Shockwaves have been felt through the media ecosystem of Texas with the announcement that Debbie Hiott, general manager of Austin NPR stations KUT and KUTX, had been fired with no notice by the University of Texas.
The announcement was made to staff on June 15 via an email sent by Anita Vangelisti, interim dean of the Moody College of Communication at UT. If that name seems familiar, it’s because Vangelisti was the public face of the decision by the university admin to kick the bulk of the inaugural KUT Festival off campus in late April – a change that again happened with little warning. The admin claimed that KUT had not provided sufficient security and public safety, a claim that Hiott refuted at the time. Her defense of the station, its staff, and the professional external event organizers hired to assist sparked a very public conflict with Amanda Cochran-McCall, UT’s vice president for legal affairs and general counsel, and a former senior staffer to Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Hiott said there was no further communication between herself and the administration about the issue since May until she got an email on Monday morning from Vangelisti’s assistant. She said that she was summoned to a meeting in the dean’s office that day at 3:10pm with no calendar invite, “which struck me as a little bit weird.” She then discovered that two other senior KUT staffers had been summoned to similar meetings shortly after. “Then I figured out that they must be about to fire me,” she said. When she got to the meeting, she said she was presented with two letters: One was a pre-written resignation awaiting her signature and one was a firing letter. “She told me that we were having this meeting to determine how I was leaving the organization.”
Hiott recalled that Vangelisti said she no longer had confidence in her leadership and personnel management. “I think that they thought I would just resign,” Hiott said. However, she told leadership, very clearly, “You’re going to have to fire me.” Vangelisti then left the room. Hiott said, “This wasn’t something that the dean was doing. This was something that the Tower was making her do.”
She was fired, effective immediately, with no severance, no payout for accrued comp time, and her insurance will be terminated at the end of the month, Hiott told us. She had to leave by the back door and was not even allowed to collect her personal possessions from her desk. She was also told that, while she was not banned from campus, she “didn’t have any reason” to visit the KUT offices.
A graduate of Texas State University, Hiott has been a fixture of the Austin media scene since she joined the Statesman in 1990. In the following 28 years, she rose to the position of editor-in-chief before taking a buyout in November 2018 after the paper was bought out by GateHouse Media. Two months later, she made the jump from print to radio, taking on the role of GM at KUT and KUTX after the departure of previous station head Stewart Vanderwilt. A two-time Pulitzer Prize jury member, she also currently serves on the board of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.
In the last year, Hiott had been contending with the massive funding cuts delivered to NPR and PBS stations around the country by the Trump administration’s defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She’s done this both as station head and in her role as an NPR board member. Due to board bylaws, as a representative of the station, she will have to stand down from that position.
So what does the future hold for KUT? On Tuesday, UT announced an interim replacement for Hiott, Gerald Johnson, the Moody College’s executive director for innovation and partnerships. Unlike Hiott, neither Johnson nor Vangelisti has leadership experience in a professional newsroom setting. While most people associate the Moody College with its journalism school, Vangelisti’s background is in interpersonal and family communications research, while Johnson spent 16 years with the Houston Chronicle in sales and business development before moving to Austin in 2014 to become director of Texas Student Media before joining KUT. Speaking confidentially, KUT staffers expressed relief that Hiott’s temporary replacement is an internal hire.
Hiott’s sudden and forced exit drew immediate criticism from the broader community. Austin Democratic U.S. Rep. Greg Casar connected her firing to both the broader attack in public media and the right-wing assault on academic freedom. Speaking bluntly, he said, “Right-wingers like Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton want to stop any and all dissent.”
Casar called Hiott “an Austin hero” and said that “the crime Debbie committed was simply disagreeing with UT when they kicked the KUT Festival off campus.” He has called for full transparency on the reasons for her firing and will be pushing for congressional investigations into such assaults on the First Amendment. “No one is asking for UT or KUT to be progressive or conservative,” he said. “We just want our universities to be independent and fair and protected.”
Casar noted that, while KUT’s license is held by UT and its offices and broadcast facilities are located at the Dealey Center for New Media, its funding comes from the Austin community, which rightly feels a sense of ownership. “The solution to this is not going to come from Greg Abbott’s office,” Casar said. “It’s going to come from the people of Austin.”
While Hiott expressed gratitude for all the support she has received, she stressed that the issue is much larger than just her dismissal. “It’s not about me,” she started. “It’s about making sure that KUT can operate safely and truthfully in the future. The fact they were ready to lie about what we were doing in the festival planning, the fact that they were ready to fire me for standing up and telling the truth, really worries me that, at some point, they’ll turn their attention on the truth tellers in the newsroom.”
This article appears in June 19 • 2026.
