are stigmatized through law, the university does not collapse. It shifts.

The liberal arts tradition conservatives claim to defend depends on contestation—from Plato’s dialogues to Du Bois’s sociological interventions to contemporary critical theory. A university that cannot sustain rigorous analysis of race and gender is not defending liberal education. It is curating it.

The question before Texas is not whether one agrees with every argument advanced in Women and Gender Studies or Ethnic Studies.

The question is whether academic legitimacy will continue to be determined by scholarly communities within shared governance structures—or by political actors invoking crisis.

Free speech does not erode because students argue.

It erodes when governance systems are redesigned to align inquiry with state-defined boundaries.

SB 17 and SB 37 are not cultural skirmishes. They are governance interventions. And governance is the backbone of academic freedom.

If we allow that backbone to weaken while congratulating ourselves for defending free speech, we should be honest about what is happening.

We are not rescuing the liberal arts. We are redefining them in the image of political oversight.

History teaches us that when authority over knowledge production shifts from scholarly communities to political power, the effects rarely remain confined to a single department. Such shifts tend to expand, normalizing intervention and narrowing the boundaries of acceptable inquiry across the institution. Once the precedent is set—that legislatures may define which fields are suspect, which governance structures are dispensable, and which scholarly frameworks are legitimate—the logic does not easily contain itself.

The question, then, is not whether one program is next. It is whether the university itself—its autonomy, its governing norms, its capacity for independent judgment—can withstand sustained political encroachment.

At moments like this, institutional repair requires more than rhetorical defense. It requires civic action. If governance structures have been weakened through legislation, they must be restored through legislation. If academic freedom has been narrowed by those in power, then the democratic remedy is clear: voters must hold those officials accountable and elect leaders committed to institutional autonomy and the public mission of higher education.

If we are to truly live in a free society, the defense of the university must be understood as inseparable from the defense of democracy itself.

References

American Association of University Professors. (1940/2015). 1940 statement of principles on academic freedom and tenure. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and

American Association of University Professors. (1966/2015). Statement on government of colleges and universities. https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/aaup-policies-reports/topical-reports/statement-government-colleges-and

MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Penguin Press.

Wilson, J. K., & Kamola, I. (2023). Free speech and Koch money: Manufacturing a campus culture war. Pluto Press.

From Women and Gender Studies to Faculty and Syllabus Surveillance at Texas A&M University, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., Jan. 31, 2026

From Women and Gender Studies to Faculty and Syllabus Surveillance at Texas A&M University

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 31, 2026

Texas A&M University has crossed a line that should deeply concern anyone who cares about public higher education. As reported by Alan Blinder in The New York Times (January 30, 2026), the university has eliminated its Women and Gender studies program and rewritten the syllabi of hundreds of courses to comply with new systemwide rules restricting how race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity may be taught. Six courses were canceled outright. 

This is not routine curriculum review. It is an extraordinary top-down intervention into the intellectual life of one of the nation’s largest public universities—one driven not by faculty governance or scholarly debate, but by political mandate.

The policies, approved by the Texas A&M System Board of Regents—all appointed by Governor Greg Abbott—bar courses from “advocating race or gender ideology.” While some classes may still address these topics, they may do so only if campus leaders deem them to have a “necessary educational purpose.” That phrase is doing enormous work. It transforms presidents and deans into ideological gatekeepers and invites widespread self-censorship.

That self-censorship is already happening. Faculty revised syllabi preemptively, uncertain where invisible lines might be drawn. Others were altered quietly. Leonard Bright, president of the AAUP chapter at Texas A&M, captured the gravity of the moment bluntly: “I have never seen anything like this.”

The elimination of Women and Gender studies marks a clear escalation. Texas A&M had already been ordered to drop its LGBTQ studies minor in 2024. Ending a full degree program—one with more than 80 enrolled students—signals that entire fields of scholarship are now politically expendable. 

Interim President Tommy Williams cited low enrollment and compliance challenges, but neither explanation withstands scrutiny. Universities regularly sustain programs with modest enrollments because they recognize their intellectual and civic value. What makes this program uniquely “difficult” is hardly a matter of the value that it adds—certainly for the 80 students enrolled—but politics.

Equally troubling is how academic freedom itself is being redefined. President Williams suggested the new policies restore “rigor” to areas where there had been “drift,” implying that scholarship on race and gender lacks seriousness or standards. This rhetorical move is familiar: delegitimize entire bodies of peer-reviewed research, then present political oversight as one of "quality control."

Regrettably, these decisions will most definitely harm Texas A&M’s reputation, despite the interim president insisting that the damage will only be temporary. Experience suggests otherwise. 

With regards to faculty recruitment alone, it's already hard to recruit top-tier researchers who in the context of job searches and interviews, express concerns about Texas policies, campus climate, and how this in turn could impact student trust, research credibility, graduate student funding, and future graduate student placements. These details, together with the enormous effort and investment it takes to hire faculty and deans are indicative of serious difficulties for our departments to rebound easily from signals that scholarly inquiry is subordinate to political approval. 

Geez, what a downer.

Perhaps the most revealing claim is that these measures “build trust in higher education.” In reality, they do the opposite. They communicate that faculty cannot be trusted to teach responsibly, that students must be shielded from complex realities, and that governing boards—not scholars—will decide what knowledge is legitimate.

It further exposes a theory of power in which trust is no longer earned through intellectual rigor, professional judgment, or faculty autonomy, but instead manufactured through surveillance, restriction, and control. Here, that power operates in explicitly gendered ways, offering a preview of how “race ideology” will be operationalized next.

When Plato’s Symposium (Sheffield, 2008) becomes suspect, when courses are canceled because professors cannot pre-script how discussion might unfold, and when entire programs are dismantled to avoid political risk, the institution is no longer governing itself as a university. It is governing itself as a compliance apparatus. As a faculty member myself at the University of Texas at Austin, it's honestly disorienting and surreal wondering when the next proverbial shoe will drop.

Texas A&M is not an outlier. New College of Florida took a similar path in 2023. Other public universities are watching closely. What is unfolding in College Station is part of a broader national effort to remake higher education through ideological control rather than scholarly judgment.

Public universities do not hollow themselves out overnight. They do so incrementally—policy by policy, exception by exception—until their public mission is reduced to whatever survives political scrutiny.

At some point, administrators must decide whether their role is merely to manage risk or to defend the conditions that make higher education worthy of public trust at all. As Professor Bright put it plainly, “When it comes to certain things, you’ve got to say no.”

The question now facing Texas A&M is not whether it has complied with regents’ mandates. It is whether it still recognizes itself as a university.

Reference

Sheffield, F. C. (Ed.). (2008). Plato: The Symposium. Cambridge University Press.

Texas A&M Ends Women’s Studies and Overhauls Classes Over Race and Gender

New policies limiting the teaching of race and gender issues led administrators and professors to change hundreds of courses. School leaders say the rules could hurt A&M’s reputation.

Texas A&M University’s new policy to limit teaching about race and gender has led to
debates on campus about academic freedom.Credit...Annie Mulligan for The New York Times

By Alan Blinder
Alan Blinder, who covers higher education, welcomes tips at nytimes.com/tips.
Jan. 30, 2026

Texas A&M University said on Friday that it would end its women’s and gender studies program, and that the syllabuses for hundreds of courses had been altered under new policies limiting how race and gender ideology may be discussed in classrooms.

The university said that six courses had been canceled entirely because of the new rules, out of the roughly 5,400 that were planned for this semester at one of the nation’s largest public universities.

The A&M system’s regents — all of them appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican — approved the restrictive policies late last year, and officials have been scrambling since then to interpret and enforce them. Supporters contend that the rules are appropriate measures to prevent political ideologies, especially those often associated with the left, from entering classrooms. Opponents say the approach encourages self-censorship and is itself ideological.

A top-down demand to scrutinize a university’s entire course catalog in so short a time is extraordinarily rare in the United States, where professors have long had sweeping control over their syllabuses.

“I have never seen anything like this,” said Leonard Bright, a professor in A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and the president of the American Association of University Professors chapter in College Station, where the A&M system has its flagship campus of more than 74,000 students.

The regents do not seem interested in the academic freedom of students and the faculty, he added, only the “freedom of their speech.”

Friday’s announcement about shutting down the university’s women’s and gender studies program went beyond the immediate repercussions that many people had anticipated.

Tommy Williams, the university’s interim president, said in a statement that he had directed the closure because of low enrollment and “the difficulty of bringing the program in compliance with the new system policies.” He said that students who were already pursuing degrees or certificates in the program would be able to complete them.

In 2024, the regents ordered A&M to drop its minor in L.G.B.T.Q. studies. But ending a full bachelor’s degree program represents a sharp escalation in the debate over what should be taught at public universities in Texas, the nation’s most populous conservative state.

Texas A&M is not the first school to drop gender studies. New College of Florida, for example, moved in 2023 to shut down its program, which had operated for decades.
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Sally Robinson, an English professor who has long taught in A&M’s women’s and gender studies program, said that the demise of the L.G.B.T.Q. studies minor had made people think the program could vanish as well, “given the political context we’re living in, especially in Texas.”

But she said she had not expected such a decision to come on Friday.

“There is a deep sense of sadness that this university is going down this path,” she said. “Whether the regents understand this or not, it’s going to have a devastating effect.”

Until Friday, discussions at A&M had often focused on how individual courses this semester would be affected by the new limits, which Mr. Williams argued in an interview this week had “restored rigor into some areas where maybe we had had some drift.”

“This has given us a transparent way to go through and make sure that what we’re advertising the course is about is actually what’s being taught,” he said on Tuesday, adding that the approach “strengthens academic integrity, it protects our academic standards and, I think, most importantly, it builds trust in higher education.”

A&M officials have nevertheless been bracing for recriminations, including possible court challenges, and for prospective students or professors to be thinking twice about heading to College Station.

“It’s been harmful to our reputation, there’s no question about that,” said Mr. Williams, a Republican former state legislator. “But I think it’s transitory.”

Mr. Williams, who previously worked for Mr. Abbott, said he had not discussed the policies with the governor. And during the interview, Mr. Williams did not mention any plans concerning the women’s and gender studies program, which currently has more than 80 students in its undergraduate major, minor and graduate certificate programs.

Under the new systemwide policies, no A&M course may “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” Certain classes that are not part of the core curriculum may include teaching about those subjects, but only if a campus president agrees that there is “a necessary educational purpose.”

Asked whether any part of him believed that the policies went too far, Mr. Williams replied, “No.” Pressed on whether deans and department heads would share that view, Mr. Williams responded, “Some would and some would not.”

For the most part, those deans and department heads have been the ones trying to navigate how far A&M should go in excising content.

“Day by day, we began to have a clearer understanding of where the line may be,” said Simon North, the interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences in College Station.

Dr. North acknowledged, though, that it was impossible to know exactly how many courses had been affected because some faculty members may have modified their syllabuses themselves.

“There are actions that people took in consultation with us,” Dr. North said, “and there are actions that people may have done on their own.”

Syllabus reviews largely took place at the departmental and college levels, but some reached the interim president’s desk. As he prepared this week to weigh requests for exemptions, Mr. Williams said that “common sense is what we’re trying to use as our gauge.”

He said that A&M officials were not looking to cut material in ways that might prevent students from being competitive in the marketplace, and that opponents of the new rules had “confused what academic freedom is.”

“It doesn’t mean you get to do whatever you want to in the classroom,” he said. “You have academic freedom, but it comes along with the responsibility, and part of that responsibility is to make sure that the learning outcomes are achieved and they’re done in a way that’s compliant with state and federal law and what our regents mandate us to do.”

Even before the wholesale course review, Texas A&M was debating what content was appropriate in college classrooms. In September, the university fired a lecturer for displaying a gender unicorn — which is used to explain the differences between gender expression and gender identity — during a course on children’s literature. The president of the university at the time — Mr. Williams’s predecessor — quickly stepped down.

A faculty appeals panel ruled that the university was “not justified” when it ousted the lecturer, Melissa McCoul, but A&M has refused to reinstate her.

Then the regents’ policies deepened the turmoil. One of the largest ruptures unspooled in the philosophy department, after a professor, Martin Peterson, proposed including portions of Plato’s Symposium in a contemporary moral issues course that can be used to fulfill a core curriculum requirement.

He also scheduled teaching modules covering race and gender ideology. He had discussed similar topics in the course in the past, though previous syllabuses showed that the modules had different names, like “race and gender issues.”

Kristi Sweet, the head of the philosophy department, asked him to “mitigate” the course to remove that content, or face reassignment to a different class. After the dispute became public, university officials repeatedly suggested that Dr. Peterson had constructed his syllabus as a provocation.

Dr. Peterson acknowledged that he had wanted to “test the waters,” but he said in an interview this week that he thought the Platonic passages would be less contentious than material he had assigned in the past: an excerpt from the Supreme Court ruling that recognized a right to same-sex marriage. He has since replaced the disputed modules and Plato readings with lessons about academic freedom.

Administrators note that Plato appears in the syllabuses for other classes.

“Hundreds of Aggies are reading Plato in their courses right now,” Dr. Sweet said. She added that the entirety of Plato’s Symposium was being taught in the Philosophy of Art course, and that despite a wide outcry over its handling of the Peterson class, the department’s “strategic priorities for continued excellence are untouched by current events.”

Dr. Bright, the A.A.U.P. chapter president, has faced questions about his own courses. Administrators initially flagged an article that included discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. But the dean of the Bush School, John Sherman, told Dr. Bright that administrators would support letting him use that text, “given the scholarly nature of the work and the applicability of the reading.”

Another of Dr. Bright’s courses worried administrators more.

Dr. Bright wrote that the course would examine the impact of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation and other social identities “on public policy and the professional ethical responsibilities of public servants.”

Dr. Sherman asked him how sexual orientation would be covered. After Dr. Bright responded that it was impossible to say exactly when the subject might come up in a discussion-driven course, the dean canceled the class.

“To say this gives me no pleasure is an understatement,” Dr. Sherman wrote. “To be clear, transparency does not equate to censorship.”

Dr. Bright said that university leaders had made an impossible demand about a course that is often shaped by current events.

It is rare for university governing boards to make decisions that reach so far into classrooms so quickly. Still, R. Bowen Loftin, a former A&M president, said there were few practical options available to campus officials who might disagree with the regents.


“When you become an administrator, especially at a public institution, there’s going to be limits on what you can say and what you can do, and you have to come to grips with that,” he said.

Dr. North, the arts and sciences dean, said “questions of academic freedom and academic responsibilities are really difficult,” but that he was “trying to implement these changes in a way that puts students first and supports faculty.”

Dr. Bright showed little patience with such defenses.

“When it comes to certain things, you’ve got to say no,” he said. “I don’t excuse administrators from that responsibility.”


Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
See more on: U.S. Politics

Truth-telling about New College, by Jonathan Scott Perry, Sun Sentinel, Jan. 7, 2026

Friends:

Please read this in tandem with my earlier post in order to get a more complete sense of the context. 

Jonathan Scott Perry’s letter, published in response to the Sun Sentinel editorial on the New College of Florida, is a searing act of truth-telling—and a reminder of what principled faculty leadership looks like in an era of institutional intimidation. Writing not only as an alumnus but as a professor at the University of South Florida Sarasota–Manatee and vice president of the USF Faculty Senate, Jonathan Scott Perry gives voice to the collective grief, anger, and moral clarity that many feel but few are positioned—or willing—to express so plainly. 

His account cuts through the propaganda surrounding New College’s takeover, naming it for what it was: not reform, not rescue, but a deliberate political experiment that hollowed out a once “wonderfully weird” public institution under the banner of anti-“woke” theater.

What makes Perry’s commentary so powerful is that he refuses euphemism. He contrasts the scrappy, underfunded but intellectually vibrant New College—where faculty taught with devotion amid “genteel squalor”—with the grotesque spectacle that followed once Ron DeSantis selected the campus as a showcase for national ambition. Perry’s metaphor of “surgeons” who arrive not to heal but to perform ideological experiments is devastating precisely because it is grounded in lived experience and historical memory. In an environment where fear has too often silenced faculty and normalized capitulation, Perry stands out as a model of academic courage. His letter is not only a defense of New College; it is a warning to the rest of the country—and especially to states like Texas—that what happened there is not an aberration, but a preview, unless faculty, students, and the public insist on naming the truth and defending the public mission of higher education.

I'm following this story. More to come.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

A student goes through books before they are sent to the landfill on the New College of Florida campus in Sarasota, Fla., Thursday, Aug. 15, 2024. (Steven Walker/Sarasota Herald-Tribune via AP)

Truth-telling about New College

Jonathan Scott Perry, Tampa

PUBLISHED: January 7, 2026 at 6:00 AM EST

Thank you for your excellent editorial: “The rest of a sad story at New College.”

It is a welcome antidote to the propaganda pieces the school has sponsored. As a New College alumnus, it makes me cry to see the vultures feasting on the carcass of my school.

It used to be a wonderfully weird, “Hippie, do your own thing,” school (in my father’s words). It absolutely encouraged exploration of whatever interested you. Bright and self-directed people could thrive, and as you noted, it produced outsized results.

It was chronically underfunded and enjoyed a certain neglect that made us “scrappy.”

Art classes were taught in a condemned Army barracks. The school made a virtue of its poverty. It would cite articles from U.S. News & World Report declaring New College one of the best values in public universities — an Ivy League education for the price of a good stereo.

My professors were slightly embarrassed by the thought of being the blue light special of higher education, but they loved teaching even in the genteel squalor.

Enter the surgeons. Gov. Ron DeSantis needed a showcase “anti-woke” project. He showered money on things nobody asked for. It makes me cry to think of how we used to beg for money to repair a roof, but now there are millions for a third-rate baseball program.

Soon the grifters will lose interest. The Legislature will pull the plug on the endless spending and the building contracts will dry up. The surgeons will excuse themselves, declaring the patient was “too woke to live.” The land will end up in the hands of a developer friend of the governor, and the vultures will fly away.

Wonderfully said

Please accept my heartiest congratulations on your wonderful editorial on New College. I hope it will be widely distributed around the state.

Jonathan Scott Perry, Tampa

The writer, speaking individually, is a professor at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee and vice president of the USF Faculty Senate.

UT Austin Is Dismantling Its Academic Core—And Calling It “Optimization,” by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

UT Austin Is Dismantling Its Academic Core—And Calling It “Optimization”

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 26, 2026

The University of Texas at Austin has announced that it is closing its Center for Teaching and Learning, along with the Office of Community Engagement, the Vick Advising Excellence Center, and the Office of Undergraduate Research.

Geez, that's a lot to come down, to get dismantled, that is.

The decision—communicated quietly, with no meaningful consultation and almost no explanation—has left faculty stunned, confused, and rightly alarmed.

According to Provost William Inboden, these closures are part of an effort to “optimize” and “streamline” operations. But stripped of administrative jargon, the reality is this: UT is eliminating the very structures that support teaching excellence, interdisciplinary collaboration, student mentoring, undergraduate research, and community engagement—at a time when faculty and students need those supports now more than ever.

As American Association of University Professors campus president Dr. Karma Chávez put it, there is no pedagogical or institutional logic for dismantling a centralized teaching center. For many faculty, the Center for Teaching and Learning was not a luxury—it was transformative. It created cross-college dialogue, supported innovative pedagogy, strengthened student learning, and allowed faculty to adapt to a rapidly changing classroom environment. For some, it was the single most meaningful professional development experience of their careers.

The administration’s claim that these functions are “rooted in colleges and schools” collapses under even minimal scrutiny. Many colleges—including the College of Liberal Arts, UT’s largest—have no teaching center at all. What this decision actually does is fragment support, deepen inequities across units, and eliminate the very spaces where interdisciplinary exchange and shared governance can occur.

Even more troubling is the broader pattern this decision fits into. The Office of Community Engagement—now being shuttered—was the last remaining remnant of UT’s once-robust Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, dismantled after Texas passed its anti-DEI law, Senate Bill 17. While these offices were not labeled “DEI,” they were grounded in the best research on how to support students, particularly those historically underserved, through advising, teaching, research access, and community connection. 

Eliminating them does not create neutrality. It creates a gaping void. And absence is not accidental. It's by design. And it's about more people losing their jobs when this is not about budgetary imperatives. Pointedly, UT Austin is not facing a financial crisis, and the provost’s email cited none. 

Nor does it make sense as cost-saving if the work is merely “redistributed” across colleges—duplicated, diluted, and stripped of the coherence it had. What is being optimized here is not efficiency, but control. What is being streamlined is not bureaucracy, but the university’s public mission.

This pattern is not unique to UT. Across the country, state laws and political pressures are eroding the capacity of universities to support students and faculty in substantive ways, not by accident but as part of a broader governance agenda that conflates equity-related work with political ideology (Sachs & Young, 2024).

At a moment when faculty are navigating political interference, curricular surveillance, and the chilling effects of state power, UT has chosen to remove the very institutions that help educators weather those storms. 

Teaching centers do not impose ideology; they defend pedagogical integrity.

Advising centers do not indoctrinate; they catch students before they fall through the cracks. 

Offices of undergraduate research do not politicize learning. They democratize access to knowledge production.

Calling this “optimization” or "streamlining" insults the intelligence of the faculty and students who know better. This is institutional subtraction masquerading as reform. And it should concern anyone who believes that a flagship public university ought to lead—not capitulate—when higher education itself is under attack.

Flagships do not hollow themselves out from the inside. When they allow it to happen, they surrender their public mission. And to whose benefit? And toward what ends? Their silence is deafening.

Reference

Sachs, J. A., & Young, J. C. (2024). America’s censored classrooms 2024: Refining the art of censorship (Report). PEN America. https://pen.org/report/americas-censored-classrooms-2024/?utm_source=chatgpt.com


UT-Austin Is Closing Its Teaching Center. Faculty Members Ask: Why?

The U. of Texas at Austin campusSergio Flores for The Washington Post, Getty Images

By Beth McMurtrieJanuary 22, 2026

The U. of Texas at Austin campusSergio Flores for The Washington Post, Getty Images

The University of Texas at Austin is shuttering its longstanding Center for Teaching and Learning at the end of the semester, part of a wave of changes announced last Friday that include the closure of the Office of Community Engagement, a campus advising center, and the Office of Undergraduate Research.

The news, which came in an email from William Inboden, the university’s provost, presented these moves as part of an effort to “optimize” and “streamline” academic operations. He wrote that resources provided by the programs would be repurposed, but offered no details.

Faculty members were stunned by the news.

“I literally cannot think of any reason why you would dismantle a centralized center for teaching and learning,” said Karma Chávez, president of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors, and a professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies. “It absolutely baffles me.”

Chávez said she had scant information — the email was sent to a small number of people on campus, including deans, she heard — but learned through conversations with colleagues who are directly affected that the “vast majority” of the staff will be laid off, more than 20 people. The teaching center is the largest of the four operations, and lists 13 staff members, along with 11 student workers, on its website.

In the email, Inboden said the changes “are designed to enhance collaboration, create new pathways for partnerships, prudently steward our resources, and strengthen existing units within our colleges and schools.”

Mike Rosen, senior director of media strategy, said in an email that the university’s commitment to undergraduate research, faculty support, advising, and student programming is unchanged. “Those functions are rooted in our colleges and schools, which are best equipped to meet their needs,” he wrote. ”Closing those particular offices will allow us to focus resources for these programs where they are most needed and most effective.”

Mary Neuburger, a history professor and chair of Slavic and Eurasian studies, said the argument that those functions are rooted in colleges and schools made little sense to her. The College of Liberal Arts, where she teaches, doesn’t even have a teaching center. “We have nothing,” she said. “And we’re one of the biggest colleges.”

Neuburger, who has taught at the university for almost 30 years, said her time working on a project with the Center for Teaching and Learning was “the single most transformative experience I’ve had at UT.” She was a Provost’s Teaching Fellow, she said, and was able to discuss teaching issues with faculty members from across the university. Now she worries that interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange of ideas will be lost.

Nina Telang, a professor of instruction in the department of electrical and computer engineering, was also a teaching fellow. The support she received at the center allowed her to build supplemental instruction into many courses in her department — not just her own — with the help of the campus tutoring center. She also developed wellness workshops for engineering students in collaboration with the campus wellness center. “Every single CTL initiative has ultimately benefited the students,” she said. “It’s all about the student.”

Josh Eyler, senior director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, who is active nationally on teaching issues, said he was surprised that UT-Austin would shutter a distinguished center with a long history, particularly at a time when the challenges facing faculty members in the classroom are growing.

“At their best,” he said, “teaching centers provide a place to advocate for faculty and to help them make it through the storm of constant changes and new technologies and new fads and new approaches that are coming down the pike.”

Professors also mourned the closure of the other offices, saying they provided special services. Every college on campus has its own advising center but the Vick Advising Excellence Center “was for students who were slipping through the cracks to get extra help,” Neuburger said. “That was part of a huge initiative to increase our graduation rates, and it was working.”

She was also confused as to why the university would eliminate the Office of Undergraduate Research when engaging students in research has been an administrative priority. That office, in particular, has helped students find opportunities to do interdisciplinary work, Chávez said.

Rosen said he did not have information on any positions eliminated. He said that Inboden was not available for an interview. Neither Molly Hatcher, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, nor Jeff Handy, director of the Vick Advising Excellence Center, responded to email requests for interviews.

Not UniqueStaffing cuts to student-facing services are certainly not unusual given the tough financial situation many colleges now find themselves in. Last year Catholic University of America eliminated 16 positions in its Center for Academic and Career Success to help address a $30-million structural deficit. And Emerson College, which has been dealing with enrollment declines, cut half of its eight full-time staff in the Office of Student Success.

But UT-Austin doesn’t have financial woes, faculty members said, and the provost’s email said nothing about needing to trim costs. Chávez said that eliminating central offices doesn’t make financial sense to her if, in fact, the administration will just be moving that work to schools and colleges, duplicating it several times over. “I’m not sure how that would be a streamlining or a cost-cutting mechanism.”

Rather, she worries that this is more about eliminating the last traces of diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus. The offices being shuttered are not practicing DEI, she said. But the best scholarship on advising, teaching, community engagement, and supporting diverse students in undergraduate research relies on that framework. She noted, too, that the Office of Community Engagement is the “last vestige” of what was once the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, which was shuttered after the state passed a law banning DEI activities. That went from a division with dozens of people to an office with two staff, doing outreach work in the community. “That’ll be gone now, too.”

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