Top Texas university deepens fears for ‘DEI’ programmes

The University of Texas at Austin (UT) has announced it will be closing its Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS), African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS), Mexican American and Latina/o Studies (MALS) and American Studies (AS) departments and consolidating their programmes into a single department.

The decision represents a significant broadening of the impact of the state’s attack on programmes that conservative Republican governor Gregg Abbott has castigated as academic manifestations of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) as opposed to focusing on “merit”.

Just last week, the state’s largest university, Texas A&M (College Station), announced it would be closing its Women’s and Gender Studies programme (WGSP).

Founded by an act of the Texas State legislature in 1876, UT, with 53,864 students, is the state’s most prestigious public university and is an R1 research university, the highest level. As a flagship state university, it can be thought of as a sister to the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), the University of Wisconsin (Madison) or the University of California (Berkeley).

Woke agendas

A year ago, in his State of the State message to the Texas legislature, which in May 2023 passed Senate Bill (SB) 17 banning DEI officers and offices, Abbott said: “College professors have increasingly pushed woke agendas,” which in the United States is code for curriculum in courses such as those in WGSS, AADS, MALS and AS.

Warming to his theme, the governor continued: “We must also expand the ban on DEI in our public universities. We must purge it from every corner of our schools and return the focus to merit. I have ordered all state agencies to eliminate DEI.”

In a statement to the university, UT President Jim Davis said that three language departments – French and Italian, Germanic Studies, and Slavic and Eurasian Studies – would be combined into one Department of European and Eurasian Studies. The WGSS, AADS, MALS and AS departments are being fused into a mammoth Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, which is scheduled to have 80 professors.

At this point, said Karma R Chávez, chair of the MALS department, she has not heard of any plans for layoffs but neither has she heard guarantees that there will not be job losses.

In an email sent to faculty in the College of Liberal Arts (CoLA), that was provided to University World News by a faculty member on condition of anonymity, where all of the affected programmes are housed, the interim dean, David Sosa, sought to frame the closure of the departments and their replacement with larger entities as the result of “a careful and forward-looking review of our departmental structure”.

He assured faculty that students presently enrolled in the soon-to-be-dissolved departments would be able to finish their “degree programmes within the new department while curriculum review and departmental change is underway”.

For his part, Davis cast the decision as a largely economic one, noting that the CoLA “operates at around a 15-to-1 student-to-faculty ratio” but that the department averages can vary from less than 2-to-1 to almost 60-to-1”, though he did not give any examples.

He said he had tasked the provost and other college leadership to “evaluate the fairness and effectiveness of this organisational model”.

After considering “size, scope, academic mission, student demand, student-to-faculty ratio, resource allocation and other dimensions”, he wrote, the review revealed inconsistencies and “provided insight into fields that remain best constituted as stand-alone departments and others that can better serve as focused areas of study within expanded departmental structures”.

Davis’ claim about “college leadership” being involved is rather overstated.

Chávez told University World News that the plan just announced was substantially the same as “the one that was on the table in August. Further, “five of the seven departments being consolidated weren’t included on that committee. The end proposal looks basically exactly the same as the beginning proposal,” she said.

This top-down diktat runs counter to the more than century-old tradition of shared governance of American universities that has vested curricula decisions in an elected faculty senate with real power; a model that has been authorised by a number of decisions of the United States Supreme Court in cases dealing with academic freedom.

In June of last year, Abbott signed SB 37, which dissolved the faculty senates in Texas’ publicly funded institutions and vested curricula and other similar decisions in the universities’ administrations. Accordingly, Davis had no requirement to secure what’s called in North America “faculty buy-in”.

An ‘authoritarian takeover’

Davis’ economic argument was rejected by the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which published on its blog a statement by Lauren Gutterman, a professor of AS and WGSS.

“There can be no reason for this decision other than an authoritarian takeover of Texas’ flagship university.

“If this was about too much fragmentation or small majors, then why are departments like Religious Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Classics unaffected? And if it’s about budgets, how does the university explain its extensive investment in the new School of Civic Leadership, which has the backing of conservative lawmakers?”

Mary Neuburger, chair of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, decried the anticipated loss of important expertise about Eastern Europe and cast the closing of the language departments as a cynical ploy.

“Our departments have a long history of providing language training and global expertise on strategically important countries like Russia. We are a vital part of UT’s innovative academic ecosystem, supporting teaching, research, and extracurricular initiatives for a wide range of students and faculty.”

Since UT leadership has denied that the mergers of the language departments are financially motivated, Neuburger added, “We can only conclude that our departments are being targeted to provide cover for the politically motivated closure of ethnic and gender studies departments,” she stated.

Lynn Pasquarella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, is also wary of Davis’ economic claims and is concerned about the political influence felt from the state’s government.

“The administration at the University of Texas-Austin argues that the consolidation of women’s, gender, and ethnic studies programmes constitutes strategic reorganisation aimed at streamlining operations, strengthening academic coherence, and preserving student pathways by positioning departments to be more sustainable, collaborative, and aligned with broader institutional goals.

“The concern is that such manoeuvres can impede autonomy and reduce power and visibility,” she said. “While framed as neutral and efficiency-driven, the decision will inevitably be viewed against the backdrop of these particular fields being politically contested in Texas.

“Restructuring them amid legislative scrutiny raises understandable worries about indirect political influence and how structural consolidation increases institutional leverage over controversial scholarship, creating conditions that make long-term weakening of academic freedom and scholarly integrity more likely.

Loss of focus and autonomy

Submerging WGSS, AADS, MALS and AS departments into one super-department in which more than 800 undergraduates will be taking majors or minors and graduate students is of major concern to Chávez and English professor Lisa Moore, who was hired in 1991 to fill a feminist theory position in the English department.

Just last week Moore told University World News that up to that point, the University of Texas at Austin had been “relatively protected in terms of academic freedom” but had warned that Texas A&M’s (TAMU’s) decision to close Women’s and Gender Studies was part of a political ecosystem that was affecting all of Texas’s public universities.

According to Chávez, who, as well as being MALS department chair, is the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and chair of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, the decision to not completely stop teaching WGSS (as is the case at TAMU) was likely due to “a concern about political fallout because there are a lot of alumni who are somewhere between centre right and far left”.

Yet, submerging her department and the others will strip them of their specificity.

Speaking of the MALS department, she noted that as a standalone, relatively small department it is very focused and very autonomous. “With all of us being experts in Latino studies, we were able to collectively determine the curriculum that makes the most sense and to provide really targeted, detailed, expert-driven education.”

She said they were providing an education model for “literally half of the state’s workforce”. In a department of 80 professors, other professors are going to "want to have their say in what is taught because it is their department too”.

In an e-mail to University World News, Moore provided a historical perspective.

“These fields of study grew from mid-twentieth-century social and civil rights movements that insisted on the humanity of previously stigmatised populations. That’s why it has been so important and intentional to name terms like ‘Black’, ‘Indigenous’, ‘Women’, ‘Gay’, and ‘Transgender’ in defining these fields of study.

“It's to remove stigma and to assert that these human lives and experiences are worthy of academic study.

“To quote feminist writer Michelle Cliff, we are ‘claiming an identity they taught us to despise’. In shuttering these departments and programmes, moving, renaming, and obscuring their purpose, more than 50 years of knowledge, teaching and learning is being rebuked,” Moore wrote.

Labelled DEI

Chávez’s answer to how the termination of these departments will impact students led her to suggest what can be surmised about the longer-term strategy of Abbott’s government.

In terms of the day-to-day lives of students, she said: “One of the functions of our department is not just to provide a world-class education, but it's also to provide a culturally appropriate social environment where Latino experiences, Latino history, Latino culture, and Latino music is going to be centred.

“That's important, when you're a minority on a campus, to have a space where you can go, not only to get your education, but to do so in a way that feels culturally relevant to you.

“Our students love being in a space that's predominantly Latino, that's playing different kinds of Caribbean music, or maybe it's Mexican music or stuff that makes them feel comfortable, and learning from teachers who look like them.”

These departments were vulnerable by implication given that SB 17 banned DEI. In fact, Chávez said, she’s spent a lot of time explaining to journalists what departments like hers were, “because they accuse us of actually being DEI departments”. And it wasn’t only journalists; critics of the departments in the universities “accuse us of actually being DEI”.

By making DEI illegal and considering these departments as manifestations of DEI, it logically follows that they should be brought to heel.

The mechanism for how this could be done is stated openly in Davis’ reference to the new department’s “curriculum review”, which, because of SB 37, cannot be carried out by what had been a fully deputised faculty senate.

It is also evident in SB 17 and Abbott’s gloss on university governance in his State of the State message, which seeks to “expand the ban on DEI in our public universities. We must purge it from every corner of our schools”.

All this has left Chávez thinking. Not only is her department unable to provide a nurturing, welcoming space in the same way, but “different marginalised communities are not going to be able to find us. I suspect they're not even going to let us put stuff like Latino studies on our website”.

New political environment

Faculty and students have little recourse to protest. On 11 February, a delegation from the Students for a Democratic Society was disciplined for walking into the provost’s office asking for a meeting to discuss how the university intended to respond to rumours that the Trump administration will again be seeking to get universities to sign onto a compact, as it did last fall; one student was suspended and the others put on probation.

“We’re in a completely different political environment in terms of what's available to us,” said Chávez, “in terms of direct action, in terms of resistance,” than just a few years ago.

“There’s a handful of us who are, you know, talking to reporters like yourself [this correspondent], because we're willing to risk that, and it’s our First Amendment right in the United States to do that. But I’m not sure what it’s going to look like beyond that,” she said.