The Trump regime’s attacks on public education at the federal level are filtering down to the states, like in Texas where the flagship university, the University of Texas, recently consolidated African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Mexican American and Latino Studies into a single unit. On today’s show, host Esty Dinur is in conversation with scholar and friend of the program, Karma Chávez about what’s happening in Texas and around the country.

Chávez says that we’re seeing a “manufactured backlash” on public education that conservatives initiated after the summer of rebellions and racial reckoning of 2020. She points to three pieces of legislation in Texas from 2023 that changed the landscape of academic freedom and paved the way for the more recent attacks on fields like ethnic studies–fields that were born from student activism–and what conservative administrators consider “unnecessary controversial subjects.” Now, as ethnic and gender studies programs have been restructured, students are registering for courses that may not exist in the Fall.

The recently consolidated departments at UT will now be called “Social and Cultural Analysis.” Chávez says this is reflective of a larger shift toward the language of “civics” that has gained popularity with conservative politicians and is championed by far-right think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. Though the attacks on higher education and DEI are most apparent in Southern schools like the University of Texas, Chávez cautions that what’s happening there is possible anywhere.

Karma R. Chávez is Chair and Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas – Austin. She is author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013); Palestine on the Air (University of Illinois Press, 2019); and The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021). She is a co-founder of her university’s Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine and president of the American Association of University Professors Chapter at UT Austin.

Featured image of the University of Texas at Austin via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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