The new curriculum

College undergoes conservative shift

Lawmakers in Texas are altering leadership and classes at UT Austin. By Vimal Patel The New York Times AUSTIN, Texas

In a state dominated by conservatives, the University of Texas at Austin stood out. Its leadership had often been a thorn in the side of the state’s politicians, resisting efforts to erode faculty power and championing diversity.

The university defended its race-conscious admissions policy all the way to the Supreme Court in 2016. It has long been a magnet for liberal students and student activism.

Today, the conservatives are winning. State Republicans have passed laws to curtail what is taught in college classes and installed new university administrators with partisan affiliations, among a host of new strategies to remake a public higher education system that they argue has been held hostage to left-leaning ideas and become hostile to conservative ones.

The University of Texas is one of their main targets. The campus is no longer led by an academic, but a Republican lawyer who worked for the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton.

The president has promised curricular changes, and the system is now conducting an audit of all gender studies courses, after a state House bill passed in May enshrined in state law that there are effectively only two genders.

Another piece of legislation, Senate Bill 37, gutted faculty control of universities, tightened a grip on what can be taught and gave appointed boards the power to approve academic leaders.

The Austin campus has opened the School of Civic Leadership, one of many such new schools on college campuses with the goal of attracting more conservative students. The university laid off several dozen employees last year after a state law made diversity and inclusion offices illegal at public colleges.

A similar story is playing out across Texas. This fall, the firing of a Texas A&M instructor teaching a gender studies course after a student complained put the university at the center of a national debate over a crackdown on professors’ speech. The instructor’s department head and dean also lost their administrative posts, and eventually, the Texas A&M president resigned.

Last month, the university system’s regents went further than Texas lawmakers, approving a policy that requires courses that teach “race or gender ideology” to have presidential approval.

The Texas Tech University System has also sought to limit how race and gender are taught in its schools and created a new course approval process.

But perhaps no campus embodies the depth of the change in Texas higher education more than UT Austin, located blocks from the Texas Capitol.

The Austin campus is one of a handful of universities that has responded warmly to a Trump administration offer to give funding preferences to schools that adhere to its list of policy prescriptions.

The proposal was widely panned by advocates of academic freedom. The handful of other schools that embraced it are right-leaning schools, such as New College in Florida. Some faculty and students worry lawmakers are trying to turn the University of Texas — a selective school with students from across the country — into a conservative campus.

But state officials and the university’s new leaders, along with the Trump administration, say their goal is to restore balance to universities. “Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said in October. “We must end indoctrination.”

Right-wing, fascist indoctrination is OK, however.

In a “state of the university” speech in October, Jim Davis, the University of Texas president, said changes on campus are meant “to create balance.” “We don’t want degree programs that are so narrow they develop only one perspective,” he said.

Right-wing perspective is allowed. The left-wing perspective that created Social Security, Medicare, poverty aids, and equal rights legislation is not allowed.

The Trump administration this year has led an aggressive attack against higher education, threatening to strip a set of mostly private institutions of large sums of money if they don’t conform to the president’s policies. But it is public university systems that are seeing the biggest changes.

For years, Florida, which, like Texas, has unified Republican control of state government, served as a lab for conservative changes. Other conservative states like Indiana, Ohio and Alabama have also demanded changes at their schools that have led to quick acquiescence, most notably the closure of diversity programs and new limits on professors.

But the main energy is in Texas, where Republicans who learned from Florida are going even further. The changes over the last year have been rapid fire, leaving students and faculty members reeling.

At a coffee shop across the street from the Austin campus last month, five students spoke of fear and helplessness. Sofia Gomez, a rhetoric and writing major, said a history professor told her of pulling a book about the experiences of a transgender man, a move the professor described as the toughest decision of her career. “I considered transferring out of UT,” said Gomez, “because if my professors are unable to teach me, and I’m not able to have candid conversations to get a proper education, what am I here for?”

The idea is that if we pretend gay people don’t exist, then they won’t exist.

A poll by the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, found 40% of faculty respondents are changing their syllabus or teaching approach to comply with state legislation. “I take classes that are supposed to be about politics, and a lot of professors are scared to even apply anything we learn to the modern day,” said Mia Reballosa, a junior majoring in government.

Next, we’ll get rid of vaccination and teach prayer instead. That should protect our children against disease.

“There’s this large looming fear on campus.” The university is exploring consolidating many liberal arts departments, an effort many faculty members believe is aimed at eliminating politically controversial departments.

Teaching religion instead of science is not controversial.

The university said the academic reviews will explore factors like student demand and academic rigor. “The university,” its statement read, “is also encouraging academic units that have allowed some of their hiring, programs and course offerings to become excessively politicized to instead recommit themselves to balanced inquiry, depoliticized curricula and welcoming a diverse range of views (especially on controversial issues).”

Balanced? Depoliticized? Deverse? Sure, as long as we get rid of immigrants, because they are replacing us. Right?

Mary Neuburger, head of Slavic and Eurasian studies, another department under threat, said she remained quiet until she had trouble sleeping at night. Then she began talking publicly. “There’s total chaos,” Neuburger said in an interview, noting a constant turnover of administrators.

“When you tell a unit they might not exist by the end of the year, what do you think that does for morale?” “I’ve been at UT for almost 30 years,” she added, “and I’ve never seen anything like this.

Somewhere, Hitler is smiling.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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