A Word of Thanks to Gina Hinojosa—and a Hope for Texas, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

 A Word of Thanks to Gina Hinojosa—and a Hope for Texas 

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

July 2, 2026

Gina Hinojosa, Martha Cotera & me

I have hesitated to write about this because I do not like to toot my own horn.

Those who know me know that I am much more comfortable lifting up the work of students, educators, communities, colleagues, and movements than calling attention to my own recognition.

But this one is special.

I write with a full heart and deep appreciation to thank State Representative Gina Hinojosa of House District 49, Democratic nominee for Texas governor, for authoring a resolution, passed by the Texas State Legislature, recognizing my inclusion in the 2025 Rick Hess Straight Up EDU Scholar Public Influence Rankings. This annual list recognizes 200 university-based scholars across the United States whose work has had significant influence on educational practice and policy.

I am grateful for the honor itself, but I am especially moved by the fact that this recognition came through the Texas Legislature and from Representative Hinojosa, whose public service has consistently reflected a deep commitment to children, families, public education, civil rights, and democratic governance.

The resolution notes my work as a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, my role as director of the University of Texas Center for Education Policy and the National Latino Education Research and Policy Project, my founding of this blog, Educational Equity, Politics, and Policy in Texas, and my scholarship on urban education, minority youth, bilingual education, and educational justice. It also recognizes my book, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring, and the honors I have received across the years, including the Henry T. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education and the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Association for Bilingual Education.

To see this work named in a formal legislative resolution is humbling. Public scholarship is often a labor of persistence, conviction, and faith. It means writing, researching, testifying, organizing, teaching, and speaking in ways that do not always fit neatly within conventional academic metrics. It means believing that knowledge should circulate beyond the university; that communities have a right to research, history, policy analysis, and critical interpretation; and that educational equity is not an abstract ideal, but a public obligation.

For more than two decades, this blog has sought to serve precisely that purpose. It has been a public archive, a policy resource, a space of reflection, and a site of democratic engagement for those committed to educational justice, bilingual education, Ethnic Studies, academic freedom, and the freedom to learn. In that sense, this recognition is not mine alone. It belongs to the many students, educators, parents, scholars, community leaders, advocates, and organizers whose struggles and insights have shaped my work and given it meaning.

I also want to say a special word about Representative Hinojosa herself. Gina Hinojosa has long been a principled and courageous advocate for public education and for a Texas that honors the dignity of all its people. As a civil rights and labor attorney, former Austin ISD school board president, and state legislator, she has brought intelligence, moral clarity, and a steady commitment to the public good into every arena of her service.

I truly hope—and expect—that Gina Hinojosa will be Texas’ next governor. Texas needs leadership rooted in care, fairness, public education, democratic accountability, and respect for the diverse communities that are the future of this state. Her authorship of this resolution is, for me, not only a personal kindness, but also a reflection of the kind of leadership she offers: one that sees education as central to democracy and recognizes the scholars, teachers, students, and communities working every day to defend it.

So, thank you, Representative Hinojosa, for this generous recognition and for your continued service to Texas. I receive this resolution with humility, gratitude, and renewed commitment to the work ahead.

At a time when public education, academic freedom, bilingual education, ethnic studies, and truthful curriculum are all under attack, such recognition matters. It reminds us that the work of educational equity is not marginal. It is central to the future of Texas. It is central to democracy. And it is work that we must continue together.

And that means showing up—not only in classrooms, community meetings, hearings, and public conversations, but also at the ballot box. As November approaches, I hope we will all make sure that we, our families, friends, neighbors, students, former students, and loved ones of voting age are registered, informed, and ready to vote. Democracy is not self-executing. It depends on our participation, our vigilance, and our willingness to act on behalf of the Texas we know is possible.

The Vanderbilt Report and the Manufacture of Suspicion Toward the Humanities, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

The Vanderbilt Report and the Manufacture of Suspicion Toward the Humanities

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

June 25, 2026

View Report Here.

The controversy over the Vanderbilt/Washington University report on the humanities (Boghossian et al., 2026) should concern all of us who care about higher education, academic freedom, and the democratic purpose of universities. Presented as a sober defense of rigor, objectivity, and scholarly standards, the report has instead become a flashpoint in the larger struggle over who gets to define legitimate knowledge in the academy (luckyuston@gmail.com, 2026). 

At a time when humanities departments, ethnic studies, gender studies, and other justice-oriented fields are already under political attack, the report risks doing more than diagnosing a problem. It risks furnishing a vocabulary for administrative scrutiny, budgetary austerity, and ideological policing.

This is why Dwight A. McBride’s (2026) critique is so important. He asks us to consider whether the report’s anxiety about “politicized” scholarship is really anxiety about a changing academy—one in which women, scholars of color, queer scholars, Indigenous scholars, and scholars from historically excluded communities are asking questions that earlier generations either ignored or suppressed.

The irony is also evident to me in light of a face-to-face conversation I once had with Dr. Randy Diehl, a former dean of the University of Texas College of Liberal Arts. He shared that he regarded much of the work in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies as cutting-edge—a characterization that, in my view, extends equally to African American and African Diaspora Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. These are precisely the critical humanities fields now under attack. My, how things have changed.

In any case, McBride’s central question is clarifying: what if the academy did not become less scholarly when it became more diverse? What if it became more intellectually honest because new scholars brought new archives, new methods, new communities, and new moral urgencies into view (McBride, 2026)?

The report appears to rely on a nostalgic idea of the university as a place where knowledge once existed above politics, untouched by power. But that imagined university was never neutral. It was a university structured by exclusion—by who was admitted, who was hired, whose work was cited, whose languages counted, whose communities were studied, and whose experiences were dismissed as particular, emotional, or political. Fields such as Black studies, ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and postcolonial studies did not emerge as departures from scholarship. They emerged because scholarship had failed to ask whole categories of questions about power, empire, race, gender, labor, sexuality, land, and inequality.

To cast these fields as inherently suspect because they engage social justice is to confuse subject matter with scholarly failure. There is poor scholarship in every field, including fields that describe themselves as neutral, empirical, classical, or objective. But serious inquiry into racism, colonialism, sexism, inequality, or state violence is not automatically activism masquerading as scholarship. Often, it is simply scholarship refusing to avert its gaze.

The danger is not merely intellectual. The report is addressed to university leaders, and it arrives in a political climate where administrators and governing boards are already being pressured to discipline faculty, reorganize departments, restrict curriculum, and eliminate programs deemed too critical or too “political.” This is especially alarming in states like Texas and Florida, where anti-DEI laws, attacks on shared governance, and efforts to narrow the curriculum have already reshaped higher education. In such a context, even a report that claims to oppose external political interference can become useful to those who seek precisely that interference.

A report on the humanities that truly centered rigor would begin with humility. It would ask whether its own evidence is sufficient for its claims. It would engage the scholars and fields it criticizes in good faith. It would distinguish between advocacy, public scholarship, community accountability, and poor method. It would recognize that the humanities have always been contested because meaning, memory, culture, language, and history are themselves contested terrains.

Instead, the Vanderbilt/Washington University report risks laundering a political anxiety through the language of standards. It treats the diversification of questions as a decline in quality. It treats scholarship attentive to power as evidence of ideological capture. It treats the old exclusions of the academy as if they were signs of intellectual purity.

The humanities do not need to be rescued from scholars who study justice. They need to be protected from those who mistake justice-oriented inquiry for intellectual corruption. The real crisis is not that the humanities have become too political. The real crisis is that, at the very moment when democracy needs deeper historical memory, ethical imagination, cultural understanding, and critical thought, powerful actors are working to narrow what can be studied, taught, funded, and known.

That is why this report matters. Not because it settles anything, but because it reveals the terms of the struggle before us. The question is not whether scholarship should be rigorous. Of course it should. The question is who gets to decide what rigor means—and whether rigor will be used to deepen democratic inquiry or to silence the very fields that have helped us understand democracy’s unfinished promises.

References

Boghossian, P., Appiah, K. A., Fine, K., Henrich, J., Fleming, K. E., Merchant, J., Morson, G. S., Rosen, G., Rubin, A., & Wilentz, S. (2026, April 5). Report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites/51/2026/06/State-of-Scholarship_Report_Final.pdf

luckyuston@gmail.com. (2026, June 11). The Vanderbilt report: A flashpoint in the battle for the humanities, Chronicle Beat. https://chroniclebeat.com/the-vanderbilt-report-a-flashpoint-in-the-battle-for-the-humanities/

McBride, D. A. (2026, June 15). The question haunting that humanities report,  Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/06/15/question-haunting-vanderbiltwash-u-report-opinion