UT Austin Axes Several Ethnic, Gender Studies Majors

The University of Texas at Austin will eliminate four majors—African and African diaspora studies; Mexican American and Latina/o studies; women’s and gender studies; and race, indigeneity and migration—as the university continues to overhaul its undergraduate curriculum and whittle down its ethnic and gender studies programs. Faculty members in the newly consolidated Social and Culture Analysis Department, which housed those majors, say they received no explanation as to why they are being cut, but some consider the move part of an ongoing effort to gradually gut the department and censor students’ learning.

Danielle Clealand, interim chair of the SCA department, told faculty members on Tuesday that the provost’s office “rejected our proposal to keep our majors,” according to an email shared with Inside Higher Ed. Interim Dean of the College of Liberal Arts Dan Brinks suggested the department instead create an “ethnic studies major with tracks or a SCA major with tracks,” Clealand wrote.

The urban studies and American studies majors, which also fall under the SCA umbrella, will remain, though faculty are confused as to whether American studies is accepting new students at this time. UT Austin students apply to a specific major at the university, and The Austin-American Statesman reported Thursday that students currently applying to UT for next fall do not see an option to add ethnic studies or gender studies as a primary or secondary major. American studies is also missing, the Statesman reported. In an emailed statement to Inside Higher Ed on Thursday, university spokesperson Mike Rosen said that the American studies and urban studies majors remain intact.

“In recognition of the changing degree offerings in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, the University is no longer enrolling new students in three majors: Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women’s & Gender Studies. So, as you might expect, those majors have been removed from the University’s admissions applications to avoid new students enrolling in majors that are changing,” Rosen wrote. “Students currently enrolled in those majors will be able to complete their degree. The Department is encouraged to develop a new degree proposal that represents its combined academic interests. American Studies and Urban Studies majors remain.”

Faculty members in the SCA department came up with a new major over the summer that would replace the race, indigeneity and migration major, but they are currently re-evaluating it in light of the recent eliminations.

Julie Minich, who teaches literature and Mexican American and Latina/o studies, said she was not surprised the majors were rejected but “was still shocked.”

“We had all been fearing it, but it just seemed so beyond the pale,” Minich said. “To me, it’s just such blatant censorship, such blatant viewpoint discrimination.”

For American studies professor Lauren Gutterman, the decision to ax the legacy majors represents the next step in the university administration’s slow march to close ethnic and gender studies programs. When she and her colleagues learned in February that their various departments were being folded into one, they were told “that consolidation would be a way for us to continue doing the teaching and research we’ve always done,” Gutterman said.

But since then, the university has taken several more steps to minimize the programs and to make it easier to shutter them entirely. In May, the University of Texas system established that presidents could bypass typical review procedures and close academic programs in “extraordinary circumstances” that necessitate “accelerated program closure due to regulatory requirements.” The new rules also allow a president to eliminate faculty positions for “bona fide academic reasons,” which include “poor program quality or effectiveness, misalignment with the institution’s mission, failure to meet student or societal needs, low enrollment and demand, and redundancy with other existing more effective programs.”

At the time, faculty feared the policy changes would allow universities to shutter departments for political reasons.

Three months later, UT Austin unveiled its new core curriculum, which booted several SCA classes from the core, Gutterman said. Then, earlier this month, the provost’s office announced that core courses in newly consolidated departments—SCA and the new Department of European and Eurasian Studies—would “no longer automatically” retain their spot in the core curriculum starting this spring, according to an email shared with Inside Higher Ed.

“Only the two new consolidated departments were given this special treatment, and all of our courses were automatically removed from the core starting in the spring,” Gutterman said.

Now, the SCA department is left with few existing majors and no current core courses.

“I think that what this is setting us up for is a mass firing of faculty, because already the UT Board of Regents passed the policy making it much easier to fire faculty regardless of tenure status if they shut down the program or department that you’re in, and then if we go from having multiple degree programs to having one or two, the university leaders could easily say, ‘We don’t need all these faculty to staff this one degree program,’” Gutterman said.

Minich agreed.

“It really feels like we are being sabotaged,” she said. “We’re a new department, and we are being set up to fail.”

Both Minich and Gutterman said the decisions amounted to censorship of students, who often seek out SCA disciplines as secondary majors that will aid them in working with and serving a diverse Texas population when they enter the workforce.

“The censorship that’s happening at Texas A&M and Texas Tech has been much more explicit and direct, saying, ‘You can’t teach courses about race, gender, sexuality.’ Here, what we’re experiencing is an attack on our courses through administrative means,” Gutterman said. “So it might seem less motivated by politics, but the motivations are exactly the same. The mechanism is different, and it is still censorship.”