AUSTIN — Unlike New Orleans, which on Thursday removed a controversial statue of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis, the University of Texas has resolved Davis’ fate on its Austin campus. 

But making UT’s larger-than-life Davis bronze the focus of a new educational display across campus doesn’t mean that questions about its place at the university won’t continue. 

“It strikes me a very politically savvy move,” to place the statue at the center of an educational display that opened in April at UT’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, said Glenn Peers, a UT art history professor. “It puts off any real resolution: It’s a quasi-resolution.”

Some observers have said worse about the decision to take down UT’s Davis statue, which in decades after it was installed as part of a Civil War memorial, raised sporadic calls for its removal.

“The removal of Jefferson Davis’s statue … may appear to end the university’s difficult struggle to shake off its historical embrace of racist values and practices,” Al Martinich and Tom Palaima, who are UT professors, wrote in Chronicle of Higher Education after the decision to bring down Davis. “It does not.”

The decision by Gregory Fenves, UT’s president, came in August 2015, after a June mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The violence there sparked a wave of efforts to remove Confederate symbols from public displays, including a decision to haul down the Confederate battle flag from South Carolina’s State House. 

The U.S. Supreme Court in June 2015 also ruled that Texas could refuse to issue license plates bearing a Confederate battle flag framed by the words “Sons of Confederate Veterans 1896.” 

Davis for more than 80 years was part of a war memorial that included a group of statues depicting Confederate leaders.

Their presence for years parked sporadic protests on a campus that didn’t admit African American undergraduates until 1956.

The protests culminated in a removal campaign that Xavier Rotnofsky, then UT’s student body president, helped lead in 2015. 

Now a California comedy writer, Rotnofsky, hasn’t seen the display, titled “From Commemoration to Education,” but he applauds Davis’ change of address.  

“Jefferson Davis was part of a legion of folks who fought for some pretty abhorrent reasons,” Rotnofsky said. “He’s no longer literally on a pedestal.”

Peers recently took a group of undergraduates to view the Davis display, and said that the exhibition could use “a little more vinegar.”

Along with the statue, which stands indoors facing the UT tower, the exhibition presents a wealth of letters, newspapers and other artifacts that document the icon’s financing and construction.

“It’s lit tastefully,” Peers said. “We thought the lights should be turned down: It should be sitting in the dark.”

He also suggested placing the toppled figurehead on its side and allowing visitors inscribe their “racial anxieties” on it with erasable markers.

“Make it clear that it’s a script that’s being written over — that we’re still writing it,” Peers said.

Peers also questioned removing the decision to remove a statue of Woodrow Wilson, the United States’ 28th president.

The university hauled off Wilson statue, which remains under wraps, from a place opposite Davis to maintain the mall’s symmetry, officials said.

“We’re being told to forget the sculpture was there because there’s no asymmetry,” Peers said. “We’re being encouraged to forget.”

On the contrary, said Ben Wright, the Briscoe Center’s assistant communications director.

“Most people who come have learned new information about the statue,” Wright said. “It’s a teachable moment.”

For those who want more, there’s an opportunity to look into the center’s archives in a nearby reading room.

The entire memorial of which the statue was part became a problem in the midst of campus construction in the early 20th century as the Civil War veterans who revered Davis were aging.

They were “on the cusp of the Civil War” which was moving “from memory to history,” Wright said.

“There’s a message about Davis encoded in the statue that’s dedicated to a certain view of history,” Wright said. “There are more angles to this. The scholarship on this will continue.”

John Austin covers the Texas Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at jaustin@cnhi.com.