Friends:
Deena Varner’s powerful essay, “How to Occupy a University,” makes an argument that deserves far more attention: the political remaking of higher education does not always arrive through dramatic legislation, mass firings, or the outright closure of universities. Sometimes it happens quietly, through the ordinary machinery of administration.
That is precisely what makes the developments at Texas Tech so troubling.
Varner shows how Chancellor Brandon Creighton’s memoranda move authority away from faculty expertise and shared governance and place it increasingly in systems of review, compliance, certification, and political oversight. The university remains open. Classes continue. Degrees are awarded. Committees still meet. But the location of authority changes—and with it, the meaning of the institution itself.
Another useful concept for understanding this process is institutional capture, a term increasingly invoked by critics to describe what happens when institutions that are supposed to exercise some degree of independent judgment are brought under the control of political actors or ideological movements. Capture does not necessarily require eliminating an institution. More often, it involves taking control of its leadership, procedures, priorities, and decision-making structures so that the institution begins serving purposes different from those for which it was established.
This is where the connection to Project 2025 becomes especially important. Project 2025 is not simply a collection of conservative policy proposals. As Varner emphasizes, it is also concerned with how political change can be made durable through personnel, supervision, organizational design, and the relocation of institutional authority. What we are witnessing in Texas higher education may be a version of that same strategy.
The goal is not necessarily to destroy the university. It is to capture it—to make the university administer its own political transformation.
That distinction matters. A university can retain its buildings, departments, students, and public identity while steadily losing the professional autonomy, faculty authority, academic freedom, and independence of judgment that make it a university in the democratic sense.
Varner gives us another powerful word for what follows from institutional capture: occupation. The two concepts work together. Institutional capture identifies the transfer of power; occupation describes the condition that results when the institution continues to function outwardly while its internal authority has been redirected toward the priorities of those who captured it.
This is also why administrative procedures deserve far more public scrutiny. The gravest threats to higher education will not always announce themselves as attacks on higher education. They may arrive as memoranda, compliance procedures, curricular reviews, reporting requirements, personnel decisions, reorganizations, and seemingly routine administrative directives. As Varner puts it, the danger is that the university’s own mechanisms can become vehicles for its political transformation.
We therefore need to pay attention not only to what universities are prohibited from doing, but also to who is acquiring the power to decide what universities may teach, study, say, and become.
That is the deeper struggle now underway in American higher education. It is not merely a fight over particular courses, programs, or words. It is a struggle over who will govern the university—and whether our public universities will remain institutions capable of independent inquiry or become instruments of political power.
Please attend tomorrow's August 12th People's Hearing at the Texas Legislature If you are desirous of speaking your truth.
-Angela Valenzuela
How to Occupy a University
Project 2025, Texas Tech, and the Administrative Remaking of Higher Education
The Higher Ed Advocate
Aug 05, 2026
by Deena Varner
Project 2025 is often described as a plan to dismantle the administrative state. Its public reputation rests on its policy proposals, but the document itself spends an astonishing amount of time elsewhere—on administration. It explains how agencies should be organized, how political appointees should be selected and managed, how civil servants should be evaluated and eliminated if they are not ideologically aligned, how authority should move through organizations, how priorities should survive changes in personnel. Again and again, it returns to the same practical problem: how does an institution continue to implement its ideological agenda in perpetuity?
That question does not end in Washington. It appears, in a different form, in the documents now reshaping public higher education in Texas.
Public debate about higher education in Texas has focused largely on legislation—restrictions on DEI, classroom speech, curricula, and faculty governance. But laws do not reorganize universities by themselves. They establish authority in the abstract. The work of transforming an institution begins afterward, in implementation documents that rarely attract public attention because they present themselves as ordinary administration.
Brandon Creighton’s memoranda are two of those documents.
Implementation
Last year, Creighton was a Texas state senator. He authored or co-sponsored much of the state’s recent legislation aimed at making the state more hostile to minoritized students, women, and LGBTQIA+ people, and dismantling public universities as we know them. In November 2025, he was appointed the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, which serves more than 65,000 students.
One of his first acts was to implement a course content review process in which all faculty were required to disclose whether their courses mentioned gender or sexuality. If a course did mention such topics, faculty were instructed to remove any such materials unless and until they were approved by the Board of Regents—a group of political appointees whose role historically has been fiduciary. On April 9, 2026, this system of prior restraint was replaced with a permanent and near total ban on classroom instruction of topics related to gender identity and sexual orientation.
While this level of censorship is unprecedented in American history, the significance of the Creighton memoranda lies also in the university it imagines. They shift judgment away from faculty and toward administrative oversight. They treat disciplinary expertise as something to be monitored rather than trusted. Questions that once belonged primarily to departments and faculty governance are now questions of compliance, review, certification, and institutional accountability.
Creighton’s memos reorganize how the university governs itself.
Occupation
The mechanisms the memoranda use are familiar: Universities already have administrators. They already produce guidance documents. They already certify compliance with state and federal law. The Creighton memos pervert these mechanisms such that they become vehicles for a political project that Creighton himself could not accomplish in the Texas senate.
The version of Texas Senate Bill 37 that Creighton authored proposed a sweeping reorganization of higher education in the state, including far-reaching restrictions on curricula and faculty authority. Even within the extraordinarily conservative Texas legislature, several of its most expansive provisions proved impossible to enact. The questions they raised, however, did not disappear. They reappeared in a different form—not as legislation, but as administration.
While this level of censorship is unprecedented in American history, the significance of the Creighton memoranda lies also in the university it imagines. They shift judgment away from faculty and toward administrative oversight. They treat disciplinary expertise as something to be monitored rather than trusted.
Under Creighton’s regime, the ordinary machinery of the university has acquired a new purpose: ideological capture. The point is no longer simply to administer the university but to align its ordinary operations with his preferred political vision.
From the outside, little appears to have changed: students attend classes, degrees are awarded, departments meet, and committees deliberate. The transformation appears in the relocation of authority, in the definition of what a university is, whom it serves, and what its members are allowed to say and learn.
This is the institutional imagination of Project 2025. Law and policy matter, but so do the mechanisms through which they become routine. Durable political victories require institutions that reliably reproduce a governing vision, and this is accomplished through personnel, supervision, and organizational design.
Creighton has applied these lessons to one university system, and he has plans to apply them to the national system of public higher education.
The genius—and the danger—of this approach is that it does not require dramatic confrontation. No loyalty oath announces the arrival of a new political order, as it did during the McCarthy era. No public purge signals that the university has entered a different era, as it did during the Stalin era. The transformation proceeds through memoranda, implementation guidance, reporting requirements, compliance reviews, curricular certifications, and administrative procedures. In the Creighton era, each document appears technical. Together they redefine the institution.
Creighton’s defining innovation is that the institution becomes the instrument of its own destruction.
For generations, political movements have sought to discipline universities from the outside—through funding cuts, legislation, purges, or public pressure. Those tools remain. But something equally ambitious is emerging alongside them: the effort to redirect the university’s own administrative machinery toward political ends. The institution is asked to preserve its legitimacy while gradually relinquishing the traditions of professional judgment that gave that legitimacy its democratic value.
Project 2025 imagines remaking the federal bureaucracy by reorganizing its internal structures. The documents now emerging from Texas suggest a parallel ambition for higher education. They point toward a university that looks increasingly familiar from the outside while operating according to a different sovereign logic.
That is not destruction. It is occupation.
The National Stage
Public universities occupy an unusual constitutional position. They are created, funded, and governed in part by the state, yet they have never been understood as ordinary state agencies. Legislatures appropriate funds and governors appoint regents, but the work of producing and evaluating knowledge has historically rested elsewhere—in disciplinary communities, faculty governance, and professional judgment. However imperfectly realized, that division of labor and authority has long defined the relationship between public universities and democratic government.
The Eleventh Circuit’s recent decision striking down key provisions of Florida’s Stop WOKE Act reaffirmed that arrangement. In protecting faculty speech against state-imposed orthodoxy, the court did more than vindicate individual expression. It preserved the institutional conditions under which universities can exercise independent judgment. In protecting speech, First Amendment doctrine has also helped preserve the institutional arrangements through which universities exercise independent judgment.
That is not destruction. It is occupation.
That constitutional tradition leaves a practical problem for political movements seeking to reorganize higher education. If professional judgment cannot simply be displaced by legislative command, then the institution itself becomes the site of ideological struggle. The question is no longer only what the law permits the state to do. It is how the university’s own procedures can be redirected toward different ends.
Creighton’s memoranda belong to this second category. They are implementation documents, and implementation is where abstract political authority becomes institutional practice. Every review process, every certification requirement, every layer of administrative oversight answers the same question: where does judgment reside? Every implementation document answers a constitutional question disguised as an administrative one.
Universities are not unique in this respect. The press occupies a similar constitutional position. Neither governs in the ordinary sense, yet both perform a public function by producing knowledge, testing political claims, and establishing standards of credibility that governments do not control. Their legitimacy depends upon their ability to reach judgments that are not merely extensions of partisan political power.
Authoritarian movements have long sought to subordinate institutions whose authority they do not fully control, and whose commitment to free thought and expression is an obstacle to their success. The occupation of Texas Tech illustrates one way that project can proceed: not by dismantling the university from without but by redirecting the ordinary procedures by which it operates.
Creighton’s memoranda are remarkable not only for their prohibition of ideas, speech, and expression but for the administrative architecture they construct. The institution continues to teach, deliberate, certify, and govern. But these activities no longer exist primarily to create and cultivate knowledge. Instead, the work of the university is concentrated on demonstrating fidelity to the political priorities of its occupying force.
The university remains. Its sovereign logic does not.
Project 2025 imagines reorganizing the federal bureaucracy so that its ordinary operations reliably reproduce a governing vision. The political project emerging from Texas demonstrates how that same organizational logic can be extended to institutions that constitutional traditions have historically insulated from direct political control.
Deena Varner is an assistant professor of practice in the English department at Texas Tech University. She is the author of From the Courtroom to the Boardroom: Privatizing Justice in the Neoliberal United States, which examines how legal and civic rights are eroded through administrative procedures. She is writing in her capacity as a private individual and not on behalf of her employer.
