UT Austin Axes African Diaspora, Mexican American, Women’s Studies Majors

If you wanted to study the African diaspora at the University of Texas at Austin, the clock is officially running. On Thursday, the flagship confirmed what faculty had been dreading for months: UT Austin is no longer enrolling new students in three majors — Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, and Women’s & Gender Studies — and a fourth, Race, Indigeneity and Migration, is expected to go too.

The news was first reported by Inside Higher Ed on September 18, 2026, and confirmed by the university. The majors have already been stripped out of the admissions application, so students applying to UT for next fall can’t even select them. If you’re currently enrolled, the university says you can finish your degree. If you were planning to declare one? That door just closed.

The part that has faculty heated: nobody told them

Here’s what should bother you no matter how you feel about the programs. According to the Washington Examiner, faculty in the newly consolidated Department of Social and Cultural Analysis got no prior warning — and interim chair Danielle Clealand wrote to colleagues this week that the removal from the application was “done without public knowledge, and it appears our dean did not know about this either.”

Let that sit for a second. The professors who teach these subjects — and apparently the dean above them — found out the majors were being killed after the decision was already made. On Tuesday, Clealand told faculty the provost’s office had “rejected our proposal to keep our majors.” The interim dean’s counteroffer? Fold everything into a single “ethnic studies major with tracks.”

Julie Minich, who teaches literature and Mexican American and Latina/o studies, didn’t mince words: “To me, it’s just such blatant censorship, such blatant viewpoint discrimination.” American studies professor Lauren Gutterman called it the next step in the administration’s “slow march” to shut down ethnic and gender studies entirely. Back in February, when their departments were folded into one mega-department, faculty were told consolidation was how they’d keep doing their work. That promise didn’t even survive the school year.

This didn’t come out of nowhere — meet SB 37

If you’re wondering how a provost gets to delete majors without the faculty even being in the room, look at Austin’s playbook. In June 2025, Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 37, authored by State Senator Brandon Creighton, and it took effect September 1, 2025.

SB 37 did a lot of things, but the two that matter here: it turned faculty senates into strictly advisory bodies with no final authority over curriculum, and it ordered every public university to periodically review its programs — including minors and certificates — specifically to flag low-enrollment ones for “consolidation or elimination.” Every Texas public university has to complete its curriculum review by January 1, 2027. Creighton himself said the law takes on “politically charged academic programs.”

Translation: the state handed administrators a legal eraser and told them which chalkboards to look at. The American Association of University Professors is already investigating what it calls “systematic statewide” political interference in Texas higher education, with SB 37’s implementation right at the center of the probe.

What this signals — for Texas and beyond

UT Austin is the biggest name, but it’s not alone. Students at Indiana University can no longer earn a standalone African American and African Diaspora Studies degree. Multiple campuses have dropped or folded similar programs this year. The pattern is the same every time: consolidate the departments first (UT did this in February), then shrink the majors, then act surprised when people notice.

And here’s what doesn’t get said in the press releases: these fields exist because students fought for them. Black studies as a discipline traces back to the 1968–69 student strike at San Francisco State, where students demanded — and won — a department dedicated to the Black experience. It wasn’t granted by generosity. It was earned by organizing. So when majors like these get cut by administrative memo instead of public debate, it’s not just a curriculum change. It’s the undoing of something students built.

Only American Studies and Urban Studies survived as standalone majors under UT’s new department, according to the university’s spokesman. Everything else the Social and Cultural Analysis department housed got folded, frozen, or cut.

If you’re a student, alum, or parent — here’s what you can do

• Current students: you can still finish your degree — hold the university to that promise in writing, and talk to your advisor about course availability before the catalog shrinks.
• Prospective students: if one of these fields is your calling, look at which Texas campuses still offer them as full majors, and let UT admissions know these programs mattered to your decision.
• Alumni and community: organized pressure has worked before — UT students were already protesting the consolidation on September 10, calling for the resignation of President Jim Davis and Provost William Inboden. Boards listen when alumni and donors talk.
• Everyone: watch your own campus. SB 37’s review deadlines hit every Texas public university by January 2027. The majors cut today at UT are the test case.

The university’s official line is that the majors are “changing.” The faculty’s line is that they were censored. Either way, the students who would have declared these majors next fall don’t get a vote — and they weren’t the ones who closed the door.

Let’s Talk About the Whitewashing Question

Because that’s what a lot of people are calling this. When the three programs on the chopping block are African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies — and nothing else — critics say this was never about budgets or low enrollment. It’s about which stories get to survive in a Texas classroom.

Faculty and student groups are framing the cuts as part of a broader push to scrub race and gender from public education in the state — the same current that carried the DEI office bans, the tenure fights, and the battles over library books. Their argument is simple: you don’t have to burn books if you can just delete the departments that teach them.

UT’s administration frames the move as compliance — aligning programs with SB 37’s restrictions on how race and gender can factor into university operations. Supporters of the law call it institutional neutrality, not erasure.

But here’s the part that won’t sit right with a lot of readers: neutrality that only ever trims the programs built by and for Black, brown, and women scholars doesn’t read as neutral. When the majors celebrating our scholarship are the ones that vanish, “compliance” starts to look an awful lot like whitewashing — whether anybody at the Tower is willing to say the word or not.