In a move without recent parallel, a committee appointed by UT-Austin President Jim Davis overruled a faculty tenure application previously approved by the College of Liberal Arts.
As first reported by the Austin American Statesman, Professor Ivan Chaar Lopez learned in February that a tenure committee tied to Davis had rejected his application.
At the time, Lopez’s application had received approval from a series of committees in his department and college. The interim dean of the college of liberal arts had also approved Lopez’s application.
Lopez is currently an assistant professor in the department of American Studies. The department, part of the College of Liberal Arts, will be consolidated into a new department of social and cultural analysis next month.
Lopez’ official university biography lists “Ethnic Studies,” “Latina/o Studies,” and “Racial formation” among his interests.
His formal academic writing includes:
- “Latina/o/e Technoscience: Labor, Race, and Gender in Cybernetics and Computing” from 2022.
- “Alien Data: Immigration and Regimes of Connectivity in the United States” from 2020.
- “Sensing Intruders: Race and the Automation of Border Control” from 2019.
Lopez is currently employed as an “up or out” tenure-track professor. The denial of his tenure application means Lopez must leave the university no later than the end of the current academic year in June 2027.
State lawmakers reformed tenure in 2023 to grant final authority for tenure decisions to university system regents. By disapproving Lopez’s application at the campus level, Davis’ committee stopped it before it reached the regents.
UT-Austin’s move stands in stark contrast to Texas A&M, where regents recently rubber stamped a series of tenure applications for professors with similar profiles to Chaar Lopez.
UT-Austin is a component of the University of Texas System. The UT-System is overseen by a board of regents that is appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Texas Senate. Kevin Eltife of Tyler is the current board chairman.
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