Faculty and staff at colleges and universities across San Antonio and Texas are growing increasingly uncomfortable in the wake of two new laws that do away with offices focused on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) while also changing the way that tenure works for professors.
Interviews with staff and faculty in recent months by the San Antonio Report reveal growing concerns over the possibility of retribution against professors for the content they teach, or the speech they participate in, driving some to actually leave the state — and in one case, the country — in order to find jobs with more sound academic freedom.
The way that some administrators have handled protests and academic events related to the Israel-Hamas war has compounded those sentiments on some campuses.
Kerry Sinanan, who was a professor at UTSA from 2018 to the summer of 2023, said the system of higher education did not arrive at this inflection point overnight.
Laws passed in 2021 restricting K-12 curriculum impacted her graduate students, many of whom were also K-12 teachers, and debate over similar laws drove more faculty of color to leave over the years.
“When I first got there, there were seven faculty members of color,” she said, referring to the UTSA English Department. “Part of the story is all but one left in the five years I was there.”
Sinanan left UTSA to teach at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, before Senate Bill 17, which bans DEI offices, went into effect. But the college had already become inhospitable for the topics she was hired to teach, she said.
“It became very, very clear that one way or another, teaching anything about race [or] slavery, whether in literature or within a historical context, was becoming increasingly unsafe,” she said.
Sinanan was hired as an expert immigrant hire from Ireland to teach 18th and 19th century transatlantic studies and to expand the department’s teaching on transatlantic slavery and postcolonial and decolonial methodologies.
Termination fears
University leaders across San Antonio stressed in interviews that content taught in the classroom is exempt from SB 17, which restricts diversity language in hiring and job descriptions, as well as disbanding offices of diversity and inclusion and others with similar goals.
But Sinanan said that retort misses the context of Senate Bill 18, another law which changes how the job protection known as tenure works for professors.
“SB 18 … essentially says that tenure is at the behest of the board of governors,” she said. “If there is a complaint made about you, regardless if it breaks SB 17, if the board of governors decide, even wrongly, that you broke SB 17, you can get sacked.”
Such complaints were becoming more common in the last years she was there, she said, with one student taking content from her class to a pastor with complaints.
“It just became totally unsafe,” she said.
A current UTSA professor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to policies against speaking to the media, said that planning for classes has been difficult this year without assurances from the UTSA administration that classroom content would be exempted.
UTSA did not respond to emails seeking comment on this concern.
The university shuttered its Office of Inclusive Excellence last year, and scrapped plans to open an alternative office early in January.
UTSA is not the only institution losing professors.
Faculty referred to colleagues leaving, or thinking about leaving Palo Alto College, part of the Alamo Colleges District among others in recent months as institutions have made changes to comply with the new laws.
But a mass exodus, predicted in the wake of a faculty survey released by the American Association of University Professors last fall, has not yet materialized.
Hiring poses challenges
The gradual departures, paired with difficulty finding replacement faculty, foreshadow an equally troubling trend, however, according to advocates and faculty interviewed by the Report in recent months.
In the survey which was released in September, two-thirds of respondents said they would not recommend Texas for a faculty position to their colleagues out of state.
With any amount of faculty leaving, and others retiring, this could spell trouble in the years to come, according to Jeremy Young, the Freedom to Learn Program director at the nonprofit PEN America, which focuses on the impact legislation has on academic freedom.
“If you are only able to hire people in one state and you’re missing out on the national market of top scholars and teachers, you’re going to have trouble … in some cases filling jobs period,” he said. “As time goes on, more and more people will leave or retire through the process of normal attrition, and you’re going to have more and more strain on the applicant pool.”
That is a concern for researchers like Wenshe Liu, a chemistry professor and the Harry E. Bovay, Jr. endowed chair at Texas A&M University in College Station.
Liu has been in Texas since 2007 and has marveled at the amount of support, freedom and resources given to higher education institutions in the state for scientific advancement and research.
“I didn’t really plan to stay in Texas for so long,” he said. “I have had many opportunities to leave, but every time, I decided to stay here.”
His colleagues in other states have to rely mostly on federal research grants for similar research, he said.
But when talking with prospective faculty members at symposiums he arranged, including a recent one in Florida, he has run into hesitation following the passage of the laws in Texas.
“A lot of people are worried about the removal of the DEI office,” he said.
“While the state [Legislature] passed it for their own reasons, it sent a message to a lot of people who don’t know the reason why it was passed and worry that they aren’t going to be treated so well,” he added.
In addition to recruitment struggles, Liu said his colleagues also have felt less supported since the office closed.
“When we had the office, for years, they were promoting diversity in hiring, and I have a lot of minority colleagues, myself included, and we kind of felt welcomed here,” he said. “And we liked to contribute more because we felt welcomed.”
Now, that feeling has been replaced with one of uncertainty.
In his own work, Liu said he has seen the value of having a wide range of ideas from people with varying backgrounds.
“I never really viewed diversity as a problem,” he said. “I always viewed that as a great thing.”
Faculty declines unique to each institution
The recent changes are not the only culprit leading to shakeups at colleges and universities. Each face unique challenges and are continuing to recover from declines in faculty and students amid the pandemic.
At Texas A&M University-San Antonio, for example, a spokesperson said that no real changes will come about as a result of SB 17.
However, in the last academic year, 19% of faculty left the university over what staff said in interviews was a decline in morale and trust between faculty and leadership.
Salvador Hector Ochoa, the new president of the university, has made quick work of meeting with faculty in an effort to rebuild trust. He, too, said in an interview in October that DEI and other issues driving staff away were not as much of an issue at TAMU-SA.
“That has not been evident here at this campus,” he said. “There’s been legislation … and as a state institution, we will follow the rules and regulations as a system in the state, but I don’t think that changes our mission, our focus and our commitment.”
Private universities exempt
The political climate that has cast a pall over public colleges and universities has not impacted private institutions of higher education in the same way.
Instead, those schools have continued efforts to hire, elevate and discuss topics related to diversity, race, equity and inclusion, according to interviews with faculty and staff in recent months.
That’s what attracted Teófilo Reis to San Antonio. Last year, he started at Trinity University as a professor of the philosophy of race.
While initially cautious about teaching in Texas given the political atmosphere, Reis, who is from Brazil, said Trinity University’s desire to hire someone to research and teach the philosophy of race was reassuring.
“Once I saw the university saying, we want to hire someone to do philosophy of race, here in San Antonio … that sounded to me like a message saying, ‘We are here, we want people to contribute to this important discussion,'” he said. “We have to discuss, we have to have discussions, because that’s how we construct public societies.”
Reis, who is starting his second semester teaching at the private liberal arts university, said he doesn’t see a benefit from shying away from the sometimes divisive topics related to race.
“When we have difficult topics, just trying to sweep them under the rug doesn’t work,” he said. “We’ve learned through history that pretending that we don’t have a problem or just behaving as if everything worked fine doesn’t help solving problems. This will not help us deal with any problems related to race, it is likely to make things even worse.”
