The University of Texas at Austin fired KUT Public Media General Manager Debbie Hiott on Monday afternoon, following a heated dispute over the public radio station's inaugural festival.
The surprise move marks an unprecedented intervention in the governance of Austin's NPR station at a time when public radio stations across the country are dealing with mounting financial and political pressures. Congress slashed federal funding to public media last year at the urging of President Donald Trump, and the landscape has also been shifting dramatically at public universities where many of the newsrooms are based.
That includes KUT, which has operated out of UT Austin for decades. Texas' Republican leaders have gotten far more involved in the running of the state's flagship public university in recent years, most recently by initiating a major academic restructuring effort that targeted various gender and ethnic studies programs.
In a phone interview shortly after she was fired, Hiott blasted the university for terminating her and called for a change in KUT's ownership structure. UT Austin holds the broadcast license for KUT and its sister music station, KUTX, and it employs the station's staff.
"It's a clear sign that a community asset as important as KUT should not be in the hands of an institution that doesn't have any sense of accountability or concern for the community," Hiott said, referring to the university's current leadership. "My hope would be that the university would relinquish the licenses to the community."
KUT and KUTX are editorially independent from UT. They are funded by community and business donations, rather than state taxpayer dollars or student tuition.
In a text message, UT spokesman Mike Rosen said that "the university does not comment on employment matters." An email announcing Hiott's departure from the interim dean of the Moody College of Communication, the university department that houses KUT and KUTX, also did not provide a reason for her termination.
"I am writing to inform you that Debbie Hiott is no longer serving as general manager of KUT/KUTX, effective immediately," the dean, Anita L. Vangelisti, wrote in an email to the station's staff, adding that an interim successor for Hiott could be named as soon as Tuesday.
However, Hiott said that Vangelisti showed her a termination letter that attributed her firing to a weeks-old dispute related to the KUT Festival, which had been set to take place on campus on May 1-2.
In April, Hiott and the university had engaged in an extraordinarily tense public exchange after the school ordered KUT to move the festival off campus at the last minute, citing "insufficient planning for safety measures." At the time, Hiott insisted that there was no basis for the claims of poor planning, and she and festival planners also provided KUT News with records casting doubt on the university's account.
Hiott said the university had fallen silent on the matter after the back-and-forth in late April until she was called into a meeting on Monday, about six weeks later.
"I just was holding out hope that they would just let it all die down because, you know, the station never did anything wrong. I never did anything wrong," Hiott said.
Hiott has served as KUT Public Media general manager since 2019. Before that, she spent 28 years at the Austin American-Statesman, including seven years as its executive editor.
In 2024, public radio stations across the country elected her to the NPR board of directors. Her 3-year term was set to expire in 2027.
In a statement, NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who recently spoke at the KUT Festival, called Hiott a "highly valued" member of the NPR board.
"Debbie's fellow NPR directors respect her greatly, knowing her to be a straight shooter, always with wisdom, kindness, and a wry sense of humor about perseverance in service of public media's mission," Maher said.
Tensions surface over KUT Festival
Universities across the country have started to reconsider their relationships with on-campus public radio stations, citing budgetary constraints and dwindling support from federal and state sources.
Last year, Penn State University's board of trustees voted to effectively shutter the local NPR and PBS affiliate housed on its campus, and Baylor University announced that it would no longer fund Waco's NPR station, KWBU.
But the tension that surfaced this year between UT Austin and KUT appeared to involve a very different issue: The planning of KUT's festival on the university's campus.
In late April, just a week before the festival was supposed to begin, Hiott said she heard from Vangelisti that there were "questions" about the event.
Then, two days before it was scheduled to occur, Vangelisti announced in an email that KUT had been asked to relocate the festival. She wrote: "Our analysis has identified key areas where KUT provided insufficient planning for safety measures, including security, health, fire, and emergency services."
Hiott quickly fired back in her own note to the station's staff, writing, "The university ordered KUT to cancel the outdoor portions of the events citing a safety analysis that they have yet to provide us."
That evening, the situation escalated further. UT's general counsel, Amanda Cochran-McCall, sent Hiott a harshly worded letter that the university also shared directly with media outlets. Cochran-McCall wrote to Hiott that "it was false to assert that you and your staff agreed to every health, security, and safety request made of KUT."
The letter claimed that festival planning staff initially "refused any police presence," failed to develop a satisfactory plan for emergency medical services, and "rejected" university police's advice to include drone surveillance as a security measure.
Hiott denied those allegations in a point-by-point response that she also made public at the time, writing, "It is unfortunate that, for reasons that are unclear to me, the university was not willing to work with us on an event that would have benefited us all."
Records, interviews cast doubt on university's allegations
In an effort to square the two competing narratives, KUT News filed a public information request with UT Austin seeking records of communications between festival organizers and university officials. The university charged about $500 for the records and has yet to provide them.
But Hiott also shared some of her records, as did the contractors who KUT hired to help produce the festival. Those documents — which include many email exchanges between KUT staff, festival planners and university officials, as well as the transcript of a video call between the various stakeholders — raise questions about some of the university's claims.
None of the records indicate there was a refusal made toward a police presence. In an interview in April, festival planning consultant Agnes Varnum called the university's claim "blatantly false."
"At any event this size, there's a police presence. That is a given," she said.
Autumn Rich, who leads the Panacea Collective, the main event production firm that planned the KUT Festival, also provided records back in April that appear to show the university was satisfied with the emergency medical response plans for the event.
For instance, she shared an email exchange with the university's senior director of emergency management, Derek Trabon, who had asked for more information about the credentials of the EMS response team. The emails include a response from Rich providing the information he asked for and a reply from Trabon stating, "This is very helpful – thank you, Autumn."
Rich said she did not receive any other communications about the issue before seeing the letter the university sent to Hiott.
In a previous interview, Rich called security her "first priority," and pointed to previous high-profile events she has worked on with the Panacea Collective, including the Texas Tribune Festival, the Austin City Limits Music Festival and an event at the White House.
She said she had believed this event would be a similarly cooperative effort.
"Up until a week ago, frankly, I thought we were all on the same page and working together, and had met every requirement that the university had," Rich said.
KUT News also reviewed the transcript of a video call that Rich, Varnum and other festival planners held with a large group of university officials on April 20, less than two weeks before the festival. In the call, UT's fire marshal asked, "Will there be any UAVs for this event?" later clarifying that he was referring to drones.
Rich answered, "No," the transcript of the call shows. The fire marshal responded, "Thank you," and the discussion moved on to other matters.
Eight days later, the university ordered KUT to move the festival due to various security concerns. Officials also said KUT would need to make the entire event free and refund tickets to anyone who had purchased them.
The university did not respond to multiple requests from KUT News to provide more evidence of its claims regarding the planning of the festival. Rosen, the university spokesman, later told the Austin American-Statesman's editorial board that KUT "was directed to move just the outdoor activities, to ensure live music and alcohol sales would not disrupt final exams."
Ultimately, the festival planners and KUT staff relocated the event to East Austin, and thousands attended.
In an update to the station sent on Monday morning, Hiott wrote that while the festival did "lose revenue and incur additional expenses with the move, we achieved our other two goals of raising the KUT and KUTX profile in the market and providing an opportunity for people to celebrate what makes Austin special and discuss the critical issues."
Hours later, she was fired.
'Well, you'll have to fire me'
Hiott said that while university officials had gone silent about the festival dispute during the month of May, she began to suspect something was amiss after no one from Moody College reached out to her late last month to begin the scheduled annual performance review process.
Then, Monday morning, Hiott received an email from Vangelisti's assistant asking her to attend an unscheduled meeting. She arrived in a room on the fifth floor of the Moody College building to find Vangelisti, an official from the university's legal affairs department, and UT human resources director Karen Chawner.
Hiott recalled that Vangelisti quickly presented her with two documents: a resignation letter and a termination letter.
"I said, you know, well, you'll have to fire me," Hiott recalled. She also told Vangelisti that "UT is going to have to be known for firing me in the media."
Hiott said Chawner then tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade her to resign, before instructing her to leave the premises immediately without returning to her office. Chawner clarified that Hiott wasn't banned from campus but said, "There's no reason for you to go to KUT," Hiott recalled.
Hiott said she still hasn't received a copy of the termination letter, but she recalls that it attributed her firing to "planning problems with the KUT festival and security issues." She also remembers that the letter stated that Vangelisti "had lost her faith in my ability, my leadership of the station."
Hiott exited through the back of the building and the university sent other staff to retrieve her personal items.
"It was a bit of a blur," she said as she drove home from the station shortly after her termination. "I've never been fired before."
KUT's Olivia Aldridge, Greta Díaz González Vázquez, Andy Jechow and Andrew Weber contributed to this story, along with KERA's Caroline Love.
Editor's note: This story was not reviewed or edited by the station's executive leadership or any university official before publication.
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