To the world and the UT Community, 

We write as concerned community members to express our firm opposition to UT Admin’s decision to consolidate departments in the College of Liberal Arts (COLA). The present UT Administration (President, Provost, and Board of Regents) has committed “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over” the university (D.O.I). As James Madison warned, the UT Administration’s “accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands…may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny” (Federalist 47).

Provost Indoden’s claim that a “combination of zealous progressives being drawn to academic careers and conservatives being discouraged (and sometimes even purged) from academia has cumulatively produced today's severe ideological imbalance of faculties and university administrations” and ruptured Academia’s social contract with American society, could not be farther from the reality unfolding at this moment. 

No, Provost Inboden, it was not the (imagined) “previous generation's antecedent to wokeness that…privileged progressive sensibilities while seeking to suppress unfavored views,” (Inboden) that violated the social contract, it is the present administration’s tyrannical application of discretionary authority that has suppressed “unfavorable views” and broken said contract.

The “consolidation” of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies has been framed as such, however it is a de facto elimination. By eliminating those departments into “Social and Cultural Analysis,” the Administration is essentially “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” (DOI)  Each Department is an academic “Charter” that grants autonomy—removing it is an act of dissolving legislatures. Each department will lose its individual voice and the freedom for the majority of stakeholders inside the department to meaningfully be heard in future decision-making processes. We oppose consolidation for that and the following reasons. 

As Provost Invoden has claimed, the “social contract also required universities to confront some internal tensions.”

UT Administration has closed all channels of open communication. There has been little attempt from administrators to make themselves available to resolve said tensions as they have refused interviews, requests for meetings, and requests for information. They have closed all channels of open communication. The President and Provost have denied faculty and student requests for information such as minutes from meetings regarding consolidation/elimination. In addition, administrators have not only denied students’ requests for meetings, but charged students with disciplinary action for requesting information. President Davis has forgone interviews with the press entirely. By removing the “voice” of UT constituents, and by extension Higher Education in the state, UT Administration has lost the consent of the governed. “To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.” (DOI)

UT Austin administration (Chair of the Board of Regents Kevin Eltiffe, President Jim Davis, Provost William Indoden, and Dean David Sosa) has not provided a clear answer as to why they are shutting down nationally-acclaimed programs besides a vague reasoning of “inconsistencies and fragmentation across the college’s departments.” (Jim Davis) President Davis, what are those “fragmentations and inconsistencies?” As it stands, UT Austin admin has not provided sufficient answers or shown accountability to their constituent students and faculty whose best interests they are meant to serve. 

UT Admin has not provided any data or evidence to support the decision to consolidate departments. 

UT Admin eliminated the democratic processes that ensure students and faculty have a say in decisions that directly affect their learning and teaching. 

UT Admin made the decision to consolidate/eliminate without consulting high-level representatives from all the affected programs. The decision to consolidate COLA departments was unilateral, from the top-down. Five of the seven departments chosen for elimination and consolidation were not included in the decision-making process for consolidation/elimination. Further, credible sources report that the consolidation/elimination committee intentionally excluded the Department Chair and Graduate Advisor of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies.

UT Admin has failed to provide a clear plan for consolidation. There is no public plan for what will happen to centers and institutes, such as the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS), the Latino Research Institute (LRI), John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and more. This is particularly concerning given the fact that CMAS and Latino Studies have a more than 50 year history at UT Austin. Even if, under the most charitable interpretation possible, the State Legislature did not intend the kind of intellectual unfreedom taking place when they passed SB 37, 17, and 18, this is a direct result of their passage. The Texas State Higher Ed. Committee, whether by force or by accident, is directly responsible for the conditions under which this elimination has been proposed. 

UT Admin has, “accompanied by partisan activism,” begun to “exert an intolerant hegemony that captures entire departments or even fields,” one that “suffocates meaningful academic inquiry.” (Inboden) In his article "Restoring the Social Contract," Provost Inboden stated “the identity-studies framework is not without insight. Race and gender are important parts of who we are and how we interact with each other (and yes, how we sometimes oppress each other)...[a] genuinely pluralist academia will include scholars who focus on such areas as part of a faculty with a broad and diverse range of views.” We agree with that salient truth. However, mathematically speaking, if you consolidate/eliminate four “identity-studies” departments into one, there are then three fewer departments. Consolidation/elimination fails Provost Inboden’s own logic. Flattening so many departments into one is antithetical to the project of generating “a genuinely pluralist academia.” One cannot claim to be expanding the “range of views” while simultaneously reducing the number of platforms available to express them.

UT Admin has shown no interest in a discovery phase of fact-finding about the consolidated departments. Present evidence suggests Inboden, Sosa, Davis, and those who helped make these decisions were not aware that such units as the Latino Research Institute, the Center for Mexican American Studies, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, had such long and prestigious histories, much less how intertwined they are. Even less the degree of cachet these Departments have in the academic world. UT Admin made no efforts to contact faculty, graduate students, or community members to learn about the affected disciplines and have therefore been unaware of the important research emerging from those units currently operating.

UT Admin’s actions have ignored, downplayed, and interfered with the immense research output from these departments and their projects’ ongoing funding sources. Neither Inboden, Davis, nor Sosa have addressed the precarious situation caused by their academic offensive. Their tyrannical impulses have affected everything from recruitment, fellowships, teaching, undergraduate studies, and community outreach. We believe that a responsible and professional administration, overseeing a world class institution of the highest order, must strive to understand the stakes of a decision to flatten academic freedom. Inboden, Davis, Sosa, and Eltiffe, do you have answers to the following (simple) questions? What do we stand to lose as an institution? How will these optics affect our standing as a world class research university? What is Latina/o Studies? Might the experts in African Diaspora Studies explain AADS? How do intersectional studies provide a fuller understanding of Texas history and its central place in the global economy? All present evidence suggests UT Admin, including Inboden, Sosa, and Davis, are confused or unsure about what actually happens in “identity studies” departments or how to accurately define “identity-studies,” hence their proposed elimination. 

UT Admin is accountable only to their own ideology, one that dictates a stark and limited rubric for higher education in the State of Texas. This entire situation suggests their ideology is guided by fear and discomfort, not curiosity or courage; or “what it means to be human and what we hold in common” (Inboden). UT has a reputation for educational excellence and exerts immense influence on how Universities nationwide conduct themselves. As it goes, "what starts here changes the world." What happens here over the coming months and years has the potential to radically reshape Higher Education in both Texas and the greater nation. First they will come for "identity-studies," but this is merely the initial elimination of many; a cover for their assault on intellectual freedom.  

At every stage of this process stakeholders have “petitioned for redress in the most humble of terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury” (DOI). “A Prince (or Administration) whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free” academic institution.

We, the below signed, demand an immediate halt to the consolidation process, a public release of all related meeting minutes related to the consolidation/elimination decision, and a restoration of the democratic processes that ensure faculty and students have a meaningful say in the governance of their own education.

Signed, 

The Coalition to Save Latino Studies at UT