Texas Colleges Rolled Over for Anti-DEI Bill. Now They Face a Broader Attack.

In 2022, I had the strange fortune to take a job teaching decolonial literature courses at a public university in Texas just as our state legislators were gunning to ban critical race theory (CRT) and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs from higher education, buoyed by their earlier success in limiting discussions of race and slavery in K-12 classrooms. At our new faculty orientation, I watched with alarm as the university president gave deft nonanswers to questions about how the university planned to protect instructors teaching within targeted fields, especially those in nontenure track positions. Even then, the message from university administration seemed to be: Keep your head down, don’t fight back or speak up, and maybe you’ll be spared direct attack.

Senate Bill 16’s efforts to restrict classroom discussions on the systemic nature of racial and gender inequality and restrict curriculum on penalty of termination ultimately failed. But the 2023 legislative session would see the passage of another vaguely worded bill, SB17, which legislators would come to use as a proxy for restricting the freedom of scholars to research and teach in fields ideologically opposed by the state — despite the bill’s explicit exemptions for classroom teaching and academic research.

SB17 prohibits DEI initiatives and offices within Texas public universities, as well as DEI considerations in hiring and employment practices. Since its passage, the bill has been used to purge university employees even after their reassignment, close vital student support services, pull university funding from student groups and bar faculty committees and mentorship networks. Eventually, some universities have interpreted SB17 to mean changing course titles and syllabi to remove references to “race,” “gender,” “class” and “equity.”

As SB17 came into effect on January 1, 2024, I watched as universities across Texas became case studies in the strategic failures of rolling over: A hope that by complying in advance or overcomplying with state repression, they might stave off its worst excesses. Task forces formed to audit all university offices, events and committees, identifying which ones would need to be closed or altered. Lists of verboten words were drawn up for monitoring website content.

This caution on the part of administrators was understandable, given the state’s threat to withhold funding from any university that allows anything that Texas legislators consider “DEI.” But as universities have complied, the goalpost has shifted. While teaching and research are explicitly exempted from SB17, a Senate Higher Education Subcommittee interim report to the 89^th Legislature claims that though “curriculum and course content related to [DEI] … does not explicitly violate the letter of the law, it contradicts its spirit” and that “ensuring compliance with SB17 is not enough.”

Universities’ rush to comply thus has not only abandoned targeted faculty and students; it has also permitted an insidious slide from DEI as “offices” to DEI as “topics” — the content and thinkability of entire fields of study.

It’s a sleight of hand that Texas teachers will not led slide. “We will fight any attempt to extend the ban on DEI into the classroom,” says Brian Evans, President of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “At a public university, students and instructors have freedom of speech to engage in discussions from a wide variety of viewpoints—including conservative, moderate, liberal, and apolitical.”

Universities across Texas became case studies in the strategic failures of rolling over: A hope that by complying in advance or overcomplying with state repression, they might stave off its worst excesses.

I left teaching again in May 2024, not necessarily because of SB17, but because opportunities arose to cultivate grassroots media as a more community-accountable alternative to the university; a collective space where the labor of thinking and writing can be useful to movement struggle. But as we enter another bruising legislative session, I find myself wanting to check in on my colleagues who still teach and research at public universities in Texas.

How have anti-DEI efforts in Texas impacted university teachers’ working conditions? What are they anticipating from the current session? And — most importantly, as the Trump administration freezes all federal spending in the name of a Texas-style purge on “DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal” — how has academic labor’s thinking on tactics shifted as state censorship of topics and teachers now aligns with authoritarian and white supremacist impulses at the federal level?

A Year of Overcompliance

Antonio Ingram is senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), which has advocated for racial justice for the past 85 years. Ingram’s own caseload focuses on educational equity and desegregation, including CRT and DEI bans around the country. He got involved in Texas after a group of African American professors reached out to LDF in 2022, alarmed by the anti-CRT stirrings that would become SBs 16, 17 and 18. For Ingram, one of the biggest impacts of anti-DEI bills like SB17 has been on student retention. “These laws are impacting the most marginalized communities,” Ingram said, “taking away resources integral to retention, to graduation, and to just feeling like you belong on campuses that still don’t reflect people’s cultures and life experiences.”

But SB17 has also undermined faculty retention and job security. As SB17 went into effect, Ingram recalled, the email listserv LDF used to support faculty organizing saw a rise in “bounce-back emails from professors who used to be teaching at these schools who [have since] left the state. Even though there’s not a critical race theory ban, there has been a sort of brain drain.”

For Valerie Martinez-Ebers, seeing these impacts on retention is deeply personal. “I remember our struggles then,” she said, referring to her time as a student at the University of North Texas (UNT), where she is now a full professor. “We didn’t have any Latina professors at all. I came back here to teach primarily because of the diversity of the school; the fact that it is a Hispanic-serving institution is a source of pride. So when they shut down the multicultural center, that made me really sad. And of course, they had to do all that as a result of SB17.”

SB17 likewise dismantled the faculty mentoring programs that had been critical for recruitment and retention. In the wake of SB17, “the co-chairs of the Black Faculty Network, well, they got different jobs in a different state. It’s been the same thing for the Latino faculty.” By the end of the academic year, her department alone will lose four faculty members, all of them from underrepresented groups. “They’re going to a state and a university that’s going to be much more accepting,” Martinez-Ebers said.

UNT is one well-documented case in which SB17 “compliance” has meant curtailing teaching outright, with its College of Education making 78 changes to graduate course titles and descriptions and 130 at the undergraduate level. Yet the far bigger problem with SB17 has likely been “self-censorship,” according to Martinez-Ebers, in no small part because UNT maintains a “trust line” where, as she learned at an October 2024 faculty senate meeting, any student or faculty member can “call or send an e-mail and anonymously report us” for alleged violations of SB17, she said.

“I was already worried when I heard about what was happening in the College of Ed,” Martinez-Ebers said. “I was like, I teach a course that’s called, ‘The Politics of Race and Ethnicity.’ So I was thinking in my head, what am I going to call this class?”

Deceleration and Truthout reached out to UNT’s media relations department to inquire how many reports had been made to their “trust line” specific to SB17 since its passage, and whether administrators had comment on faculty concerns about the impact of this system on teaching and research. As of deadline we did not get a response.

Karma Chávez, who chairs University of Texas Austin’s Mexican American and Latina/o Studies Department, likewise pointed out the impossibility of self-censorship for faculty teaching in targeted fields. “I’ve heard so many people kind of casually saying, ‘I don’t think I’m going to teach the race class this year,’ or ‘I’m going to leave that section out on Black studies.’ And I kept saying to people, ‘You know what, you go right ahead and do that, because you can. But I cannot. And when you make those decisions, you’re leaving my department, or Black studies, to fend for ourselves.’”

Ultimately, the mission creep of SB17 has become a job security issue for many on campus. “Even with all I do as a sort of a rabble-rouser and activist and everything else, I [have] never worr[ied] about losing my job,” Chávez said. “This is the first time. And all the people I interact with I think have that same kind of low-level anxiety.”

While Chávez has tenure, Stephanie (who requested her last name be withheld for safety) teaches off the tenure track, covering core courses in postcolonial, Black and Latinx literature for her department. Though her courses have not been altered yet and she has thus far not self-censored her own teaching, this is largely because, as contingent faculty, “I [already] feel like easy picking,” she said. “They’re going to just get rid of me if, you know, I become too bothersome. And I’ve just kind of nihilistically accepted that.”

“The working conditions for the professors become the learning conditions for the students.”

Thus, “the working conditions for the professors become the learning conditions for the students,” as Evans summed up. Martinez-Ebers, for instance, described how several students from one course this semester stayed after class, concerned about SB17. Most were young women of color. “These are freshmen, right? But they’re honor students. They stay on top of things. I had to assure them this is not going to affect what we talk about in this class. But these students were already thinking: ‘Well, I’m not going to get a degree in Latino or Latin American studies. Will that degree even be around?’ I don’t know if you call that censorship, but it definitely is no longer academic freedom when [students] self-select out of courses that have to do with marginalized groups because they’re afraid [they’re] not going to be around.”

New (and Old) Solidarities for Terrifying Times

Based on bills already filed and bills publicly promised, Evans expects the current legislative session to be “a direct continuation from last time. Last session, they told instructors to shut up and teach. This session they’re telling them to shut up and teach, AND they’re going to tell you what to teach.”

In the “already filed” column are SB452, which gives university boards of regents — governor-appointed bodies of mostly Republican, mostly white businessmen — sole authority to appoint department chairs. House Bill 1830 revives last session’s efforts to eliminate tenure, another means of tightening state control over faculty hiring and firing. Bills promised at interim committee meetings in 2024 include efforts to limit the power of faculty senates, another key site of faculty governance; and plans to expand anti-DEI efforts to “programs and certificates,” or teaching and curriculum. On social media, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has also promised another effort to ban “CRT in higher education.”

With these state-level restrictions now compounded by the assaults on DEI and the Department of Education itself threatened by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Ingram acknowledged that faculty organizing around academic freedom and racial justice in higher education will require new messaging and tactics.

“In 2023, we could sort of use what was essentially a tension between the federal government’s preferences on these sorts of issues and the elected officials in Texas,” he said. “That tension will no longer be part of the messaging that we can rely on.”

On the ground, this has manifested as a mood of uncertainty and demoralization among faculty and students alike, Stephanie said, where “everyone really is just so overwhelmed and kind of in survival mode.” And yet, she noted the persistence of student organizing, even a return to analog tactics. “On the outside of my door, I’ve got a Palestinian flag and I’ve also got a rainbow flag. And so, occasionally I’ll get flyers stuffed under my door related to some sort of protest. And I’m sure they’re using social media too, but they’re going back to old-school flyers.”

Chávez articulated the deeper soul searching on tactics underway in other organizing spaces — for now, shifting away from the “possibility for mass organizing” and toward the intimate question at the heart of a mutual aid strategy: “How are we going to take care of our communities? How are we going to make sure that people are going to be OK no matter what happens?”

Recalling reflections by abolitionist thinker and activist Mariame Kaba, Chávez said, “We can’t get bogged down in the shock and awe of this moment and fighting every single thing. A lot of bad shit’s going to happen. We know that. The point of right now is: We need to be building the communities we need for what we’re trying to do next.”

Yet one of the most hopeful tactics to emerge in this moment is a mass organizing strategy, arising from a recognition that what happens to higher education in the legislature is deeply connected to what happens to public education broadly at the K-12 level. Some of this has come about via the Texas legislature’s folding of the Subcommittee on Higher Education, in previous sessions a separate entity, into a new Education K-16 subcommittee.

While this maneuver seems intended to more easily justify expanding K-12 restrictions on curricula to colleges, it has also created opportunities for wider solidarities, exemplified last March when the Texas AAUP affiliated with the Texas American Federation of Teachers (AFT). This has helped overcome some of the challenges unique to organizing university faculty, chiefly its “individualistic approach,” Evans said, and the fact that, often, “professors don’t view themselves as workers.”

But as “more faculty are seeing the external threats,” they’re “realizing they need external advocacy,” he said. Some of this involves a legal strategy, as in the suit filed by AAUP and other groups against Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders. And as they organize under the broader umbrella of public education, professors also more readily recognize they are knowledge workers in strategic alliance with workers across the K-12 system — from “teachers, to bus drivers, to classroom aides, to librarians,” as Texas AFT notes in its “Educator’s Bill of Rights for the 89th Legislature.”

Martinez-Ebers has seen this consciousness grow in her campus’s own fledgling chapter of AAUP as academia’s “every [person] for themselves” ethos gives way to broader solidarity. “Faculty have always been kind of apathetic,” she said, “and particularly [among] political scientists, cynical. But I think we are going to spend a lot more time paying attention, doing interviews, writing our own op-ed pieces, [and having] a lot more physical presence down there [at the Capitol]. That’s a big change right there. I don’t think it’s new, but it’s a reawakening of what we can do grassroots, right?” she said.