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This chapter looks at the most recent case to challenge affirmative action in college admissions policies in the U.S. Supreme Court, the Fisher v. The University of Texas at Austin (2013 and 2016). Like chapter 5, the purpose of this chapter is to understand precisely what supporters and opponents are saying about the controversial policy. That is, how are they framing the debate surrounding affirmative action. However, this chapter looks at how framing may have changed over a decade later. We again focus on amicus briefs submitted by social authorities to the U.S. Supreme Court who had interests in the outcome of the cases. While we were interested in variation in types of frames used in these two cases (Fisher I and II) relative to the Gratz and Grutter cases, we mainly focused on authors continued use of both color-blind and group threat frames to state their positions. While some nuanced changes were observed from Gratz/Grutter to Fisher, our findings revealed a great deal of consistency from case to case and that the briefs continued to rely on color-blind and threat frames to characterize the policy. Particularly among opponents’ briefs, threat frames suggested that whites, in general, were losing in a country consumed by liberal agendas of diversification and entitlements only afforded to unqualified and ill-prepared non-whites.

Concepts already at work in the world, namely the exceptionalism of Texas as a region and the hipness of the Austin-based progressive-country music scene, came together in the person of Willie Nelson on the pilot episode of Austin City Limits. Nelson’s contemporary emergence as an iconic figure in mainstream popular culture was a bonus—a providential cherry-on-top. In ways surely no one could have foreseen, he laid the groundwork for the sustained relevance of both Austin City Limits and the city of Austin itself. The significance of both show and city carried on long after the progressive-country moment passed. But the pilot was arguably this moment’s apotheosis.

Joshua Z. Gahr and Michael P. Young’s chapter provides a historical analysis of the somewhat counterintuitive, yet central, role that Protestant institutions played in the emergence of the new Left. Through a case study of the Christian Faith-and-Life Community at the University of Texas at Austin from 1955 to 1962, the chapter documents how a group of liberal Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist clergy pushed university students to reconceive the Church’s “mission-in-the-world” and their personal witness to this mission in ways that unleashed a moral “breakthrough.”

The attack on affirmative action has come from a select few individuals with resource. This fight was thought to have culminated with the end of affirmative action signaled by the Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin Supreme Court case. However, the policy received a surprising victory and continues to be an object of disdain by many conservatives today. With that being said, this chapter outlines the role of elite actors in framing prominent social issues, including affirmative action. This chapter also describes how certain frames may be used to not only minimize the discussion of race surrounding the policy but will also attempt to use threat and emotion to produce animosity in order to remove the policy from higher education.

This chapter discusses the Ruth Elvish Mantz Collection in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Mantz wrote the first biography of Mansfield in 1933, in conjunction with Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murry, who was brought in as a co-author by the publishers. The finished biography was not what she originally intended to write. She spent the rest of her life writing numerous unpublished manuscripts reworking the events of Mansfield’s life into book form. All her papers are now in Texas, and offer a fascinating insight into Mansfield’s first biographer.

Lisa Sánchez González explores the highlights and lowlights in her journey from kindergarten to tenure as a Boricua feminist scholar deemed "radical" in U.S. academia. Her essay charts the challenges that the she (and many other Latina girls identified early in their education as "gifted") overcame in public schools and the pattern of racial, class and gender stereotyping that perpetually repeated itself in her academic career, as well as how it uniquely deformed the shape of her first tenure review. Sánchez González, who was denied tenure at the University of Texas-Austin, discusses how the Freedom Of Information Act made it possible for her to review her tenure case.

The introduction argues that although the academy has a spoken (the written) commitment to diversity, the same attitudes (the unwritten) that kept faculty of color out of predominately white institutions in the 1940s works against them during personnel reviews. It highlights examples of the current climate where meritocratic language is used as if it’s neutral, discusses how the work of program building that many scholars of color are called upon to do is undervalued, and argues that personal narratives about tenure process are vital to a clearer understanding of the system’s weaknesses. In addition to including quantitative data, the introduction offers a historical and contemporary context for the stories included in the anthology.