University of Texas cutting three race, gender studies majors

The University of Texas board didn’t just trim a few course listings. They took an axe to three entire degree programs in gender, sexuality, and race studies, and the reaction from the left has been exactly what you’d expect. Mass hand-wringing about the death of academic freedom. But someone has to ask the question the professors won’t: what exactly was that degree preparing a student for?

These majors were a tuition-funded subsidy for political activism. When a core curriculum can’t teach a student to read a balance sheet or write a coherent paragraph, but it can marshal an entire department to study the intersection of "Latinx" identity with whale conservation—a real proposal from the UT board meeting, by the way—we have stopped being a university and started being a theme park. The cost of these programs isn’t just the $3,000 a semester in wasted tuition. It’s the four years of a young person’s life spent learning a vocabulary of grievance that evaporates the moment they try to get a job in the actual economy.

What the critics refuse to admit is that Texas isn't banning anyone from reading books. A student who wants to study Michel Foucault or bell hooks can still do that in the history or English departments. What we’re cutting is the pretense that this ideology deserves its own taxpayer-funded silo. We are drawing a line that says a university isn't there to validate your feelings; it's there to sharpen your mind for the world you will actually inherit.

This is a victory because it’s about prioritization. Let UT Austin get back to being the engineering and business powerhouse it was always meant to be. The regents looked at a bloated catalog of self-licking ice-cream cones and decided the state of Texas shouldn't pay for the re-education of adults who already think they know everything. That isn't a war on thought; it's a correction of priorities. And if that makes the faculty lounge uncomfortable, so be it. They could use a little discomfort.