On October 17, Texas Christian University announced it would close its Women and Gender Studies (WGST) and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) departments, folding what remains of the programs into the English department. The official reason given was “low enrollment.” But I know what this decision really means. I know because I’ve watched my university abandon my colleagues, then me, and now entire fields of study—all while extremists documented every capitulation as proof that public harassment campaigns can and do reshape higher education in Texas.
In July 2023, my WGST colleague Nino Testa received death threats severe enough that campus police instructed him to leave. His crime? Teaching a course on the art of drag. Over 200 faculty members signed a petition asking Texas Christian University (TCU) to publicly support LGBTQ+ faculty and students. The administration refused.
In August 2024, it was my turn. Conservative activists, including two elected Tarrant County officials, publicly called for my firing over social media posts made before I even worked at TCU. Local extremists called my work with CRES “anti-white.” Within days, my home address was published online. Death threats arrived in my work email inbox.
TCU’s response? An email from the communications office with “suggestions on what to do when a faculty member is targeted on social media,” which included deleting my posts and making my accounts private. There was no public statement defending academic freedom. No acknowledgment that faculty shouldn’t have to “stay on the downlow”—the actual words used by my dean—in order to avoid targeted harassment. (In a statement to the Texas Observer, TCU said, “The university has a thorough process to notify faculty and staff members and provide them with appropriate guidance and support to mitigate potential risks.”)
This September, another faculty member affiliated with these programs was targeted. Again, no public support from the administration. Now, both departments are gone.
At the October 22 faculty meeting where this decision was officially presented to the English department, I watched my university’s leadership tell contradictory stories about what was happening. The provost insisted political pressure “had no influence” on the decision. But after he left the room, the dean told us something different: “I have been concerned for WGST and CRES since January 20″—the day of Trump’s second inauguration.
When faculty asked for the financial analysis justifying this supposedly “fiscal” decision, the provost said he had numbers but wouldn’t share them. A colleague asked whether we’d ever see this analysis. “No,” he said.
A decision justified by fiscal responsibility, but we’re forbidden from seeing the fiscal analysis. A decision supposedly unrelated to politics, but made by administrators who’ve supposedly been worried about political attacks since Inauguration Day. A decision affecting three academic departments, but made without consulting a single faculty member in those departments—a direct violation of our Faculty Handbook’s shared governance requirements.
(TCU said in its statement: “Changes are rooted in a review that began more than two years ago with a comprehensive academic program review of class sizes, demand for courses and program enrollment. That review has led to adjustments to many courses and programs as well as realignment of academic units.”)
There’s a particular kind of despair that comes from watching an institution abandon its principles in real time. It’s not the dramatic betrayal of a single moment. It’s slower than that. It’s watching your university refuse to defend a colleague, then refuse to defend you, then eliminate entire fields of study—and claim with a straight face that these events are unrelated.
It’s the sick feeling of recognizing that your employer has been making calculations about you that you weren’t privy to. Which faculty do we want to protect? Which programs can we be bothered to keep? What’s the political cost of supporting our own people versus the cost of quietly surrendering?
It’s realizing that when administrators said they supported “inclusive excellence” and “academic freedom,” what they meant was: only until someone complains.
The people who harassed my colleagues and me documented everything. They took screenshots, compiled spreadsheets, and, in some cases, leaked audio that could only have come from other campus employees. They hypothesized that if you target faculty systematically enough, if you get elected officials involved, if you generate enough outrage on social media and in the news, universities will eventually abandon the people and programs you’re attacking.
And my university just proved them right.
Here’s what TCU has taught anyone paying attention:
First, identify faculty teaching about race, gender, or sexuality. Make them individually vulnerable through harassment, doxxing, and threats.
Second, wait for the university to refuse to defend them publicly. Universities are risk-averse institutions. They’ll tell targeted faculty to “stay on the downlow” rather than make themselves targets by defending academic freedom.
Third, keep up the pressure. The harassment doesn’t have to work immediately. Just keep targeting faculty in these fields, year after year. Document the university’s silence as evidence you’re winning.
Fourth, wait for the university to eliminate the programs “for other reasons.” They’ll cite enrollment numbers, budget constraints, or administrative efficiency. They’ll violate their own shared governance procedures if necessary. They’ll refuse to show the financial analysis. They’ll tell contradictory stories about whether politics was involved.
Finally, move to the next target. You’ve just proven the tactic works.
When these departments close, we lose more than two lines on an organizational chart. We lose scholars who have dedicated their careers to understanding how race and gender shape our society. We lose courses where students learn to think critically about power, identity, and justice. We lose intellectual community for faculty and students whose work doesn’t always fit neatly next to the business school.
But we also lose something harder to quantify: the belief that universities are places where difficult questions can be explored, where broad sets of ideas can be examined, where faculty can pursue scholarship without fear of harassment campaigns determining what gets taught.
My university just taught me that belief was naive.
The students majoring and minoring in these departments deserved an institution that would stand behind the fields they’d chosen to study. The faculty who built these programs over decades deserved consultation before their departments were dissolved. The hundreds of students who take these courses to fulfill core requirements deserve to know their university believes this scholarship matters.
Instead, they got a Friday afternoon announcement and a provost who claims he has a financial analysis he’ll never share.
TCU is a private institution. The Texas Legislature didn’t force this decision. No law required the school to close these departments. They did it willingly.
That should terrify anyone who cares about academic freedom.
Public universities can point to legislative pressure and budget cuts mandated by the state. They can say—truthfully—that their hands are tied. But when private universities eliminate programs studying race and gender without any external requirement to do so, it reveals something darker: institutions are abandoning these fields because they’ve decided the political cost of supporting them is too high.
If private universities won’t defend scholarship, where exactly is it safe? If institutions with the resources and autonomy to protect academic freedom choose not to, what message does that send to scholars considering this work?
The answer is already visible. Faculty are leaving the academy. Graduate students are choosing safer dissertation topics. Scholars self-censor before anyone asks them to. And universities are discovering that there’s always another program that might make them a target, always another reason to quietly divest from real intellectual inquiry.
The question isn’t whether my university will eventually regret this decision. The question is whether we’ll recognize the pattern before it’s too late—before every institution has learned that the easiest way to deal with harassment campaigns is to eliminate what the harassers are attacking.
I don’t know what comes next for me in academia. I’ve already been doxxed and threatened for my research, teaching, and First Amendment-protected speech. I’ve already watched my university refuse to defend me or my colleagues publicly. I’ve already seen what happens to programs that study the topics I care about.
But I know this: when universities abandon faculty under attack, when they violate their own governance procedures, when they tell contradictory stories about their motivations, when they refuse basic transparency about their decision-making—they’re not protecting their institutions. They’re hollowing them out.
TCU’s motto is “Learning is power.” I agree. But after watching my university systematically abandon every principle it claims to uphold, I understand the motto differently now. Power goes to whoever is willing to use it. And my university just handed its power to the people working hardest to dismantle learning itself.
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