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.

This is news to make a professor shudder: a university closing its doors.

A Massachusetts liberal arts college is set to close permanently due to low enrollment and financial problems.

The board of trustees of Hampshire College, a small liberal arts school in Amherst founded in 1965, pointed to “financial pressures” that have been “compounded by shifting external factors”.

Universities have been under attack for decades, thanks to our ‘friends’ in the Republican party. Authoritarians and conservatives hate new ideas and helping people rise up out of poverty, and they’ve been whittling away at support for universities, throwing so much debt onto the shoulders of our students. The pandemic hit many colleges hard, too.

Hampshire College hits a little bit close to home. It was a little smaller in enrollment than UMM, my school, and was founded a bit more recently. It was also a liberal arts college, like mine. It differed in some significant ways. According to Wikipedia:

The college utilizes an alternative curriculum, with an emphasis on progressive pedagogy and self-directed academic concentrations, a focus on portfolios rather than distribution requirements, and a reliance on narrative evaluations instead of grades and GPAs.

That’s interesting and I appreciate innovative education, but it does make the work of that university harder. UMM has a more traditional curriculum, but we’ve also struggled over the past few years. Our enrollment bottomed out about two years ago — which is why my senior level genetics course has only 8 students this year, rather than the 30-40 I used to see. (We’re working ourselves out of this hole right now — my fall courses are fully enrolled already, and we may have to pack more students into the class.)

The situation of Hampshire College is a reminder that the situation of all universities in this country is precarious.

Conservative media likes to play up their persecution complex — and colleges are a common target. We’re too liberal, they say, we try to silence conservative students. None of that is true, as a recent poll shows.

According to a report that Gallup and the Lumina Foundation published today, just 2 percent of all college students—including 3 percent of Republicans—say they feel they don’t belong on campus due to their political views. That’s one of the many disconnects between public perceptions about higher education’s climate and value and what students say is actually happening on campus, according to the report, “The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes.”

Two to three percent sounds about right, and probably represents the fraction of faculty who are outright assholes (we’ve always got a few of them, any slice of humanity you can choose will have a few bad apples rattling around.) Almost all students are welcome, we like to discuss controversial issues and present dissenting views, and we actually have expectations for passing a class that do not ever include holding a particular political affiliation, or what kind of haircut you have, or who you voted for in recent elections.

However, I was disappointed by one result from the poll.

The results showed that two-thirds of college students said most of their professors encourage them to share their views, including those that make others uncomfortable. At the same time, 71 percent said their professors create a classroom environment that supports both students who express unpopular opinions and those who may be upset by such views.

Only 71%? I don’t believe it. One of our most common challenges is getting students to speak up — I want students to raise their hand or just shout at questions in the middle of a lecture…please please please interrupt me and tell me what you are thinking. I think that’s true of every faculty member, getting students to think and express themselves is our job. Too many students want to just get through the class and get out of there, and getting a conversation going is harder than just taking notes and listening quietly.

I have never objected to conservative students taking my classes. If anything, it goes the other way–I’ve had students put me on lists at FIRE and TPUSA, they’ve reported me to the campus police (that never goes anywhere), they know me at local churches that I do not attend. A few years ago, we had a TPUSA chapter that constantly posted posters with their stupid slogans on them — I’ve seen a few with Sharpie ‘enhancements’, but that’s about the limit of their oppression. One of their representatives did go on to win notoriety by graduating, joining Project Veritas, and getting arrested for breaking into a Louisiana politician’s office. Note that he did graduate.

Come to think of it, I just checked our list of student organizations, and TPUSA isn’t on it! We must have hounded them out of existence. Or, more likely, the former members were so aggressively antagonistic and unpleasantly ineffectual that they tainted the reputation of their organization for years to come, and no one wanted to join. I didn’t kick them out, despite their feeble efforts to kick me out.