A horse-drawn hearse, a Grim reaper, and mourners dressed in black moved through downtown Austin on Wednesday as critics staged a mock funeral for academic freedom, one day before University of Texas System regents are expected to vote on giving campus presidents more power to cut college programs and faculty jobs.
Critics say the system’s proposal would leave fewer safeguards at a time when Texas universities face political pressure over what can be taught and studied.
“I come bearing terrible news,” graduate student Cameron Samuels told the crowd through a megaphone outside the system’s headquarters. “The University of Texas is dead. Yes, you heard that right.”
Samuels, co-founder of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, said the university and “its spirit of academic freedom” had fallen to “a death by a thousand cuts.”
Currently, faculty at UT System schools have a formal role in reviewing academic programs and some jobs before they are cut. The proposed rule would put administrators more firmly in charge of that process and make clear that professors could not appeal a president’s decision on such matters.
The move aims to streamline the process while preserving faculty input and due process, according to UT System agenda materials.
After the first day of meetings got underway, several speakers urged regents to slow down or reverse consolidations of ethnic and gender studies programs. Board Chair Kevin Eltife defended the direction of the UT System. The system has record enrollment, philanthropy and alumni support, and 95,000 students applied to UT-Austin this year for 9,000 spots, he told attendees.
“Whatever we’re doing, we’re not perfect, but we’re damn sure headed in the right direction,” Eltife said. “We respectfully agree to disagree.”
Some UT schools are in the process of consolidating programs tied to race, ethnicity and gender.
UT-Austin officials announced in February plans to merge several race, ethnic and gender studies departments by September 2027. Faculty were later told the consolidation would be completed by this fall. University of Texas at San Antonio officials, meanwhile, said they would combine the university’s bicultural-bilingual studies department with its race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies department by Sept. 1.
In records obtained by The Texas Tribune through public information requests, UTSA cited declining enrollment, financial pressures and an “uncertain policy landscape” among the reasons for its move. UT-Austin officials reviewed data comparing faculty and undergraduate major counts in several departments slated for consolidation with much larger departments, according to the records. For example, data show women’s, gender and sexuality studies had 13 faculty members and 24 undergraduate majors, compared with 53 faculty members and 2,927 undergraduate majors in economics last fall.
Teaching about race, gender or sexuality isn’t against state or federal law. However, elected and appointed leaders in both levels of government are increasingly pressuring colleges over those subjects.
Last year, for example, President Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott issued executive orders directing the federal and state governments to recognize only two sexes. UT-Austin was among the schools offered a Trump administration compact that would have given signatories priority for federal grants and other benefits if they agreed to campus policy changes. Eltife initially praised the proposal as an opportunity for reform, but UT-Austin leaders did not sign it.
Students and faculty dressed in funeral attire marched nearly 2 miles from the UT Tower on campus to system headquarters downtown, retracing a route organizers linked to student protests after former UT-Austin President Homer Price Rainey was fired in the 1940s amid conflict with regents over academic freedom.
The funeral was organized by Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a youth-led advocacy group that held a similar mock funeral for academic freedom at a Texas Tech University System Board of Regents meeting on May 7. The group plans another demonstration Thursday at the University of North Texas System’s regents meeting.
Samuels urged alumni and supporters to withhold donations until UT leaders take steps to protect academic freedom as well as students and faculty members’ rights. In an interview Tuesday, Samuels said about 20 people had signed the pledge to withhold their donations over the past week, though not all listed an amount. Samuels said those who did list amounts had pledged to withhold about $30,000. That total does not include Pamela Ribon, a UT-Austin alumna with an endowed scholarship in the theatre and dance department.
Ribon, who spoke at the College of Fine Arts commencement in 2019, confirmed she will not add to that endowment or contribute to the Annual Fund, which she has done nearly every year since graduating in 1997.
“This is heartbreaking to me,” Ribon said in an email to The Tribune.
Karma Chávez chairs UT-Austin’s Mexican American and Latina/o studies department, which is among those being consolidated. She is also president of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
When she arrived at UT-Austin a decade ago, Chávez thought she had “won the workplace lottery,” she said during the funeral demonstration.
She had come from the University of Wisconsin System, which she said had weakened faculty governance and tenure protections. Now what happened in Wisconsin “appears quaint compared to what this board and our administration at UT have already done and plan to do here,” Chávez said.
“Faculty are assumed to be out-of-touch elites, hell-bent on indoctrinating students, and our beloved students are infantilized and disempowered at every turn,” she said. “Though the UT we once knew is gone, we are its future, and we must fight for the future we want.”
During public comment, Alicia Perez-Hodge, representing HABLA Hispanic Advocates and Business Leaders of Austin and the Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, said regents’ decisions in Austin affect students across Texas. She said she wished she had learned about Simón Bolívar, the South American independence leader, at the same time she learned about George Washington.
“But in South Texas, they taught us about Robert E. Lee,” Perez-Hodge said. “You talk about indoctrination? The man was a traitor to the United States of America, yet we were taught to honor him.”
Under the current policy, tenured faculty in a program being considered for closure must be allowed to contribute to a review through a committee made up of faculty and administrators.
The proposed rule would shift more of that review into administrators’ hands. The president would direct the review and decide what to consider, including cost, enrollment, student demand, completion rates and whether the program fits within the university’s mission. The provost would conduct the review and recommend a decision to the president.
Faculty could still submit information, and a review panel made up mostly of faculty members would consider it before making recommendations to the provost.
The proposal would narrow some appeals. Faculty could not appeal a president’s decision to eliminate an academic program and the jobs tied to it. They could appeal only when some jobs are cut within a program that remains open and only to challenge whether university leaders acted arbitrarily in choosing one professor over another. The proposal would cut the appeal window from 30 days to 15 days.
Presidents could fast-track program closures in rare, time-sensitive cases involving state or federal regulations, including when delays could threaten compliance or students’ eligibility for federal aid. The proposed change does not outline how quickly that process could move but notes that financial pressure or enrollment declines alone would not qualify.
Randa Safady, UT System’s vice chancellor for external relations, communications and advancement services, responded to The Tribune’s questions about the proposed changes saying they are part of a broader effort by regents to streamline rules and “make each section work more efficiently.” The academic program elimination rule was created more than two decades ago and has had little modification since, leaving it to operate under “old language and definitions,” Safady wrote in her response.
Safady said drafts of rule changes are sent to university presidents, faculty representatives, members of the employee and student advisory councils and others for review. She did not say whether the proposed rule could apply to ongoing consolidations at campuses.
