Across the United States, the rapid shift in equity work and initiatives has had a substantial impact on universities' functions and operations. Amid backlash and the rollout of anti-DEI efforts, higher education stakeholders have seen state and federal governments push to neutralize “gender and race ideologies.”
Specifically in Texas, university professors in gender and ethnic studies are navigating a tense sociopolitical climate, as many professors in the fields of Women’s and Gender Studies, African and African American Studies, Latino/x Studies, American Studies, and other ethnic studies are being heavily attacked and surveilled by state and university policies. Increasingly, Texas institutions are beginning to condense their identity-based programs in ethnic and gender studies under broader administrative department names.
At the University of Texas at Austin, the African and African Diaspora Studies; Mexican American and Latino Studies; Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and American Studies departments are being consolidated as the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. At the University of Texas at San Antonio, the Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is being absorbed by the Department of Bicultural-Bilingual Studies – a department that has traditionally focused on education and language acquisition. UTSA faculty and students have noted that this specific umbrella effectively "erases" the explicit visibility of race and gender studies from the departmental directory. And Texas A&M University chose to completely eliminate its Women's and Gender Studies program rather than rebranding or consolidating it under a broader social science department.
Some argue that consolidating gender and ethnic studies is a means of protecting these programs from scrutiny in the current political climate by clustering them together, while others say the strategy will only accelerate the erasure of their cultural histories. However, Dr. Karma Chávez, the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and chair of the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, called the approach is a “political takeover,” saying the consolidation is “not protecting anyone because all of the targeting has not happened to the same bodies of thought, but actually to the same groups of [minoritized] people.”
“When you lump [the disciplines] in together as one thing, you’re actually erasing decades of scholarship and independent intellectual thought,” she continued. “The only thing that brings them together is the fact that they’re targeting marginalized people, especially on the lines of race, gender, and sexuality.”
One UT San Antonio faculty member, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, shared her concerns about how the pressures surrounding gender and ethnic studies are creating new tensions at her institution, saying the current guidance from UTSA administrators is to “stay under the radar and not bring attention to themselves,” which she called a “survival strategy” for faculty who are otherwise instructed to “be grateful and not complain or contribute to attention being brought upon the [institution and departments].”
While UTSA’s administration sees this as the best way to stay the current political climate, the faculty member says it has created “in-fighting” among her colleagues. She pointed to a lack of guidance from the institution as it prepared for the departmental merger, saying, “They want the task force to come up with the guidelines. … But I don’t know if it’s to make it look like they’re giving control to faculty to have some oversight. But it’s causing friction, unfortunately, between faculty that doesn’t have to be there.”
