Why What's Happening At Texas Colleges Matters For HBCUs
UT-Austin Consolidated Race Studies. What Happens If They Turn To HBCUs Where Race Isn’t A Department But The Lens?
They always announce these decisions in the softest possible language. The words are careful, managerial. They use phrases like streamlining, restructuring, reducing fragmentation, and enhancing collaboration just so they can gut Black-centered scholarship without ever having to admit they’re trying to kill it. But what’s really going down is a quiet choreography between compliant academics and right-wing legislatures who prefer their erasure disguised as fiscal prudence.
Last week, the University of Texas at Austin announced that it would consolidate several race- and gender-focused academic departments into a broader academic unit titled “Social and Cultural Analysis.” Administrators insist the programs are not being eliminated – only reorganized.
Courses will continue. Faculty will remain. Students can still major and minor in related fields. On paper, nothing is disappearing. But history teaches us that institutional change need not be loud to be transformative. It can be procedural.
This decision does not exist in isolation. It arrives in the wake of Texas Senate Bill 17, which effectively dismantled DEI offices at public universities across the state. Since the law took effect, institutions have eliminated diversity staff, shuttered offices, and scrubbed public commitments to race-conscious initiatives. The broader political environment has made clear that programs explicitly centered on race and identity are under suspicion. Against that backdrop, the consolidation of race and gender departments into a more generalized administrative umbrella cannot be treated as routine housekeeping.
What administrators don’t publicly advertise is what typically follows when standalone departments lose autonomy.
When a department loses standalone status, it usually loses budget control first. Hiring lines, programming funds, and staff support are no longer guaranteed. A retirement in Black Studies does not automatically mean another Black Studies hire. That line now competes with other priorities. Over time, vacancies go unfilled, tenure-track positions become visiting roles, and course offerings quietly shrink.
Enrollment then becomes the next lever. When a department’s name disappears into a generic umbrella, recruitment weakens. Fewer declared majors become justification for fewer resources. Administrators point to declining numbers without acknowledging that consolidation helped produce them in the first place.
Leadership and research follow the same pattern. A standalone chair advocates solely for that field, but a consolidated director must balance multiple units. Internal grants and graduate assistantships flow toward areas labeled as growth priorities. Once race-centered scholarship loses visibility and autonomy, it becomes easier to sideline.
Consolidation rarely looks like closure, but it looks like slow compression: fewer hires, thinner course rotations, smaller graduate cohorts. A department becomes a program. A program becomes a track. Survival on paper remains, but structural power erodes. And once that erodes, the rest follows quietly.
And that’s the genius of it. Administrators can avoid protests and headlines screaming “shutdown.” There are just spreadsheets and organizational charts, doing what outright bans would trigger outrage for. It is erasure engineered to look like administration. Think of it as death by memo instead of decree. By the time folks realize what’s been hollowed out, there’s nothing dramatic to point to other than just a series of “reasonable” decisions that somehow always shrink the same kinds of knowledge.
To understand why this matters, we have to remember how these departments came into being. Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Mexican American Studies, and related programs were not created as aesthetic additions to the university. They were born from protest. Students occupied buildings. Faculty risked careers. Communities demanded that institutions acknowledge intellectual traditions long excluded from formal curricula. These departments were structural correctives to centuries of erasure. They represented a refusal to accept that the study of marginalized communities should remain elective, peripheral, or extracurricular.
From their inception, these fields have faced accusations of ideological bias and unnecessary duplication. Consolidation has long been floated as a solution whenever the political winds shift, and the language of efficiency has consistently shadowed that of inclusion. In earlier decades, some institutions folded Black Studies into broader American Studies departments or rebranded Women’s Studies as Gender and Human Development. Sometimes these reorganizations preserved intellectual rigor. Other times, they diluted the political and cultural autonomy that made the departments distinct in the first place. The pattern has repeated itself often enough to warrant vigilance.
What distinguishes this moment is the scale and coordination of political pressure across multiple states. In at least 18 states (including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming), lawmakers have signaled hostility toward race-conscious scholarship and institutional diversity efforts. The shift is not merely rhetorical; it is legislative.
This week’s federal court ruling striking down the Department of Education’s unlawful DEI directive underscores exactly why consolidation has become the preferred tactic. When blunt political interference fails in court, the pressure doesn’t disappear; it just goes quiet. It moves from federal guidance to state budgets, from classroom censorship to administrative restructuring. Courts can stop bans, but they are far less equipped to stop “reorganizations.” And that is why what’s happening at UT-Austin matters even more now, not less.
Funding structures are being recalibrated. Boards of trustees are being reshaped. The message to public universities is unmistakable: race- and gender-focused frameworks are no longer politically neutral. When consolidation occurs in that climate, it cannot be understood solely as an internal academic decision. The most pressing concern is not simply what happens at UT-Austin. What happens if this logic spreads elsewhere, particularly at state-funded Historically Black Colleges and Universities?
Many observers treat attacks on race-conscious programming as phenomena confined to predominantly white institutions in conservative states. That assumption is dangerously short-sighted. HBCUs, especially public ones, are not insulated from state politics. They rely on legislative appropriations. Their boards are often appointed by governors. They depend on state funding. They operate within the same legal frameworks that govern flagship universities.
If consolidation language becomes normalized as “good governance,” it gives lawmakers vocabulary to question Black-centered scholarship everywhere, including at Black institutions. Lawmakers in other states may begin to ask why separate Black Studies departments are necessary at HBCUs if the entire institution already centers Black history and culture.
But there’s a greater danger.
At many HBCUs, Black and Black Diaspora scholarship is not confined to just one department. It is braided throughout the curriculum. Anyone who has visited an HBCU campus, read a syllabus, attended a lecture, or looked at course catalogs already knows that Black intellectual frameworks permeate everything and everywhere. That is literally the mission. It is public, celebrated, and foundational.
Black political thought shows up in political science. The Black intellectual tradition shapes philosophy. Public health courses examine racial disparities. Business programs analyze structural inequality and wealth gaps. Literature departments center African American texts as foundational rather than supplemental. Journalism and film interrogate media bias and racial framing. Even STEM programs increasingly examine how race shapes health outcomes, environmental exposure, and technological design.
If the political logic shifts from “eliminate DEI offices” to “consolidate race-focused departments for efficiency,” what happens when that logic turns outward and asks whether Black-centered inquiry across disciplines is redundant, ideological, or duplicative?
At that point, the scrutiny would not stop at one department. It would seep into general education requirements. It would creep into tenure reviews and hiring lines. It could shape which courses fulfill core requirements and which are labeled electives. The argument would not be framed as anti-Black. It would be framed as standardization. And that is far more destabilizing.
Because if Black Studies is only one department, you can defend one department. If Black intellectual inquiry is embedded across the institution, then the target becomes the curriculum itself. The question quietly shifts from “Do we need this department?” to “Why is race being discussed in accounting? In biology? In engineering?”
The very strength of HBCUs and the fact that Black life, Black history, and Black Diaspora scholarship permeate every corner of the campus could be reframed as excess rather than excellence under hostile political climates. That is the malignant spread, and that would fundamentally alter the intellectual architecture of HBCUs. Because at HBCUs, Black history and Diaspora studies are not add-ons. They are analytic frameworks. They shape how the world is interpreted. To dilute that framework is not administrative tinkering. It is epistemic restructuring.
That is why this moment is not simply about what happens at UT-Austin. It is about whether the language of “efficiency” becomes a Trojan horse for narrowing where and how Black knowledge can live in academia. The consolidation at UT-Austin should therefore be read not only as a local administrative event but as a bellwether. For HBCUs, the stakes are particularly high. These institutions do not merely host race-conscious scholarship; they embody it. Their existence testifies to historical exclusion and to community-driven educational self-determination.
By raising a red flag, I’m not trying to be alarmist, nor am I predicting immediate catastrophe. It means we need to recognize patterns before they solidify into norms. The long arc of higher education shows that fields centered on marginalized communities expand during periods of social reckoning and contract during periods of backlash. We are currently navigating a backlash. The rhetoric may be measured, but the trajectory is visible.
If consolidation becomes the respectable face of retreat at flagship universities like UT-Austin, then HBCUs must recognize what that precedent authorizes. It authorizes questions about scope, necessity, and duplication. And once those questions are institutionalized, they can be used to justify reallocating resources away from Black-centered inquiry, even when that inquiry defines the institution’s mission.
Awareness strengthens defense. Silence does not. If flagship universities normalize retreat, HBCUs must double down on protecting the intellectual sovereignty that defines them. HBCUs cannot afford to be reactive; they must lock in curricular and governance protections before someone else tries to “streamline” them out of existence.
The courts may have closed the door on outright bans, but consolidation is the side entrance, and HBCUs would be reckless not to guard it.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.
SEE ALSO:
Texas Universities Going All In On Censorship And Anti-DEI Policies
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