The headline is somewhat misleading: “The Conservative Overhaul of the University of Texas is Underway.” The story continues:

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.

Apart from brazen violations of academic freedom when it comes to teaching about race and gender, the main initiative at UT Austin now is affirmative action for academics on the “right” in some ill-defined sense of “right”: libertarians, Straussians, traditional conservatives, and so on. Some of the appointments have been fine, some dubious. Those on the right sometimes reply: well, universities have had affirmative action for liberals and identity politics ideologues for a long time, now it’s our turn. (There have clearly been racial preferences in faculty hiring, but put that to one side.) The evidence for this claim is unclear.

Certainly American university faculties are to the left of of the Republican Party, but so is America and the rest of the world. (Trump’s election does not show that most voters are MAGA reactionaries, given how electoral outcomes actually occur.) What is true is that there are departments and programs in universities without clear disciplinary standards (English is a major offender for many years now, some programs organized around racial or ethnic categories are similar, and some law schools have related problems), with the result that the main criteria of appointment are ideological. (There are fields, like economics, that have disciplinary standards that coincide with ideological commitments, but that is a different kind of problem.) My preference would be to close (or reform) those programs that fall short of the Humboldtian ideal, than to engage in massive affirmative action based on political beliefs that mostly lack cognitive content and frequently track religious dogma. Alas, that is now what UT Austin is doing.

Does this amount to a “conservative overhaul”? Obviously if the authoritarians move from violating the academic freedom of those who teach about race and gender to those who teach about other subjects, then it really will be an “overhaul.” For now, it may mean sub-standard appointments based on political ideology. Whether it goes further than that remains to be seen. Certainly a story like this is a disaster for the university and its efforts to recruit faculty on the merits.