Political correctness and identity politics are corrupting colleges and universities around the country, public and private, even in states usually regarded as Republican bastions. It may surprise some readers, but in the home state of stalwart conservative Senator Ted Cruz, where the GOP controls both houses of the legislature and holds all statewide elected offices, leftist zealots at the University of Texas are in control and doing their best to mimic—or perhaps outdo—UC Berkeley.
Under the leadership of university president Greg Fenves, UT is being molded into a burnt-orange knock-off of Evergreen State—a showcase for left-wing academic fads. Fenves, a Berkeley alumnus who also taught there, has overseen the removal of “offensive” historical statuary (including one commemorating a former Texas governor, James Stephen Hogg); an expensive legal battle to defend the school’s use of racial preferences in admissions; the expansion of a highly paid diversity bureaucracy (with a staff approaching 100); the denial of due process in UT’s handling of sexual-misconduct claims; the implementation of campus speech codes and the creation of “bias response teams”; and, in 2016, UT’s first international black studies conference, featuring the notorious Communist activist Angela Davis (a former member of the FBI’s most wanted list) as a keynote speaker.
Many UT alumni place greater importance on the success of the school’s sports teams than they do on academic politics, paying scant attention to Fenves’s transformation of their alma mater into a social-justice academy. Despite his aggressive activist agenda, the only significant pushback Fenves has faced thus far was over the university’s “MasculinUT” program, a widely ridiculed campaign designed to combat “toxic masculinity” on campus. The risible initiative suggested that men suffer when they are told to “act like a man” or are encouraged to be the “breadwinner.” The $330,000-per-year Dean of Students, Soncia Reagins-Lilly, was forced to put the program on hold when national media and radio talk show hosts mocked it.