UT-Austin has collapsed its race, ethnic, and gender studies into a single program while a new policy asks faculty to avoid “controversial” topics. But the attacks won’t end there.
Students gather at the Gregory Gym Plaza on UT-Austin’s campus in a rally on February 16 to oppose the elimination of race, ethnic, and gender studies departments.
(Austin Students for a Democratic Society)
In 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17 into law, banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions across the state. In the years since, the University of Texas at Austin has been steadily remaking itself in the image demanded by conservative legislators across town.
The university’s most recent changes include the consolidation of African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies into a single “Social and Cultural Analysis” department, as well as a UT system-wide policy asking faculty to avoid “controversial” topics in the classroom. While the shift seems sudden, these attacks are in line with an ant-DEI, right-wing agenda that has been years in the making.
Both measures are purposefully vague on the timeline, procedure, and funding. “We are in difficult times,” said UT board of regents chair Kevin Eltife during the meeting at which the topics policy was approved. “Vagueness can be our friend.”
For the impacted students and faculty, this lack of specificity serves only to plunge their work and studies into a state of precarity. Reid Pinckard, a first-year PhD student in American Studies, said when the consolidation was announced on February 12, “it genuinely sucked the energy out of the office we were in.” In chats with other graduate students, the measure also caused a “frenzy,” he said. “There were questions like, ‘What are we supposed to do? How can we handle this?’ People that are graduating this semester were like, ‘Is my degree going to be in American Studies, or is it going to be this or that?’ That’s really what this is serving to do, which is to make people feel like they don’t know what’s going on.”
As a teaching assistant, Áine McGehee Marley, a third-year PhD student in African and African Diaspora Studies, said similar concerns rang true for her class of around 50 undergraduate students. “They’re really worried and scared,” said McGehee Marley. “There’s a general fear among a lot of people of ‘what am I allowed to do and what am I not allowed to do,’ and ‘even if I thought I was allowed to do something, could that still get me in trouble?’”
In November of last year, McGehee Marley and six other students participated in a sit-in at the university’s main tower. At the demonstration, they requested to meet with the school’s provost only to receive notices of disciplinary actions for disruptive conduct and unauthorized entry. The university suspended one student and issued deferred suspensions to the rest of the students, all of whom were undergrads except for McGehee Marley.
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The university’s repressive efforts prompted further organizing in support of the students facing disciplinary charges and against UT’s consolidation and President Trump’s overarching “Compact for Higher Education” plan. Throughout the fall semester and into the new year, a coalition of campus and community groups—including UT Grad Workers Union, Palestine Solidarity Committee, Texas Students for DEI, Not Our Texas, and the Austin chapter of Students for a Democratic Society—continued to organize protests, marches, and teach-ins, arrange press conferences, demonstrations, and letter writing campaigns against both the consolidation and Trump’s education plan.
Nonetheless, the university moved forward with the consolidation as expected. “We made it very clear where we stood on this issue, and none of that seemed to matter,” said Alfonso Ayala III, a second-year PhD student in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “There’s a feeling of complete disrespect and disavowal of the value our work has to the university community.”
Yet more students have also become interested in learning about race, gender, and ethnic studies programs. “Since the news has come out, I have had a lot of students asking me about ethnic and gender studies, some expressing interest in joining or getting a minor in it,” said Madee Puente-Bonilla, a teaching assistant and second-year dual master’s student in Women’s and Gender Studies and Information Studies. “The consolidation [and] elimination of these departments has had the opposite effect of what the administration wants. What I’ve seen with my students is that it’s been pushing them towards these departments.”
Out of such desolate circumstances comes an opportunity, or perhaps even a responsibility, to lean into new structures. What comes next, according to Lena Mose-Vargas, a third-year Ph.D. student in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, is unknown because “Texas moves quickly and vaguely,” but it will require “a lot of improvisation and ambition.”
Mose-Vargas said to move forward means to think about alternatives to the institution. “Understanding that they don’t want us to have these spaces, and that they will use any measure they can to make sure we don’t have as much potential to create change in these spaces, mandates that we find ways outside of the university to learn what we want to learn and to have the discussions we want to have.”
On February 12, Austin’s SDS chapter had planned a teach-in about the consolidation, aimed at informing students to prepare them for when the measure would inevitably be announced. It just so happened that the consolidation was announced that morning.
SDS member Alfredo Campos said, as a result, turnout to the teach-in was higher than expected. “Our teach-ins are some of our less popular actions. We usually get no more than 20 people [but] around 50 people showed up,” said Campos, a government freshman who’s also minoring in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “We had a packed classroom, which shows that the secrecy around consolidation is something that benefits the administration and is intentional. They don’t want people to know because they know that if people did know, they’d be rightfully angry.”
While race, gender, and ethnic studies programs are being dismantled, the university continues to trumpet the School of Civic Leadership and its right-wing-funded think tank, the Civitas Institute—both of which idealize free enterprise, conservative thought, and Western civilization without critical consideration of race, gender, or class. (This has been called hypocritical given the race, gender, and ethnic studies programs have been consolidated due to supposed “inconsistencies and fragmentation,” yet the School of Civic Leadership is not seen as redundant to the College of Liberal Arts’ classics, government, economics, and philosophy departments.)
Despite growing up in the Rio Grande Valley, a majority–Hispanic and Latino area of Texas, Campos was never exposed to Latino history in school. It was only after coming to UT-Austin and enrolling in courses offered by the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies department that he was able to learn his own history.
“I had no explanation for why the educational system was so poor [where I’m from, or] why there’s very little economic mobility,” Campos said, until he finally got to look at history through a critical lens: “how the border moved past Mexicans; how, when they were made US citizens with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a lot of property was stolen; how, through legal and violent means, they were excluded from participating in society and reduced to laborers.” It was then, after critical analysis of this history, that Campos “started applying it to how I think about the Valley, and it makes sense why I was never taught this information.”
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“A history of the United States without explanation of race or gender is an incomplete history,” Campos said. “It’s a white supremacist history,”
Campos’ experience makes clear that the consolidation of such worthwhile departments is a tremendous loss, chief among them is how the restructuring adversely impacts the students who have learned, grown, and been shaped by the affected programs. Karma Chávez, the chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, said it plainly: “It’s going to be bad in every possible way, and students are going to be the biggest losers.”
Even more, Lauren Gutterman, an associate professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, worries that consolidation is not the end point. “My biggest fear is that this is a temporary measure on the path to elimination.” She recalled, for instance, Texas Christian University’s consolidation-turned-elimination of its race and gender studies programs—and there are many other examples. A little over a week after UT-Austin’s announcement, UT–San Antonio said that it will dissolve its Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality Studies by September, folding it into another department. Texas A&M eliminated its women’s and gender studies degree programs last year while restricting teaching on race and gender. Texas Tech, the University of Houston, and the University of North Texas have all implemented similar policies of censorship, limiting discussion of race, gender, and sexuality in the classroom and canceling courses and exhibitions that confront and critique systems of oppression and injustice.
Pinckard, whose work engages with Southern politics, made note that what so often starts out in the South reverberates elsewhere—which is especially the case when the Trump administration cuts federal funding and then incentivizes adherence to its right-wing agenda with funding. The University of Michigan, where McGehee Marley went for undergrad prior to her joining UT’s Black Studies PhD program, axed its DEI offices last year. At UT, it’s all a “part of an ongoing attack,” Gutterman said. “And it won’t end here.”
If there’s any silver lining to higher education’s ongoing unraveling, maybe it lies in a focused commitment to imagining alternatives to learning that are free from the institution itself, as Mose-Vargas suggests. Just as much, it also means looking to students like Campos, who continue to “fight tooth and nail” to preserve these departments. “If I get hit with conduct charges, so be it,” he said. “I’m not going to scurry away.”
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