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Reposted by Deena Varner

Micah Schwartzman @micahschwartzman.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

In a concurrence to his own majority opinion in a Title VII vaccine exemption case, a Ninth Circuit judge claims that the administrative state is “inherently hostil[e]” to religion because administrators rely on rational and secular reasons to make decisions. /1 cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/op...

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

In case you missed it, administrators in Texas destroying their own universities are being paid millions of dollars for the privilege. Texas A&M and Texas Tech were #1 & #3 in 2025: www.chronicle.com/article/pres... #academicfreedom #censorship

chronicle.com

How Much Are Public-College Presidents Paid?

Explore our updated dataset of base pay, bonuses, and benefits for 172 chief executives at public doctoral universities and systems in 2025.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

GA-48 never tells scholars what conclusions they may reach. It governs the travel, relationships, collaborations, and access from which conclusions are made—and creates professional reasons not to ask certain questions in the first place.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Formally, the same rules apply to every public university employee. Materially, the burdens will not be unevenly distributed.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

As to its relationship with more explicit censorship that emerges in its aftermath, there is a chilling effect produced by uncertainty about what “associated with,” “connection,” “continuous connections,” and similar open-ended terms might encompass.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The higher-education “solutions” produce a university that functions as: procurement gatekeeper; travel authority; collector of personal information; ethics enforcer; foreign-influence reporting site; security-screening institution; and conduit of information to state political officials.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Essentially, universities are to develop an infrastructure to routinely surveil employees for criminal history—as an heuristic for predicting disloyalty to the state.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

"....criminal history or continuous connections to the government or political apparatus of a foreign adversary that might prevent the applicant, employee, or contractor from being able to maintain the security or integrity of the infrastructure."

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

All such personnel "must be routinely reviewed to determine whether or not things such as...."

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

University employment, for those who "research, work on, or have access to critical infrastructure," is contingent upon "the ability to maintain the security or integrity of the infrastructure."

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The order does not limit what institutions may ask, how the information may be used, how long it may be retained, who may access it, or whether it may feed into the recurring reviews required elsewhere.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

For many employees, especially immigrants and people with family abroad, “purpose” may mean disclosing family relationships, caregiving, illness, weddings, funerals, property matters, or other intimate facts.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

University employees' personal travel to foreign adversary nations requires disclosure, including dates and purpose, to their employer.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Universities cannot begin, renew, or extend a contract with a covered company. Their personnel may not accept any gifts from any entity associated with foreign adversary nations. Nor may their personnel "travel to, for professional purposes, a country on the...foreign adversaries list."

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Higher education is not part of the order’s stated problem, but it becomes a major site of its solution. In fact, institutions of higher education are implicated in *most* of the EO's restrictions, and are the exclusive subject of several.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

It constructs a threat through stories about political officials, state-government infiltration, software, and critical infrastructure—and then extends the resulting security apparatus into universities without explaining the transition.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

GA-48 does not begin with a problem in higher education and then design measures responsive to that problem. The recitals do not mention higher education, academic research, universities, scholarship, students, or learning.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

To realize this worldview, the EO places restrictions on "all state agencies controlled by gubernatorial appointed heads, and all public institutions of higher education."

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

In a way, the order transforms trust from an ordinary condition of employment into something certain people must continually earn, document, and defend.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Unlike components, people do not come with supply-chain labels, so institutions begin reading travel, relationships, and affiliations as evidence of what a person might do.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Components must not be “sourced by foreign adversaries.” People must be prevented from compromising the infrastructure. The component is treated according to provenance. The person is treated according to predicted conduct.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

"Protecting critical infrastructure is not just about ensuring the components of that infrastructure are not sourced by foreign adversaries but also ensuring the people who have access to that infrastructure will not compromise it."

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The EO anticipates racialization. It disclaims suspicion of people while building a system that operates by scrutinizing people and their connections.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

"The threat from the PRC is from the government of the PRC and the CCP itself, and not from Chinese-Americans or the Chinese people, who are often the primary victims of the PRC and the CCP...."

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

"The government of the PRC and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are the greatest longterm threat to the United States' economy and national security." The order’s logic is organized around a multi-country category, while its political justification is overwhelmingly Sinocentric.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

The opening clause first adopts the federal government’s list of “foreign adversaries”—China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Russia, and Nicolás Maduro—but the subsequent clauses narrow the narrative almost entirely to China and the "Chinese Communist Party."

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

In 2024, Greg Abbot issued Executive Order GA-48: Relating to the hardening of state government. Given the more recent censorship of academic research and teaching in the state, I wanted to put this EO into conversation with those restrictions. gov.texas.gov/uploads/file...

gov.texas.gov

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Reposted by Deena Varner

Texas Conference of the AAUP @texasaaup.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

⭐️ NEW from The Higher Ed Advocate: “censorship devalues a university degree…eliminat[ing] topics like race, gender, sexuality, and social inequality from the university curriculum…will leave Texas students ill-equipped to face not only the workforce but life itself.” 🗣️🗣️

substack.com

Censored Universities Cannot Offer Degrees of Value

What determines whether a college degree is worth it?

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

"Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches and burnt women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears." — Justice Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California (1927)

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

That rhetorical classification means that race and gender are categories through which institutions supposedly distribute improper advantage; religion becomes an exercise of individual and associational freedom.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

It instead enters through the vocabulary of belief, speech, conscience, association, and liberty.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The bill calls the first category “identity-based activities.” Religion, although obviously an identity and often an institutional affiliation, does not appear conceptually within identity politics at all.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Put together, the governing distinction makes race, sex, gender, and ethnicity identity categories that are presumptively suspect, while religion is an identity category that necessitates institutional accommodation and autonomy.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Meanwhile, other protected identities are repeatedly presented as possible sources of illicit preference.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Like the AG's memo I wrote about recently, Heritage gives religious student organizations an additional, explicit protection: universities cannot deny them benefits because of their “religious beliefs, practices, speech, leadership standards, or standards of conduct.”

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Rhetorically and structurally, “nondiscrimination” is being redefined as the suppression of particular forms of race-, sex-, and gender-conscious institutional practice, while religion is positioned as something institutions must protect from interference.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Its disappearance from this particular list therefore looks less like an accidental omission than part of the architecture of the bill.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

That’s a remarkable drafting choice because religion is, of course, ordinarily one of the paradigmatic protected classifications in American civil rights and constitutional law.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Any recognized student group—including an affinity group organized around race, ethnicity, national origin, or sex—must satisfy strict scrutiny. Religion isn’t included.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The contrast is even sharper in the civil rights audit section.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The text therefore isn’t developing a general principle against identity-based preference. It is sorting identities into different legal-political categories: some forms of identity-conscious organization are presumptively dangerous; religious organizations receive special dispensations.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Yet a religious student organization is expressly protected in its ability to maintain belief-based leadership standards and standards of conduct.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The ML says an institution may not partner with an outside organization that gives “any preference” based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin “for any purpose.”

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

A public institution may not deny a religious student organization any right, benefit, or privilege because of its “religious beliefs, practices, speech, leadership standards, or standards of conduct.”

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

But religion is conspicuously absent from those lists. More than absent, really: elsewhere the bill singles religion out for affirmative protection.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

It singles out student organizations or affinity groups focused on “race, ethnicity, national origin, or sex” for strict-scrutiny review.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

It prohibits preferences in scholarships, employment, institutional functions, and outside partnerships on those grounds, and it bars proxies for several of those categories.

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Deena Varner @deena-varner.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The model legislation (ML) repeatedly constructs race, sex, color, ethnicity, and national origin as suspect bases of institutional action, and then subjects activities organized around those categories to unusually aggressive restrictions.

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