4 February 6 - 12, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents CLIMATE OF FEAR TEXAS COLLEGE STUDENTS WERE ALREADY STRUGGLING WITHOUT DEI. THEN CAME ANOTHER TRUMP TERM. BY TYLER HICKS E very day, Ben Wright wakes up and checks the mail to see if he’s going back to jail. It’s not just him, either. As of this writing, six stu- dents at the University of Texas at Dallas, where Wright teaches history, still face criminal trespassing charges related to last year’s protests over the war in Gaza. Wright and the students were arrested on UTD’s campus, and because of their bond conditions, the students are now forbidden from entering campus for any reason except attending classes. “That means they can’t go to the library, they can’t go to the health center, they can’t attend the kind of club activities that are ac- tually kind of mandatory if you want to pur- sue certain careers,” Wright tells the Observer. “So, really, the university has found a way to kill the career prospects for a few of its outspoken students, while publicly claiming neutrality, but actually, on a daily basis, continuing to inflict pain and suffering on students who were brave in speaking out against injustice.” UTD did not respond to questions for this story, but its students’ plight is one of the more glaring examples of a fraught cli- mate in Texas education. “There’s a climate of fear of the conse- quences of speaking up,” says a UTD professor who asked the Observer not to use their name. This fall, after the protests, the professor says being on campus was “kind of surreal.” “Everyone wanted to return to normal and act like nothing happened.” But things are far from normal. A little over a year ago, Senate Bill 17 effectively wiped out all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) activities at public universities. Now, President Donald Trump’s new adminis- tration brings added pressures for profes- sors like Wright, UTD students speaking out for Gaza and thousands of other vul- nerable students across Texas. That in- cludes Lillian Anderson, a University of Texas at Arlington student who recently came out as transgender. “Ideally, we’d love to get our DEI pro- gram back,” Anderson says. “But at the very least, we’d like to stop more attacks from happening.” Overcompliance T he current strain between govern- ment and higher education — as well as institutions and their students — has often been compared to the campus un- rest of the 1960s, when students and professors across the country were disci- plined for speaking out against the Vietnam War. The 1970 shooting at Kent State Uni- versity, in which National Guard troops killed four students at an anti-war protest, is an infamous flashpoint in this conflict. Yet the government also attempted to quell the unrest in far more subtle ways, dispatching FBI agents to spy on students, discredit pro- test leaders and try to cause the firing of ad- ministrators deemed insufficiently tough on protesters. Many universities have since built plaques or exhibits celebrating protest movements and student involvement, while at the same time adopting policies they believe will mol- lify unrest on campus. According to Inside Higher Ed, steps such as the “liberalization of graduation requirements,” the creation of co- ed dorms and “consultation with students about policy decisions” have been taken, in part, “to defuse or re-direct student protest.” Other, more recent rules have been more overt, limiting when and where students can protest and forbidding encampments like the one that resulted in arrests at UTD. Multiple people interviewed for this story worry that these gradual efforts to limit protesting will have a larger effect than universities may realize. “Colleges are communities,” Thomas Saenz says. “What impacts one member im- pacts the entire community.” | UNFAIR PARK | >>p6 Mike Brooks A protester speaks out against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies in Dallas.
