College undergoes conservative shift
Lawmakers in Texas are altering leadership and classes at UT Austin. By Vimal Patel The New York Times AUSTIN, Texas
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.
The university 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 classes 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 boards the power to approve academic leaders.
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 further than Texas lawmakers, approving a policy that requires courses that teach “race or gender ideology” to have presidential approval.
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 UT Austin, located blocks from the Texas Capitol.
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 with 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.”
Right-wing, fascist indoctrination is OK, however.
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.
Right-wing perspective is allowed. The left-wing perspective that created Social Security, Medicare, poverty aids, and equal rights legislation is not allowed.
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 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 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 UT,” said 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?”
The idea is that if we pretend gay people don’t exist, then they won’t exist.
A poll by the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, found 40% 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.
Next, we’ll get rid of vaccination and teach prayer instead. That should protect our children against disease.
“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.
Teaching religion instead of science is not controversial.
The university said the academic reviews will explore factors like student demand and academic rigor. “The university,” its statement read, “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).”
Balanced? Depoliticized? Deverse? Sure, as long as we get rid of immigrants, because they are replacing us. Right?
Mary Neuburger, 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,” 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 UT for almost 30 years,” she added, “and I’ve never seen anything like this.
Somewhere, Hitler is smiling.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
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Sometimes it takes a while for sanity and competence to emerge, but you can see it happening now as respected organizations refuse to toe the crazy, bigoted, Kennedy, anti-science line.
Trump tries to deny the facts, but he will pay the price as even ardent MAGAs will not countenance his obvious lies and the deaths of their children:
American Academy of Pediatrics loses HHS funding after criticizing RFK Jr.
HHS cuts key AAP grants, citing concerns about “identity-based language” and insufficient focus on agency priorities. The organization said the cuts could harm child health.
December 17, 2025 at 2:17 p.m. EST
By Lena H. Sun and Paige Winfield Cunningham
The Department of Health and Human Services has terminated seven grants totaling millions of dollars to the American Academy of Pediatrics, including for initiatives on reducing sudden infant deaths, improving adolescent health, preventing fetal alcohol syndrome and identifying autism early, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The abrupt loss of funds this week surprised the professional pediatrician association, which has been one of the harshest critics of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s changes to federal vaccine policy.
“The sudden withdrawal of these funds will directly impact and potentially harm infants, children, youth, and their families in communities across the United States,” Mark Del Monte, AAP’s chief executive and executive vice president, said in a statement to The Post.The organization is exploring options to push back, he said, including a legal challenge.
Administration officials cited a range of reasons for cutting off the funding to AAP, including the group’s use of “identity-based language,” including references to racial disparities and “pregnant people,” and insufficient focus in at least one grant program on nutrition and chronic disease prevention, which they said runs afoul of HHS’s priorities.
These grants, previously awarded to the American Academy of Pediatrics, were canceled along with a number of other grants to other organizations because they “no longer align with the Department’s mission or priorities,” HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement.
The AAP has criticized Kennedy for making unilateral changes to federal vaccine policy, calling them unscientific and arguing that his actions underminedevidence-based medicine, sidelined expert advice, eroded trust in vaccines and jeopardized public health by making communities more vulnerable to preventable diseases. The group condemned his firing of the CDC’sindependent vaccine advisers to replace them with his own picks, many of whom previously criticized vaccine guidance.
Kennedy has blasted AAP for receiving funding from vaccine manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies. In response to the organization contradicting him by recommending annual covid vaccination for infants and toddlers, Kennedy called on the group to disclose conflicts of interest “so that Americans may ask whether the AAP’s recommendations reflect public health interest, or are, perhaps, just a pay-to-play scheme to promote commercial ambitions of AAP’s Big Pharma benefactors.”
The AAP and other medical groups are suing HHS and Kennedy in federal court, alleging that his coronavirus vaccine policy changes violate federal law. The lawsuit is seeking to have Kennedy’s vaccine advisory panel disbanded and reconstituted under court supervision.
AAP received $18.4 million in federal grants from HHS this year, according to a federal grants database. Some anti-vaccine activists and other allies of Kennedy had criticized the federal funding of the group because it supports school vaccine mandates.
Three of the terminated grants had been awarded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; four others had been awarded by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), another health agency.
“This vital work spanned multiple child health priorities, including reducing sudden infant death, rural access to health care, mental health, adolescent health, supporting children with birth defects, early identification of autism, and prevention of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, among other topics,” Del Monte said.
One letter terminating a CDC grant on birth defects and infant disorders said “identity-based language” used in grant materials are “not aligned with current CDC and HHS priorities.” AAP received $18 million from that grant from 2023 to 2025.
The letter highlighted language in AAP’s application and award documents, including a reference to “the health of pregnant and postpartum people,” a statement that “disparities caused by racism and poverty are only exacerbated during emergencies” and a commitment to incorporating “diverse perspectives into clinical care and public health materials.”
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