Like many lifelong Austinites, I watched armed DPS officers break up a mostly peaceful demonstration and arrest dozens of people in response to last week’s campus protests for Palestinian rights. I was very upset by UT Austin’s excessive response by sending me a student. Over the past few days, UT faculty and students have launched a “no confidence” campaign against President Jay Hartzell, protesting the police response and recent eviction of UT faculty involved in the DEI program. This effort definitely has good intentions, but it just doesn’t make sense logically. Rather, it seems to be rooted in completely misplaced anger and frustration.
To all concerned – I completely share your frustration. But we instead distract voters from terrible policies like blocking Medicaid expansion and deregulating state power grids by appealing to phantom social anxieties about equality for racial minorities and LGBT individuals. They should be directed at the extremists in the Republican Party who are trying to do that. They are using our state universities as pawns in a sick game of political chess. To be clear, if Mr. Hartzell had not complied with the ridiculous new DEI bill passed by the Republican-controlled Congress, Senate Bill 17, as legally required under the law; He would have been tarred and feathered by Republican state leaders. He was treated as a political punching bag and then fired by the university’s regents until someone else followed suit.
In case you didn’t know, UT’s president is elected by a nine-member University Board of Trustees, which is appointed by the governor and serves a six-year term. Although regents can be reappointed, Gov. Greg Abbott is currently in his third term, so every regent, whether appointed for the first time or renewed, has personal approval. The selection of a new president is not under the control of faculty, students, or the City of Austin.
Hartzell was appointed in April 2020, just before the killing of George Floyd and the deserved national racial reckoning that followed. However, if a chancellor appointment were to occur in the near future, it would not occur under the kind of benign political climate that prevailed for Hartzell in early 2020. In retrospect, we can see that the ensuing protests against the chancellor were motivated by racial injustice, especially by conservatives in the South, who aimed to correct DEI and grave historical abuses against our nation’s minorities. Other measures polarized reactionary opposition.
Mr. Abbott came under attack from the increasingly radical right wing of the Republican base in the first half of 2020 for initially imposing COVID-19 restrictions on schools, gyms, bars and restaurants. They took advantage of the political opening of racial tensions by launching a campaign. The fight against supposed “wokeness” in higher education. I don’t think Mr. Abbott positively believes in the merits of his own right-wing agitation on race, gender, and sexuality. Most likely, he’s acting like a MAGA freak to secure a spot as Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate or to run for president in 2028. But that doesn’t matter if our beloved higher education institutions are guaranteed to succeed. In his crosshairs. In this new political environment, forcing Mr. Hartzell to step down and allowing Regent Abbott to hand-pick a new president would be tantamount to giving a Molotov cocktail to an arsonist and ensuring that the state’s “top universities” You will become a victim.
I’m not going to defend Hartzell as some kind of saintly figure, but sometimes you have to pick your battles. A left-wing figure who suggests he should lose his job over the excessive police response to last week’s pro-Palestinian rights campus protests will be asked to immediately nominate someone who could be chosen to replace him. Should. Seriously…what is the ultimate goal here? Giving regents Abbott the opportunity to appoint a diabolical right-wing lunatic like Dan Patrick’s wife (who is a former school teacher by the way) as the next university president. So, do you really want to acquire Texas-sized self-ownership? I don’t agree with that.
Dash Kostka, 20, is a former student at the University of California, Berkeley, who was recently accepted to the University of Texas Butler School of Music in fall 2024.
Is there anything you want to say?of chronicle We welcome input on any topic from the community. Submit it now at austinchronicle.com/opinion.
