Bingamon gives voice to faculty who have long carried the mission of the University of Texas with distinction—scholars like Heather Houser, Christen Smith, Karma Chávez, and countless others who entered this profession out of love for teaching, discovery, and the promise of higher education as a public good. Their stories reveal the human cost of a political project bent on re-engineering the university into an instrument of control rather than inquiry. What we are witnessing is not a pendulum swing in policy; it is an assault on the very conditions that make knowledge possible.
Senate Bills 17 and 37, the firing of DEI staff, the erasure of the Flags curriculum, and the installation of partisan overseers in leadership posts are not isolated acts of “reform.” They are pieces of a coordinated campaign to recast education as indoctrination and to punish faculty for thinking critically, for teaching honestly, for caring about the truth. And now, as Bingamon notes, the chilling effects are measurable: a widening exodus of talent, plummeting morale, and a slow bleed of the intellectual capital that once defined the University of Texas as a beacon of excellence.
What’s especially haunting is how familiar this pattern feels to those of us who study history. Authoritarian regimes have always begun their consolidations of power by restricting what can be taught, by defunding the sciences, by intimidating artists and humanists, and by turning teachers into suspects. As German-American theorist and political philosopher Herbert Marcuse reminded us,
“the truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality.” (Marcuse, 1978, p. 6).
That is precisely why authoritarian regimes fear artists, teachers, and scholars: we remind people that another world is possible
While Bingamon’s reporting makes clear that this playbook is now unfolding in our own backyard. despair is not the only lesson here. The very professors and students being silenced are also the ones preserving our democratic inheritance. They are documenting, organizing, and refusing to normalize the unacceptable. As Christen Smith reminds us,
“cutting people off from information has never, in the history of our world, stopped that information from existing.”
This is so true. Knowledge born of struggle cannot be buried.
So yes—hats off to Brant Bingamon for telling the truth plainly. And hats off to every scholar, staff member, and student who continues to do the same, even when our students express fear and the cost feels unbearable.
We will keep teaching.
We will keep writing.
We will keep bearing witness.
Because truth, once spoken, has a way of surviving the storm.
— Angela Valenzuela
Right-Wing Crackdowns Drive Academics Away From UT and the U.S.
Staff morale, federal funds, and state confidence dry up
y Heather Houser liked a lot about Austin when she moved here in 2011. The city had amazing music, she told us, a good food scene, and a left-leaning political atmosphere. But what made her content in Austin was her new job at the University of Texas.
“It was a really good place for me, and the kinds of work – the research, the teaching – I wanted to do,” Houser said. “I had great colleagues. I enjoyed working with the student populations at the undergrad and grad levels. I like to say that I have had one of the best careers, in the way that the university has supported me as an individual. It’s been really wonderful.”
Houser was still in her 20s, one year removed from completing a Ph.D. in English and American literature at Stanford. She began teaching English lit that fall in the College of Liberal Arts and doing the one thing sure to please her department chair – getting published. She placed several pieces in peer-reviewed journals in her first years at UT. In 2014, she published a well-regarded book, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.
Houser has cranked out the writing ever since – scholarly articles, chapters for multi-author works, and, in 2020, another award-winning book. She’s gained expertise in demography, reproductive health, women’s policy, and climate change. She served on the transportation advisory group to help develop Austin’s Climate Equity Plan. She moved up in the English department, becoming the Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor. She’ll soon publish two more books, one about having children in the age of climate change, the other a memoir of her girlhood in small-town Pennsylvania.
All of this to say, Heather Houser is the kind of professor UT tries to recruit and hopes to keep. She never stops working. She wins awards. She brings justification to UT’s claim that it is a university of the first class.
But in 2019, Houser began having doubts about UT. She saw, she said, that some of the school’s programs are well-funded, while others remain in permanent austerity. Her doubts deepened during the COVID pandemic. A series of disease variants swept through the school and UT’s leaders seemed reluctant to offer guidance to professors.
“Texas was not very forward-thinking on things like vaccines and mask mandates, and that trickled down to the institution too,” Houser said. “The communications from the leaders at UT can be very frustrating. They do not take political stances, which is not surprising for a public university, but you’re left in the lurch. You’re left utterly adrift. You’re not sure what you’re allowed to do, much less encouraged to do, with respect to students or even your own work sometimes.”
COVID seemed to mark a turning point at UT, several professors told us. A national right-wing consensus rose up that questioned science, fearmongered about trans people, and pushed book bans in K-12 schools. Texas leaders, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, adopted the messaging and announced their intention to censor the teaching of critical race theory at the state’s public universities, end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and eliminate tenure.
Republicans wound up passing Senate Bill 17 in the 2023 legislative session, a law requiring universities to dismantle their DEI programs. In April of 2024, the university fired about 60 employees who had previously worked in positions related to DEI. Three weeks later, at the demand of Gov. Greg Abbott, UT leaders called in state troopers to put down nonviolent pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Hundreds of faculty signed a petition objecting to the students’ arrests. UT administrators ignored them.
Houser had been fielding job offers for years but had never seriously considered leaving UT. Now it was time to get out. She ended her 14 years with the university this month, taking a pay cut to move to Belgium and teach at the University of Antwerp. She made the decision last summer, she told us, but hung on at UT one more year to wrap up her work.
“I could have left a year ago, and at that point, when I would tell people, they were like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, that’s kind of weird, but I guess Europe is fun.’ But as soon as Trump was elected, everyone was like, ‘Wow, you’re getting out just in time.’”
Indoctrination
As she taught her last semester at UT, Houser watched Texas Republicans attack higher education with renewed ferocity in the just-concluded legislative session, passing Senate Bill 37, a law which will deepen their control over the state’s universities. Her colleagues fought the bill all session. Houser had no illusions about whether it would pass.
“The discourse around critical race theory, the book bans, the anti-LGBTQ discourse – it did seem like a first step,” she said. “And now we’re seeing the next step. With what the Lege has done this year, my colleagues are thinking they won’t be able to teach what they have before. They won’t be able to do research, or at least have it supported. They might lose their jobs entirely. Units might close. All of that.”
SB 37 impacts Texas’ public universities in several ways. It strips professors of the power to help choose the leaders of their universities – the provosts, vice presidents, and deans – and gives that power to the board of regents of the state’s public university systems. It reduces professors’ power to participate in other university decisions by weakening faculty senates, which traditionally have shared decision-making with university administrators. It creates the “Office of the Ombudsman,” an overseer appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott to investigate professors accused of violating SB 17 and SB 37.
But the provision of SB 37 that could most affect the careers of professors in the College of Liberal Arts is the power it gives the board of regents to decide which courses Texas’ public universities offer. SB 37 requires the regents to examine each university’s core curriculum – the courses all students in a university must pass in order to graduate – and to remove courses they decide aren’t essential for “civic and professional life.” It also requires the regents to review each institution’s minors and certificate programs and consolidate or eliminate those they judge to have inadequate “workforce demand.”
The core curriculum is a set of courses that make up roughly a third of the coursework that all students, in all majors, need to pass to complete a baccalaureate degree. The core, as professors call it, includes basic kinds of learning – reading and math – along with courses in science, culture, the creative arts, American history, government, and the social sciences. It includes hundreds of course options. Some are in departments like African and African diaspora studies, Mexican American studies, and women’s and gender studies – disciplines that Republicans have characterized as part of a “woke agenda.” The core also includes history courses like the history of the Civil Rights Movement. At least one poll has found that many conservatives oppose courses with this kind of content because of “guilt.” In the words of Condoleezza Rice, they may “make white kids feel bad for being white.”
Dan Patrick has regularly criticized ethnic and gender studies courses as tools of political indoctrination. The author of SB 37, state Sen. Brandon Creighton, described them as “rooted in activism and political indoctrination” in a May celebration of the passage of SB 37. He added that Texas’ boards of regents will now have the power to scrub such courses from the core.
The professors we spoke with believe the charges of indoctrination are a case of projection – that it is conservatives who want to impose their views on students. They say their courses are the opposite of brainwashing, that they teach critical thinking, something that develops moral character and produces better citizens. This kind of teaching is a product of the 18th century Enlightenment, which insisted on the primacy of reason and served as a north star for developing democracies, and the universities that were envisioned as pillars of them. As Thomas Jefferson, a major figure of the Enlightenment, wrote: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be.”
Academics told us the core curriculum is important on a practical level, because the general education it provides helps graduates pivot to new careers when the specialized instruction they learn becomes obsolete. The core also serves to knit Texas’ democratic society together.
“No matter what your major is, no matter what your specialization is, you know a set of things that you have in common with everyone who graduated from the university,” said Christen Smith, who until last year taught African and African diaspora studies and anthropology at UT. “Things like writing, critical thinking, critical reading, math and statistics and science. Just basic stuff.”
Professors like Karma Chávez, the chair of UT’s Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, fear that the regents will soon eliminate the ethnic and gender studies courses that have been accepted parts of the core curriculum. “Those of us in the College of Liberal Arts – especially ethnic and gender studies, American studies, those kinds of things – our classes are not going to be allowed in the core curriculum,” Chávez told us in May, days before SB 37 was approved. “They’re trying to make it so that no one takes our classes. And then what they’re going to do is say, ‘Well, no one takes your classes, so now we’re going to slash your budget.’ It’ll be a death by a thousand cuts.”
As SB 37 was still being debated in April, UT officials quietly removed the university’s own core curriculum program, called the Flags. The program, proposed by industry executives in the 2000s and in effect since 2006, required students to take courses with six kinds of content, inspiring its name, in reference to the six flags that have flown over Texas. The content included ethics, quantitative reasoning, independent inquiry, writing, global cultures, and cultural diversity. The point of the program, according to a passage on UT’s website which has been removed, was to teach students to “engage in ethical decision-making and independent problem-solving, and understand the diverse, data-dense world.”
The Flags requirements were designed to be, in the words of one professor, “legislation-proof,” meaning that the program would not have been affected by SB 37. But Flags was not immune to the political moment. Former UT President Jay Hartzell initiated a review of the program in February, warning faculty that Republican legislators were scrutinizing it. Two months later, the program was suddenly dropped, effective immediately.
“There was a whole task force that was addressing this, looking at the positives and the negatives of the Flags and what we should do about them, and before they could even write a report, the decision was made,” a liberal arts professor who didn’t want to be named told us. “It was alarming, because things don’t happen quickly in academia, and that happened very quickly.”
Research Funding Clawed Back
Professors on the science and engineering side of UT have watched with varying levels of concern as Republicans passed SB 17 and SB 37, but with no sense that their own work was imperiled. Donald Trump’s cancellation of research grant funding has changed that.
“The view here was like, ‘It’s impacting our university, but we’re really only indirectly impacted,’” a science professor who did not want to be named told us. “So I think having this direct impact on our faculty was a little bit eye-opening. Like, oh, we’re also not safe.”
One of Trump’s first acts after his inauguration was to order the leaders of federal agencies like the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to evaluate existing research grants, the kinds that go to U.S. universities, and recommend which could be terminated. In April, the White House froze grants for ongoing projects worth billions of dollars at Harvard, Princeton, Northwestern, Columbia, and other universities. Many of the cuts appeared to have been arrived at through keyword searches for terms in grant proposals like “diversity and inclusion,” “sexual identity,” and “vaccines.”
In May, Trump’s administration unveiled its budget goal for 2026, which included cuts described as a “blitzkrieg against science” by Stanford historian Robert Proctor. The cuts included a 56% reduction to the budget of the National Science Foundation; a 53% cut to the CDC; and a 40% cut to NIH, the biggest funder of scientific research in the nation.
Professors at UT told us there is no way to overstate the importance of NIH grants to universities and graduate students. More than 80% of the money NIH spends goes to professors running labs at universities across the U.S., including those at UT-Austin.
“I don’t know anyone in biomedical research who doesn’t have NIH funding,” said John Wallingford, the Doherty Regents Chair in Molecular Biology (a no leadership position, he told us, different from chairing the Molecular Biosciences department). Wallingford stresses the opinions he expressed are his own and do not reflect the position of the department or his colleagues. “There are small handfuls of people who do it entirely off of something else, but the vast majority of all biomedical science is paid for by NIH. Pretty much every person who works in biotech in America has a biology degree and has received it, has been trained, using NIH money.”
The cuts to UT’s NIH research grants thus far are not as extreme as they have been at universities like Northwestern, which has lost every dollar of its NIH money. A UT spokesperson told us that, as of July 1, its research groups have had 75 out of a total of 4,600 grants terminated. That represents $31 million in lost funding out of $1.1 billion in annual budget expenditures. One of the biggest cancellations was to research overseen by professor Jason McLellan, who helped develop a COVID vaccine and was recently inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. McLellan had a multi-year NIH grant to develop drugs with the potential to save lives in future pandemics. It was canceled abruptly on March 24. “All research and spending had to cease that day,” McLellan told KUT.
The grant cuts will not just end research but also put the young scientists learning to do the research out of work. That’s because the overwhelming majority of federal grant money goes to pay grad students. These students, who are working to complete master’s and Ph.D. programs, typically make about $30,000 a year. They attend classes, but research is their main job.
One professor, who asked not to be identified, estimated that 80% of the money he receives from federal grants goes to pay his students. The professor said that a 40% cut to NIH grants can be expected to result in at least a 30% reduction in the number of grad students working at labs in the nation’s universities.
Wallingford said that students usually apply for graduate programs in November and December and that programs in his department typically accept dozens of applicants. This year, he expects the number to be severely reduced. “This has happened all over the country,” he said. “Some schools have said they’re going to take zero students.”
People have no idea how much economic damage the proposed cuts will create, Wallingford told us. A March report from United for Medical Research found that NIH awarded $37 billion in grants to researchers last year, supporting 407,782 jobs and $94.5 billion in economic activity nationwide, a return on investment of $2.56 for every $1 provided. Texas researchers received $1.9 billion, which supported $6 billion in economic activity and over 30,000 jobs. The top awardee was the University of Texas System.
Wallingford likened UT’s labs to small businesses and provided a snapshot of his own, which studies the genes that control how embryos develop, to determine why birth defects like spina bifida happen. Such birth defects are the leading cause of death for babies in the U.S.
“My small business is a research lab,” Wallingford said. “What my lab produces is knowledge. I have 14 employees. Some of these are full-time workers. Some of them are graduate research assistants, which you need to understand is a full-time job. Some of these are college students getting hourly wages. But my budget is about $750,000 a year. That goes to these 14 people’s salaries but also there’s a FedEx delivery man in my lab every single day. There are plumbers fixing my aquariums. Once a month, there are electricians fixing equipment in my laboratory. The number of people who get paid with my NIH grant is a really complex ecosystem of regular folks.”
If the cuts that Republicans are planning do come to pass, professors expect large numbers of labs to shut down. This will ultimately reduce the number of courses offered at universities and the numbers of professors employed. Schools like UT will shrink.
Wallingford is waiting to learn the fate of his own grants. “I have three grants that run my lab and all three of mine happen to roll over this summer. I have one of them in the bank, but my other two grants are supposed to show up in July, and I just don’t know if they’re going to come. If they don’t, I let my people go. And lots of grants have been cut, lots of people are out of business. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t now made a triage list of who gets fired first if one of their grants just doesn’t show up. This is how we’re living right now.”
Right-Wing Overseers
There has been unprecedented turnover in top leadership positions at UT over the last two years. Several of the professors we spoke with are convinced that Texas Republicans are replacing the university’s leaders with loyal allies. They believe Jim Davis, who was appointed by the board of regents as UT’s interim president in February, is one of these.
“It’s pretty clear that he’s just taking orders from someone else who knows a little bit more about what to do next,” a UT faculty member in a position of leadership told us. “And there’s lots of speculation about which regent is pulling most of those strings.”
Davis took over the presidency after former President Jay Hartzell’s sudden departure. Davis was hired straight out of Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office in 2018, after three years of working beside Paxton as his deputy, to take over the university’s Legal Affairs division. He is the first UT president since 1899 without a background in teaching.
It would make sense that career politician Kevin Eltife would be one of the Republicans pulling the strings at UT. Eltife was an ally of Gov. Abbott and Lt. Gov. Patrick during his days as a state senator and was appointed to the board of regents by Abbott in 2017. In fact, Davis explicitly told faculty in an email in May that he conferred with Eltife in picking William Inboden to be the sole finalist for provost, the second-in-command position at the university. Davis said he sought Eltife’s approval of Inboden because of the new rules in SB 37, which give final decision-making authority to the regents in the hiring of provosts, vice presidents, and deans. Davis predicted in the email that once Inboden is confirmed the university will “have the leaders we need in place this fall to begin shaping what comes next.” Inboden was named vice president and provost on July 17.
Inboden has cultivated the kind of image that was once of great value in the Republican Party. He was a senior director of the National Security Council under George W. Bush and has written or co-edited several books on foreign policy, including Ronald Reagan and the invasion of Iraq. He taught at UT’s LBJ School of Public Policy from 2010 to 2023, serving as the executive director of the Clements Center for National Security, a think tank which, according to its website, aims to “train the next generation of national security leaders.”
Provost is a critical position at the university, even more critical than president, some professors told us, because provosts oversee the school’s academic mission – its curriculum and degree programs, faculty advancement and tenure, and the university’s $1 billion research portfolio. Davis’ unilateral selection of Inboden shocked professors who weren’t already numb to such breaks with precedent, because it violated the university’s policy requiring a committee of nine faculty members to review candidates for the position and recommend three for the president to pick from.
Inboden returns to UT after spending two years at the University of Florida as the director of the Alexander Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. The Alexander Hamilton School is one of over a dozen new schools at universities across the country that have been established by Republican legislators, rather than in the usual fashion, by the universities’ faculties. The leaders of the schools typically deny that these are political projects, but not the Republicans who vote them into existence. In advocating for the expansion of the Alexander Hamilton School in 2023, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the school was created to “push back against the tactics of liberal elites.”
Of course, UT has its own Republican-mandated school at UT, the School of Civic Leadership, an explicitly anti-woke enterprise created over faculty protest in 2023 at the insistence of Lt. Gov. Patrick, Kevin Eltife, and billionaire donors like Harlan Crow. The school will usher in its inaugural class this fall after Texas Republicans voted in May to give it $100 million in taxpayer dollars. The school’s goal, according to its website, is to foster in students a “thoughtful admiration for Western Civilization,” a coded term, the professors we spoke with said, for wealthy, white, male values. Inboden, UT’s new vice president, will also have a faculty appointment in the School of Civic Leadership.
Professors at the College of Liberal Arts fear that Republicans are trying to redirect students who take courses like economics and history at the college to similar courses at the School of Civic Leadership. Morale at College of Liberal Arts is terrible, they tell us, and has been ever since the departure of the school’s dean, Ann Stevens. Stevens was told last October that she would not be allowed to serve a second term, despite having improved the scholarly profile of the college and increased its fundraising to record levels. Stevens began a new position as provost at the University of Colorado Boulder on July 15.
Several professors we spoke with said Stevens’ firing helped convince them to leave UT. They worry for their colleagues, who will have to coexist with SB 37’s Office of the Ombudsman. The new office was created to intimidate faculty, the professors believe, as it funds an investigator in state government, appointed by Gov. Abbott, whose sole job is to scrutinize professors accused of violating SB 17 and 37. Professors who are accused will have little right to defend themselves, according to the American Association of University Professors, making the office “ripe for abuse.”
Heather Houser said her former colleagues at UT are afraid students will record their lectures and turn them over to the Office of the Ombudsman. Christen Smith, who taught African and African diaspora studies and anthropology at UT until last year, said the Office of the Ombudsman will lead professors to self-censor.
“They’re not going to be giving their best in the classroom, because they are going to be afraid of being surveilled,” Smith said. “Literally, people are going to refuse to tell the truth to their students and withhold information from their students. If a student comes up and says, ‘I really want to read this book,’ you’ll have to say, ‘I don’t know what book that is. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ This is the 1984 moment that we’re in.”
The UT faculty leader who requested anonymity warned that the fact that regents can now make hiring decisions all the way down to the level of dean will also frighten instructors into self-censorship. He said that, for most of the university’s existence, the president protected the faculty from political interference by the board of regents, that the regents’ role was essentially ceremonial, and that the board did little more than rubber-stamp the university’s budget and plans. Now, the firewall between the board and UT administrators has been torn down. Leaders like Jim Davis will sit back and watch, he fears, as the regents take control and the university withers in size and prestige.
“You know, we can go through these battles, and we have in the past,” the professor said. “[Former governor] Rick Perry had his own ideas for the university, but at that time we had strong leadership in the positions of university president and provost who would push back. That’s just not the case right now. Nobody down here in the trenches feels like Jim Davis is helping us, protecting us, or protecting the mission.”
Cutting People Off
The faculty leader related a story, something of a parable, about the way Republican lawmakers see UT, and the way everyday Texans see it. He told us he completed grad school in a very conservative state, where the Legislature regularly attacked higher education. Then he got hired at UT.
“When I came to Texas, Texas was equally as conservative as [where I came from], but people loved UT. Everybody wants one of their kids to go to UT. I would go into hardware stores to get stuff for my lab and people would find out I was a professor. They’d go on about their family members that had been at UT and say, ‘Oh, take this for free.’ You know: ‘We really want to support the university.’
“And I guess what is paradoxical to me now is that, for whatever reason, the university has become this boogeyman that needs to be controlled. But I’m just going to tell you, I went and bought a car yesterday out in one of the little towns outside Austin, and the guy who sold me the car was an older guy, about to retire. He introduced me to everybody he could grab at the place as a member of the UT faculty. He said, ‘This guy’s doing incredible work for the state.’”
This summer marked the end of this professor’s many years at UT. He’s moving on in August to do the same kind of teaching at a well-regarded university out of state. Christen Smith taught at UT for 18 years and served as the director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, periodically turning down offers to move to other prestigious universities. She accepted a position at Yale last summer. She said she knew UT had begun undermining its teaching values with its new policies and that this would impact her ability to teach in the classroom.
“The writing was very much on the wall about the increasing disdain towards Black studies and towards women’s and gender studies and sexuality studies and toward Latin American studies – everything that I did, everything that I helped build for the 18 years that I was there,” she said. “That’s not something that you want. I don’t want to be a part of an educational process that refuses to acknowledge parts of our history and parts of our reality, or that censors what we can say.”
Smith is quick to add, however, that she saw a very high quality of scholarship at the university. “I have told my colleagues at Ivy League institutions that the students and my colleagues at UT can rival any Ivy League institution in this country. But that is because of the academic integrity of the institution. Everything that’s happening now is undermining that integrity.”
The AAUP is currently surveying professors, asking which are leaving or planning to leave the university. By June, they had identified at least 40 who plan to go. One of those, a professor who has accepted a position at a university out of state but has not yet left, said she expects more professors to apply for jobs elsewhere this fall, which is the season that such applications are usually filed.
Heather Houser arrived in Antwerp this month and is already learning Dutch. She’s staying in contact with her former colleagues. “People who haven’t thought about leaving are definitely talking about it more, like living away from their spouses and children so that they could have a different faculty job in a different state,” she said. “I don’t know anyone who isn’t in a deep state of despair and anger and utter bafflement. And I speak with staff too. This isn’t just faculty. I don’t want to mention names, but senior staff are like, ‘Look, I can retire in a year.’”
Houser is excited to live in Europe, partly because higher education there remains strong. College is cheap or free. Academic freedom is respected throughout most of the continent. Such is no longer the case in the U.S. A recent analysis of the relative strength of the world’s democracies found that the U.S. now ranks 85th – far below Europe and Canada – on the indicator of academic freedom, which includes measurements of professors’ autonomy from government control and freedom to discuss their work without censorship. Other research shows that professors submitted 32 percent more applications for jobs abroad in the first few months of 2025, compared with the same number in 2024.
In early July, France’s Aix-Marseille Université introduced eight U.S. researchers that it referred to as “scientific refugees.” They have joined the university through its Safe Place for Science program. AMU President Eric Berton compared the political environment in the U.S. to the one faced by European professors who fled Nazi Germany during Hitler’s rise, saying, “What is at play here today is not unrelated to another dark period of our history.”
Academics no longer consider the comparison overstated. One professor we spoke with said American universities will descend much farther if people don’t rise to defend them now. He pointed out that in late June, Trump succeeded in pressuring the president of the University of Virginia to resign. He believes Trump and his Republican enablers, like the ones ensconced at UT, are taking inspiration from Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban. Hungary’s Orban destroyed academic freedom in the early years of his rule by slashing universities’ budgets and installing allies in leadership positions. In 2021, he handed control of three-fourths of the nation’s public universities to private foundations. In Russia, students and professors have been removed from universities for criticizing the country’s war with Ukraine.
The UT faculty leader said it’s not too late to save UT, however, and that leaders like Jim Davis and Bill Inboden are well-positioned to act. “If they say, ‘Yeah, we’re conservatives, we know the concerns of the conservatives, but we also know that there’s a lot here that needs to be protected and preserved’ – if they take that approach – things could be okay. If they go the other way, where it’s time to purge people they don’t like and all these other things, they could ruin the place pretty quickly.”
This professor isn’t waiting around to find out if UT’s Republican overseers will save it. He is part of the widening exodus. By September, when the AAUP releases its yearly faculty survey, we’ll get a clearer picture of how many professors are giving up on UT.
Christen Smith thinks it’s too late for the university to avoid a hit to its prestige. But ultimately, she said, the information that Republicans don’t want young people to learn can’t be controlled. “Cutting people off from information has never, in the history of our world, stopped that information from existing, or stopped people from seeking it. Cutting people off from information also has never been a key ingredient to creating a peaceful and just society.”
Editor’s Note Tuesday, July 29, 11:47am: This story incorrectly identified John Wallingford as chair of UT’s Molecular Biosciences Department; he is the Doherty Regents Chair in Molecular Biology, a no leadership position, while Jeffrey Gross is chair of the Molecular Biosciences Department. Also, a photo cutline incorrectly stated Heather Houser moved to the Netherlands; she is in Belgium. The Chronicle regrets the errors.
This article appears in July 25 • 2025.
