I have been privileged to witness the abrupt destruction of higher education in America. It’s been dramatic and dizzying — federal scientific institutions taken over by crackpots, research funding cut, politics inserted into the university system (well, it’s always been there, but not quite so overt), and condemnation of open-minded analysis in favor of puritanical, religious, cult-like dogma. I would rather not be seeing this.

The cool thing about it all is that it is quantifiable. We can measure the repression of our universities! The Academic Freedom Index assessed the autonomy of universities worldwide — universities are increasingly constrained by political demands. The US in particular is being hit hard.

Institutional Autonomy, Development for the US and the Average Peer Country in Western Europe and North
America from 2015 to 2025.

I don’t think we’ve hit bottom yet. It’s going to get worse, I predict.

For a crystal clear example of an oppressive reduction of university autonomy, we can look to Texas. This may be the future fate of the rest of the country, which really should be looking on Texas with horror.

A new memo at Texas Tech University establishes a sweeping and draconian censorship policy toward LGBTQ+ people, creating a campus equivalent of “Don’t Say Gay” in one of the most extreme anti-speech policies ever imposed at a public university. The memo bars professors from discussing LGBTQ+ topics in core and lower-level courses and eliminates entire fields of study across the five-university system. It even requires that if an industry-standard textbook includes content on sexual orientation or gender identity, instructors must skip over it and avoid discussion around it. Most troubling, however, is that the censorship regime extends beyond professors to students themselves: the memo states that “no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI [Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity] topics,” a total ban on LGBTQ+ mentions in dissertations or graduate thesis work.

The memorandum, which was issued by Chancellor Brandon Creighton—a former Republican state senator who authored Texas’s ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public universities and a campus protest restriction law that a federal judge blocked as unconstitutional—went out to the presidents of all five universities in the Texas Tech University System this month. The system serves approximately 64,000 students across Texas Tech University, Angelo State University, Midwestern State University, and two Health Sciences Centers. Under the new policy, all majors, minors, certificates, and graduate degrees “centered on” sexual orientation or gender identity will be eliminated. Provosts at each university must identify every affected program and submit finalized lists to the chancellor’s office by June 15, 2026, at which point an immediate admissions freeze will take effect—no new students will be allowed to enroll in or declare any of the targeted programs. Currently enrolled students will be allowed to finish their degrees through a teach-out process, but once the last of them graduates, the fields will cease to exist at Texas Tech entirely.

I repeat, by authoritarian dictat, “fields will cease to exist at Texas Tech entirely”. Entire domains of research will be eradicated, not because the evidence makes them invalid, but because the narrow religious dogma of a small number of conservative zealots, and the social pressure from a deluded, ill-informed public, has decreed that they do not exist. The rest of the world will continue to study, measure, and analyze these very real sociological and psychological and biological phenomena, but Texas will close its eyes and ears and punish anyone who dares to acknowledge their existence.