It happened slowly, then all at once.
I’ve taught at the University of Texas at Austin for more than 30 years, and I’ve always been proud to do so. UT has long been both a top-tier university and one of the most accessible. While other states boast excellent public institutions — Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan — their in-state tuition can cost up to five times more than UT’s. The top students at every high school in Texas are guaranteed a spot at UT, meaning that each region sends its best and brightest to Austin.
UT powers the city’s and state’s economy, attracting innovators in technology, business and the arts. For almost 150 years, we’ve prepared Texans for meaningful work and purposeful lives.
Today, however, UT is being dismantled piece by piece. Those who see higher education as a threat are intervening directly — breaking norms, rules and even constitutional protections — in an effort to suppress and punish controversial opinions among our students and faculty.
Then we get bullet points on all the changes just from 2024 forward.
This is no longer the profession I have served with joy for 35 years. We are being pushed to retreat from the hard-won knowledge and progress of generations. Yet, like the medieval monks and nuns who buried precious manuscripts to hide them from the kings who burned their abbeys, we will preserve this knowledge and progress for another time in the future. In the meantime, we know the truth, and that keeps us free.
That second sentence is just unreal, and yet this is the culmination of a ~75yr project to tear down democracy in the States.
In some ways, we only have ourselves to blame for this, yet now it’s time to do the best we can with what we have left…
