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 |
