Opinion: Force Out Hartzell at Your Own Risk

Like many of my fellow lifetime Austinites, I was quite disturbed by UT-Austin’s excessive response to last week’s campus protests for Palestinian rights by sending armed DPS officers to disperse largely peaceful demonstrations and arrest dozens of people. In the past few days, UT faculty and students launched a “no-confidence” campaign against University President Jay Hartzell, both in opposition to the police response, as well as the recent forced exodus of UT faculty involved with DEI programs. While the effort undoubtedly has good intentions, it doesn’t really make any logical sense. Rather, it seems to be rooted in wholly misdirected anger and grievance.

To those involved – I completely share your frustrations. But we should instead direct them at Republican extremists who are trying to distract voters from their terrible policies – such as stonewalling Medicaid expansion and deregulating the state’s power grid – by appealing to phantom social anxieties about equality for racial minorities and LGBT individuals. They are using our state universities as pawns in their sick game of political chess. Let’s be clear: If Hartzell hadn’t adhered to the ridiculous new DEI bill passed by our Republican-controlled Legislature, Senate Bill 17, as he’s legally required to do under the law, he would’ve been tarred and feathered by Republican state leaders as a political punching bag and subsequently fired by the university’s regents until someone else followed through.

In case you were unaware, the UT president is elected by the nine-person University Board of Regents, who are appointed by the governor to serve six-year terms. While regents can be reappointed, because Gov. Greg Abbott is now in his third term, every single regent has earned his personal stamp of approval, whether appointed for the first time or given a renewal. The selection of a new president isn’t under the control of faculty, students, or the city of Austin.

Hartzell was appointed in April of 2020, just before George Floyd’s murder and the well-deserved national reckoning on race that followed. But the next appointment of a university president, if such an opening should occur in the near future, isn’t going to be under the same calm political circumstances as Hartzell was afforded in early 2020. As we know in hindsight, the subsequent protests against racial injustice polarized conservatives – especially in the South – into a reactionary opposition against DEI and other measures designed to correct our nation’s gross historical mistreatment of minorities.

Abbott, who in the first half of 2020 was under attack from the right flank of his ever-increasingly extremist Republican base for initially instituting COVID restrictions on schools, gyms, bars, and restaurants, capitalized upon the political opening of racial strife by waging total war on supposed “wokeness” in higher education. I doubt Abbott affirmatively believes in the merits of his own right-wing demagoguery on race, gender, and sexuality; he is more likely play-acting as a MAGA freak in order to secure a spot as Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate or make his own run for the presidency in 2028. But that’s beside the point if our beloved institutions of higher education are guaranteed to be in his crosshairs. Forcing Hartzell out of office and allowing Abbott’s regents to handpick a new president in this new political environment would be the equivalent of giving an arsonist a Molotov cocktail – and our state’s “university of the first class” would be the ultimate victim.

I’m not defending Hartzell as some sort of saint figure, but there are times when you have to pick your battles. Any person on the left who suggests that he should lose his job over the excessive police response to last week’s pro-Palestinian-rights campus demonstrations should be required to immediately name the person who could possibly be selected as his replacement. Seriously ... what’s your end game here? Do you really want to engage in a Texas-sized self-own by giving Abbott’s regents the chance to appoint some viciously right-wing nutcase like Dan Patrick’s wife (she is a former schoolteacher, by the way) as the next university president? I’m not on board with that.

---

Dash Kostka, 20, was recently accepted to the University of Texas’ Butler School of Music for the fall of 2024, and is a former student at the University of California, Berkeley.