The UT Administration is Dismantling Academic Freedom and Lying About It. We Must Stop Them.

Over the last few months, the Trump administration and its acolytes in state governments have launched an existential challenge to academic freedom in university research and teaching. The federal government is slashing funding for entire fields, from environmental research to gender studies, based not on scientific reason but on a fundamental denial of established scientific conclusions that challenge the worldview of those in power. In Texas, the government has seized curricular authority from faculty and handed it to political appointees. In the face of these attacks, UT Austin’s administration should be defending basic speech rights and good science. Instead, they are further cementing the ideological subordination of the university to the state. What is at stake is nothing less than a core pillar of democracy: free thought. As graduate students and university employees, we must recognize this challenge for what it is and prepare to fight—and win.

UT Austin’s administration is eager to point fingers elsewhere. In a September op-ed in National Affairs, executive vice president and provost William Inboden acknowledges a crisis in our university, the sources of which he conveniently aligns with Trump and Abbot’s enemies: spying Chinese students, liberal cancel culture, and America-hating “Marxist” professors. These arguments are uniformly weak; his claims about Chinese students rest upon a single anecdote. In decrying “cancel culture,” he ignores the systemic suppression of pro-Palestinian scholars while uplifting fifteen ‘punished’ conservative professors, most of whom experienced little worse than an investigation. Throughout, Inboden fails to mention the Trump and Abbot administrations’ authoritarian crackdowns, except to imply that universities brought this upon themselves.

Beyond writing deceptive op-eds, what is the UT administration doing to protect students and scholars? They are joining the offensive. This semester began with new restrictions on students' speech and assembly rights. The UT system is currently auditing gender studies courses with the aim of enforcing a federally imposed concept of gender. On October 1st, the Trump administration proposed a “compact” to nine universities, including UT, which would condition federal funding on towing a far-right party line. UT board of regents president Kevin P. Eltife responded with stomach-turning gratitude—a stark contrast to the other schools' neutral-to-opposition stances.

UT administrators did not need to do any of this. The UT system, the second wealthiest university system in the world, has the institutional resources to raise a meaningful defense of academic independence and free thought. Instead, they have revealed themselves to be leading figures in the campaign to destroy the political and intellectual independence of American universities—sycophants of the Trump administration.

Provosts, presidents, and regents can’t be trusted to defend us—we have to do it ourselves. As graduate students, we teach the classes, grade the exams, and do the research which brings in UT’s millions in grants. United, we have tremendous power, and the UT Graduate Workers Union is organizing to channel that power. While resistance may be daunting, silence will not save us. All evidence suggests that they will not stop here. Even if your classes, your research, your job are yet unaffected, it would be naive to take comfort. Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones, but what are all the publications in the world when your peers have been expelled and scholarship itself has become nothing but a hollow mouthpiece for the state? If you are a UT graduate student, it is time for you to join your union and join the fight. The UT administration is selling us out and lying to our faces about it. We have no choice but to stop them.