\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The university \u2013 the largest in the public University of Texas system \u2013 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\u2019s and gender studies.<\/p>\n
The university did not respond to the Guardian\u2019s 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 \u201cthorough review\u201d of the university\u2019s core curriculum \u2013 a set of required courses taken by all students \u2013 \u201cto better fulfill the purpose of this curriculum and identify gaps in quality, rigor, or intellectual cohesion\u201d, the university\u2019s president wrote in an email.<\/p>\n
The taskforce is made up of 18 professors \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
<\/span>An image circulated by students at the University of Texas at Austin.<\/span> Photograph: Obtained by The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re hearing bits and pieces,\u201d said Julie Minich, a professor in the English and Mexican American and Latina\/o studies departments at UT Austin. \u201cWe\u2019re hearing that the dean appointed a restructuring committee. We\u2019re hearing rumors about who\u2019s on it. And then we\u2019re trying to read the tea leaves.\u201d<\/p>\n Concerns escalated after a new state law went into effect on 1 September, disbanding the public university system\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n As the law kicked in, UT Austin\u2019s new president \u2013 the first to be appointed without faculty input \u2013 announced the establishment of a 12-person faculty advisory board entirely selected by him and \u201ccharged with advising on institutional matters and focusing on the best interests of the entire University\u201d.<\/p>\n While UT Austin leaders have said little about their plans for the university\u2019s 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 \u201clegitimacy and trust\u201d in US higher education and universities\u2019 \u201cideological imbalance\u201d, in part blaming the \u201cidentity-studies framework\u201d for them.<\/p>\n \u201cToo 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,\u201d he wrote, repeating a position often invoked by conservatives, including Donald Trump, who have railed against universities as bastions of woke liberalism.<\/p>\n Inboden\u2019s manifesto \u201creally outlines his sense that the humanities and liberal arts are full of pathology and rot\u201d, said Craig Campbell, an anthropology professor at UT Austin. \u201cThat\u2019s what they\u2019re going after.\u201d<\/p>\n He added that the uncertainty had been a major distraction this semester. \u201cIt\u2019s a horrible, horrible climate right now.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe really took this article as an indication of hostility for our field,\u201d echoed Minich, referring to Inboden\u2019s essay. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier this year, the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute also took aim at UT Austin. In a report titled \u201cAre the \u2018Studies\u2019 Worth Studying?\u201d, the conservative thinktank appears to foreshadow the targeting of the same departments faculty now fear are under threat.<\/p>\n \u201cThe \u2018Studies\u2019 \u2013 e.g., \u2018Women\u2019s Studies,\u2019 \u2018Asian American Studies,\u2019 \u2018Critical Disability Studies,\u2019 etc. \u2013 are activist rather than scholarly disciplines,\u201d the report concludes, claiming that they are rife with \u201cgrade inflation\u201d. \u201c\u2018Low hanging-fruit\u2019 remedies to grade inflation include eliminating low-rigor disciplines (such as the Studies).\u201d<\/p>\n Minich flatly rejected the report\u2019s conclusions.<\/p>\n \u201cI would vigorously dispute any characterization of area studies or ethnic studies as ideologically engaged in the indoctrination of students,\u201d she said. \u201cMy goal in the classroom is never to tell students what to think. It\u2019s to give them tools for how to think about a complicated world, and the fact that I feel that I\u2019m being prevented from doing that seems to me to be a real problem.\u201d<\/p>\n Texas \u2013 along with other Republican-led states like Florida and Ohio \u2013 has long led conservative efforts to reshape US higher education. The state\u2019s legislators were among the first to weaken protections for tenured faculty and to eliminate diversity and inclusion initiatives. Last month, a controversy over \u201cgender ideology\u201d in the classroom led to the resignation of the president of Texas A&M University\u2019s main campus.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n UT Austin leaders have not yet responded to the president\u2019s offer. Earlier this week, about 200 students made their opposition to it clear as they chanted \u201cdo not sign\u201d in front of the administration\u2019s main building.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 \u2013 the largest in the public University of Texas system \u2013 has not made any announcements about cuts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28775,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[955,12769,5667,3350,1518,11669,8792,1010,781],"class_list":{"0":"post-28774","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-departments","10":"tag-entire","11":"tag-faculty","12":"tag-fear","13":"tag-liberal","14":"tag-slashed","15":"tag-texas","16":"tag-university"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}