Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick

The Increasingly Authoritarian War on Tenure

Right-wing attacks on the professoriate are divorced from evidence.

The Review | Opinion
By Jennifer Ruth February 23, 2022

In 2015, I asked a history professor at a prominent university in Shanghai what happens if graduate students in China want to study the Cultural Revolution. They don’t get funding, he said flatly, and they won’t get a job. Clear and simple. In the United States, politicians have to work a little harder when they want to control what professors research and teach. Unlike in the People’s Republic of China, politicians in the United States have to loop their efforts through invocations of “the people.” We saw this in action on Friday when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas held a

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

In 2015, I asked a history professor at a prominent university in Shanghai what happens if graduate students in China want to study the Cultural Revolution. They don’t get funding, he said flatly, and they won’t get a job. Clear and simple. In the United States, politicians have to work a little harder when they want to control what professors research and teach. Unlike in the People’s Republic of China, politicians in the United States have to loop their efforts through invocations of “the people.” We saw this in action on Friday when Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas held a news conference. He promised to end tenure because he was enraged that the Faculty Council of the University of Texas at Austin had passed a resolution a few days earlier defending faculty members’ academic freedom to teach gender justice and critical race theory.

It’s easy to rally people behind you when you feed them propaganda.

UT-Austin’s resolution is one of over 20 that have passed at institutions across the country in response to the laws and pending bills censoring what and how we teach in the classroom. Seven of these were passed by public flagships. Many of these resolutions, including the one passed in Texas, are drawn from a template provided by the African American Policy Forum while others, such as the one passed at the University of Alabama, were drafted from scratch. The resolutions affirm the long-established prerogative of faculty, as the experts in their fields, to determine curriculum. “We must collectively demonstrate that the faculty are organized on our own campuses across the country to fight back,” the UCLA law professors Kimberlé Crenshaw and Devon Carbado and three others wrote in an open letter encouraging faculty to bring resolutions to their senate floors.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Dan Patrick does have a high degree of popular support among the general public in Texas. It’s easy to rally people behind you when you feed them propaganda. It’s easy to work people up by suggesting that their (white) college-aged offspring are routinely denounced by their (Black) professors for being inherently racist. Politicians don’t need evidence for their claims; they just need one or two opportunistic activists spreading misinformation through social media. They then simply gesture at the debris floating at the top of the mediasphere in lieu of real evidence.

This feedback loop is familiar: Consider how the partisan activist Christopher F. Rufo’s prolific falsehoods became evidence in a formal opinion by Montana’s attorney general. In Texas, the loop took all of two days after the resolution passed. A finance professor who came to the council meeting only for the period during which the resolution was on the floor gave a prepared speech chock-full of basic misunderstandings about both critical race theory and the role of faculty resolutions. He then tweeted a clip of himself, thus disregarding the faculty member who patiently explained his misunderstandings. (A Washington Post article brought that context back to the foreground.) Claiming that the finance professor’s tweet had gone viral, Fox News called further attention to it. Dan Patrick now had all the evidence he apparently felt he needed.

Photo illustration of Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan PatrickIllustration by The Chronicle; Photo by Brandon Bell, Getty Images

In his news conference, Patrick lauded the finance professor and blamed a “small minority” for the resolution. In fact, it was proposed with the full support of the academic-freedom committee, and with the endorsement of three other standing committees. Each committee had held its own discussion of the proposal weeks and, in some cases, months earlier. When council members voted, the tally was 41 in favor and 5 against, with three abstentions. Patrick also trotted out that time-honored McCarthyite trick of intentionally conflating issues involving race with communism by claiming that the faculty in favor of the resolution were “looney” (sic) Marxists. In fact, they are neuroscientists, biologists, historians, art historians, and so forth. The available evidence suggests that they are not loony nor, for that matter, Marxist.

Whether we teach critical race theory or not, faculty across the country know that none of us walk into classrooms and call white people oppressors and Black people victims. That’s not how teaching works. If we assign something by Richard Delgado or Gloria Ladson-Billings, we don’t instruct our students to sign their name in blood at the top. We ask, “What do you think?” It is, of course, profoundly insulting to Delgado and Ladson-Billings, and all of us who teach their work, to suggest the goal of this scholarship is to indoctrinate. But these insults are not really directed at us. They are naked attempts to manipulate the public. They are about elections. The morning of the day Patrick gave his news conference, The Texas Tribune ran a story deeply embarrassing to him about his “behind-the-scenes maneuvering this election cycle” to undermine other members of his party. By the afternoon, the Tribune had released a story on Patrick’s war on tenure, burying the earlier one. This is exactly what Patrick intended. This is precisely how the phrase “critical race theory” operates in some right-wing circles: It is an empty, scary phrase to throw at the public to distract and outrage them.

Academic freedom is not free speech. Politicians can make demonstrably wrong, irresponsible, and race-baiting claims; responsible professors cannot. Academics also have First Amendment rights in other aspects of our lives, but we are held to the standards of our profession when we make claims in peer-reviewed journals or submit our work to promotion and tenure committees. Through these processes, society comes into possession of a body of work that has been vetted by experts and that cannot be reduced to mere opinion or hearsay. They provide a democratic society with what the law professor and former Yale Law dean Robert Post calls “democratic competence.” And this — academic freedom — is what distinguishes universities in democratic states from those in authoritarian and totalitarian states where one political group has the ability to control knowledge. Despite all its old Cold War fear-mongering and all its empty talk of freedom, the Republican Party now harbors a sizable contingent of politicians who are increasingly willing to use authoritarian tactics to get what they want.

Democratic societies build in protections for university faculty so that we are not at the whims of whichever party is currently in power. When Patrick threatens tenure, he threatens those protections. With tenure, if we research climate change, we can do this throughout our careers, not in fits and starts every other four years. If we study the history of this country, we can produce and disseminate our findings even if a powerful politician considers them insufficiently patriotic. But now powerful politicians are taking direct aim at academic freedom. Losing it would mean the partisan political control of knowledge — which is precisely what partisans like Patrick are after.

A version of this article appeared in the March 18, 2022, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Opinion Political Influence & Activism Academic Freedom Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
About the Author
Jennifer Ruth
Jennifer Ruth is a professor and associate dean at Portland State University. She is the co-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.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Joan Wong for The Chronicle
Productivity Measures
A 4/4 Teaching Load Becomes Law at Most of Wisconsin’s Public Universities
Illustration showing a letter from the South Carolina Secretary of State over a photo of the Bob Jones University campus.
Missing Files
Apparent Paperwork Error Threatens Bob Jones U.'s Legal Standing in South Carolina
Pro-Palestinian student protesters demonstrate outside Barnard College in New York on February 27, 2025, the morning after pro-Palestinian student protesters stormed a Barnard College building to protest the expulsion last month of two students who interrupted a university class on Israel. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP) (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
A College Vows to Stop Engaging With Some Student Activists to Settle a Lawsuit Brought by Jewish Students
LeeNIHGhosting-0709
Stuck in limbo
The Scientists Who Got Ghosted by the NIH

From The Review

Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky
Photo-based illustration depicting a close-up image of a mouth of a young woman with the letter A over the lips and grades in the background
The Review | Opinion
When Students Want You to Change Their Grades
By James K. Beggan

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin