Defending DEI: What We’ve Learned from Building a Network in Texas

With Donald Trump once again in the White House, attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have gone national. How can leaders who seek to protect racial justice respond?

As a faculty member at the University of Texas (UT) in Austin, I have experienced the disadvantages of a hostile state government, but arguably now have the advantage of seeing what attacks on DEI look like—and an understanding of what kinds of response are possible.

An Attack on “Looney Marxist Professors”

In February 2022, the UT Austin Faculty Council (our academic senate) affirmed in a 41–5 vote (with three abstentions) our right to teach and research in our respective areas of expertise without political or other interference, including our right to teach about race and gender.

Our action did not sit well with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, however. Patrick publicly lambasted Texas faculty, who he called “looney Marxist professors,” and promised to work to end tenure and to ban so-called critical race theory in Texas’s public colleges and universities. As lieutenant governor, Patrick chairs the Texas State Senate, where we anticipated he would try to push his proposals through.

We knew we had three primary tasks in front of us: organize our people, prepare for a legislative defense…and build relationships.

After he spoke out, campus racial justice advocates knew we would have a battle on our hands. In response, that spring a group of UT faculty of color, mostly housed in the school’s ethnic studies departments, gathered in a backyard away from university-owned property to begin to prepare for the inevitable attacks.

We knew we had three primary tasks in front of us: organize our people, prepare for a legislative defense for the upcoming 2023 legislative session (Texas did not have a legislative session in 2022; its standing sessions are in odd-numbered years), and build relationships for what would likely become a legal battle in the long term.

In terms of group assets, we had a few. Our informal group of faculty had a lot of experience studying social movements, education policy, and politics. Several of us were also members of the American Association of University Professors, a professional organization that aims to defend faculty rights in the areas of shared governance, tenure, and academic freedom. We also had close relationships with student organizers.

But we also had some notable weaknesses. In particular, we lacked legal expertise; we didn’t have statewide faculty networks; and given our professional commitments, we lacked time.

Our foresight to gather early and identify our strengths and weaknesses would be useful given that in 2023, Patrick introduced three anti-higher-education bills that became the subject of our attention: SB 16, which threatened to ban teaching on race and gender (with a focus on banning “critical race theory”); SB 17, which sought to ban diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and practices in Texas public universities; and SB 18, which was designed to eliminate tenure.

Organizing Ourselves

Over the course of the months before the legislative session began, we divided our tasks and worked to address our weaknesses and capitalize on our strengths. For example, one group of us decided to reach out to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) to find out what our legal rights were and to understand the kinds of support that the LDF could provide.

LDF not only advised us of our rights, but during the session, they helped to organize faculty across the state of Texas. The LDF brought busloads of people to testify during hearings at the capital and provided a room and refreshments for the long days. LDF lawyers also supplied their own testimony and kept detailed records of what transpired in order to prepare for eventual lawsuits against the bills.

A second group reached out to student organizers. Although political relationships among faculty and students are often frowned upon, we knew that we needed to have a strong student voice to advocate for our shared interests in academic freedom, shared governance, DEI, and a tenured faculty. From that outreach, student leaders developed a grassroots effort they called Texas Students for DEI, which started at UT Austin but eventually gathered students from around the state and provided resources for legislative advocacy. Texas Students for DEI worked closely with faculty, testified, proposed amendments, and engaged in media advocacy.

A third group sought to organize faculty statewide. For this, we began outreach to our local chapter and the statewide conference of AAUP to consolidate our efforts.

But as faculty of color, we were wary of putting all of our efforts under the AAUP banner, an organization that historically had ignored or sidelined race and racism and reproduced discriminatory structures that negatively impacted historically Black colleges. Also, until it changed its position in 2024, AAUP opposed all boycotts of Israeli institutions, in the name of academic freedom. For us, this stance denied the academic freedom of Palestinian colleagues.

Nonetheless, given that the local UT Austin chapter leadership included one of our coalition members and, in general, shared much of our politics, we agreed to share resources with AAUP and work closely with them while retaining our autonomy.

That autonomy resulted in creating a statewide coalition called the Texas Faculty Coalition, which we built after first creating a network of all the leaders of ethnic and gender studies at Texas colleges and universities.

Getting Down to the Nitty-Gritty

Organizing was tedious work that first required us to compile a list of all the institutions, find all the leaders, and then email them at their employer email address to ask for their personal address to avoid violating state law by using state resources for political advocacy.

In a little under a year, we had a list of roughly 1,000 colleagues from every corner of Texas.

After a couple of months, we had a robust email list, so we asked those leaders to distribute a form to their networks wherein their colleagues could use their personal email lists to join the statewide effort. In a little under a year, we had a list of roughly 1,000 colleagues from every corner of Texas.

Because some of our colleagues were at least a day’s drive from Austin, we typically focused our asks on issues like writing op-eds, petitioning university administrators, submitting online testimony, and encouraging others to get involved. We asked too for people willing to speak to their local media.

Playing Defense at the State House

On May 3, 2023, we partnered with the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) for their Freedom to Learn Day of Action and held a protest at the capital. To do so, we connected with the Texas Black Legislative Caucus who invited us to be present for our action that day. The LDF bussed in colleagues from other parts of the state, and in addition to Senator Royce West and Representative Ron Reynolds, we had faculty born and raised in Texas speak at the rally.

By this time, we had an extensive media list and well-developed relationships with reporters, so we received wide media coverage, and were one of AAPF’s featured protests, joining colleagues from around the country who demanded our freedom to learn. We also spent the spring of 2023 in the offices of legislators, attending protests, creating one-pagers, talking to media, and coordinating with our various partners.

Our efforts were, in many ways, successful. SB 16 never made it to the House of Representatives floor for debate. SB 17 was amended in a way that allowed registered student groups to continue DEI work and allowed research and teaching to continue more or less as it had. However, it banned DEI considerations in hiring, made DEI training illegal, ended any campus-based DEI work that was supported by state funds, and closed or required major restructuring of all DEI campus offices. As for SB 18, the bill, as amended, did not end tenure, but it did reduce labor protections.

In addition to these material wins, we also fortified our relationships with partner organizations, including AAUP, which has since adopted positions more aligned with our own. AAUP is now avidly pro-DEI, supports faculty rights to academic boycott, and its current national leadership has taken a much more radical stance on academic freedom in ways that recognize the need to account for power differentials.

Moreover, we continue our relationship with the LDF, which has never stopped organizing faculty in the state and provides ongoing legal advice. Similarly, though many members of Texas Students for DEI graduated, they continue to partner with us in defending academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance.

Furthermore, many of the now-graduated students are attorneys who continue to provide sage advice to us. This has been especially valuable as we face various executive orders from the new Trump administration and face a new onslaught of attacks from the Texas Legislature.

Where We Could Have Done Better

Though our achievements were significant, we also had significant gaps in our organizing. For instance, we never had a good alumni strategy. In part, this had to do with the fact that few core organizers were from Texas. But we also had not maintained relationships with students after graduation in ways that would facilitate participation in our political struggles. This is an area of growth we need to address for the 2025 legislative session.

Also, we were ineffective in lobbying community stakeholders. Although we made attempts to reach out to local nonprofits and business organizations like the Black and Hispanic Chambers of Commerce in our local communities, that outreach never resulted in any partnerships.

Why are there not more partnerships? In part, we were not diligent enough in our outreach, but the broad onslaught of attacks means nearly every single progressive organization in Texas was taxed beyond its means. LGBTQ+ organizations, for example, were faced with a string of anti-trans bills. K–12 organizations were targeted with book bans and voucher bills.

What remains clear is that without organizing stakeholders, higher education in Texas would have been far worse off than it currently is.

Finally, we were ineffective in partnering with our local university administrators, who often saw us as antagonists rather than partners. In the case of UT Austin, despite numerous meetings with our president, provost, and government affairs officer, we never felt that they would really be advocating for the importance of academic freedom or DEI.

While we lack the material evidence to support our view, we feel confident that campus administrators sacrificed DEI in order to preserve some semblance of academic freedom in teaching and research and some version of tenure protections. Perhaps that was worth the sacrifice, but faculty were not included in those backroom conversations.

What’s Next?

Higher education continues to be a primary target of right-wing ire. We are entering the 2025 legislative session in Texas, and we fear that maintaining the level of mobilization we achieved in 2023 will be challenging.

What remains clear is that without organizing stakeholders, higher education in Texas would have been far worse off than it currently is.

Organizing stakeholders, developing media relationships, showing up during the legislative process, and working closely with students are essential tools. Following through on these strategies will continue to be necessary to protect our communities going forward.