Faculty at the University of Texas at Austin fear entire academic departments may be on the chopping block after the university quietly appointed a committee charged with studying the restructuring of its liberal arts programs.
The university – the largest in the public University of Texas system – has not made any announcements about cuts or restructuring, but faculty there have learned the committee was established earlier this semester and tasked with a review that they believe is focused on ethnic and regional disciplines such as African and African diaspora studies, Mexican American and Latina/o studies, as well as women’s and gender studies.
The university did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment and faculty who asked administrators about the committee said they have received no clear answers. On Thursday, UT Austin also announced a taskforce to conduct a “thorough review” of the university’s core curriculum – a set of required courses taken by all students – “to better fulfill the purpose of this curriculum and identify gaps in quality, rigor, or intellectual cohesion”, the university’s president wrote in an email.
The taskforce is made up of 18 professors – none from the departments where cuts are feared. Students have circulated an image in private emails and chats mocking the fact that almost all faculty on it are white.
An image circulated by students at the University of Texas at Austin. Photograph: Obtained by The Guardian
“We’re hearing bits and pieces,” said Julie Minich, a professor in the English and Mexican American and Latina/o studies departments at UT Austin. “We’re hearing that the dean appointed a restructuring committee. We’re hearing rumors about who’s on it. And then we’re trying to read the tea leaves.”
Concerns escalated after a new state law went into effect on 1 September, disbanding the public university system’s long-established faculty senates and giving university administrators near-absolute control over university governance matters. While university senates hold advisory roles at most schools, they are generally a primary outlet for faculty to engage in decisions concerning the university.
As the law kicked in, UT Austin’s new president – the first to be appointed without faculty input – announced the establishment of a 12-person faculty advisory board entirely selected by him and “charged with advising on institutional matters and focusing on the best interests of the entire University”.
While UT Austin leaders have said little about their plans for the university’s future, the new provost, William Inboden, recently outlined his vision in a 7,000-word manifesto published in National Affairs, a rightwing magazine. In the essay, he laments the crisis of “legitimacy and trust” in US higher education and universities’ “ideological imbalance”, in part blaming the “identity-studies framework” for them.
“Too many American history courses present the American past as a litany of oppressions and hypocrisies, leaving students with an imbalanced view of the United States,” he wrote, repeating a position often invoked by conservatives, including Donald Trump, who have railed against universities as bastions of woke liberalism.
Inboden’s manifesto “really outlines his sense that the humanities and liberal arts are full of pathology and rot”, said Craig Campbell, an anthropology professor at UT Austin. “That’s what they’re going after.”
He added that the uncertainty had been a major distraction this semester. “It’s a horrible, horrible climate right now.”
“We really took this article as an indication of hostility for our field,” echoed Minich, referring to Inboden’s essay. “The combination of the formation of this committee without any communication with the faculty and then this article published by the provost has really put a lot of people on edge.”
Earlier this year, the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute also took aim at UT Austin. In a report titled “Are the ‘Studies’ Worth Studying?”, the conservative thinktank appears to foreshadow the targeting of the same departments faculty now fear are under threat.
“The ‘Studies’ – e.g., ‘Women’s Studies,’ ‘Asian American Studies,’ ‘Critical Disability Studies,’ etc. – are activist rather than scholarly disciplines,” the report concludes, claiming that they are rife with “grade inflation”. “‘Low hanging-fruit’ remedies to grade inflation include eliminating low-rigor disciplines (such as the Studies).”
Minich flatly rejected the report’s conclusions.
“I would vigorously dispute any characterization of area studies or ethnic studies as ideologically engaged in the indoctrination of students,” she said. “My goal in the classroom is never to tell students what to think. It’s to give them tools for how to think about a complicated world, and the fact that I feel that I’m being prevented from doing that seems to me to be a real problem.”
Texas – along with other Republican-led states like Florida and Ohio – has long led conservative efforts to reshape US higher education. The state’s legislators were among the first to weaken protections for tenured faculty and to eliminate diversity and inclusion initiatives. Last month, a controversy over “gender ideology” in the classroom led to the resignation of the president of Texas A&M University’s main campus.
UT Austin scrapped its diversity initiatives and laid off about 60 staff working on related programs before Trump returned to office. It also closed its Multicultural Engagement Center and cancelled its traditional bilingual graduation ceremony for Spanish-speaking students.
The university was among the first institutions the Trump administration offered preferential access to federal funding in exchange for an overhaul of its policies to align with the administration’s agenda, an offer since extended to all universities in the country. The University of Virginia, MIT, Brown, the University of Southern California, and the University of Pennsylvania have turned it down.
UT Austin leaders have not yet responded to the president’s offer. Earlier this week, about 200 students made their opposition to it clear as they chanted “do not sign” in front of the administration’s main building.
