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.”
(this could have used another pass by a copyeditor)