Friends:
The conservative takeover of the University of Texas is well underway, and Forrest Wilder’s powerful Texas Monthly investigation lays bare just how far it has progressed. What emerges from his reporting is not simply a story of administrative restructuring or ideological disagreement, but a far-reaching transformation of our flagship university through political interference, the erosion of shared governance, and the systematic weakening of academic freedom.
For myself and others, it feels more like an "occupation," as opposed to "bureaucratic restructuring."
Particularly alarming is the dismantling of Ethnic and gender studies programs, the marginalization of faculty expertise, and the chilling climate of fear and self-censorship taking hold on campus. Wilder situates these developments within UT’s longer history of political assaults on intellectual independence, reminding us that the university has faced—and resisted—such threats before.
The central contradiction is impossible to ignore: How can a university aspire to greatness while undermining the very intellectual freedom, diversity of knowledge, and democratic principles upon which academic excellence depends? What is at stake is not simply UT’s national standing, but its public mission, its moral credibility, and the future of higher education as a cornerstone of democracy.
I am so very grateful to Wilder for this illuminating piece. We've been here before. We can and should push back on this today.
Our reputation is at stake.
Inside the Conservative Takeover of the University of Texas
A secretive president. A crusading provost. A domineering legislature. What are UT’s new leaders building?
IIt’s about 1,600 miles from Laredo to Detroit—a long haul by any measure. For Roberto Carlos, who made the trip often as a trucker, the drive was mostly a grind, monotonous and dangerous. Trucking was a hard way to make a living, but it was honest work that his parents, immigrants from Mexico who had settled in San Antonio, respected.
One of the highlights of the trip came in Austin, when he would pass by the University of Texas campus. Carlos would downshift to spend a few more moments gazing at the Forty Acres. Just off Interstate 35, there was the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, flanked by majestic live oaks. Nearby sat Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium, one of the great venues in college football and the home of the Texas Longhorns. In the heart of campus rose the famous Tower, the 307-foot monument to the school’s ambition and power. From the eighteen-wheeler cab, it all seemed so close and yet so far away.
In a time when higher education is beset by crises and doubts, it’s easy to forget what a place like UT has meant for so many: a ticket out of poverty, an invitation to labor on matters of the mind, an opportunity to contribute, in some small way, to the world’s storehouse of knowledge.
But that was all just theory for Carlos. He had graduated from high school in San Antonio and gone straight to work. After two years of long-haul trucking, he decided that he needed to get a college degree. He didn’t have the grades to get into UT, so he went to Texas State University. After graduating, he taught at Churchill High School, in San Antonio, for five and a half years while working on a masters degree at the University of Texas at San Antonio. The idea was to become a better teacher, but he ended up falling in love with research. He left to get a doctorate at the University of Chicago and then landed his first faculty job at the University of Georgia in 2019.
Carlos and his wife were happy in Athens. They were restoring a home, and his career was taking off. He published an article in one of the top political science journals on how young Latinos often function as adults in their families, helping their immigrant parents navigate unfamiliar systems and customs. Suddenly he was a hot prospect in the brutal academic labor market. Carlos had his dream job in mind: “When my peers were talking about, ‘I want to teach at Harvard’ or ‘I want to teach at Stanford,’ I was like, ‘I want to teach at UT.’ And they would be like, ‘Really?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s the place to be.’ ”
The draw for Carlos wasn’t just the school. It was Texas. “I love Texas. I love H-E-B. I love my family, and I love Whataburger, probably in that order.”
In late 2021 the dream became reality. He landed a tenure-track job in UT’s
government department with an appointment in the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, which was founded in 1940. In many ways, UT was everything Carlos had hoped for. He got season tickets to football and basketball games. He began working on a book for a top university press. In Carlos, the university had landed a rising star. “He’s such a high-caliber scholar with such a great reputation,” said Hannah Walker, a government professor who helped recruit him. And his students got that invaluable commodity on a college campus: a respected young scholar who loves to teach and is good at it.
Carlos figured he would bleed burnt orange for life. But what he didn’t realize was that he had wandered into the first battle of what was to be a long war.
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| Much of the Forty Acres is a construction site, with $2.4 billion in projects underway. Photograph by Jeff Wilson |
In theory, Texas colleges enjoy a degree of freedom and independence. They have a layer of insulation from politics: The governor appoints board members, and these regents in turn hire (and fire) a university’s president. Under state law, governing boards are also obliged to “preserve institutional independence.” The day-to-day business is—or was—conducted through a model of “shared governance,” in which faculty and administrators each have a role in decision-making. To ensure academic freedom, the right to teach and conduct research without political interference, universities established a system of tenure for professors, a promise of indefinite employment that makes it hard, but not impossible, for faculty to be fired for speaking their minds.
But in 2021 that order began to break. That year, according to The Texas Tribune, billionaire donors such as Harlan Crow and Robert Rowling worked behind the scenes with Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick to set up a conservative think tank at UT-Austin, which the Lege seeded with $6 million. Now called the Civitas Institute, it trains students on “liberty and private enterprise.”
Then in 2022, Patrick announced that he was so sick of the “indoctrination” happening on college campuses—with critical race theory taught by “looney Marxist UT professors”—that he supported a radical proposition: the abolition of tenure for new faculty. Patrick’s proposal was shocking and potentially destabilizing to the state’s system of higher education. Though the ban died in the House, the Legislature codified weakened tenure rules and moved to abolish diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. UT dutifully laid off at least sixty staff members, and the campus’s multicultural center closed. Some faculty might have privately stomached the rollback of the DEI bureaucracy, but the effort to bring colleges to heel was far from over.
In the years to follow, the Republican-controlled Legislature paved the way for UT and other colleges to dissolve their faculty councils—elected bodies that help govern academic matters in the spirit of shared governance—and gave regents sweeping new authority over hiring, curriculum, and degree offerings.
University governing boards read the room and went even further. Texas Tech University regents would order campuses to shut down any program “ ‘centered on’ . . . sexual orientation and gender identity.” Meanwhile, at Texas A&M University, restrictions on gender-and race-studies classes would be so far-reaching that a philosophy professor would be told to remove a Plato reading from his course. Texas State would suggest that faculty use AI to help de-wokeify their course’s titles and descriptions.
Carlos, who studies politics for a living, was unnerved by what he was seeing. “The state legislature should have a role in what happens at public institutions,” he told me. But, he thought, politicians were jeopardizing the very thing that made universities a cornerstone of democracy: the right of scholars to teach and do research without government interference. “It really is this idea of, can we ask hard questions even when they’re uncomfortable?”
Carlos was up for tenure in 2025, but he found himself questioning whether UT would remain a place for free thinking. By April of that year—when Patrick encouraged “looney Marxist UT professors” to move to a blue state—he had already accepted a job at the University of Michigan. “Leaving UT was super hard,” he said. “My mom’s still mad.”
He stressed to me that the Michigan offer was attractive. “I don’t want my move to be read as a protest,” he said. “But I do think that the fact that a pretty proud Texan would leave—I would literally stop and clap if somebody sang ‘The stars at night’ —that should spark some reflection about the importance of protecting higher education from unnecessary interference.”
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| Roberto Carlos, a lifelong Longhorns fan, in November 2022, shortly after he came back to the state for his dream job.Courtesy of Roberto Carlos |
Over my year of reporting and talking to dozens of professors, students, administrators, and staff at UT, I was struck by the degree of fear on campus and the sense that a freewheeling intellectual culture was dead or dying. Many told me about acts of self-censorship. Fears of being doxed or fired had led some faculty to avoid controversy, though few wanted to discuss it on the record.
A Middle Eastern studies professor spoke to me in their office about no longer teaching texts that are critical of Israel and about donor pressure to cancel events sympathetic to Palestinians. Julia Mickenberg, a tenured professor who’s taught at UT for 25 years, removed Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer from her Children’s Literature and American Culture syllabus after the Texas A&M professor Melissa McCoul was fired over her teaching of a similar LGBTQ-themed book. Mickenberg had assigned the memoir for the first time specifically because it’s one of the most frequently banned books in the country. And yet here she was self-censoring.
In February, UT’s board passed a policy that seemed to limit the discussion of “controversial topics” in the classroom. It offered no definition of the term. Kevin Eltife, the chairman of the board and a former East Texas Republican state senator, said the lack of clarity was a virtue—“vagueness can be our friend.”
That’s not how it was received on campus. Ricardo Lowe, a demographer who was a postdoctoral fellow, said he had to dramatically change the way he taught a course on race and statistics. He said the policy forced him to navigate a minefield. “I didn’t know the boundaries of what I was supposed to be saying or not saying.”
Jeremi Suri, a professor in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs, told me that what’s happening on campus is akin to Mc-
Carthyism. “What we’re seeing is a classic chilling effect, whether intended or not. This is what happens when people become concerned that what might have been acceptable or protected yesterday won’t be protected tomorrow.”
Morale among faculty, especially in the College of Liberal Arts, is dismal. “It’s definitely the worst it’s ever been,” one professor told me. Last year, The Daily Texan, UT’s student newspaper, surveyed faculty and found that 60 percent of respondents were thinking about leaving. “It’s going to take a lot to move people, but I do think we’ll start to see more than a trickle and less than a flood out of there by the people who have the best options,” said a dean who has since left UT.
It wasn’t hard for me to find others who had left. PJ Raval, a prolific Filipino American filmmaker and film professor, moved to Canada this year because he felt that UT was no longer a place that supported marginalized people. His husband, also on the faculty, had fled to Canada too. They were part of a mini-exodus of the department’s non-white, LGBTQ , and female faculty, including its only Black media-studies professor. Sharmila Rudrappa—who’d spent nearly two decades as a tenured Longhorn, including a stint as the director of the South Asia Institute—left UT’s fourteenth-ranked sociology program for the University of Illinois Chicago’s forty-second-ranked program in 2024.
And it wasn’t just professors who could be pigeonholed as “woke.” Amy Kristin Sanders, a First Amendment scholar and attorney, came to UT in 2019 for a tenured position in the Moody College of Communication, thinking it would be her forever home. She describes her politics as “right of center.” Her commitment to free speech is such that she served as an expert witness for Fox News in a $2.7 billion defamation suit tied to the network’s false claims about the 2020 election being stolen.
In her first year, Sanders watched with pride as the Legislature passed laws that expanded free speech at Texas colleges. But in spring 2024 she was teaching a class called Global Protections for Speech, Press, and Protest when UT’s then-president, Jay Hartzell, and Governor Greg Abbott invited a small army of cops, including state troopers on horses and campus police in riot gear, to crush pro-Palestinian protests. More than 130 demonstrators were arrested—some tackled and dragged in what faculty onlookers described as arbitrary arrests. (All the criminal trespassing charges were dropped.)
In summer 2024, Sanders accepted an endowed chair at Pennsylvania State University. If she had any doubts about the move, they were dispelled when, the next year, the Texas Legislature passed the Campus Protection Act. The new law directed universities to ban “expressive activities”—protests, speeches, public prayers—“on campus between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.” and to limit speech to “members of the university community.” Its author, Republican Senator Brandon Creighton, who is now the Texas Tech chancellor, said the restrictions were necessary in light of the “campuses across the country taken hostage by pro-terrorist mobs last year.” The wrong people were protesting, and they needed to be stopped. (A federal judge blocked enforcement of much of the law, averring that “the First Amendment does not have a bedtime of 10:00 p.m.”)
In a sense, things are going exactly to plan. GOP politicians have openly cheered the faculty exodus. When Art Markman, a psychology professor and the cohost of the NPR show Two Guys on Your Head, announced that he had been sacked from his senior vice provost position over “ideological differences,” Abbott (class of ’81) gloated on X: “Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation.” (Markman was more of a technocrat than a revolutionary; after he was fired, he took a job with a higher-ed-tech company in California.)
Sanders predicts that UT’s reputation will soon begin to falter, with lasting effects on the university’s ability to produce cutting-edge research and train the next generation of state leaders: “Very quickly, these changes are going to impact the student body that can be recruited, the faculty that can be hired, the staff that are willing to work there. And I think undermining academic freedom undermines the entire value of higher education—and maybe that’s the plan.”
The stakes at UT are high. Texas’s rise as an economic, political, and cultural powerhouse is in many ways tethered to UT. California has a half dozen world-class public universities, but Texas has, well, only Texas. (Sorry, Aggies.)
Are professors’ fears exaggerated?
Compared with those at A&M, Tech, and other campuses, the crackdowns at UT have been less in-your-face, the administration more sophisticated in undoing purported wokeness. None of the faculty at UT whom I spoke to said they had been threatened with dismissal. A few departures aside, Texas’s flagship campus remains a powerful magnet for talent. In 2022–2023 there were 8,540 applications for 74 faculty positions. This year, there were 12,465 for 94. “A lot more people want to be here than are potentially interested in leaving,” said a high-level administrator who asked for anonymity to speak candidly.
I graduated from UT in 2003 and then stuck around Austin, but somewhere along the way I lost touch with my alma mater. Spending time on the Forty Acres recently, I was stunned by the changes. Campus buzzes with construction projects, and the place appears to be thriving. The Tower is wrapped in scaffolding, part of a $77 million restoration project. In April, Michael and Susan Dell announced that they would be donating $750 million to create an “AI-native” medical research campus. Texas had the best athletic performance of any university in the past academic year, according to CBS News. West Campus (Wampus, as students now unfortunately call it) has transformed from a slum of frat houses and ratty apartments into a maze of glitzy high-rises with names like Torre and the Mark. I felt a little swagger in my step: We’re Texas! What starts here changes the world!
When I was an undergrad, UT was a good public university. Today it’s one of the nation’s best. Admissions is cutthroat. In 1999, my freshman year, 61 percent of applicants got in. In 2025 the acceptance rate was 26 percent. The year I graduated, Texas was ranked the seventeenth-best public university by U.S. News & World Report, and the late Paul Burka—a UT Law grad and this magazine’s political scribe for decades—lamented that the school had never reached the upper echelon alongside the Michigans and the Berkeleys. “The UT hierarchy would light the Tower orange for a year if it ranked seventh overall among the publics,” he wrote in 2003. Last year, the university clawed into seventh place.
Many are indeed ready to light the Tower orange. Devin Stauffer, a mildly disheveled government professor with a scruffy beard, said his colleagues were too dour about the changes afoot. I met with him in May at his office. His desk was watched over by Plato’s visage in a nod to his area of expertise, classical and early modern political philosophy. A university spokesperson sat in on our interview, which I found strange, though Stauffer didn’t seem to mind. “UT’s ascendant,” he said. “And by the way, this is at a time when higher education in general is really troubled and suffering.”
Both the right and the left were prone to overreaction, he believed. Yes, the woke era had indeed been stifling. There was a period, roughly from 2020 to 2022, when there was “a sense that certain things couldn’t be said on college campuses, certain positions couldn’t be taken.” Even the school’s song, “The Eyes of Texas,” had been put under the racial-justice microscope, with students pointing to its origins in a minstrel show as a reason to ban it.
But the right had “a caricature view” of UT’s faculty, overstating the degree of indoctrination happening in classrooms. Now it was the left’s turn to overreact. “I don’t think this push is as extreme or as detrimental as the left thinks it is,” Stauffer said. “It’s a rebalancing.”
Even the most embittered faculty will concede that UT has been on an incredible run. They just worry that political interference will stop the momentum. “What’s really sad is that Texas has been poised for a while to become a top-five public university in this country,” said one veteran member of the Liberal Arts faculty. “If these guys just don’t f— it up.”
rom the beginning, UT was destined for greatness—or so its boosters hoped. In 1839, when Texas was still an independent republic, its Congress, broke and dysfunctional, set aside forty acres on the high grounds north of the future Capitol, in Austin. The 1876 Constitution, the one we still live under today, envisioned the University of Texas as a “university of the first class.” In some ways, the story of UT is its 143-year struggle to achieve that charter.
Part of the trouble has long been political interference. Every so often, a governor or a regent, not content to leave well enough alone, tries to remake the school in his image.
UT’s first major crisis came in 1916. That year, Governor James “Pa” Ferguson demanded that the president resign and ordered the board of regents to fire professors he didn’t care for, including the first dean of the school of journalism. Ferguson found UT to be snobbish, a charge that has echoed down the generations. When the president did not step down, Ferguson vetoed nearly all the school’s funding. The Legislature responded by impeaching him.
You will find no buildings on campus named for Ferguson, but you will find one named for Homer Rainey, the school’s twelfth president and one of the state’s bravest champions of scholastic freedom. When Rainey assumed the presidency, in 1939, UT “was just beginning to make its bid to become one of the truly great universities in the country,” as he wrote in his memoir about his time there. But not long after Rainey started, Governor Wilbert Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel—like Dan Patrick, a business-friendly radio personality posing as a country boy—launched a crude campaign to rid UT of “radicalism,” a cause continued by his successor, Coke Stevenson. At Rainey’s first board meeting with a new slate of ultra-conservative regents, in 1942, one of Stevenson’s handpicked men, a lobbyist for financial interests, slid a card across the table with a list of four economics professors. “We want you to fire these men,” he told Rainey. The regents regarded the faculty members as communists, though they were in fact New Deal liberals.
That wasn’t all. In an early nod to the Texas sport of book banning, the regents instructed the school to stop teaching John Dos Passos’s novel The Big Money. It was an “obscene and filthy volume,” one regent intoned, helping to ignite sales of the book across the fair state. Like many men and women of history, Rainey felt that he had no choice: He had to take a stand for UT’s independence. He refused to fire the professors and resisted attempts to abolish tenure. The impasse went on for years, while World War II raged. After Rainey publicly denounced the regents, in 1944, the board fired him. Campus erupted. Six thousand students—some of them GIs fresh from fighting fascism in Europe—marched to the Capitol, bearing a coffin that announced that “academic freedom is dead.” The controversy, Rainey wrote, was fundamentally a “conflict between the old world and the modern world.” And the old world had seemingly won.
The Rainey episode did lasting damage to UT. The stain made it harder to recruit faculty, and it landed the school on the American Association of University Professors’ censure list for nine years.
A similar pattern played out in the sixties and seventies. This time, a theatrically tyrannical board chairman—Frank Erwin, a.k.a. the Emperor of UT—made it his business to crush the counterculture and chase off faculty whom he considered unpatriotic. In an attempt to squelch rabble-rousing leftist groups like Students for a Democratic Society, he closed campus to nonstudents. He tried to defund The Daily Texan and fired the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. In October 1969, Erwin personally oversaw the detention of students who had climbed up into giant oak and cypress trees along Waller Creek to stop their destruction. “Arrest all the people you have to,” he told the police he had summoned. “Once these trees are down, there won’t be anything to protest.”
Donna Howard, now a Democratic state representative from Austin, was a freshman that year. “It took us years to regain our standing,” she said. “But here we are again as if we didn’t learn those lessons.”
Frank Erwin (right), onetime chairman of the UT board of regents, was famous for cracking down on dissent, and once ordered the arrests of students occupying trees along Waller Creek to prevent their removal.Othell O. Owensby Jr./Houston Chronicle/Getty
UT has had good presidents and bad presidents. But in the past 120 years, all of them hailed from academia. All of them, that is, until Jim Davis. A bearded lawyer who grew up in Austin, Davis joined the Navy after high school, where, he said, his job as a cryptographer was to maintain secrets and to “do what I was told.” Later he earned a bachelor’s in history from UT and a law degree from Harvard. He worked for state Attorney General Ken Paxton from 2015 until 2018, when he became UT’s vice president for legal affairs. The regents made him interim president in February 2025 and gave him the permanent role that July. They did so without a national search, instead relying on a committee led by billionaire donor Robert Rowling. Davis has an annual salary of $1.25 million and a tenured professorship.
So far in his time as president, he has given two interviews to journalists, both from The Daily Texan, only after the Austin American-Statesman ran a scathing piece about his unusual reluctance to engage with the media. (Before that he gave an interview to a communications staffer with the university for its alumni magazine, The Alcalde.) I didn’t have any more luck; he also declined my request to talk.
But he was certainly paying close attention to the coverage about him. In February, Davis announced that three ethnic- and gender-studies programs, along with American studies, would lose their individual status and merge into a new department—a move that many regarded as an attempt to de-wokeify the College of Liberal Arts. The Texas Travesty, a satirical student newspaper that was founded in 1997, whipped up its take on the news: an illustration of a bloated-looking Davis sitting down to a meal of UT’s campus. The accompanying text read, “Report: A Famished Jim Davis Has Begun to
Eat COLA.”
In a meeting soon after, the Travesty’s adviser—a staff member with Texas Student Media—warned the newspaper’s leaders that they had upset Davis. “The underlying message was sort of, ‘Hey, we are funded [by UT]. Jim Davis has control over TSM’s money to a degree,’ ” said Nick Morris, the Travesty’s managing editor. “And if he responded like that to something so minuscule, then how would he react to something bigger?”
In truth, Davis had already confronted a major controversy. Several months after he was named president, American higher education was roiled by alarming news. The Trump administration had sent a letter to nine universities, UT-Austin among them, with an unprecedented deal. The schools could receive priority access to federal funding if they agreed to a list of demands, which included dismantling programs that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” Several schools quickly rejected the offer. UT gave an enthusiastic response to the compact, as it was called, with chairman Eltife stating, “We look forward to working with the Trump administration on it.”
A few weeks later, I went to Davis’s investiture. Across the street from Hogg Memorial Auditorium, a cluster of protesters had gathered in front of the Littlefield House, the temporary home of the School of Civic Leadership, to protest the compact: Hey, Jim Davis, stop the deal. We won’t bend. We won’t kneel. Inside, past heavy security, the front rows were filled with important political figures: state representatives, Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, Fifth Circuit Justice Don Willett. I was curious to hear what sort of vision Davis would announce for UT in his State of the University speech.
Onstage, a succession of campus leaders presented Davis with ceremonial baubles—a class ring, a gavel, a medallion, a wooden mace. Wearing a burnt-orange gown, Davis seemed eager to put a scholarly gloss on his CV. He talked fondly about growing up in the shadow of the Tower alongside his father, who had been the chair of the radio, television, and film department. He quoted from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself”) and said he’d come of age admiring Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the nineteenth-century transcendentalists.
Davis never mentioned the compact—it would come out months later that the negotiations had fizzled behind the scenes—but he did bemoan a “loss of public trust in higher education.” Like Socrates, he posed a series of questions: “Has inquiry become indoctrination? Has science surrendered to subjectivity? Have we given in to a culture of asserting my truth, with an intolerance for any other?”
Students, he said, needed to be prepared for a “critical and divisive world” by learning about truth, beauty, and goodness. And UT’s leaders would help them do that in three ways: value, balance, and completeness. (During a
cocktail reception next to the beloved Turtle Pond, a friend of mine in the College of Liberal Arts dryly noted that Davis had seemingly replaced DEI with a new three-letter acronym—VBC—its meaning about as fuzzy.)
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| Provost William Inboden and Jim Davis at Davis’s presidential investiture in October 2025.Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman/Getty |
In November 2025 a dozen or so UT students went to provost William
Inboden’s office to demand a public meeting about the compact. On social media, they called it a sit-in, but it wasn’t much of one. There were no signs or chanting. Daniel Ramirez, a computer-science sophomore from the Rio Grande Valley and the president of Austin Students for a Democratic Society (hello, Frank Erwin!), urged the group to politely file into the provost’s office. “Should we be entertaining for the live [stream]?” the person filming asked. Apparently not—the students left after being asked to do so by an associate dean of students. The whole encounter lasted about fifteen minutes.
Regardless, the Office of the Dean of Students charged seven students with “disruptive conduct.” Ramirez was suspended for a semester, a decision he initially seemed devastated by. (What would Thoreau, author of “Civil Disobedience,” have said about UT’s treatment of Ramirez and those other protesters?)
I met up with Ramirez at a coffee shop on the Drag in late May. He had with him a copy of Crime and Punishment. “My plan is to replace scrolling with fiction,” he explained.
He was unexpectedly upbeat. His biggest fear had been telling his dad, a Fox News–watching retired Homeland Security Investigations agent, about the suspension, but it went better than he thought. Plus, Ramirez had gotten the last laugh on the Tower. He’d used AI to write his required apology essay—the first and only time he’s done so. The punishment hadn’t discouraged him at all. He’d be right back to protesting on campus as soon as he was done serving his suspension.
The higher education system, he said, was completely broken. I told him he sounded a lot like Christopher Rufo, an activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who had laid the intellectual groundwork for the policies and laws attacking DEI and critical race theory. He corrected me—Rufo thought that reform was possible. “My view, and this is not a nice view, but I think it’s the correct one,” he said, “is that it is f—ed and it can’t be reformed.”
As for his own studies? Like many of his peers, Ramirez was dubious about the value of his degree, which he told me was both obscenely expensive and increasingly obsolete. After graduation, he planned to go into the trades to pay off his $60,000 in student loans.
If there’s an intellectual blueprint for UT in the post-woke era, it was drawn by Davis’s right-hand man, provost William Inboden. Pale and bald, Inboden is extremely tall, especially in his cowboy boots, though his spectacular size is softened a bit by a pair of glasses and a solicitous manner.
The 53-year-old historian is something of an accidental academic. After graduating from Stanford, in 1994, he went to work in politics in Washington, D.C. He took a job with Senator Sam Nunn, a Georgia Democrat, and then worked for Tom DeLay, a Republican congressman from Sugar Land who was known for his ruthless enforcement of GOP priorities. In 1998 he began working on a doctorate in history at Yale University, the Ivy League school that has radicalized many a conservative, where he befriended Ben Sasse, a fellow PhD student in history and a future Republican U.S. senator.
Inboden bounced around the world of conservative think tanks, served on George W. Bush’s National Security Council, and wrote a book that argued that Christian theology helped mobilize Americans to fight the Cold War. Eventually, he landed a faculty job at UT’s LBJ School, published a book on Ronald Reagan, and ran the Clements Center for National Security, a training hub for diplomats, military officers, and intelligence analysts. In 2023, Sasse, then the president of the University of Florida, hired Inboden to run its Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, one of several dozen conservative-leaning centers at American colleges. In July 2025, Davis brought him back to UT to serve as provost—a big promotion.
Inboden is a staunch conservative, though more in the mold of Dick Cheney than of Donald Trump. In the 2016 presidential election, he wrote in Sasse’s name. He has taken care to put some distance between himself and MAGA’s incendiary posture toward universities. “I do not think we burn it all down,” Inboden said in November 2025 on Civitas’s podcast. “That is not the answer.”
Nonetheless, he has developed a trenchant critique of higher education. Last fall, in a 7,500-word essay in National Affairs, a conservative journal, Inboden laid out his philosophy. American higher education, he wrote, is predicated on an “academic social contract.” Citizens pay for universities, with their arcane systems of self-governance and tenure, and in exchange, we the people receive the benefits of society-improving research and the cultivation of educated citizens.
This model helped win the Cold War and opened pathways to the middle class and beyond for college graduates. But then, beginning in the sixties and accelerating in the eighties, the deal began to unravel. “Zealous progressives” took control of universities while conservatives dwindled. This new cohort of activist-academics imposed an “intolerant hegemony”—wokeness—on the academy, one that viewed the world through the lens of identity and took a dim view of American history. “Over the past two decades, many of the most acute violations of academic freedom have stemmed not from politicians, but from within universities themselves,” he stated. The contract was broken.
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| Mulva Hall, designed to “attract world-class faculty,” is under construction at a time when 60 percent of surveyed professors say they are thinking of leaving.Photograph by Jeff Wilson |
The essay contained some uncomfortable truths. University faculties do tend to be overwhelmingly left-leaning, with little so-called viewpoint diversity in some programs. According to a recent study, UT-Austin tilts liberal, though not nearly as much as peers like the University of California, Berkeley. It is also true that the ideology of a certain kind of lefty academic recently escaped containment and infused the broader culture. In the early 2020s, many Americans were exposed for the first time to gender-inclusive pronouns, land acknowledgments, the implicit belief that one’s racial identity explained more about you than your own individual life experience—and didn’t like what they heard.
But beneath the piece’s measured tone, some UT faculty—many of them experts in the art of exegesis—sensed something cruder. “It’s not about an academic vision; it’s political,” said the former dean, who worked with Inboden. In his essay, the provost had completely passed over UT’s own vicious fights over academic freedom. Where were Pa Ferguson, Homer Rainey, and Frank Erwin? The piece seemed curiously uninterested, too, in reckoning with the way universities helped perpetuate inequality—UT refused to admit Black undergraduates until it was forced to do so, in the early fifties.
Karma Chávez is probably the kind of zealous progressive that Inboden had in mind. She’s queer. She’s Chicana. She’s an activist. Until recently, she chaired the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, and her first book is called Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities. “I think they want to get rid of me,” she said, referring to the UT administration. “I would want to get rid of me.”
She was unimpressed by Inboden’s scholarship. “The story he tells of history is laughable for a historian,” she said. “The idea of the social contract that he glorifies in that article was at a time when Jim Crow existed and when women didn’t have the right to vote.”
Soon, Inboden’s idea of a new social contract came into view. In February, Davis announced a change that had been rumored: Two ethnic-studies programs—Mexican American and Latina/o Studies and African and African Diaspora Studies—plus American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies were stripped of their departmental statuses and merged into a new Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Three other departments were collapsed into the Department of European and Eurasian Studies. The official position was that “consolidation” was an efficiency measure, but few seemed to believe that, least of
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| From left to right, Davis, UT system chairman Kevin Eltife, Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and dean Justin Dyer announcing a $100 million investment in the School of Civic Leadership on May 8, 2025.Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman/Getty |
I met up with her in her office the day of the announcement. To my surprise, she expressed some sympathy for Davis and Inboden. They were under “tremendous pressure from the state government” to do something. But they couldn’t simply cancel a program like women’s studies, as Tech and A&M had, and still expect UT to be taken seriously as a world-class university. As a result, the two ended up in a muddled middle, with programs downgraded but not canceled.
On the other hand, Chávez—whose department was dismantled—leveled a strident critique of Inboden. “Do I think that Will Inboden is a white supremacist in his mind or an authoritarian in his mind? No. Do I think that he is right now participating in behaviors that contribute to authoritarianism and white supremacy? Absolutely.” Her acid take wasn’t personal, she said. “I think he probably hasn’t thought fully about the history of this country from a perspective that isn’t the dominant one.”
The high-level administrator told me that it was a “category error” to assume that a subject worthy of study should automatically have its own academic department. Moreover, such siloing had engendered groupthink—“an ideological narrowing that,” the administrator said, “is inimical to the broader spirit of university and free speech.”
A week after the consolidation news, Davis, in a rare move, rejected the promotion and tenure of a highly recommended scholar, Iván Chaar López, who was an assistant professor in American Studies. Chaar López had easily cleared hurdles at every level. Eight outside reviewers had unanimously recommended him for tenure. A college committee then approved him in a 19–2 vote, as reported by the Austin American-Statesman.
Davis gave no reason for the rejection, and the members of the president’s promotion-and-tenure committee aren’t publicly listed. “It was a shock,” Chaar López told me. “It was a gut punch.” Given his stellar credentials, he could only conclude that his work, which is critical of surveillance technologies at the border, had made him a target.
For much of the last academic year, many faculty worried that they could be fired at any second. Now a more likely scenario presented itself: Programs would be whittled away through attrition. Some would call it a rebalancing, others a purge.
As the fall semester began, details about a plan to overhaul the core curriculum surfaced. The broad strokes seemed sensible. The previous core had been a “haphazard grab bag,” Davis said, with more than six hundred courses across ten component areas, including offerings such as the History of College Football. The proposed new core would instead rest on three main pillars: arts and humanities, STEM, and social sciences, each with a set of required course areas including “Great Questions of Human Life,” “Computer Science and AI,” and “Western Civilization.”
But then details began to emerge. History of College Football would no longer count toward the core requirements, but neither would Slavery and Its Legacies; United States Women, Sexuality, and Gender to 1865; or The History of Money and Corruption. Most pointedly, Inboden’s office rejected all the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies classes that were submitted for approval.
“It will kill our course enrollments, then our majors, and then they will say we don’t need these degree plans or [the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis] or all these faculty,” said Lauren Gutterman, a former chair of the American Studies department. A couple of weeks later, she texted me with more news: Inboden’s office had eliminated four majors in the new department, including ones in Black studies and women’s studies. Eventually, she predicted, the regents would wipe out whole programs and fire faculty like her.
Meanwhile, a new university seems to be going up alongside the old one. In summer 2026, Inboden’s office suddenly opened a new Center for Humanities. There was no public announcement or explanation of how the center was funded, what exactly it would do, or how it was different from the existing 25-year-old Humanities Institute, other than a brief blurb on its website that extolled “a new interdisciplinary unit” tied to the new core curriculum. Of the center’s fourteen faculty, five had come from the Hamilton School, including the center’s director. Many have appointments with Civitas, the conservative think tank that Dan Patrick helped found.
The School of Civic Leadership, created by the regents in 2023 with an initial $100 million in funding, has acquired its own gravity on campus too. The rapidly growing school is part of a national effort, backed by red-state legislatures, to wrest the humanities away from the left and restore an undergraduate education centered on the great books and the virtues of Western civilization. Over the summer, the SCL announced its latest tranche of hires—26 new faculty, all but two of them men.
In April, the SCL hosted its signal event of the past academic year: a speech from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in which he linked progressives to the atrocities committed by Mao, Stalin, and Hitler.
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| The Tower is undergoing a four-year facelift, which will be completed in 2028. Photograph by Jeff Wilson |
Will Davis’s and Inboden’s sweeping changes help or hurt Texas’s flagship? The unsatisfying answer is that it’s too soon to say. It may be years before we know if UT’s upward trajectory is stymied. Universities are hulking battleships; they turn slowly and not always in the direction that their captains intend.
Davis and Inboden will have to steer through narrow straits. If they veer too far toward appeasing the Legislature, the faculty brain drain could accelerate, and UT might enter a period of mediocrity. If they don’t turn fast enough, their minders might get restless. Meanwhile, they run the risk of a full-blown mutiny from the campus community.
In our ambiguous present, however, UT exists in a discomfiting in-between. In the most recent rankings in U.S. News & World Report, UT slipped from seventh to eighth place on the list of best public universities. Is this a sign of things to come or just a statistical blip? By the end of the tumultuous 2025–2026 academic year, many were just looking for answers to what the hell was going on.
In late May, the board of regents gathered for a meeting at the University
of Texas System headquarters, in downtown Austin. On the agenda: rules that would make it easier for university presidents to fire tenured faculty and shut down whole programs for many reasons, including a “failure to meet student or societal needs” or “misalignment with the institution’s mission.”
The academic year had been marked by small but persistent protests, and now organizers were bringing it to a close with another one. Eighty-two years after the student-led march in the wake of Homer Rainey’s firing, protesters held another funeral for academic freedom. Dressed in black, students, faculty members, and alumni marched from campus to the system building. Instead of six thousand protesters, as in 1944, there were a few dozen. Ramirez was there with a sign that said “First They Came for My School.” Chávez, wearing a black veil, spoke into a megaphone. “Though the UT we once knew is gone, we are its future, and together we must fight for the future we want. There is mourning, but there must be militancy.”
Following the protesters were two dark-colored horses pulling a windowed hearse with books inside. The driver, wearing white gloves and formal riding attire, held the reins as cars whizzed by on Seventh Street.
Inside, the regents entertained public comment. A recent graduate, Raul Ernesto Longoria, explained how he—a proud son of South Texas, of public schools—had come to UT knowing very little about the fraught history of Hispanics in Texas. About the racial violence perpetrated by the Texas Rangers. About the way that Mexican American children were segregated from whites in public schools. But he’d taken some ethnic-studies classes, and the scales began to fall from his eyes.
“Ethnic studies helped me understand the world around me,” he said. He saw the consolidation of these departments as part of “a broader attack on academic freedom.” Would the regents commit to transparency and dialogue, to bringing faculty and students into the conversation?
These were reasonable requests. But Eltife never addressed them. Instead, the last critic to speak that day—an amped-up undergraduate—gave Eltife, an old political hand, an opening. The student angrily accused the regents of harboring “fascist beliefs” and called them “disgusting.”
“We sure appreciate your upbeat message to us today,” Eltife said sarcastically. “Now just let me say that across the UT system, we have record enrollment, record applicants. UT-Austin this year, ninety-five thousand kids applied to go to our school. Only nine thousand could get in. We have record philanthropy this year,” he continued, chopping the dais with his hand. “We have record alumni support this year. So whatever we’re doing, we’re not perfect, but we’re damn sure headed in the right direction.”
Four months later, Eltife was confronted by another of UT’s angry critics. This time it was a much more powerful figure—Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission. In mid-September the Longhorns had just managed an improbable fourth-quarter comeback against the number one–ranked Ohio State Buckeyes. Amid the postgame jubilation, French took notice of some especially excited fans. On X, he posted a photo of students, many of whom were South Asian, celebrating in the stands in burnt-orange shirts and cowboy hats. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote. “The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
French’s post laid bare something that the highfalutin debates over academic freedom sometimes obscure: that UT’s diversity, Texas’s diversity, is seen by some in power not as a strength but as a terrible problem.
Some Republican officials forcefully condemned French. But UT’s own leaders seemed strangely passive toward his vile attack on their students. Eltife put out a tepid statement that avoided naming or denouncing French. “When I stood on the sidelines at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium Saturday night and looked up at the seats filled with incredible fans, I saw Longhorns,” he wrote. Davis’s contribution: “Proud to stand with Chairman Eltife. Our students are exceptional. All of them are Longhorns.”
These men were too busy building UT’s glorious future to take much notice of a darkening present.
This article originally appeared in the November 2026 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Excuse the Mess.” Subscribe today.
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