Feedback: October 9, 2026

Dear Editor,

At the end of last December, I retired from UT, where I had taught in the Department of French and Italian for over 30 years. While there has been a lot of deserved focus on the fate of gender studies at UT, the changes have been even more sweeping, and, I dare say, damaging. The College of Liberal Arts is slowly being reshaped (not to say eviscerated) to make way for faculty and offerings in line with the ideological direction of the current UT president, provost, and state government. There has been minimal consultation, and the major structural and curricular changes have been chaotic, driven by committees whose members don’t come from the affected departments. My former department, French and Italian, was combined with Germanic Studies and Slavic and Eurasian Studies over the summer without giving the faculty a chance to develop a shared sense of purpose. Some of my colleagues have told me that they’re simply waiting passively to learn what comes next. Despite official pronouncements to the contrary, the consolidation makes little pedagogical sense, and surely that is what matters most. If this is truly the Department of European and Eurasian Studies, why aren’t Spanish and Portuguese included? The last time I checked, they were part of the European Union, too.

However, there is a bigger picture that should be emphasized: This is no way to run any large organization, let alone a university, which should be built on collaboration. Effective governance requires employees to feel invested in the organization’s mission and to have a chance to help shape it. Faculty feel demoralized and excluded from the process. Let’s not forget that UT President Jim Davis is not an educator in any sense of the word, but the current provost should know better.

Marc Bizer

The post Feedback: October 9, 2026 appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.