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.<\/p>\n
In the latest wrinkle of the ongoing assaults on education, Harvard University is reportedly seeking donors<\/a> to underwrite recruitment of \u201cconservative\u201d 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 \u2013 in the name of \u201cviewpoint\u201d diversity, of course, because under the tyrant, knowledge has been declared partisan.<\/p>\n Harvard isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n Then again, others aren\u2019t even interested in trying. In Texas, university administrators have largely been eager to demonstrate in advance their loyalty to the New National Order. It\u2019s 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 \u2013 most often over their football teams \u2013 state politicians reflexively target universities for ideological deviation, in order to demonstrate how tough they are on faculty \u201cleftism\u201d and student activists.\u00a0<\/p>\n In Austin, a dramatic example<\/a> was Gov. Greg Abbott\u2019s 2024 crackdown on student protests against Israel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n A notorious episode<\/a> occurred at Texas A&M, where senior lecturer Melissa McCoul was fired for including material about gay and nonbinary children in her children\u2019s 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 \u201caccording to our president, there\u2019s only two genders\u201d and therefore McCoy\u2019s class was allegedly violating \u201cthe president\u2019s laws\u201d as well as the student\u2019s own \u201creligious beliefs.\u201d (It\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s how TAMU nurtures \u201cviewpoint diversity.\u201d<\/p>\n Over at the University of Houston, administrators have responded<\/a> to legislative pressure by requiring faculty members to \u201ccertify\u201d that their coursework is based on \u201cteaching, not indoctrination.\u201d 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 \u2013 meaning faculty are expected to decide whether compliance or non-compliance is more self-incriminating. Administrators also imposed an official curriculum \u201cchecklist,\u201d 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 \u201cwhether 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.\u201d (The Tribune reports that similarly intrusive ideological reviews have been imposed at Texas Tech and Texas State.)<\/p>\n That last provision, about cautioning students in advance, didn\u2019t help TAMU\u2019s McCoul. She informed students at the beginning of her course that it would include \u201ccontroversial\u201d material, but that they were \u201ccertainly not required to agree with me (or your peers), or to adhere to any particular viewpoints.\u201d That\u2019s not good enough for tyrants; the only acceptable response to \u201ccontroversial subjects\u201d is mandated silence.<\/p>\n In case there is any lingering doubt in Austin, the now official policy of the University of Texas board of regents is that \u201ccontroversy\u201d has no place on campus.<\/p>\n In case there is any lingering doubt in Austin, the now official policy<\/a> of the University of Texas board of regents is that \u201ccontroversy\u201d has no place on campus. In a lengthy and convoluted ruling issued in February, the regents \u2013 a group appointed by the governor and about as ideologically diverse as a Highland Park country club \u2013 informed faculty that they should avoid (unspecified) \u201cunnecessary controversial subjects,\u201d leaving to individual teachers the determination of what that might mean.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n The regents might well be asked, in what substantive field of human knowledge are there no \u201ccontroversial\u201d ideas? And what exactly is the point of teaching, at a university level, only matters that are beyond dispute? It\u2019s hardly a way to encourage critical thinking, let alone cultural or scientific invention \u2013 in the presumed chest-beating spirit of UT\u2019s official slogan,\u201cWhat Starts Here Changes the World.\u201d Our reigning masters in D.C. and at the Capitol are mightily engaged in doing away with all that \u201ccontroversial\u201d nonsense.<\/p>\n Board of Regents Chair Kevin Eltife called the vagueness of the new policy a virtue. \u201cWe are in difficult times. Vagueness can be our friend.\u201d Indeed, it will serve to better intimidate faculty \u2013 especially junior faculty \u2013 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.<\/p>\n That academic and journalistic weasel word \u2013 \u201ccontroversial\u201d \u2013 reminded me of renowned climate scientist Kate Marvel, who recently resigned<\/a> her position at NASA\u2019s 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\u2019s DOGE, who arrogantly refuse to acknowledge there is any such thing as man-made climate change. Marvel said<\/a> she felt compelled to resign, simply, because \u201cI want to tell the truth.\u201d Increasingly, there is no room for the truth at U.S. or Texas universities, certainly no room at all for \u201cunnecessary controversial subjects\u201d such as climate change.<\/p>\n Marvel had thoughts on that question as well: \u201cThese 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s just too controversial.<\/p>\n