Statement Condemning UT's COLA Consolidation

UTGWU finds ourselves writing yet another statement condemning the UT administration’s recent changes to our campus’s departments, centers, and resources. On February 12th, UT faculty, staff, and students received an announcement via email regarding the consolidation of seven independent departments into two new conglomerate departments. African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS), American Studies (AMS), Mexican American and Latinx Studies (MALS), and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) are to be consolidated into the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, effectively sanitizing their radical histories. The Department of French and Italian, Germanic Studies, and Slavic and Eurasian Studies are to become the Department of European and Eurasian Studies. Even more recently, the announcement of a School of Computing, which will absorb the School of Information, has thrown the future of the Libraries and Archives program into question. We see these changes for what they truly are—an erasure of vital academic units and another step in degrading academic freedom at the University of Texas at Austin.

This announcement from President Jim Davis came as no surprise given the fact that faculty, staff, and students raised the alarm in October about the “Advisory Committee on Administrative Structure” that Government professor Daniel Brinks chaired throughout the Fall 2025 semester. Of course, due to SB 37—which went into effect on September 1st, 2025—faculty senates were stripped of consequential input while Curriculum Advisory Committees were formed to oversee curricular “efficiency.” The Advisory Committee on Administrative Structure was a charade of the democratic process. In reality, UT’s administration already knew how they would proceed. University administrators should be ashamed of their top-down decision, and we call on them to reverse it.

We know this because Provost William Inboden already told us his plan. In his Fall 2025 National Affairs op-ed entitled “Restoring the Academic Social Contract,” Provost Inboden makes clear his political goals: to prioritize far-right disciplines and programs while categorizing those he doesn’t like as “Grievance Studies.” Restoring the social contract, he argues, requires “eliminating diversity statements [and] curtailing frivolous general-education classes” as well as creating schools of Civic Thought—like UT’s new School for Civic Leadership (SCL). The SCL’s newly created “Great Books” major promises to “ immerse students in texts that have shaped Western civilization.” It is clear that Inboden and the UT administration only include white people in their understanding of the “humanities.” We are only at the beginning of their efforts to transform the Liberal Arts into a vehicle for far-right indoctrination.

Even still, last week’s announcement hurt. Radical student movements fought for these departments and fought for real representation. They demanded a change to UT’s campus which has historically been littered with Confederate statues and buildings named after racist donors. These departments have award-winning faculty, teach important classes across the social sciences and humanities, and serve as community hubs for thousands of students. There is no real question about their effectiveness or rigor. UT admin are not having a good-faith discussion about these programs, but blatantly using dog whistles to censor critical studies that they find threatening.

As graduate students and workers on this campus, we see the writing on the wall. We will continue to call it what it is: an open embrace of far-right rhetoric and an attack on academic freedom. Even in the face of this destructive consolidation, we will fight for these programs to continue accepting new graduate students, to continue granting undergraduate majors and minors, to continue receiving adequate funding, and for their curriculum to be incorporated into university and college-wide requirements.