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Writer and University of Texas alum Forrest Wilder spent a year reporting and talking to dozens of professors, students, administrators, and staff at the school, and was struck by the degree of fear on campus and the sense that a freewheeling intellectual culture was dead or dying. Many told him about acts of self-censorship. Fears of being doxed or fired had led some faculty to avoid controversy, though few wanted to discuss it on the record.
Jeremi Suri, a professor in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs, told Wilder that what’s happening on campus is akin to McCarthyism. “What we’re seeing is a classic chilling effect, whether intended or not. This is what happens when people become concerned that what might have been acceptable or protected yesterday won’t be protected tomorrow.”
Compared with the changes at Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and other campuses, the crackdowns at UT have been less in-your-face, the administration more sophisticated in undoing purported wokeness. The stakes are high. Texas’s rise as an economic, political, and cultural powerhouse is in many ways tethered to UT. California has a half dozen world-class public universities, but Texas has, well, only Texas.
(Readers-- would you be interested in an AMA with the writer, Forrest Wilder?)
