How Not to “Change the World”

Among the drearier aspects of life under tyranny is the abject willingness of major institutions and their leadership to submit to political domination. Under this second and worse Trump regime, corporations have rushed to eliminate diversity and equity programs, law firms have buckled to administration pressure, and (with rare exceptions) universities have cleansed their curricula of content (and faculty) that might cause offense to Dear Leader and his apparatchiks.

In the latest wrinkle of the ongoing assaults on education, Harvard University is reportedly seeking donors to underwrite recruitment of “conservative” faculty, to be seeded through various departments. Under Trumpism it is no longer permissible to invite long-excluded minority scholars or women to join the pool of possible faculty hires, but right-wing professors otherwise unqualified will now move to the front of the line – in the name of “viewpoint” diversity, of course, because under the tyrant, knowledge has been declared partisan.

Harvard isn’t the worst, by a long shot, but Trump and his minions have specifically targeted the Ivy League school as a potential headline scalp in their anti-intellectual crusade. In some instances, Harvard has in fact fought back successfully against various forms of blackmail and budget cuts. Most schools have neither a sufficient endowment nor the legal army to defend themselves against D.C. pressure and intimidation.

Then again, others aren’t even interested in trying. In Texas, university administrators have largely been eager to demonstrate in advance their loyalty to the New National Order. It’s not even a new phenomenon; the state of Texas has a long tradition of violating university autonomy and generating legislative pressure to keep campuses and faculty in political line. Despite endless posturing about their alma maters – most often over their football teams – state politicians reflexively target universities for ideological deviation, in order to demonstrate how tough they are on faculty “leftism” and student activists. 

In Austin, a dramatic example was Gov. Greg Abbott’s 2024 crackdown on student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. Across the country, university administrators have eagerly used student protests as excuses to demonstrate their authoritarian impulses. Beyond outright suppression, the steady drip of fascism is more often a bureaucratic phenomenon: professors fired or disciplined for speaking out or for teaching forbidden subjects; curricula cleansed of offending books or other uncomfortable content; vague policy declarations intended to put faculty on notice that their teaching and research remains always to subject to ideological review.

A notorious episode occurred at Texas A&M, where senior lecturer Melissa McCoul was fired for including material about gay and nonbinary children in her children’s literature class. (In the new fascist orthodoxy, such children are presumed not to exist.) In apparently premeditated sabotage, one student secretly recorded herself objecting to the material, explicitly because “according to our president, there’s only two genders” and therefore McCoy’s class was allegedly violating “the president’s laws” as well as the student’s own “religious beliefs.” (It’s not often that a student demonstrates simultaneously her ignorance of the law, academic freedom, and basic grammar.) As intended, online outrage inevitably ensued, and after right-wing pressure (including from Republican legislators) university administrators fired McCoul (who is suing the university for reinstatement) and disciplined her department. In the subsequent fallout, A&M has engaged in a curriculum review to root out impermissible LGBTQ content, and ended entirely its women and gender studies program. 

That’s how TAMU nurtures “viewpoint diversity.”

Over at the University of Houston, administrators have responded to legislative pressure by requiring faculty members to “certify” that their coursework is based on “teaching, not indoctrination.” In the time-honored manner of authoritarian regimes, the new policies are vaguely defined and imposed as mandatory by some deans, semi-voluntary by others – meaning faculty are expected to decide whether compliance or non-compliance is more self-incriminating. Administrators also imposed an official curriculum “checklist,” supposedly enabling faculty to determine whether their coursework is out of line with the new requirements. According to the Texas Tribune, the checklist asks faculty “whether they require students to adopt a particular political or ideological viewpoint, present multiple perspectives and avoid requiring students to express their personal beliefs or penalizing them for those beliefs.” (The Tribune reports that similarly intrusive ideological reviews have been imposed at Texas Tech and Texas State.)

That last provision, about cautioning students in advance, didn’t help TAMU’s McCoul. She informed students at the beginning of her course that it would include “controversial” material, but that they were “certainly not required to agree with me (or your peers), or to adhere to any particular viewpoints.” That’s not good enough for tyrants; the only acceptable response to “controversial subjects” is mandated silence.

In case there is any lingering doubt in Austin, the now official policy of the University of Texas board of regents is that “controversy” has no place on campus.

In case there is any lingering doubt in Austin, the now official policy of the University of Texas board of regents is that “controversy” has no place on campus. In a lengthy and convoluted ruling issued in February, the regents – a group appointed by the governor and about as ideologically diverse as a Highland Park country club – informed faculty that they should avoid (unspecified) “unnecessary controversial subjects,” leaving to individual teachers the determination of what that might mean. 

One imagines a similar task facing a 16th-century English monk under the bloody reign of Henry VIII, as the poor fellow tried to surmise which theological doctrines were permissible at any given moment. At least the current contemporary consequence for guessing wrong is only professional rather than literal beheading. 

The regents might well be asked, in what substantive field of human knowledge are there no “controversial” ideas? And what exactly is the point of teaching, at a university level, only matters that are beyond dispute? It’s hardly a way to encourage critical thinking, let alone cultural or scientific invention – in the presumed chest-beating spirit of UT’s official slogan,“What Starts Here Changes the World.” Our reigning masters in D.C. and at the Capitol are mightily engaged in doing away with all that “controversial” nonsense.

Board of Regents Chair Kevin Eltife called the vagueness of the new policy a virtue. “We are in difficult times. Vagueness can be our friend.” Indeed, it will serve to better intimidate faculty – especially junior faculty – who will walk into their classrooms wondering whether to be looking over their shoulders for administrative censorship, or down the aisles for some woke-hunting troll with a cell phone, masquerading as a student in search of an actual education.

That academic and journalistic weasel word – “controversial” – reminded me of renowned climate scientist Kate Marvel, who recently resigned her position at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. The acclaimed Institute was shuttered and stripped of its budget and research projects by the vandals at the White House and Elon Musk’s DOGE, who arrogantly refuse to acknowledge there is any such thing as man-made climate change. Marvel said she felt compelled to resign, simply, because “I want to tell the truth.” Increasingly, there is no room for the truth at U.S. or Texas universities, certainly no room at all for “unnecessary controversial subjects” such as climate change.

Marvel had thoughts on that question as well: “These are things I know and will continue to know until the weight of the evidence convinces me otherwise: the Earth is warming due to human activities, this warming is already responsible for human suffering, and it can be stopped by human action. None of this is, or should be, the least bit controversial.”

Looking forward, we should no longer expect students educated in Texas universities to contribute to that body of knowledge, or to encourage that human action. In Texas, it’s just too controversial.

From 2005-2020, now-retired Austin Chronicle News Editor Michael King wrote about city and state politics from a progressive perspective in his weekly column, “Point Austin.” We’re pleased to bring back his column whenever he’s inspired to tackle the state we’re in.

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