BY JENNIFER RUTH

On the August 3 episode of the Progress Texas podcast, guests discussed the recent incidents of political interference at Texas A&M University. One situation involved trustee interference in the hiring of distinguished professor of journalism Kathleen McElroy and the subsequent resignation of President Katherine Banks and the other involved the suspension and investigation of professor Joy Alonzo, an expert on the fentanyl crisis, in order to appease Lt. Governor Dan Patrick. Podcast guest Pat Heinztelman, president of the Texas Faculty Association and instructor of English at Lamar University, singled out Texas A&M’s faculty senate for praise for repeatedly and forcefully speaking out and demanding accountability for the incidents. The faculty senate prevented these acts of political interference from getting swept under the rug.

Faculty senates are the new targets of the right-wing culture wars being waged by politicians like Dan Patrick. It makes sense, since as faculty begin to organize to defend themselves, their students, and their institutions, they are speaking more and more in one voice. No longer must just individual professors be defamed and discredited in the eyes of the public but entire faculty bodies. Dan Patrick and the like have an uphill battle to do this, because Texans seem to be seeing through the propaganda. You find full-throated support for faculty and for academic freedom in the Texas newspapers (Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman, and Texas Monthly, especially). The editorial boards consistently speak out for academic freedom and the faculty at Texas’s colleges and universities: see “Don’t let Dan Patrick dictate what professors can teach in Texas” and “Political meddling threatens academic freedoms” for only two of many examples.  A wonderful piece by Dan Solomon in Texas Monthly, quoting law professor Robert Post on academic freedom, eviscerates Dan Patrick’s logic in his op-ed trying to justify going after Alonzo.

In his own memo about the Alonzo incident, Chancellor John Sharp admits that Texas A&M forgot its “core values” when it investigated Alonzo. He is presumably thinking about the fact that universities should be able to create and disseminate knowledge without fear of retaliation from partisan politicians. He explains that he picked up the phone when Patrick called to complain to him, because otherwise, it “would be bad for the alma mater I love so much.” And this is, of course, the problem. What do you do when a powerful politician with a monumental ego and a track record for taking things personally doesn’t grasp the concept of academic freedom (or free speech, for that matter) but his hands are on your purse strings? You may feel you have to appease him, even when you know it is fundamentally against your principles to do so. Going forward, Sharp needs to have the courage not to.

I grew up in Plano but it’s been a while since I lived in Texas. I wasn’t familiar with Patrick until he held an unhinged press conference in 2022 calling UT-Austin faculty “looney Marxists” and declaring his intent to abolish tenure. I was stunned. This man believed—or pretended to believe—that the UT-Austin faculty senate passed a resolution just to give him the middle finger. The resolution defending faculty’s prerogative over curricula (specifically, to teach critical race theory and race and gender justice) was a version of one that was passed by faculty senates at over 80 institutions of higher education in states all over the country. The University of Georgia passed one. So did the entire Colorado University system. It was an African American Policy Forum initiative that was part of a nationwide faculty response to the rise of the education gag orders and it followed on the heels of the “Joint Statement on Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism“ co-authored by the AAUP and signed by over seventy organizations.

About Texas A&M’s faculty senate’s call to investigate the Alonzo incident, Patrick writes: “This isn’t the first time a ‘faculty senate’ has pushed back at me for holding them accountable. Last year, the University of Texas Faculty Council bluntly stated they are not accountable to the Board of Regents (appointed by the governor) or the Legislature.” It is as if the UT-Austin resolution had been “pushing back” on Patrick personally rather than responding to the widespread legislative attacks on teaching about race and racism. Now the Texas A&M faculty are the prima donnas: “Their outrage,” Patrick writes, “seems based on the belief that anyone who dares ask a question about what is being taught or said in a classroom at a state university is somehow challenging their ‘academic freedom.’”

Patrick puts both the terms “faculty senate” and “academic freedom” in scare quotes, as if they were made-up concepts dreamt up by self-serving radicals. In fact, until recently, academic freedom was championed as much by Republicans as Democrats, as I argued recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education. For yesterday’s freedom-loving Republicans, the idea that the state should not instill fear in America’s universities was one of our country’s greatest virtues, something distinguishing us from authoritarian countries like China. Democrats and Republicans alike agreed that when government meddles in universities’ inner workings and instills fear in faculty and administrators, it turns them into arms of the state.

A loud and influential faction of conservatives who admire Viktor Orbán’s control over Hungary’s universities are trying to change this consensus. The New York Times‘ recent decision to run an op-ed by Chris Rufo and the unduly respectful review of Rufo’s hysterical book given by Len Gutkin in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggest that they are having some success (Check out—ideally, without buying—Rufo’s book for yourself; it has all the fascist favorites: secret histories of power grabbing, left-wing conspiracies to dominate, existential threats, etc.). Let’s not let them. As Mike Budd argues in the blog’s last post, “Florida 2023: Mourning and Organizing,” let’s organize.  If you’re in Texas, this means joining and/or supporting the efforts of the following organizations and advocacy groups that are building a strong coalition: Texas American Association of University Professors, Texas Association of College Teachers, Texas American Federation of Teachers, Texas Faculty Association, Texas Council of Faculty Senates, Texas State Employees Union, Black Brown Dialogues on Policy, Every Texan, and the Texas NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

If you’re not in Texas, join your AAUP or AFT chapter and, if you don’t have one, start one! As the president of my chapter of PSU-AAUP tells me, we’re not immune from these kinds of attacks in Oregon. And you’re not immune where you are.

Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and co-editor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, forthcoming from Beacon Press.