Danielle Clealand, professor and interim chair of the University of Texas at Austin's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, sent an email to faculty this week with the kind of news that would ruin a lesser academic's afternoon. The provost's office, she wrote, had "rejected our proposal to keep our majors."

Three of them, specifically. Gone.

The African and African diaspora studies major, the Mexican American and Latino studies major, and the women and gender studies major are all being eliminated at one of the largest state universities in the country. Current students can finish their degrees, but the pipeline of new enrollees into these programs is shutting off.

The provost's office didn't just trim around the edges. It reviewed the department's pitch to preserve the programs and said no. Faculty now have until the end of the semester to propose a replacement major under the newly created Department of Social and Cultural Analysis — which itself sounds like the kind of name a committee invents when it knows the old brand is toxic but still wants office space.

Texas has been moving in this direction since the state legislature started dismantling DEI infrastructure across public universities. The UT-Austin cuts are the most visible result yet. These aren't elective courses being quietly delisted from a catalog. These are entire degree programs — the ones students declare, build schedules around, and presumably explain to their parents at Thanksgiving.

The counter-argument writes itself: these programs provide valuable perspectives, promote inclusion, contribute to a well-rounded education. The people making that argument are the same faculty who spent a decade watching enrollment in these majors flatline while tuition climbed past $11,000 a year for in-state students. If the marketplace of ideas actually functioned inside a university, these programs would have needed a bailout long before the provost pulled the plug.

What Clealand's email didn't contain was any mention of student demand. No enrollment figures. No job placement rates. No argument that graduates of these programs were walking into careers that justified the cost. The defense was about keeping the majors — not about whether anyone was using them for anything after graduation.

The University of Texas at Austin has 52,000 students, a $46 billion endowment, and a football program that prints money. It will survive without a women and gender studies degree track.

The faculty have until December to propose something new. The provost's office rejected what they had.