An investigation by The Texas Horn has uncovered shocking statements from Richard Reddick, Senior Vice Provost for Curriculum and Enrollment and the Dean of Undergraduate Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.
On X, Reddick attributed Donald Trump’s electoral success to “White Privilege and Supremacy,” and claimed that white supremacy “needs to own the win.” He has also described Donald Trump as a “KKK endorsee,” a proponent of “Russian espionage,” “Racist,” “Sexist,” and a “White Supremacist.”
In another post, he circulated and approved of a historian’s claim that Trump supporters are “like the Germans who elected Hitler.”
He also asserted that the United States had become a “wholly owned colony of Russia” because of the actions of the Republican Party.
Reddick also stated that calls for “law and order” in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots are “code for white supremacist actions committed against black and brown people.”
In October of this year, Reddick was appointed by President Jim Davis to the Core Curriculum Task Force created to review the University’s general curriculum requirements. His bio on the UT College of Education website states that “he comes to this position after serving the last several years as inaugural associate dean for equity, community engagement, and outreach.
America’s “White Supremacist” Founding
In his book, Restorative Resistance in Higher Education (2023), Reddick describes the United States as a country founded on White Supremacy.
“I concur…the ideological root of White supremacy is in the fabric of our nation and the institutions formed at its founding.”
Reddick declares that the institutional duty of university leaders is to “reimagine a world without White supremacy,” a task he describes as “equitably divided among all of us.” This posits that White Supremacy is the defining structure of American life, and universities are the sites where this structure must be confronted, dismantled, and replaced.
Reddick also claims that at universities, “Students, faculty, staff, and administrators are immersed in contexts where White supremacy, ableism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and related vitriolic forms exist as microaggressions, systemic structures, and violence.”
Anti-DEI = Anti-Democracy
In September 2025, Reddick appeared on a podcast and denounced Anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo’s work as “anti-Democratic.” He described DEI as a national, coordinated effort responding to what he called a systematic political “playbook” unfolding in red states. “There’s a system, there’s a playbook that’s being used,” he said, pointing to Christopher Rufo’s work to abolish DEI as the blueprint for the opposition. Reddick argued that many of the anti-DEI initiatives are “anti-democratic,” comparing the current political climate to “the history of totalitarianism,” invoking the famous “ first they came for this group and this group, and all of a sudden there I was, they came from me” quote to describe the rollback of DEI programs. He urged DEI practitioners to share “alternative methods” for continuing DEI work after it becomes illegal, and described the dismantling of UT Austin’s DEI division as a “loss” requiring “collective mourning.”
DEI As Political Resistance
In 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law Senate Bill 17, which banned the operation of DEI offices, prohibited mandatory DEI training, and forbade public universities from using race, sex, color, or ethnicity as criteria in hiring, admissions, or programming. In response, the University of Texas System ordered the dismantling of DEI units, and UT Austin closed its central DEI office, eliminating or relocating the staff who had led it.
Reddick has called his entire approach to education “restorative resistance” (also the name of his book), making clear that, to him, DEI is an engine for political action inside the university. He says his work in DEI began in the 1980s and that DEI was his “unofficial undeclared major” via his involvement on UT Austin’s campus.
He has also been “immersing” himself in DEI Projects since “before it was called DEI” because the work of DEI is “completely Necessary.”
Reddick also supports demanding that candidates submit diversity statements during the hiring process. He says that when hiring staff, he looks for a “candidate’s commitment to anti-racism and anti-bias.” However, SB 17 correctly banned the use of such statements in Texas universities. Instead of evaluating a scholar’s research or teaching ability, these statements solely function as ideological litmus tests that pressure applicants to affirm the ‘correct’ political views.
After becoming the first UT Austin College of Education Dean for Equity, Community, Engagement, and Outreach, Reddick used diversity as a metric to hire staff, and trained search committees in “implicit bias” to create an “equity-centered” template for job postings.
Finding “new ways” to do affirmative action
After the Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions policies (affirmative action), Reddick told the Harvard School of Education that institutions should “do the work that we’ve always done” and simply “find new ways to do it” under the new legal constraints. His guidance was not to abandon the mission, but to adapt tactics and continue the work of the DEI project. Policies of affirmative action in higher education admissions rigged the process, penalizing Asian and White applicants based on the belief that they were more privileged. It ditched merit in favor of race in deciding who deserved admission to universities.
Institutional Racism
Reddick’s 2007 dissertation also presumes that any academic gap is automatic evidence of “overt racism” and “microaggressions” baked into “predominantly White institutions.” This treats universities as racist by default and excuses any underperformance as due to institutionalized racism and racism by peers in academic settings.
In “Existing While Black?,” he argues that “Institutional racism ensures white people can enact their personal fears” into “state-sanctioned” actions like violence. He insists that academic credentials, income, or status can’t mitigate these encounters, because “White supremacy” is “inescapable.”
His op-ed “Amid Uproar Over Black People Killed” states that calls for “law and order” are “code for white supremacist actions committed against black and brown people.”
Reddick’s approach to curriculum follows the same structure. In “Patriotic Education Is a Whitewashing of History,” he argues that efforts to emphasize civic heritage or America’s founding ideals represent attempts to obscure “systemic racism.” He elevates the 1619 Project as the proper frame for understanding American history and rejects alternative narratives as “sugarcoating.” The 1619 Project rewrites America’s origins by claiming the nation was founded on slavery and, in doing so, frames American institutions as inherently corrupt and teaches citizens to view their own nation with hate rather than pride; it is an explicitly anti-American leftist project.
In an interview about fraternities, he said he worries about these spaces being “dominated by privileged white men” and argued that such spaces require oversight and mandatory training to ensure they are not exclusionary.
The future of UT Austin’s core curriculum is poised to be shaped in part by an administrator whose published writings, public talks, and social-media statements routinely portray American institutions as grounded in white supremacy, label Trump a “Racist” and “White Supremacist,” and draw explicit parallels between Trump’s political rise and that of Hitler. These are not incidental comments but part of a framework he has articulated for years, including his view that higher education leaders must “reimagine a world without White supremacy” and that efforts to roll back DEI follow a coordinated political “playbook” that mimics Totalitarianism. With Texas law now prohibiting DEI offices and related hiring practices, the significance of placing such a figure on the committee in charge of redesigning UT Austin’s core curriculum is substantial and warrants public attention. Students, faculty, parents, and taxpayers have a legitimate interest in understanding how his DEI-centered worldview will influence the courses every undergraduate is required to take.
Richard Reddick did not respond to our request for comment.
