The 1980s were a consequential decade for universities. The marketization of higher education, the adjunctification of labor, and culture wars over curriculum transformed the landscape in a short period of time. The Battles of Texas traces the lived consequences of this upheaval by focusing on one influential institution: the writing program at the University of Texas at Austin.

Drawing from university records, newspaper archives, and present-day interviews, Nate Kreuter and Mark Garrett Longaker provide an on-the-ground perspective of the radical creation of UT Austin’s writing program and the subsequent events that made national headlines: the mass firing of lecturers in 1985, the national debate over “multicultural” content in the first-year curriculum, and the divorce of the writing program from the English Department in 1992. Despite these pressures, however, the authors also reveal how writing program administrators at UT Austin exerted their own agency to resist economic and political forces in service of their students and adjunct lecturers. By highlighting the parallels between the 1980s and current labor and political pressures in higher education, The Battles of Texas offers a strategic perspective for academics and administrators today.

Combining a narrative institutional history with a public digital archive, searchable and arranged in exhibits and in chronological annals, The Battles of Texas provides academics with the resources they need to survive in times of rapid transition.

The issues grappled with in this case study continue to affect higher education today as questions of federal funding, DEI, and elitism dominate public conversations.

Offers a strategic perspective for academics and administrators facing challenges in today’s political and cultural climate.

Drawing from institutional records, newspaper archives, and present-day interviews, Mark Garrett Longaker and Nate Kreuter provide an on-the-ground perspective on the radical creation of the writing program at UT Austin and the subsequent events that made national headlines.

Nate Kreuter is Associate Professor of English at the University of Georgia. Mark Garrett Longaker is Professor of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Longaker is also the author of Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue and Rhetoric and the Republic, the former of which was also published by Penn State University Press.