When Texas A&M University notified faculty last week that it is eliminating its women’s and gender studies program, low enrollment and cost were cited as reasons.
“One of the primary duties of university administrators is to be good stewards of public money,” wrote Alan Sams, Texas A&M’s provost and executive vice president, according to The Texas Tribune. “Even the smallest programs require ongoing investment in faculty time, staff support, and administrative oversight.”
Actually, there’s a larger context for the cuts at Texas A&M.
Actually, there’s a larger context for the cuts: Faculty were told last month that approximately 200 courses in the College of Arts and Sciences could be affected by restrictions on classroom discussions about race and gender approved late last year. After a student secretly recorded an A&M professor teaching differences in gender identity, expression and sexuality in a summer course, the A&M System Board of Regents required campus presidents to approve courses that advocate for “race and gender ideology.” In December, the board revised that policy to prohibit discussion of these topics in core curriculum courses unless university administrators determined that the material serves a “necessary educational purpose.”
Professor Melissa McCoul was fired after a video of her exchange with a student went viral. (McCoul filed a lawsuit against the university Tuesday.) Now, it seems, the women’s and gender studies program is paying the price for daring to defy the Trump administration’s assertion that college classrooms are no place for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, teachings.
The women’s and gender studies program is paying the price for daring to defy the Trump administration’s assertion that college classrooms are no place for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, teachings.
All told, these developments signal a continued federal assault on academic freedom. Texas A&M administrators apparently would have us believe that women’s and gender studies is a frivolous discipline, easily disposed of. But that’s untrue, especially to those of us who have been educated through its multidisciplinary approach to teaching gender, sexuality, expression, race, class, nationality, ability, ethnicity, power and privilege.
I am a trained journalist, a discipline that values the illusion of “objectivity,” or the idea that it is possible to tell stories without considering context. After completing journalism school in 2012, I was capable of reporting “impartial” stories, but I didn’t have the context — historical, cultural and political — to understand journalism’s power as a tool of liberation. Women’s and gender studies changed that for me.
When I began pursuing a graduate minor in women’s, gender and sexuality studies, I wasn’t sure I was cut out for what the discipline asked of me. I felt frustrated by the language (what did hegemony even mean?) and pushed to my limits as a thinker and writer. But things clicked after I attended a guest lecture about how Tyler Perry’s productions perpetuate age-old controlling images about Black women. Suddenly, women’s and gender studies blew up my world in the best possible way. Rather than remaining indoctrinated by patriarchal norms, I was being trained to challenge those norms, dismantle them and envision an expansive world that could exist in its place.
Rather than remaining indoctrinated by patriarchal norms, I was being trained to challenge those norms, dismantle them and envision an expansive world that could exist in its place.
Through this new purview, I began to see more broadly — things like how pop culture can both challenge and reinforce -isms and -phobias, how our cultural protection of R. Kelly came at the expense of his young Black victims, how Black children are adultified while white children are coddled and how some retellings of the Civil Rights Movement erasee essential work performed by Black women activists. As I took courses about Black feminism and critical race theory, my journalism became even more enriched.
In these courses, I learned about historical figures such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who courageously used journalism to report about lynchings and call for an end to the violent practice, and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who founded the Woman’s Era Club newspaper and convened the inaugural National Conference of Colored Women. These women and many others intentionally blurred the lines between journalism and activism because their commitment to justice outweighed any supposed commitment to “objectivity.” I began developing a more expansive view of the possibilities of journalism.
That is the promise of women’s and gender studies. The first women’s studies program was founded in 1970 amid a national women’s movement. It emerged from a feminist push in higher education and philanthropy to offer research and teaching that furthered specific political and social goals, including closing the wage gap and passing the Equal Rights Amendment. Women were finally being considered worthy of serious scholarship in academia. Gender studies emerged specifically to focus on gender and sexuality as it relates to gender-expansive people. Over time, the disciplines have overlapped.
Scholars join these departments from a range of disciplines: history, sociology, law, medicine, communications and more. Women’s and gender studies programs are as expansive as the scholars invested in the discipline. That’s also the reason women’s and gender studies are under political attack. Such studies furthered a movement to offer women and other marginalized groups rights we’ve long been due, rights that the Trump administration aims to erode. As Monica Potts wrote in The New Republic, the goal is to attack higher education, which has been “an engine for women’s equality” since the 1970s, and reverse the economic gains women have made as a result.
It’s no coincidence that this political targeting is happening at the same time Black women are being pushed out of the workforce in record numbers. It is all part of the white nationalist vision laid out in Project 2025. But those of us trained in women’s and gender studies will continue speaking truth to power because that is how the discipline has trained us. We’ve read far too much about those who have similarly faced down regimes set on stripping us of our rights to succumb to these bids for ideological control over what we learn and how we learn it.
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