On Monday, the Chronicle spoke with Lisa Moore, who has served since 2023 as the chair of UT-Austin’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department – a department that is now being collapsed with three other programs into a single department. Moore spoke as an individual and not on behalf of any institution.
Austin Chronicle: Professors in the College of Liberal Arts have been hearing about the possibility of these consolidations since last fall. What are your thoughts now that they’re here?
Lisa Moore: Yes, finally the announcement has been made – but we have no details. We have no timeline. We don’t know anything. Are we moving offices? Are people going to have a choice about what department to move into? Are staff going to be fired? There are just all these things that actually matter and should have been worked out, if this had been planned properly.
“I would compare it to DOGE, like, ‘We’re doing this to show that we are anti-woke.'”
Lisa Moore, chair of UT-Austin’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department
AC: We’ve consistently heard from sources that the administration no longer communicates with professors in decision-making …
LM: That’s by design, right? I mean, once they dissolved the Faculty Council, it became the kind of decision-making process that we’re familiar with on the state and federal levels right now – suspending norms and due process and making decisions that have a big symbolic or ideological impact, without thinking through the practical manifestations. I would compare it to DOGE, like, “We’re doing this to show that we are anti-woke.”
AC: Texas Republicans have argued that departments like yours should be consolidated because there isn’t enough workforce demand for degrees in ethnic and gender studies, that graduates don’t make as much money as those from other degree programs. What’s your response?
LM: I’ve surveyed my alumni. I know their salaries. A degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is comparable to, or better than, any other liberal arts degree. And liberal arts degrees are comparable to STEM degrees after 10 years. It’s a degree where you have a lot more flexibility in the job market than if you’re a particular kind of engineer. So really, this is just a display of dominance from the top down, to say, “We don’t have to take into account the thinking, the history, the contributions of Black people, of Latino people, of women, of LGBTQ people anymore. We’re tired of doing that. And now we’re just going to shut it down.”
“I want our students to know, I want our alumni to know, I want the people of Texas to know, that we’re still here doing the work day after day, and we take our duty to our students and to the people of Texas seriously.”
Lisa Moore, chair of UT-Austin’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department
AC: Another argument Republicans make is that fewer students take these classes. They imply that small classes are less valuable.
LM: Yeah, it’s the opposite. I just reject the idea that only large classes have value. If you went to college, probably the classes that you remember are the small classes. In pedagogy, it’s best practice to have a low faculty-to-student ratio. These are relatively small majors, but they are centers of energy that benefit the whole campus.
Another thing is, these names – Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies – these fields emerged from a post-World War II understanding that our society was impoverished by not including the humanity of everybody. I mean, it was bad to be a woman writer. “Black” was an insult. “Gay” was something you had to hide. So it was important to just say these words out loud and say to the people in these demographics that their knowledge is necessary for us to understand the full account of what it is to be human. That matters. Those names matter. What we’re teaching is the ability to name aspects of human experience as worthy of study and respect, and not things that have to be hidden.
There’s a great essay by Joan Scott this week in The Guardian about the relationship between closing down Feminist Studies in American universities and the Epstein files. Feminism is what gave us the power to critique. Without feminism, it would be perfectly legal to rape your daughter or your wife. It always was before. The idea that women and children are not just playthings of the powerful is something we fought for. Battered women’s shelters – we wouldn’t have them without feminism. Domestic violence laws – wouldn’t have them without feminism. I mean, Kristi Noem wouldn’t have a job, can she admit that? Not that I want to claim credit, because I think her policies are terrible, but she wouldn’t have been able to serve in the cabinet, she wouldn’t have even been able to have her own credit card.
AC: What’s your assessment of the damage this will do to UT? And what’s your resolve, going forward?
LM: I believe you can’t put this genie back in the bottle. There’s no doubt that this is a very destructive blow that is going to damage the reputation of the University of Texas for a long time. But I want our students to know, I want our alumni to know, I want the people of Texas to know, that we’re still here doing the work day after day, and we take our duty to our students and to the people of Texas seriously. So we’ll be finding ways to continue. It’s a little early to know exactly what that’s going to look like. But I think what the student protesters have said is very apposite. We will not be erased.
This article appears in February 20 • 2026.