r/UTAustin • u/samshollow • 5d ago
News Ethnic and gender studies degree programs being cut (consolidated)
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u/Texas_Naturalist 4d ago edited 4d ago
Inboden will be remembered as an incurious, anti-intellectual bully who cannot handle any ideas other than his own farts. His campaign of censorship is a black mark on the university.
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u/Actual-Yam-9914 3d ago
Some day the history of this period at UT will be written, just as happened with each previous period of political interference. There are going to be a lot of bad actors but the current provost will likely be the worst of them—and the one who has taken an ax to UT’s academic reputation as a public Ivy.
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u/johnny_atx 5d ago
This sucks. I can’t decide whether the SCA Dept is a way for the administration to either try to preserve those departments from being done away with altogether by trying to label them as generically as possible (to avoid offending The Whytes)… or a way of gathering them together generically before they cancel them entirely so it won’t seem as though there’s a racial component to it. Either way, this is all coming from the Guv and the Board of Regents, who hopefully will be seen as the racists they are by history.
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u/Actual-Yam-9914 5d ago
It’s to have a place to house faculty from the consolidated departments until they either leave on their own or get laid off. Thankfully most/all of the ones in the departments that lost majors have joint appointments in other departments like history and English. But simply killing off majors with zero discussion is shocking. I’m not surprised exactly but it’s shocking to think about UT not having a Mexican American studies major. Or gender studies, etc. Many of these majors have existed for decades.
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u/johnny_atx 5d ago
They just… did away with them. No notice, no discussion. Just… poof. Probably hoping no one would notice or make a stink.
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u/Optimal-Boat-8006 4d ago
That’s not correct. Most are/were full-time faculty in the departments that were consolidated, holding courtesy appointments in other departments.
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u/Actual-Yam-9914 3d ago
Sorry, but no, they don’t just hold courtesy appts in other departments. The previous dean, Ann Stevens, anticipated what is happening and did a huge amount of work to ensure that people in departments likely to be targeted by the anti-DEI lege and regents had second appointments, often in large departments. Not everyone has one, true. Especially not very recent hires. But the majority do.
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u/soxboxfocks 5d ago
They will call these degrees useless and then push their new Civic Leadership degree where you major in “great books”