The Quiet Dismantling of Academic Freedom in the UT System, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., May 28, 2026

The Quiet Dismantling of Academic Freedom in the UT System

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 28, 2026

The rule revision also allows the president to eliminate individual faculty positions
for “bona fide academic reasons.” Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman/Getty Images

Recent actions by the University of Texas System Board of Regents should alarm every faculty member, student, parent, and taxpayer who believes that public universities exist to pursue truth rather than political conformity. Under newly revised policies, university presidents now possess expanded authority to eliminate academic programs, terminate faculty positions, and bypass meaningful faculty participation in decisions that fundamentally reshape the university itself.

According to a recent report in Inside Higher Ed, the Board approved revisions to Rule 31003 that allow presidents to close programs not only for traditional academic or financial reasons, but also under vaguely defined “extraordinary circumstances” requiring “accelerated program closure” (Whitford, 2026a; Unglesbee, 2026). The revised policy further enables administrators to eliminate individual faculty positions for what are termed “bona fide academic reasons,” while sharply limiting appeal processes previously available to tenured faculty (Whitford, 2026a).

For many faculty across the UT System, these developments do not appear isolated. Rather, they represent part of a broader pattern of political encroachment into higher education governance in Texas. Earlier this year, the UT System adopted another controversial policy instructing faculty to “eschew topics and controversies that are not germane” to their courses (Whitford, 2026b). Faculty immediately raised concerns that the language was intentionally vague and would inevitably produce self-censorship in classrooms.

The danger of these policies lies not simply in the rules themselves, but in the climate they create.

Tenure was never designed to protect comfort or complacency. Its purpose is to protect intellectual independence—the ability of scholars to pursue difficult, unpopular, or politically inconvenient lines of inquiry without fear of retaliation. When dismissal procedures become easier and program closures can occur without meaningful faculty review, the likely outcome is not institutional “efficiency,” but anticipatory silence. Faculty begin asking not whether a topic is intellectually necessary, but whether it is politically survivable.

The consequences extend far beyond individual professors. Entire disciplines become vulnerable when political controversy can trigger administrative restructuring. Fields such as Ethnic Studies, gender studies, critical race scholarship, migration studies, environmental justice, and public health may increasingly be viewed not through the lens of academic standards, but through ideological scrutiny—towing the "party line," as it were. 

Indeed, faculty quoted in Inside Higher Ed expressed concern that the newly added “extraordinary circumstances” clause appears designed to anticipate future legislative interventions into what faculty may teach and research (Whitford, 2026a; Unglesbee, 2026).

Equally troubling is the continued erosion of shared governance. Faculty senates and governance structures historically emerged because universities are not corporations. Academic institutions require the expertise of scholars to guide curriculum, research priorities, standards of evidence, and educational integrity. 

Yet recent state legislation has already weakened faculty senates across Texas, reducing them to advisory bodies with little institutional authority. The newest UT policies further consolidate power upward into administrative and political channels while diminishing faculty participation in decisions that directly affect academic life.

This transformation should concern not only faculty, but the broader public.
The university is a public trust. Texans fund higher education not to produce ideological compliance, but to cultivate scientific discovery, historical understanding, democratic debate, artistic expression, and critical thinking. When political actors increasingly determine what can be taught, researched, or discussed, universities risk becoming instruments of state ideology rather than spaces of intellectual exploration.

Moreover, these developments threaten the long-term reputation and competitiveness of Texas higher education. Faculty recruitment becomes more difficult when scholars perceive universities as politically unstable environments. Graduate students and early-career researchers may seek institutions elsewhere. National collaborations weaken when academic freedom protections appear uncertain. Over time, institutional prestige suffers not through dramatic collapse, but through the slow erosion of intellectual credibility.

The broader context makes these changes especially concerning. Proposed legislation in Texas has already sought to weaken or eliminate tenure protections altogether. Texas House Bill 1830, introduced during the 89th Legislature, proposed prohibiting institutions from granting tenure or permanent employment status to future faculty hires while expanding grounds for dismissal. Although not enacted in its introduced form, the proposal signals an unmistakable political trajectory.

Faculty within the UT System should therefore recognize the current moment for what it is: not a series of disconnected administrative adjustments, but a larger restructuring of higher education governance itself. The cumulative effect of weakened tenure protections, restricted classroom discourse, diminished shared governance, and politically vulnerable programs is the normalization of fear within academic life.

And fear is incompatible with the mission of a university.

References

Whitford, E. (2026a, May 27). U of Texas makes it easier to fire faculty, close programs. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/shared-governance/2026/05/27/u-texas-makes-it-easier-fire-faculty-close-programs 

Whitford, E. (2026b, February 20). UT board policy asks faculty to avoid “controversial” topics in class. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/curriculum/2026/02/20/ut-policy-asks-faculty-avoid-controversial-topics

Unglesbee, B. (2026, May 21). UT System makes it easier to shutter programs, fire faculty. Higher Ed Dive. https://www.highereddive.com/news/ut-system-makes-it-easier-to-shutter-programs-fire-faculty/820932/

Texas House Bill 1830, 89th Legislature (2025). Relating to tenure and employment status at public institutions of higher education in this state. https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB1830/id/3053324

From Deficit to Doctrine: The Hidden Logic Behind the University of North Texas Denton's Drastic Program Cuts, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

From Deficit to Doctrine: The Hidden Logic Behind the University of North Texas Denton's Drastic Program Cuts

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 28, 2026

The headline in the Texas Tribune is is nothing short of staggering: "University of North Texas to cut more than 70 programs and minors to trim $45 million deficit." At first glance, the decision by the University of North Texas to eliminate more than 70 academic programs, minors, and certificates appears to be a straightforward case of institutional belt-tightening. A $45 million deficit, declining international enrollment, and reduced state funding are presented as the primary drivers. President Harrison Keller has been explicit: no state official directed these cuts. On its surface, then, this reads as a story of fiscal responsibility.

But to read it that way alone is to miss two critical dynamics. First, the revenue shortfall is tied to the steep decline in international students—who have long subsidized public universities by paying full tuition. Second, it obscures how power operates in the current context. In Texas today, policy does not always arrive as an explicit mandate; it often works through what might be called anticipatory compliance—a form of governance in which institutions reorganize themselves in response to political signals rather than direct edicts.

Hence, the pattern of what is being eliminated matters. The phase-out of programs in Women and Gender Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Latino and Latin American studies, Mexican American Studies, Africana Studies, and Asian studies is not incidental. It reflects a broader alignment between institutional decision-making and an increasingly restrictive political climate around race, gender, and knowledge itself.

The university’s stated rationale rests on metrics—low enrollment, high instructional costs, and a concept that has gained traction in higher education: “time to value.” Programs are evaluated according to how quickly graduates can recoup the cost of their degrees through post-graduation earnings. Framed this way, the cuts appear pragmatic. Yet this metric quietly narrows the meaning of education. 

Fields that interrogate power, history, language, and inequality rarely produce immediate financial returns. Their contributions are less easily quantified but no less essential. They cultivate the habits of mind necessary for democratic life: critical analysis, historical awareness, and the capacity to engage across difference. To judge them primarily through wage outcomes is not simply to measure their value differently; it is to redefine what counts as valuable knowledge in the first place.

Although President Keller has emphasized that the program cuts are separate from political pressures, the broader context cannot be ignored. In recent years, Texas has witnessed the dismantling of DEI infrastructures through legislation such as Senate Bill 17, alongside executive and administrative directives that narrow acceptable discourse on race, gender, and sexuality. Universities have been asked to review curricula under compliance frameworks that, while not explicitly banning certain fields, clearly signal heightened scrutiny. 

At the same time, faculty governance has been weakened through measures such as Senate Bill 37 , shifting decision-making authority away from traditional shared governance structures. In such an environment, institutions do not need to be told what to cut. They understand the terrain well enough to adjust on their own.

This is what policy looks like when it operates without formal declaration. No directive is issued, yet outcomes begin to mirror political priorities. The language remains managerial—efficiency, sustainability, return on investment—but the effects are unmistakably political. The adoption of “time to value” as a guiding principle further embeds this shift, privileging disciplines aligned with immediate labor market demands while marginalizing those that offer critical perspectives on society. 

Linguistics, for instance, may not produce the highest salaries, but its applications span law, education, and technology. Ethnic studies fields are indispensable for understanding demographic change and inequality in a state as diverse as Texas. Their elimination signals not just a budgetary decision, but a reordering of intellectual priorities—raising questions about coherence as the university simultaneously advances a new undergraduate degree in artificial intelligence, a field deeply rooted in linguistics (Breeding-Gonzales, 2026).

Equally telling is the reported lack of meaningful faculty consultation. This reflects a broader transformation in governance across Texas higher education, where decisions once shaped through deliberation are increasingly centralized. As shared governance erodes, so too does the ability of institutions to resist external pressures—whether economic, political, or ideological. What emerges is a system in which major academic decisions can be made quickly, efficiently, and with limited internal dissent.

The consequences are already visible. Students are forced to reconsider their academic trajectories. Departments lose the capacity to sustain intellectual communities. Campuses become thinner spaces, offering fewer opportunities to engage deeply with questions of race, gender, and inequality. Over time, the public itself is affected, as the range of knowledge produced and circulated through these institutions narrows.

None of this occurs through dramatic decree. It unfolds incrementally, through decisions that, taken individually, appear reasonable—even necessary. But collectively, they amount to something far more significant: a restructuring of knowledge itself.

The question, then, is not whether universities should be fiscally responsible. It is what values guide those decisions. If higher education is reduced to workforce preparation alone, programs that challenge power and expand democratic understanding will always be at risk. If, however, universities are understood as public goods—institutions responsible for cultivating not only workers but informed and engaged citizens—then a different calculus is required.

What is happening at the University of North Texas is not an isolated development. It is part of a broader reconfiguration of higher education in Texas and across the nation. The language used to justify it may be technocratic, but the underlying logic is unmistakably political. And its consequences will shape not only what universities teach, but what society is able to know about itself.

Reference

Breeding-Gonzales, L. (2026, February 24). UNT to launch undergraduate AI degree this fall, Denton Record-Chronicle.

University of North Texas to cut more than 70 programs and minors to trim $45 million deficit

Offering new details, President Harrison Keller said no state official pushed for the changes, which include phasing out degrees in linguistics and Latin American and women’s and gender studies.

by Jessica Priest March 20, 2026, 2:15 p.m. Central Updated March 25, 2026, 1:40 p.m. Central


Students walk the University of North Texas campus in Denton on Feb. 24, 2022. Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune

University of North Texas President Harrison Keller offered new details this week after announcing plans to cut or consolidate more than 70 academic programs, minors and certificates as it works to close a projected $45 million budget shortfall driven by a sharp decline in international enrollment and reduced state funding.

“We weren’t directed to eliminate programs by any state official,” Keller said in a March 24 interview with The Texas Tribune about a plan that includes phasing out its linguistics degrees, eliminating a women’s and gender studies master’s program and cutting a bachelor’s degree in Latino and Latin American Studies, along with 25 undergraduate minors and more than 40 certificate programs.

The minors being eliminated include women’s and gender studies, LGBTQ studies, Mexican American studies, Africana studies, Asian studies as well as dance, geology and special education.

The cuts come amid a broader political climate in which Texas public universities have faced pressure from state Republican leaders and conservative activists to limit teaching about gender, race and sexuality.

Last fall, the UNT System, like other public university systems in the state, ordered a review of its courses. Some university systems said the reviews were meant to ensure compliance with an executive order from President Donald Trump, a directive from Gov. Greg Abbott and House Bill 229, all of which recognize only two sexes, male and female, though none explicitly bans teaching gender-related topics.

The UNT System did not cite a specific law when it ordered its review.

Keller said that review is separate from the decision to cut areas of study and expected to be complete by April 1.

Earlier this year, Texas A&M eliminated its women’s and gender studies program, while the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at San Antonio moved to consolidate programs focused on race, gender and ethnicity.

Keller and Provost Michael McPherson said in a March 19 message to the campus community that the decisions followed a “careful review.” They said the linguistics department has seen declining enrollment since 2021, along with higher instructional costs and lower “time to value,” and that the merger with the Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures will take effect Sept. 1.

They said the master’s programs being cut enrolled an average of 15 or fewer students over the past five years, while the undergraduate minors had 20 or fewer students since 2021 and certificate programs had fewer than two students per year.

Students enrolled in affected programs will be able to complete their degrees, but new students will no longer be admitted.

“We must adapt to meet the changing needs of our students, employers and communities across Texas and beyond, especially by providing degree and credential pathways that translate into opportunities beyond graduation,” they wrote.

William Salmon, chair of the linguistics department, told the Tribune that faculty learned of the decision shortly before every else did.

“And we weren’t consulted on the matter at all,” he said.

Salmon declined to elaborate further, saying he was focused on supporting students and faculty and “answering the many questions coming in.”

University officials did not immediately respond to detailed questions last week, but Keller said this week that the changes are expected to save the university “a few million dollars” over the next several years, though the exact amount remains unclear. He said the university uses “time to value” to measure how long it takes graduates to recoup the cost of their degrees, factoring in tuition, lost wages while enrolled and typical earnings after graduation, and that officials aim for programs to reach that point in less than 10 years.

Last month, UNT offered buyouts to faculty with at least 15 years of service. Tenured faculty could receive a payout equal to one year of salary, while some non-tenure-track faculty on multiyear contracts could receive half a year’s salary to leave early. About 30 faculty members have applied ahead of the the April 10 deadline, Keller said, and no faculty have been laid off, though some adjunct instructors may not be rehired if their courses were eliminated.

UNT is also planning to move more lectures online in response to the budget shortfall. Beginning this fall, more than 40 courses will shift to a model where lectures are delivered online and students attend weekly in-person sessions in smaller groups focused on discussion and problem-solving. Keller said the hybrid courses will include an additional $35 per credit hour fee, capped at $315 per semester, to cover technology costs, and described the model as a way to serve more students without making more hires.

It’s not yet clear the total number of students enrolled in the affected programs or how long required courses will continue to be offered.

Grace Youngberg, a third-year linguistics major, said she was shocked and felt “disrespected” by the decision and lack of prior notice.

She had planned to attend graduate school at UNT and pursue a career in forensic linguistics, applying language analysis in legal settings to help people better understand and communicate in court proceedings.

Now, she said, she may have to look elsewhere to continue her studies.

Youngberg also questioned the university’s emphasis on “time to value.”

“Putting a monetary value on education to begin with is closed-minded,” she said, adding that there is a need for linguists even if the field is not the highest paying.

Nearly 47,000 students attend the Denton university.

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: University of North Texas, University of Texas at Austin and University of Texas at San Antonio have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Harvard’s removal of Mary Bassett and the Remaking of Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Harvard’s removal of Mary Bassett and the Remaking of Higher Education

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

January 10, 2026

Writing for The Nation, Gregg Gonsalves is right to call Harvard’s removal of Mary Bassett what it is: an act of institutional cowardice. But it is also something larger—a sign of how higher education is being quietly reshaped for an authoritarian moment.

Bassett was not removed for poor leadership or scholarly failure. She was removed because her work named injustice—specifically, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza—and refused the demand for silence now imposed on universities by donors, politicians, and bad-faith actors wielding accusations of antisemitism as a political weapon. This was not compliance with law. It was anticipatory obedience.

What makes this moment dangerous is not only Harvard’s decision, but the logic behind it. Universities are increasingly sacrificing people, programs, and principles to prove their “neutrality.” In reality, there is nothing neutral about purging scholars whose work confronts racism, colonial violence, or state power. That is not risk management; it is ideological discipline.

We have already seen where this leads. At New College of Florida, political intervention openly remade an institution. Harvard’s case is more troubling precisely because no governor forced its hand. The institution chose to capitulate.

It should not go unnoticed that two of the most prominent academic casualties of this era have been Black women leaders, namely, Dr. Claudine Gay — Harvard’s first Black President—and now Mary Bassett, a globally recognized Black public health leader. When universities decide who is expendable, power speaks plainly.

If institutions of higher learning cannot tolerate scholarship that links public health to human rights, or education to democracy, they cease to be universities in any meaningful sense. They become risk-averse corporations, curating acceptable knowledge to appease those in power.

Bassett’s ouster clarifies the stakes. Higher education is being remade—not through force alone, but through fear. The question now is whether universities will continue down this path, or whether faculty, students, and the public will insist that truth-telling is not a liability, but the very reason universities exist.

Society / January 8, 2026

Harvard’s Ouster of Mary Bassett Is a Revolting Act of Cowardice

The public health icon was brutally removed from her job for one reason: her opposition to genocide in Gaza.

Gregg Gonsalves |The Nation

Mary Bassett, commissioner of the New York State Department of Health, speaks
during a health department press briefing on August 22, 2022, in New York City.
(John Lamparski / Sipa USA via AP)

We’ll come out of this. Let me tell you something. If none of us are here, if none of us are here to see it, tell your children who the cowards were.

                      —Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mary Bassett is a legend in public health. From her student years at Radcliffe College where she volunteered with the Black Panthers to provide sickle cell disease screening in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, to her work on HIV prevention when she was on the faculty of the University of Zimbabwe, to her pioneering role on AIDS care in Africa as the Rockefeller Foundation’s point person on health equity, to her tenure as the commissioner of health for both New York City and New York State, Bassett has been a visionary, sought after for her commitment to the health of the most vulnerable people in the US and around the planet.

In 2018, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health scored a coup by getting Bassett to lead the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights. Let me be clear—Dr. Bassett elevated Harvard by taking up this role, not the other way around.

Yet in mid-December of last year, the school’s dean, Andrea Baccarelli—more on him later—suddenly told Bassett that he was removing her as director of FXB. It was abrupt, unceremonious, and cruel. But cruelty is the point nowadays, isn’t it?

Harvard’s decision has sent shock waves through the international public health and academic communities. Over 2,000 colleagues have signed a petition calling for Bassett’s reinstatement. Leaders like Jocalyn Clark, international editor of The BMJ, one of the world’s most influential medical journals, called it “a shocking move,” while Martin McKee at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was appalled at what happened, asking, “What were they thinking?”

Well, what were they thinking? It’s clear that Bassett was pushed out for one reason only—her insistence on highlighting the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Her leadership of the FXB Center was singled out in a report on campus antisemitism as focused “heavily on Palestinians”—an apparent cardinal sin.

Let’s be frank about a few things. By now, many people have come to see what is happening in Gaza as an abomination—including people from within Israel and the Jewish diaspora. It is those who have refused to condemn the atrocities in Gaza—including noted Harvard bigwig and sex pest Larry Summers, who has been critical of FXB for months and months—who came gunning for Bassett.

And the charges of antisemitism are, bluntly, bullshit. The massacres by Hamas on October 7 were abhorrent in their own right, but the response from the Netanyahu government has been indefensible—his government means to wipe Gaza off the map and has taken 70,000 lives in this quest to date. The genocide has also caused one of the gravest public health crises of the 21st century, with Gaza’s entire medical system virtually wiped out and hunger and disease running rampant. In other words, the situation in Gaza couldn’t be more relevant to the work of an institution focused on health and human rights like the one Bassett ran.

To categorically frame Bassett and every single other person who refuses to give the Israeli government carte blanche and justify Netanyahu’s actions as antisemitic is just not right. Of course, there are antisemites among Israel’s critics, but plenty of Jewish people, inside and outside of Israel, are appalled by what is happening—they don’t give up claims to their Jewishness because they oppose Likud and its coalition partners’ actions. In fact, what is happening is simply a political move to crush dissent against a country’s foreign policy and military decisions. It also is a move to silence the voices of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis trying to bridge divides in their home country.

But on college campuses, Bassett’s firing is about something more. Antisemitism has been mobilized by antisemites to assert control over higher education in America. Elise Stefanik, a key architect of the ouster of Harvard’s former President Claudine Gay and others on the basis of their response to campus antisemitism, was called out by her own hometown newspaper in 2021 for her invocation of the Great Replacement theory (“How low, Ms. Stefanik?”)—she is clearly no friend to the Jews. Far-right activist Christopher Rufo willingly exposed his strategy in his use of antisemitism in an interview with Politico in January 2024, gleefully admitting he used it to bring down university presidents by cultivating allies among the liberal press who were credulous enough to take the charges he was making at face value.

And more and more influential figures among American Jews are calling all this out. In December, a letter from Joe Berman, a former top litigator for the Anti-Defamation League put it succinctly, “Jews and the fight against antisemitism are being cynically used to advance an authoritarian, anti-democratic agenda.… Make no mistake: this will not end well, especially for Jewish Americans.” And an Ipsos poll last September of over 1,000 Americans who self-identified as Jewish found that “a wide majority—by nearly a three-to-one margin—report that President Trump uses allegations of antisemitism as an ‘excuse’ to pause or cut university funding, rather than saying he ‘truly cares’ about the well-being of Jewish students.” Clearly, the game is up for many Jewish Americans. But not for Harvard.

The only reason Bassett was fired is that Harvard donors, trustees, HSPH dean Andrea Baccarelli, and President Alan Garber wanted it to happen. There are two possible reasons for this, and both are alarming at this terrible political moment in American history. One scenario is simple: they agree with the policies of the current Israeli government, and the charges hurled against colleges by the Trump administration, and are gladly squelching any dissent. That is, they are collaborators.

The second, and more likely, reason is that the leaders at Harvard are cowards. Under pressure from the White House and the far right, they thought the sacrifice of Bassett was simply worth it to appease their critics, even bad-faith ones. The quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates above is from a longer speech he gave recently, where he explicitly calls out civic leaders, including those at universities, who speak forthrightly about the importance of institutions of higher education, but yet shrink back at the moment of truth: “These institutions, rich, prestigious, cower rather than confront. They compromise their principles instead of defending justice.”

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

Baccarelli and Garber have sacrificed one of the leading public health figures of our time out of deep moral cowardice. They’ll go down with those who turned in their friends and colleagues during the blacklist in the 1950s, substituting a dubious expediency for any self-respect. And one might also ask, where is the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard on all of this? While these faculty have been noisily clamoring for free speech and viewpoint diversity on campus for years, they’ve been noticeably silent on what is clearly a purge of a fellow academic. I guess it’s free speech for me, not for thee when it comes to viewpoints they may disagree with. Cowards all.

Why does all this matter? The Trump administration is trying to reshape higher education for an authoritarian era, as has been done in other countries, at other times. You need cowards to do this: people who will sell out their colleagues and their principles to promote their own safety or advancement, even as they claim they are doing it because they have no choice. I am sure Baccarelli and Garber have also told themselves they are saving their school by making these concessions, but what is left in capitulation and collaboration’s wake?

Universities are no longer about open inquiry and debate if they are willing to close programs, shutter departments, shift away from priorities that arouse the ire of the state, and purge those who run afoul of those in power. Rebuilding academia in the image of the far right is the goal. For an example of where that leads, just look at New College of Florida. But even there, Governor Ron DeSantis forced New College’s hand. Baccarelli and Garber are lending their own hands to this project.

As for public health and medicine? This move is part of the campaign to reshape our fields as well. Bassett was fired because she spoke up on Gaza, but it is clear that her seminal work on racism and health, and her willingness to speak up about these issues, also put her on the wrong side of the Trump administration, as well as those on campus who see current discussions on race and social justice in medical school curriculums as overly woke, “promot[ing] extensive and dangerous misinformation,” and representing a form of “pedagogical malpractice.”

Baccarelli has said the “new” version of FXB will emphasize children’s health as its focus (even though FXB already has a program on this topic). One has to wonder which children will count in this new cramped vision of human rights at Harvard. If I were at Harvard, I’d also be worried about the future of FXB’s other programs on climate change and public health emergencies, on racial justice, on migrants and refugees, and the Roma program for health and human rights. This is what Baccarelli and Garber are willing to leave behind.

At this moment, the rise of authoritarianism and the backlash to Me Too, Black Lives Matter, and the fight for trans equality have begun to converge. Those on campus who want to make university life safe for misogyny, racism, and transphobia again are feeling empowered. The academics among Epstein’s men, like Larry Summers, who yearn for a past in which we all knew our place in the pecking order, see their fortunes rising. (It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the two most prominent terminations at Harvard in this era—Mary Bassett and Claudine Gay—have been two Black women.)

Making an example of Mary Bassett was a very bad move. We know who the cowards (and collaborators) are now. Bassett was at the forefront of a new public health, grounded in science and justice for all. And even as they may say they are doing no such thing, we need to realize that these men have declared war on an entire field, because their quest was not just to remove a single leader but to extirpate a set of ideas and principles fundamental to public health that their patrons find objectionable.

At least, though, we know where we stand. The contours of the struggle ahead are coming into clearer relief every day. It is bad medicine to carve out discussions of gross human rights violations, like the carnage in Gaza, of race, sexuality, and gender, and the entire panoply of social determinants of health out of our work to satisfy this regressive politics. Because in the end, it is not viruses and rogue cells alone that kill us—it is what we inflict on each other that makes us sick, leaves us dead.

Gregg Gonsalves
Nation public health correspondent Gregg Gonsalves is the codirector of the Global Health Justice Partnership and an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.