The Right-Wingification of UT: Texas targets liberal enemies within one of the top U.S. schools – News

Chris Rufo stood before an audience of 50 at the University of Texas in a dark suit, with a trimmed beard, appearing something like a tech bro, relaxed, faintly sneering. It was November of last year and Rufo had been invited to speak at the Salem Center, UT’s new right-wing think tank headquartered in Rowling Hall, an immaculate 458,000-square-foot building erected in 2018 at a cost of $172 million.

As he began, Rufo commanded his listeners to disbelieve their senses, to not see the wealth surrounding them, to not feel the safety of the bubble that is the University of Texas at Austin. He declared, instead, that UT and public universities throughout the country are frightening, dangerous places.

“I think people from across the political spectrum would acknowledge a sense of anxiety,” he said. “A sense of fear. A sense of foreboding. Something has gone quite wrong.”

Rufo isn’t the only right-wing culture warrior pushing this message, but he’s one of the most influential. An inspiration to Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Texas Republicans Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, and Ken Paxton, Rufo rose to prominence by innovating the campaign against critical race theory, a formerly obscure academic theory whipped into a message of white supremacy. He also fights against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and tenure.

At the Salem Center, Rufo unrolled a 30-minute attack on higher education, claiming that universities no longer prioritize the teaching of the classics, that professors no longer contemplate beauty and truth. He complained about African American studies, Latino studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies, and LGBTQ studies, saying, “If it’s got ‘studies’ after it, it’s probably a pseudo-discipline.” He concluded by calling for a politically motivated assault, “a protracted siege,” of universities like the one in which he spoke.

Then he took questions. Pauline Strong, the director of UT’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Program, approached the microphone. Strong has taught at UT for 31 years. She is the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, a national group founded in 1915 to support academic freedom, tenure, joint decision making between university faculty and administrators, and due process.

Strong told Rufo she believed in intellectual diversity but didn’t hear a commitment to the principle from him. She said her hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom and neutrality in higher learning. She asked if Rufo supported those values.

Rufo stiffened. The muscles in his face froze. He spoke and his words came fast, pitched a half-step higher. He said it would have been better if Dewey had never been born. He said that adhering to Dewey’s values creates “an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” He said academics like Strong who believe in Dewey, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”

Perhaps Rufo imagined he was being discreet by leaving “what’s coming” vague. But professors paying attention to Texas politics know exactly what it means. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has, over the last four years, called for the elimination of tenure, for restricting students’ free speech, and for mandating what professors can teach. Patrick has also pushed for the elimination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs at Texas’ public universities. And, in the case of these programs, “what’s coming” is already here. Texas outlawed DEI in January.

The attacks against higher education have hurt faculty morale. There is anecdotal evidence that they are beginning to damage UT’s ability to attract high-quality professors. An August survey of 950 Texas faculty conducted by the AAUP revealed that two-thirds would not recommend Texas universities to their out-of-state colleagues. More than a quarter plan to interview for jobs elsewhere this year. A similar number have already done so. Half said they have noticed fewer, and less qualified, applicants for open positions. The top reason cited by those looking to leave is the state’s political climate. Anxieties about academic freedom, DEI attacks, access to reproductive care, LGBTQ+ issues, and tenure also made the list.

Strong told us that faculty who teach African American studies, Latina/o studies, Asian American studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and LGBTQ studies are some of the most discouraged. Some have fought Dan Patrick’s attacks in previous legislative sessions and are doing so again, now that the Texas Senate is preparing to meet in January. But most faculty are staying silent, unaware of the threats or performing the equivalent of a tactical retreat. As one professor who didn’t want to be named said, “Jobs are on the line. Programs are on the line.”

So although Rufo’s speech last year was, at times, ridiculous, there was truth in his opener. There is fear at UT. There is foreboding. Something has gone quite wrong.

“There’s a great deal of anxiety among faculty, especially in the College of Liberal Arts,” Strong told us. “There is a great deal of pain. We feel that our research and teaching enterprises are under sustained attack.”

DEI & Pro-Palestinian Protests

Rufo’s talk was partly a victory lap. Six months earlier, Texas Republicans had borrowed model legislation he’d written to create Senate Bill 17, a bill abolishing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in Texas’ public universities.

The SB 17 ban went into effect in January, prohibiting universities from considering diversity in hiring decisions and from conducting DEI training. At UT, administrators dismantled the Multicultural Engagement Center, the Gender and Sexuality Center, and the Fearless Leadership Institute (a professional development program for African American and Hispanic women). The university also moved dozens of employees, most of them in the Division of Diversity and Campus Engagement, to non-DEI work. “We’re going to respect the law,” UT System Chairman Kevin Eltife said at the time. “We’re not going to look for loopholes.”

Republicans weren’t satisfied. In March, SB 17’s author, state Sen. Brandon Creighton, threatened to withhold state funding from the university if administrators didn’t prove they had eradicated DEI. A week later, UT’s president, Jay Hartzell, announced that he had fired dozens of employees who had previously worked at the Division of Diversity and Campus Engagement. Most of them were people of color. He later implied that the administration had gone beyond the letter of the law to satisfy Republicans, saying the “legislative climate toward higher education” was “moving.”

Andrea Gore, a pharmacology professor who has taught at UT for 22 years, believes the fired staffers were sacrificial lambs. “They were not doing DEI jobs anymore,” Gore said. “They all had new job assignments that were documented in writing. They got fired because they had done DEI jobs.”

The firings shocked faculty, but three weeks later a different controversy broke out – the university’s crackdown on students protesting Israel’s war on Palestine.

Ashanté Reese, a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, rushed to the campus on April 24 after learning that scores of state troopers, assisted by UT and Austin police, were confronting a group of about 200 students on the university’s South Lawn, in the shadow of the Tower. Reese spoke to the officers, trying to de-escalate the situation. It didn’t work. Officers in riot gear surrounded the protesters and repeatedly rammed into them, arresting 57.

Reese felt she came near being arrested herself. “I was doing, in the moment, what I thought was the right thing, and I still believe was the right thing,” she said. “But it was a really traumatic experience. It was traumatic to know that the people on the campus that pay you to do your job then also call the police on you for doing your job.”

A week later, a group calling itself Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine held a silent vigil on the steps of the Tower to support the students and protest Israel’s killing of Palestinian professors and its destruction of universities. As the vigil ended, students formed again on the South Lawn. Again, they were surrounded by police in riot gear. Another 79 were arrested.

The charges against the protesters – trespassing on their campus – were dropped by Travis County officials. UT took the opposite approach. Members of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, which had organized the first protest, were threatened with suspension. One of the PSC’s leaders, Ammer Qaddumi, was suspended for a year. The group itself was banned from campus.

This summer, UT drafted new rules allowing its staff to shut down demonstrations in public areas like the South Mall “in some instances.” It also rewrote its free speech policy to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, a logical fallacy that silences anyone who would speak out on Israel’s war.

As Karma Chávez, the chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, said, “it’s very clear who is being targeted.” Chávez co-authored a summation of the DEI and protest controversies in October, urging professors to continue speaking out about the university’s actions and teaching what they deem relevant in their classes.

“We are in the fight of our lives,” she concluded. “Anything less than a principled, full-frontal response will inevitably fail.”

Faculty Lose Faith in the Administration

Many faculty denounced the firings and crackdowns: 650 of UT’s approximately 3,700 faculty signed a letter drafted by the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors expressing no confidence in President Jay Hartzell. “He has violated our trust,” the letter stated. “The University is no longer a safe and welcoming place.”

The Faculty Council also weighed in. The Faculty Council is a group of about four dozen professors elected by staff and instructors from the colleges and schools within UT. Andrea Gore, the 22-year professor at the School of Pharmacy, chaired the council from 2015-2016. Gore said that historically it has partnered with administrators to jointly make decisions on hiring and policy, a practice known as shared governance.

“We talk to them: ‘Here’s what’s on our mind,’” Gore said. “They listen to us. We’ve been able to talk about important and often difficult things, and we’ve also always been involved in choosing the leaders of the university.”

The Faculty Council condemned the DEI firings as politically motivated. It passed a resolution asking the administration why it invited state troopers onto campus. It demanded UT grant amnesty to the arrested students. But some, like Gore, think the Council’s responses were too restrained.

Gore believes the restraint can be traced back to an erosion in shared governance that began with Jay Hartzell’s appointment as president by the Board of Regents in 2020. “There was no faculty input or an opportunity for due diligence,” Gore said of the appointment. “It’s unlikely the outcome would have been different, but the process of exclusion set a dangerous precedent.”

The professors we spoke with said that since Hartzell’s appointment there have been a number of poorly explained retirements and replacements in top leadership positions, from provost – basically a second-in-command to the president – to vice presidents and deans.

Soncia Reagins-Lilly resigned as the head of student affairs in January, after the DEI ban went into effect. Reagins-Lilly is one of three Black VPs who have left UT since Hartzell assumed office. No Black VPs remain.

Emily Reagan, VP of marketing and communications, resigned in August, after more than 20 communications staffers were laid off in a reorganization which Reagan described as necessary for the university to focus on “managing reputational issues and crises” – a seeming reference to negative publicity from the Palestinian protests.

Provost Sharon Wood also resigned in August, with just a week’s notice. Resignations in positions like provost are typically announced a year in advance, our sources told us, to let faculty weigh in on a replacement and provide time for a smooth transition. The professors assume that Wood was pressured into resigning and that her decision to leave immediately was a form of protest. Her departure came days after she and Hartzell were named as defendants in a lawsuit by Ammer Qaddumi.

Eve Stephens, UT’s chief of police, resigned in September. Stephens had been sworn in just a year earlier following a highly successful 24-year career at the Austin Police Department. A to Z Sports reporter Brian Davis, a former UT communications employee, reported that Stephens was pressured into resigning. Faculty speculate that her response to the Palestinian protests was not aggressive enough for UT administrators.

But for professors like Karma Chávez, the most troubling change has been that of Ann Stevens, who was told in September that she would not be allowed to serve a second term as dean of the College of Liberal Arts. COLA is the heart of UT-Austin, as liberal arts programs are at universities throughout the world. It is UT’s largest college, with 800 faculty serving a fifth of the university’s students. Its professors teach subjects that right-wingers like Chris Rufo champion – economics, English literature, European history – and it houses the centers and study programs they despise – African diaspora studies, LGBTQ studies, Mexican American and Latina/o studies, women’s studies, Native American and Indigenous studies.

Stevens is one of UT’s most highly regarded leaders. “She is a very, very, very successful dean,” Chávez said. “She’s someone that I disagreed with on the regular – we have locked horns in all sorts of ways. But she’s also a very principled leader, and I really respected her work as dean. And I think all of the department chairs felt that way.”

Stevens’ firing – which is what it’s being called – was announced by letter, something that professors say is unprecedented. Her response was equally unprecedented. Stevens explained in an email to faculty that Hartzell told her she “did not have a grand enough vision for the college,” something she disputed. Despite her restrained language and refusal to talk to the press, faculty view Stevens’ message as a protest against the university’s top-down decision making.

The recent firings and resignations have professors wondering if Texas’ right-wing politicians are dictating to Hartzell who to hire and fire. “Our understanding is basically there’s no firewall between Jay Hartzell and the governor and the chancellors,” said Craig Campbell, an anthropology professor who’s taught at UT for 15 years. “I think he’s on board with them. I think he sees himself as a part of that mission.”

As resignations and replacements have increased, a less-understood personnel change has occurred at UT’s Legal Affairs division, which handles litigation for the university and consults on policy. Since 2018, Legal Affairs has hired the majority of its attorneys straight out of the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton, regarded as the most corrupt and partisan AG in the nation.

The change began with Jim Davis, who worked as Paxton’s deputy for three years before taking the helm of Legal Affairs in 2018. Last year, Davis was promoted to senior vice president and chief operating officer, one of the top positions in the university. Amanda Cochran-McCall, who served Paxton for four years, rising to become his chief of general litigation, replaced Davis at Legal Affairs. Cochran-McCall’s second-in-command, Adam Biggs, previously worked as Paxton’s deputy for over four years. Of the 10 other employees featured on UT’s Legal Affairs web page, internet searches reveal that at least six formerly worked for Paxton.

The Trouble With Tenure

The DEI ban was one of three attacks on Texas public universities in the 2023 legislative session. Another, SB 16, was essentially a gag order prohibiting professors from teaching critical race theory. It died in the House of Representatives. The third attack, SB 18, was originally a bill to end tenure for professors at Texas universities. The version of SB 18 that got passed didn’t abolish tenure but expanded the grounds for which tenured faculty can be fired.

Tenure is essentially a lifetime appointment for a professor. It protects those who achieve it from being fired except for cause. It was introduced in U.S. universities in the early 1900s and is considered integral to academic freedom, because it allows professors to teach controversial subjects and pursue controversial research without fear of losing their jobs.

“In an ideal world, every job would have tenure attached to it, so that you were hard to fire as long as you’re doing your job,” Karma Chávez said. “In the university context, tenure means you can chase the data wherever it takes you, you can chase the primary sources wherever that takes you. You don’t have to worry about being pressured by political forces, whether that’s your department chair, your university president, or your governor.”

Research is the raw material that, when properly processed, produces facts, knowledge. The creation and transmission of knowledge is the reason universities exist. Some research creates money, the professors we spoke with said, and some creates controversy. But even controversial research is useful. For example, after each legislative session, researchers collect data on newly enacted laws – in Texas, that could be bans on abortion, or books, or health care for trans kids – to find how the laws have impacted people’s lives. The facts that are gathered hopefully inform future policymaking.

Of course, some of that research, when processed and taught, offends Republicans. “A lot of the stuff that I teach is inherently controversial,” Chávez told us, “and it inherently ruptures what students have been taught to think about themselves, about their state, about U.S. history. But I teach from peer-reviewed scholarship. I also teach thought pieces that I may or may not agree with, but that are designed to get students thinking. And with tenure, I don’t worry that some student who disagrees with the politics of a particular piece is going to be able to come after my job. So, really, tenure is integral to being able to do teaching and researching.”

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has repeatedly criticized tenure. In announcing the passage of SB 18 in 2023, he wrote that tenured Texas professors “feel immune to oversight from the legislature” and “hide behind their tenure to continue blatantly advancing their agenda.” This year, Patrick has once again instructed Republicans to study the issue. With DEI already outlawed and critical race theory not getting as much attention as in the past, some professors believe Republicans will try to end tenure in this year’s legislative session.

Lauren Gutterman, an associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, doubts that UT’s leaders will be able to effectively push back against any such attack. Gutterman lost faith in the administration’s lobbying efforts in 2023, as Republicans prepared to pass the DEI ban. “SB 16, 17, and 18 were so upsetting, so frightening, and a direct attack on us,” Gutterman said. “And I felt like the message that we were getting from the administration was, ‘We have it under control and everything’s gonna be fine.’ That’s part of the reason a lot of faculty chose not to really freak out about this legislation. And the president’s silence, his refusal to communicate directly with us, was really distressing.”

Andrea Gore warns that any changes to tenure will hurt the recruitment of first-class instructors, saying she has personally heard of two candidates who turned down job offers from UT in the last year because of the changes Texas Republicans have already made to tenure, which are minor compared with what they may do in 2025.

“It will take some time to see that we’re not getting the top scholars anymore,” Gore said. “Maybe we’re getting the next tier of scholars who are willing to accept working someplace where there’s a little bit more risk, because maybe they don’t have as many options. It’s not only the scholars who are in the area of ethnic studies. We’re also going to lose the scholars who are going to the business school or the law school or the engineering school.”

Gore said that threats to tenure have already begun to lower the quality of teaching, by persuading professors to skip controversial subjects. “I have a colleague who teaches a course that doesn’t sound very controversial at all, and she said, ‘I’m not going to teach these lectures anymore, because I’m wondering if they’re going to trigger some sort of reaction that is going to cause somebody to report me.’ It’s shades of the McCarthy era.”

School of Civic Leadership

“There’s lots of rumors swirling at the moment because people are scared and we have a total lack of communication from the president,” Lauren Gutterman told us. “It just breeds all these different theories.”

One of the theories we heard is that the Legislature will seek to carve up the College of Liberal Arts in the upcoming session, starve some of its programs of funding, and feed others to the Red McCombs School of Business and its School of Civic Leadership.

The School of Civic Leadership is brand-new; it began offering classes this semester. The college was created in May of 2023 to house the Civitas Institute, which, in turn, was created the year before at the behest of Dan Patrick and several far-right billionaires, including Robert Rowling and Harlan Crow, the Dallas businessman who has helped corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Patrick and others have said the School of Civic Leadership is necessary to remedy UT’s lack of “intellectual diversity” – that is, its lack of right-wing professors and programs. It’s a claim conservatives are making across the country, one that has led to the creation of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the James Madison Program at Princeton, and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, among others.

Faculty protested the creation of the new school, arguing that it violates the core tenets of academia by allowing state lawmakers and rich donors to spew their political agendas onto the campus. They say that UT’s hierarchy of instruction – its studies programs, which become institutes, which become departments, which become schools and colleges – is built from the ground up by professors, course by course, and represents identifiable disciplines and bodies of research. In other words, the schools are there for a reason. They aren’t top-down enterprises created in one legislative biennium by politicians and oligarchs.

The new dean of the School of Civic Leadership, Justin Dyer, denies the school is politically motivated and stresses it will focus on the country’s founding principles and the importance of free enterprise. A recent UT press release said it will teach the “intellectual inheritance of Western Civilization.”

“This is the way they frame it to make it palatable,” Campbell said, “which is to say, ‘These are the classics. These are the great traditions. What can anyone say about Plato or Aristotle? These great thinkers have worked for us, so we need to hear them.’ That’s the bullshit candy coating. But the company they keep is damning. I mean, they’ve got John Yoo as a fellow. They’re in bed with some really fucking hideous, hideous people.”

Yoo is notorious as the attorney who wrote the so-called “Torture Memos” in 2002, providing the George W. Bush administration legal cover to torture people captured in Afghanistan and Iraq during the War on Terror. Other notorious figures associated with the School of Civic Leadership include Richard Hanania, who was employed by the school’s Salem Center in 2022 but was quietly let go after reports surfaced that he’d written extensively for white supremacist groups under a pen name. Chris Rufo is another controversial figure connected to Salem. Professor Mark Regnerus, a senior scholar at Salem, has published research arguing that gay people make poor parents. (Following one of Regnerus’ reports, 200 sociologists signed a letter questioning the integrity of the peer review process for his paper.)

Regnerus also teaches at UT’s school of sociology, which is part of the College of Liberal Arts. The faculty we spoke with say this is another problem with the School of Civic Leadership – it is redundant and will reduce funding for other schools which teach the same subjects, like economics, philosophy, and pretty much anything associated with “Western Civilization.”

“We have a classics department,” Karma Chávez said of COLA. “We have a government department that teaches classical liberalism, that teaches all of the Founding Fathers. We have a Thomas Jefferson Center. That material is already taught widely on this campus. And in fact, the original Civitas Institute was basically all populated by College of Liberal Arts faculty. Now the school is hiring its own folks, but many of them could easily be hired into the College of Liberal Arts.”

Chávez, paradoxically, teaches Chris Rufo’s material. “I think it’s important for students to see where this stuff is coming from,” she said. “If you look at Rufo’s reports, they don’t cite any peer-reviewed academic scholarship. They cite ‘institute reports,’ they cite news articles, they cite himself, over and over. How’s that scholarship? How is anyone to take that seriously? So, sure, you want to bring in a controversial speaker as a conversation piece – okay. But what is the motivation behind that? Rufo has no credentials whatsoever. He is a pure ideologue. How is that a part of a university which is invested in the pursuit of knowledge?”

Campbell said it’s true there are few far-right professors at UT or on college campuses anywhere, but the idea that most are progressive activists is mistaken because professors are trained to think in more complex terms than right versus left and many are politically agnostic. Campbell added that the right’s complaint about intellectual diversity is a case of projection.

“Intellectual diversity is essentially a fake problem that is used to create cover for ideologically committed, far-right faculty who are not intellectually honest,” he said. “Universities are a pain for extremist governments, because they’re full of people who are committed to careful exploration of the world and how things work and function – stuff that doesn’t jibe with the fantasies the politicians are trying to create or the policies they want to enact.”

The End Game

Campbell has been hearing threats against the university by state Republicans ever since he arrived on campus in 2009. But this is the worst it’s ever felt.

“I remember my colleagues, the older colleagues, were always like, ‘They rattle their sabers and then it all sort of works out.’ But it’s like boiling frogs. It’s been this slow degradation of programs and funding. The faculty is very unhappy, suspicious, looking to get out, disinvesting. It makes it a terrible environment. We’re not program-building, we’re just constantly trying to keep people calm.”

Campbell said the anthropology department has lost several of its top scholars in the last two years and others want to leave. But tenure has been ebbing across the country, while universities continue to churn out Ph.D.s. So the job market is tight. Tenure-track positions at good universities can attract hundreds of applicants. It’s not as easy to leave as it once was.

For faculty who aren’t leaving, it should be a simple decision to get politically active, to speak out against the attacks, even if they aren’t directly affected by them. But there are good reasons not to. Some younger professors have crushing student debt and can’t afford to endanger their jobs. Others want to protect the research they’re doing or the programs they’ve built. Many aren’t from Texas and aren’t invested. For those who don’t already have tenure it’s very risky to speak out.

And then there are the professors who love the university and love their students. And among them are some, like Lauren Gutterman, who couldn’t fade into the background if they wanted to.

“I don’t feel that I have the luxury of retreating because I do queer history, right?” Gutterman said. “And so it doesn’t matter if I’m loud or not, or visible or not. I will always be a target. So I don’t think I have anything to gain from silence.”

Gutterman is planning to once again testify at committee hearings in the Capitol. She hopes to have colleagues at her side. “We now know what SB 17 did to our campus, so we understand how this incredibly broad and vague legislation can enact real harm on our students and our campus and our peers,” she said. “So I hope and I expect that more people will be mobilized. But at the same time, fear is really powerful and I’m sure that some people will continue to feel that the best way to protect themselves is to be quiet.”

Reese told us she will testify before lawmakers this session and believes other faculty will too. “We’re trying to be in solidarity and community with as many people as possible, even if we don’t all think the same and don’t all have the same objectives or approaches to activism. At some point, at the heart of things, it’s like, ‘Do I believe that what is happening is unjust? And if the answer is yes, then people are like, ‘We just have to do something about it.’”

The professors we spoke with are some of the top scholars at UT. They’ve published influential papers in peer-reviewed journals, they speak at international conferences, they have secured multimillion-dollar grants for research, they are leaders in their respective departments. They have built careers and programs here and don’t want to abandon what they’ve created. “Take Karma [Chávez], you know?” Campbell said. “She’s been doing so much institution-building. So the idea that you’re gonna let the state take this over, they can fuck right off, you know?”

This fall, Chávez is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Latina/o studies department that she has put together piece by piece. The department is regarded as one of the best of its kind, if not the best, in the nation. With its recognized success, Chávez could find a job elsewhere but wants to stay in Texas. “I love it here,” she said. “I want to build my life here. I think there’s so much history and culture here. And the politics are hard, but I’m learning to live with that. And the weather, I actually love. People shit on Texas all the time, but I’m definitely not one of those.”

Chávez said her father was a union worker and she thinks of the current struggle as a labor battle. As a queer person of mixed race and a feminist, she believes she has to fight. “People like me are explicitly or implicitly the targets of a lot of these attacks, and the kind of research and teaching that I do is explicitly at the center of this. So I feel it’s important to fight. But I also feel like it starts here, and then it’s going to go elsewhere. And so it’s not just a personal investment. It’s a bigger investment into this thing called Higher Education.”

Chávez has been quoted in other publications frequently over the last couple of years. She said she speaks out because other professors won’t. “Somebody has to talk about what’s happening. Somebody has to be willing to say it out loud and not worry so much about what it’s going to mean for their job,” she said. “I’ve decided that I’ll be one of those people.”