The University of Texas-Austin's new President Jim Davis didn't waste any time mixing things up with the radical left. The former Texas deputy attorney general is the school's first non-academic hire for president in a hundred years, and he immediately went to work dismantling some of the more egregious examples of woke indoctrination.
Shortly after being hired, Davis convened a committee to review the Department of Liberal Arts, which recommended consolidating the "studies" departments.
African studies, African diaspora studies, American studies (How'd that get in there?), Mexican American and Latina/Latino Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies were combined into a new Department of Social and Cultural Analysis.
This just won't do, whined the woke. We need to be RECOGNIZED! We need to be PAMPERED! We need the school administration to GROVEL before us!
Davis didn't budge. The move to consolidate wokeness was more than just efficiency. All of the "studies" programs were outlets for the teaching of critical race theory. Being placed together, the contagion could be contained.
I remember when the first "studies" programs were offered at my school. At that time, it seemed logical, even necessary. There was a widespread feeling that minority studies were given short shrift. Not just in history, but the arts as well.
What happened? The radicals captured those departments and heavily politicized them. Instead of scholarship, they substituted activism and rank propaganda.
The new departments stuck around even as the perspectives of these activists gradually spread throughout the academy. While today, the formal minority studies programs are largely irrelevant to the modern university’s academic dynamism, they have become the center of its left-wing political radicalism.
Over the last few years, the Texas state legislature—like those of Florida and other states—has tried to return state schools’ focus to academics. Last June, the legislature passed Senate Bill 37, which granted the state-appointed Board of Regents greater say over academic decisions, while reducing the authority of faculty committees.
The Regents in turn installed Davis, the former Texas deputy attorney general, as president of UT Austin—the university’s first nonacademic presidential hire in a century. Shortly after Davis’s hiring, he convened a committee to review the departmental structure of the College of Liberal Arts. One of the review’s two recommendations was consolidation of the “studies” departments.
"Texas’s consolidation reflects the fact that the 'studies' disciplines are not primarily about women, African Americans, America, or whatever their prefix happens to be," writes City Journal's John Masko. "Rather, they are about the application to those topics of critical theory—'a lens,' in the words of Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, 'that detects power dynamics in every interaction, utterance, and cultural artifact—even when they aren’t obvious or real.'"
Obviously, the "studies" programs have little to do with race, heritage, or gender. They are about promoting a culture of grievance on campus and beyond. They're about students honing their skills to better apply the lessons of the radical left when they take to the streets.
If the consolidation underway in Austin is emulated at peer institutions, it will improve the climate of American academia significantly. It will encourage students to study the important topics currently covered by “studies” disciplines through the genuinely knowledge-making methods of history, economics, literature, or political science. And it will elevate fields the primary concern of which is to teach students how to evaluate evidence, not how to act on assumed political conclusions.
If the “studies” fields should exist at all in academia, they should be quarantined to prevent their infecting the rest of the institution. In that spirit, universities around the country should follow Texas’s lead.
Will they? The blue-red divide will come into play again, although leftist administrators at schools in red states may continue to ignore the backlash. This needs to be a generational effort of parents, voters, students, and other teachers and administrators who can recapture higher education from the propagandists and return schools to their primary function as educators and trainers for the future.
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