Corporate Logic, Political Control: The Assault on Public Universities in Texas

Friends:

Texas Republicans are moving aggressively to consolidate political control over the state’s public universities through Senate Bill 37—a sweeping and dangerous piece of legislation that would hand over key academic decisions to Governor Abbott’s appointees. 

Passed out of the House Higher Education Committee on a party-line vote, the bill would let politically appointed regents dictate core curricula, approve or reject key university hires, and even override administrative decisions. 

SB 37 opens the door to state-sanctioned censorship, with vague mandates about course content and a new ombudsman office empowered to investigate faculty based on student or staff complaints. As UT professor Karma Chávez puts it plainly. It will "'enshrine intellectual discrimination' at UT."

The bill also guts faculty governance by slashing elected representation on faculty councils and granting administrators—many of whom are deeply enmeshed in partisan politics—expanded authority over academic affairs. Courses in ethnic studies, gender studies, and the humanities are especially at risk, and faculty fear a climate of fear, self-censorship, and punitive budget cuts. 

Scholars like Adele Nelson and Andrea Gore describe widespread panic as the legislation threatens not only academic freedom but the very capacity to teach truthfully and critically. What’s unfolding in Texas is a systematic effort to dismantle higher education as a space for inquiry, dialogue, and democracy—and to replace it with a model of top-down political control.

I guess the first test of university takeovers was the New College in Florida. We're the next test case but in this case, a flagship university. My guess is that these designs will migrate to other states and their respective universities if they haven't already.

Becoming corporate means that we're in for a rough ride in Texas higher education. We need to vote these leaders who oppose democracy and actual freedom out of office and seek a SB 37 repeal bill next session lest they ruin higher education. The legislative session isn't over, so stay tuned for legislative updates.

-Angela Valenzuela

How Gov. Greg Abbott Appointees Could Take Over UT
Texas Republicans move forward with new bill attacking academic freedom By Brant Bingamon, Fri., May 23, 2025 | Austin Chronicle




Senate Bill 37 shifts power from university administrators and faculties to boards appointed by the governor (design by Zeke Barbaro / Getty Images)

Texas Republicans are working to tighten their grip on the state’s public universities. Monday night, the House’s Higher Education Committee voted along party lines, 6-5, to approve Senate Bill 37, a bill that would let Republicans selected by the governor influence the courses taught at Texas universities, choose the schools’ leaders, micromanage their lower-level hires, and open investigations into their professors.

SB 37 could be approved by the full House and Senate within the next week and sent to Gov. Greg Abbott for his signature. UT-Austin professor Karma Chávez told us she and her colleagues believe that if the bill is passed it will “enshrine intellectual discrimination” at UT. “It’s indoctrination,” Chavez said. “Our leaders always say they are worried about indoctrination, but they are the ones who want to insert politics into every corner of public university education in the state.”

SB 37 makes several big changes to higher education. It shifts power over the courses that students take from the universities’ administrators and gives it to their governing boards. These boards, like UT’s Board of Regents, are composed of political appointees chosen by Gov. Greg Abbott, with the approval of the Texas Senate. SB 37 requires the governing boards to examine each university’s core curriculum – the courses that students must pass in order to graduate. The bill states that the governing boards shall ensure that courses in the curriculum do not "advocate or promote the idea that any race, sex, or ethnicity or any religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, or ethnicity or any religious belief." The bill further states that the universities have the final decision-making authority over which courses remain in the curriculum -- "under the direction of the institution's governing board.”
“It’ll be a death by a thousand cuts.”– UT Austin professor Karma Chávez

Chávez told us that UT’s core curriculum includes many courses in disciplines like history, humanities, and the arts. The courses are proposed by instructors from the different departments within the university and approved by administrators. She said the Republican claims that professors endorse particular ideologies is unfounded. She believes they don’t want students to learn about the civil rights victories that minority groups have won over the last several decades and said restricting education will help them achieve that goal.

“Those of us in the College of Liberal Arts – especially ethnic and gender studies, American Studies, those kinds of things – our classes are not going to be allowed in the core curriculum,” Chávez said. “They’re trying to make it so that no one takes our classes. And then what they’re going to do is say, 'Well, no one takes your classes, so now we’re going to slash your budget.’ It’ll be a death by a thousand cuts.”

SB 37 also changes the way universities choose their leaders, giving Abbott’s governing bodies the power to approve or deny the hiring of vice presidents, provosts, and deans. The governing boards could also approve or deny job postings for tenured faculty positions in fields other than science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. One jarringly expansive rule simply states, “The governing board of an institution of higher education may overturn any decision made by the administration of a campus under the board’s control and management.”

The bill also creates an avenue to investigate professors for violations of state law -- the Office of the Ombudsman. Under the proposal, Abbott, with the consent of the Senate, will appoint a ombudsman within the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board who will open investigations into professors after written complaints by any student, faculty member, or staff member of a university. The ombudsman will make yearly reports to Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and other state officials.

UT professor Andrea Gore said her colleagues believe the creation of the Office of the Ombudsman will encourage an avalanche of baseless accusations. “They can report on professors and then there’s going to be an investigation by this politically appointed ombudsperson,” Gore said. “It is kind of scary.”

Gore said SB 37 also undermines faculty governance, the principle that faculty members should help create and manage school policy with university leaders. The bill would greatly reduce the number of professors sitting on faculty senates at the state’s colleges and universities. It would give UT’s president – former Ken Paxton lieutenant Jim Davis – the power to appoint half of UT’s faculty council members, who are currently elected by their fellow academics. It would also allow Davis to pick which of those members sit on the faculty council’s executive board, with whom he meets weekly.

Taken as a whole, the professors we spoke with believe that SB 37 is another effort to silence voices and stifle research that Republicans take issue with. They think it will further damage the reputation of our colleges and universities.

“I’ve already lost key colleagues who have accepted positions at other institutions and will be gone this coming fall,” UT professor Adele Nelson said. “And frankly, I have no idea how I’m going to teach my classes. I can’t talk about Latin American art history without discussing race and ethnicity. And obviously, I don’t advocate for the superiority of one race or ethnicity over the other, but part of the humanities' critical thinking is understanding the perspective of other people. And I’m worried that a student will misunderstand that and I’ll be reported.

“So we’re panicked, both in how we’re going to manage our classrooms and the destruction that this will bring on UT’s departments.”

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that a university's governing board must create a review committee to evaluate school curricula. In fact, SB 37 states that a governing board may do so. It also misnamed the Office of the Ombudsman as the Office of Excellence in Higher Education. The Chronicle regrets the errors.

As convincingly argued by Texas State University System (TSU) History Professor Jeffrey Helgesen, the public is right to concern itself with the re-opening of our schools, colleges, and universities, asking the key question of whose interest this serves. As outlined herein, McKinsey & Company has a history of closing schools. So why are they the corporation of choice for TSU's re-opening? 

We have enormous talent, knowledge, and resources in our universities and communities.  So why aren't our communities engaged in crafting a response? Something as dangerous and multifaceted as COVID cannot be fully outsourced anyway.

We, as a public, most especially students of color that overwhelmingly attend these school systems must be very discerning and wise with any corporate response to a crisis that ALWAYS spells not only corporate profits, but an expansion of an ultimately racist and classist agenda to corporatize public education. They would be legitimate if they were involved in the fight for greater funding of our colleges universities, but they are not—and that means something.

Thanks to Dr. Estela Bensimon for sharing.

-Angela Valenzuela

McKinsey’s approach to school reform is precisely not what we need right now. (Don & Melinda Crawford/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

WEB ONLY / VIEWS » JULY 2, 2020

My University Plans to Reopen This Summer, Based on Advice From McKinsey. That’s Terrifying.

McKinsey & Company is pushing a military-style, corporate response to the Covid-19 crisis in public higher education. What we need is an anti-racist approach.

BY JEFFREY HELGESON

The infamous 1970s “busing crisis” in Boston may seem far-flung from efforts by university administrators to confront the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The connection, however, came home to me recently when I learned that the administrators of the Texas State University System—where I have worked for a decade—are planning a return to campus this summer, following the advice of the controversial corporate consulting firm, McKinsey & Company.

Just as corporate leaders came together to help oversee desegregation of Boston’s public schools nearly 50 years ago, today, business interests are again at the table, this time guiding school administrators on how to reopen in the midst of a deadly outbreak.

McKinsey’s advice has already undermined effective responses to the pandemic in other sectors than higher education. Volunteers from the firm have been central to the Trump administration’s botched efforts to procure personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospitals. Meanwhile, the firm has profited from state-level officials looking for a veneer of legitimacy in their efforts to limit the distribution of unemployment and food aid to those now in poverty. There is no reason to believe McKinsey’s advice for public higher education will be any more promising.

The administrators I work with in the Texas State University System, nonetheless, have called on messaging from McKinsey & Company to sell our faculty and staff on the plan to return to face-to-face instruction—originally on July 6, now August 24—and to do so while absorbing the impact of severe budget reductions during an ongoing spike in Covid-19 infections in Texas. To facilitate this reentry into on-campus work and study, McKinsey is selling a top-down, closed process. They have laid out a military-style crisis response that includes no systematic efforts to collect the views of faculty, staff or students. Instead, they’re calling on the people most at risk upon returning to campus to embrace both possible infection and a post-pandemic “new normal”—defined by austerity.

A history of privatization

McKinsey & Company is not new to the business of restructuring public education. The firm has been a key player in the effort to exert private-sector control over Boston’s public schools since at least the 1980s.

The history of the 1970s “busing crisis” in Boston is well-known. Images of white Bostonians stoning school buses transporting Black children to previously all-white schools, and of demagogues tearing the city apart with appeals to “white pride,” have been seared into our collective historical memory. Yet fewer are familiar with what is perhaps that period’s most lasting legacy: the insidious way corporate and finance leaders exploited desegregation to privatize public education.

In 1974, Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity issued a landmark decision calling for the immediate desegregation of Boston’s public schools. Local school officials, however, refused to enforce Garrity’s order. To meet this resistance, Garrity personally oversaw the implementation of desegregation. Looking for help wherever he could get it, Garrity invited corporate leaders to partner in that process. Yet many Bostonians were skeptical of this new corporate intervention.

McKinsey & Company stepped into the Boston school reform effort as advisors to the philanthropic foundations that funded public-private partnerships in education during the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1990s, McKinsey advisors were helping to advance the cause of publicly-subsidized, for-profit charter schools.

McKinsey has sought to privatize and close public schools even if it required skewing the facts. In June 2013, Boston Public Schools reported that the 128 buildings in the system had total a capacity of 61,300 seats, with an enrollment of 56,400. But just two years later, McKinsey reported to Mayor Marty Walsh that capacity had grown by nearly 150%, to 93,000 seats. This surge in capacity would justify shuttering dozens of schools. But where did they find all this extra space? As a parents’ group discovered through a Freedom of Information Act Request, McKinsey had counted hallways and bathrooms as classroom space. McKinsey’s role was not to shape sound policies to improve education, but rather to justify a predetermined policy goal: closing 30 to 50 district schools, privileging, as the parents concluded, “short-sighted cost-savings” over “equitable access to quality schools for all children.”

McKinsey’s approach to school reform is precisely not what we need right now. Mass school closures have been found to hurt surrounding communities and to consolidate private-sector control over urban schools. In the name of “excellence” and “choice,” privatization schemes have actually undermined the commitment to equity in education as a public good. As historian Diane Ravitch put it in her survey of McKinsey’s record in education reform: “McKinsey is always there, although there is no evidence that they are education experts… . Education has been warped for the past 30 years by the inappropriate application of corporate strategy to schools and classrooms and children.”

Military-style response

McKinsey appears to be using the emergency of the pandemic to undermine what is left of faculty governance and student voice in higher education. In a May 18 article published on McKinsey’s website, titled “Lessons from the generals: Decisive action amid the chaos of crisis,” senior partners Yuval Atsmon, David Chinn, Martin Hirt and Sven Smit lay out this militaristic strategy. Structural changes will be driven by protocols of “crisis management” defined by a “military-command structure” that will plan “across all time horizons,” while keeping focused on adopting “age-old principles of war.”

In 2016, an exasperated Boston parent asked, “Why hire a firm like McKinsey with a reputation for closing schools, if that wasn't your end goal?” We should ask our university administrators a similar question. Why look to a firm like McKinsey, with its record of corporatizing public institutions, if that is not your end goal? Is the objective merely to justify ongoing budget cuts, increased insecurity for faculty and staff, attacks on tenure, and declines in the quality of education? It is difficult to come to any other conclusion.

McKinsey’s advice makes no mention of fighting for more state or federal funding for public universities, which continued to decrease after the Great Recession of 2007-2009, even as state revenue and university enrollment grew. In the absence of increased funding we will see the extension of ongoing trends that increase tuition while lowering the quality of education. Students will pay more for an impoverished university experience. Technical training will prevail over the broad exploration of the humanities and social sciences. Growing ranks of contingent faculty and outsourced staff will struggle to keep up, as administrators increase their workloads and cut their pay. All of this will hit low-income and first-generation students the hardest.

The bottom line is that a McKinsey-style warlike response threatens to divert resources from students, particularly our working-class Black and Latinx students (the majority of students at Texas State), for whom higher education promises a path to the lives they strive to create.

Toward an anti-racist approach

Rather than corporate reformers like McKinsey & Company, we need to listen to students, faculty, staff and parents to recall the true purpose of public education. In 1977, looking back on the fight for desegregation in Boston, the legendary parent-activist and community-based crisis counselor, Ruth Batson, spoke to the heart of the matter: “The theory that has propelled Black people since slavery to educate their children,” she declared, has been that education is “a survival mechanism, a way out—a way out of ignorance, a way out of poverty—a way out of a binding and non-fulfilling job—a way out of exploitation.” The willingness of Black parents to “endure busing,” as Batson put it, reflected their need to go through what they knew would be a painful process in order to secure a quality education for their children.

Neither the attempt at desegregation nor the corporate-driven “reform” of public schools secured the access to a quality education that Batson and her fellow parents were seeking. Batson knew “busing” alone would not get the job done, but she was willing to endure it in the hope that it would be a step in the right direction.

What she could not have known is that “socially responsible” corporations would step into the process to profit off of school systems, thereby creating new barriers to the equity parents sought. One has only to look at the recent trend in privatization of elderly care in the United States, and its disastrous consequences for residents and staff during the pandemic, to see that privatization and consolidation is not a panacea.

We in the nation’s public universities are having to endure the challenges of dealing with a pandemic. The appearance of McKinsey & Company raises the fear that the return to campus will not only threaten our lives, but force us to act in ways that will undermine the kind of public education that can be “a way out” for our students. If that’s the case, we will have endured the pandemic to find that we’ve facilitated our public university’s turbocharged transformation into the corporate university.

Instead, in the midst of both a pandemic and the most widespread uprisings against racism in modern U.S. history, let us come together to demand an anti-racist state response to the Covid-19 crisis in higher education. The goal ought not to be maintaining morale by convincing faculty and staff to make warlike sacrifices in the interests of austerity. We must instead demand a democratically conceived project of reinvesting in public universities—cementing higher education as the public good that it is.  

Betsy DeVos and her No Good, Very Bad Record on Public Education: Here's What She's Done

This is a must-read piece by President Lily Eskelsen of the National Education Association. U.S. Department of Betsy DeVos is part of the neoliberal agenda to destroy public education and in its stead, have a market-based, privatized system, where your education amounts to the best education you can buy while the for-profit, Educate Management Organizations (EMOs) reap massive profits on the taxpayer's dime.

Yes, your/our tax dollars at work to destroy public education.  Sadly, this is the "McDonaldization" or "WalMartization of public education," the big-box, predatory, corporate enterprise that represents an about-face both from public education, and the notion of public schools' role in the preservation of a democracy.  I refer here to the promise of public education not always as it is, but certainly as it should be and the promise that it holds for a more equitable, values-based, education.

If you want to learn about the roots of neoliberal thinking, a good place to start is with Nancy MacLean's book, DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS.  This privatization agenda that works in tandem with gentrification and the displacement of poor people is at best indifferent, and at worst, hostile to community, as a whole.

If this were otherwise, the charter school leaders and community would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with us in the legislature and community advocating for children's rights to bilingual education, immigrant children's rights, Ethnic Studies, equitable school funding, growing our own educators, and so on.  They are never within view on such matters at the legislature. Not a single champion to find among them.  They must be all busy administering....

For the gentrifiers of our cities and the gentrifiers of our schools, "community" often amounts to an inconvenience.  How patronizing and how unfortunate a stance.  But then, it makes sense when you consider that the kids and their parents become "clients."  

How disempowering.  No governance to speak of in this scenario.  No local control.  No elected school board.  Only a market.  That's why large class sizes actually make sense because it's profitable for the EMOs.

Not that individual charter schools aren't good, doing the great work.  However, when one is in policy, as I myself am, one knows the perils of passing laws that are premised on exceptions rather than the rule. Just because one hypothetical revolutionary, progressive, civil rights charter school in Houston, Texas, is doing wonders with its children, this doesn't justify a blunt policy doctrine where the EMOs rake in the public's hard-earned money while public education is shamed, blamed, and deprived of resources in order to turn off folks to the public schools.

As a rule—at least in Texas—you're child is mostly not better off in a charter school.  See the evidence for yourself in this important analysis conducted by the Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) titled, "Charter School Expansion in Texas is "Troubling."  Think twice before you put your child in a charter school.  And once your child is in, if you still opt for this, stay very much on top as an involved parent so that you can see not only how well your child is doing, but are they hiring certified teachers?  Are they paying them well and do they get benefits?  

We need to be sure and get out to vote, my friends—and also to educate ourselves on the neoliberal agenda of which charter schools are a core part.  Together with this, do not support charter-friendly candidates—who you can sometimes identify as the ones having slick, glossy mail-outs and war chests chock full of cash just to win a local race that shouldn't cost millions of dollars to win in the first place.  

Dr. MacLean's book is a very good place to start getting educated on the neoliberal agenda. DeVos' budget is another good place to learn about it.  Consider, for example, and earlier posted on the matter.  Here's another really good, if profoundly-concerning, piece on the school privatization agenda that you can also read.

Do click on the Betsy DeVos' timeline constructed by the NEA to see how it's gone.
This charterization and privatization agenda is very harmful to public education.  But then how can it be when it primarily benefits the top 1 percent.  

Get woke, folks!  And get involved not just in your child's education, but education policy, in general.


-Angela Valenzuela

#GetWoke #StayWoke

Subscriber,

Betsy DeVos had a bad week. First, she defended her budget that calls for the elimination of federal funding for the Special Olympics.

As if that wasn't bad enough, she also had the audacity to claim that—and this is a direct quote—“Students may be better served by being in larger classes.”

Anyone who has ever been in a classroom knows this is cluelessly wrong.

But, this was not the first or only time Betsy DeVos tried to roll back funding for students who need it most.

In fact, she has spent her entire time as education secretary trying to eliminate funding and protections for public school students.

We should know. We put together a timeline of Betsy DeVos’ tenure as education secretary. Check it out here.

Line by line, month by month, you can see in real-time how she’s promoted the privatization of public schools through vouchers, called for deep cuts to federal funding, rolled back protections for vulnerable children, and shilled for the for-profit college industry that has defrauded countless students.

We will continue to hold Betsy DeVos accountable for her actions, and come November 2020, we’ll send her and her allies a powerful message: Our students deserve better.

In solidarity,

Lily Eskelsen García
President
National Education Association 

The Climate Apartheid: How Global Warming Affects the Rich and Poor

As per this sobering Rolling Stones piece, climate change is indeed remaking our world.  Quote from within:

But economic losses are only one way of thinking about the consequences of sea-level rise. The number of people who may be displaced – in other words, potential climate refugees – is another. When you factor in future population growth, Lagos is near the top of the list of places to worry about. By 2050, the city is projected to have 30 million people. How many of those will be swamped by rising seas and forced to flee? Various studies have come up with numbers ranging from 3 million to 8 million. Whatever the number, you only have to spend a few hours in Lagos to understand that sea-level rise will displace a lot of people, and those people are going to have to go somewhere.

Thanks to American civil rights attorney, Judith Browne-Dianis, for sharing.  All of this is so troubling and terrifying. She herself, a brilliant national leader, is co-director of the Advancement Project, a progressive, nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.  

We were together to honor both John H. Jackson and Barbara Madeloni as this year's "Deborah W. Meier - Heroes in Education Award" in a wonderful program that recognizes the contributions by major, national leaders in education, including their championing of the fight against high-stakes testing. You can check out the FairTest Staff and Board here. FairTest  always puts on such a beautiful program.  

Here are this year's awardee's bios:

Dr. John H. Jackson is President and CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education. Dr. Jackson leads the Foundation’s efforts to ensure a high quality public education for all students regardless of race or gender. He joined Schott after seven years at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Dr. Jackson also served on the Obama-Biden Education Policy transition team and was Senior Policy Advisor in the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Education in the Clinton Administration. He holds a J.D. from the University of Illinois and a Doctorate in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Barbara Madeloni is President of the 110,000-member Massachusetts Teachers Association and a staunch advocate for students and educators in public schools and higher education. She is committed to racial and economic justice and to building effective unions in alliance with parents, students and communities. She was a key leader in the successful 2016 Massachusetts campaign to block the expansion of charter schools. Madeloni is senior lecturer (on leave) in the Labor Studies Department at UMass-Amherst, where she previously worked at the School of Education. She also has taught high school and worked as a psychotherapist.

Thank you, FairTest, for doing all that you do in leading the nation in the fight against high-stakes testing.  Your work has made a tremendous difference in the struggle that has evolved into an opt-out movement that I am hoping will merge with other movements. These consist of the bilingual education, Ethnic Studies, place-based education, authentic assessment, and grow-your-own, critically conscious teacher agendas in order to forge a culturally sustaining, fair, and equitably-oriented approaches to educational reform that are rooted in the cultures, languages, histories, stories, and lived experiences of our communities.  

We must develop and nurture partnerships between community-based organizations, non-profits, civil rights groups, and higher education institutions, districts and cities.  Together, we can accomplish this great task of re-envisioning public schools, working in an interlocking way with our resource-rich communities and local organizations.

We're going green in other places.  No reasons why we can't or shouldn't go green in education by getting close to the ground in our communities.  Plus, we are all the better for it.  This is grassroots democracy at its best! 

And let's keep fighting against these tests that for far too many a student, render the schooling experience a punishing one.  We need less schooling and more education.  

Why must education be a punishing one for any child? Why must education be a punishing one for any teacher or administrator?  It doesn't have to be this way.  But our communities must organize in  and with our most democratic institution in our history in this country, namely, the public schools.  Yes, more people of conscience need to run for public office, but this is but only one component.  We need to work to bring the late education philosopher, psychologist and education reformer, John Dewey's, words to life in his characterization of public schools as "laboratories for democracy."

These standardized, high-stakes tests are handmaiden to the pursuit of the corporate sector's complete ownership and control of public education—a dystopia, with only a few  public school "outposts," vestiges of an earlier era, located here and there. 

No matter how nicely dressed it looks—which these corporate folks happen to be very good at when you see that they put so much of our taxpayer money into marketing and not teachers who do not have to be certified to teach in their schools—this anti-democratic approach equates to a diminishing of democracy, meaning a loss of democratic control over public education. 

No more elected school boards or elections. This is a contract society where you as a consumer get the best education you can buy and beholden to a corporation.  How alienating.  How meaningless.  And how, as a consequence, dangerous, or potentially so.

John and Barbara, thank you for doing all that you do in the world to help our children, parents, teachers, and communities.  And Judith, may you keep up the good fight!  So wonderful to see you and everybody at FairTest.  

Those of us that have been involved in the struggle against high-stakes testing have been well served by FairTest over the years.  

My friends, do consider making a donation to FairTest HERE so that they can keep on doing great work.

And do read this very concerning piece below. Our nations are, for the most part, not having the conversations that we need to be having on climate change and its current impacts, and how these are circumscribed by class, race, economics, and power—including the making of a "climate apartheid," as this piece so clearly shows.

Angela Valenzuela

c/s

The Climate Apartheid: How Global Warming Affects the Rich and Poor

A trip to Lagos, Nigeria to investigate the social consequences of climate change 

A young boy swims through the Makoko slum in Lagos Mohammed Elshamy/Anadolu Agency/Getty

By Jeff Goodell