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 efforts. The university successfully 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 classrooms 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 governing boards the power to approve academic leaders, including academic deans.
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 even farther than Texas lawmakers, approving a policy that requires courses that teach “race or gender ideology” to have the approval of the president. 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 the University of Texas at Austin, located blocks away from the Texas Capitol building.
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 that attracts 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.”
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.
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 some of 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 now 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 U.T.,” said Ms. 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?”
A recent poll by the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, found that 40 percent 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. “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. One of the units most under fire is the university’s gender studies department. Its chair, Lisa Moore, initially agreed to an interview but then declined.
Mary Neuburger, the 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,” Dr. 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 U.T. for almost 30 years,” she added, “and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
In a statement, the university said the academic reviews will explore factors like student demand and academic rigor.
“The university,” the statement continued, “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).”
Some professors have welcomed the political scrutiny.
The dynamics on the Austin campus, with professors and students skewing to the left and the power structure to the right, “forces a calibration back to the middle” and pushes the university out of a “homogenous echo chamber,” said Steven T. Collis, a law professor.
“My own experience has been that faculty who are genuinely trying to seek truth and pass on knowledge to their students and show the complexity of views on any given issue have absolutely nothing to worry about,” he said.
One of Senate Bill 37’s provisions gives a university system’s regents, who are political appointees, authority to reject courses. It also gives them final approval over the selection of a provost, a university’s top academic officer, and even a dean.
The Austin campus became the first school to hire a provost — William Inboden, a historian who served in the George W. Bush White House — under the new policy. He began his job in August.
In an interview, Dr. Inboden said that his goal was to “depoliticize higher education” because it faces a “crisis of confidence” brought on by a professoriate that has become skewed to the left and too political.
He said universities can attract more conservatives if they pay attention to their curricular offerings. Dr. Inboden used history as an example. The discipline should include historians of diplomacy, the military, business and religion — subfields that he says have “atrophied” over the last half-century.
“There’s been a move much more into doing race and gender history,” he said, along with environmental and class history.
Faculty members say they are frustrated with the overhaul efforts because conservative critics have not pointed to specific examples of indoctrination or ideological conformity. Dr. Inboden himself noted that even as he had criticisms of how history is taught, the Austin history department “is better than a lot of other universities on this.”
And some say universities are naturally going to be progressive places, since young people tend to skew left politically.
Jim Nicar, an alumnus who researches the university’s history, cited a seminal academic freedom controversy from the 1940s. The university’s regents fired President Homer Rainey after a series of academic freedom controversies, including his refusal to fire economics professors agitating for a 40-hour work week.
Some regents then believed progressivism was running amok on the Austin campus. Thousands of students marched on the streets of Austin, some carrying a coffin with the words “Academic Freedom” over it.
Mr. Nicar said that lawmakers and regents have since learned their lesson. “Instead of trying to get around the president,” he said, “the thing to do now is to replace presidents with people who are more favorable.”
The author of Senate Bill 37, Brandon Creighton, a longtime critic of liberal ideology in higher education, began serving as chancellor of the Texas Tech system in September. The head of the Texas A&M University and University of Texas systems are also former Republican lawmakers.
The campus changes will be easier because the law also gutted faculty senates, through which professors share in the governance of many campuses. The University of Texas went farther than the legislation required and dissolved its faculty council. University officials say they still value faculty input, but it will now come via a panel appointed by the president.
The new system is “very much corporate and top down,” said Gordon Novak, a former faculty council member who became a professor at U.T. in the 1970s. He said the leaders are likely to filter out anyone deemed radical or difficult.
At the coffee shop near campus, students said they worried about what is safe to discuss in their classes under the new leadership.
“They don’t consider questioning how women are treated in society,” said Ryan Lowe, a math and linguistics major. “They don’t consider questioning how African American people are treated in society. They see those as questions that don’t need to be asked.”
Vimal Patel writes about higher education for The Times with a focus on speech and campus culture.
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