Oh Good Gravy! College Presidents Are Now Directly Firing Professors
I drafted this column's headline more than six months ago, but I never actually wrote the column to go with it. Although the content of today's column covers more than the specific problem noted, I still like the headline enough to stick with it. A more boring, accurate headline might be: "Republicans Continue to Prove That They Never Cared About Intellectual Diversity," or something like that.
In any event, the news story that inspired today's headline was "Texas Professor Fired After Accusations of Teaching 'Gender Ideology,'" with the subheadline "Two administrators also lost their posts at Texas A&M, an example of how Republican policies meant to curb liberal ideas are reaching into university classrooms," which The New York Times published on September 10, 2025. That article reported that
Texas A&M University swiftly fired a lecturer and removed two administrators after a student filmed herself arguing with the instructor that a children’s literature course broke the law because the coursework recognized more than two genders. ...
Mark Welsh, Texas A&M’s president, said he terminated the instructor, Melissa McCoul, and removed the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and head of the English department from their posts. ...
Gov. Greg Abbott said, in a post on social media responding to the video of the classroom at Texas A&M, that the teaching of gender depicted in the class was “contrary to Texas law.” But it was not clear what law Mr. Abbott was referring to. A spokesman for the governor pointed to the termination letter sent to Dr. McCoul that did not directly allege any violation of state law.
That story broke less than a month after I wrote "The Grim March Toward Enforced Right-Wing Groupthink in US Universities," here on Dorf on Law. There, I quoted the recently ousted President of the University of Florida's disingenuous claim that "[t]he culture of ideological conformity and monoculture at [American universities] is unhealthy not just for them, but for the nation at large." Monoculture. Check. I then argued that
the Trumpian right is no longer trying to set up alternatives to the elite institutions that they have habitually smeared. Instead, they are now busily remaking everything to fit their idea of what a university is supposed to be. Which is? A true "monoculture" in which even to be in favor of, say, diversity is a fireable offense, and where teaching about systemic racism (or really about bigotry of any kind) is potentially criminal. For all of their complaints about non-conservatives' supposed intolerance of opposing views, these people are the most intolerant snowflakes imaginable.
Although I did in fact call that one correctly, I am not going to take much of a victory lap, because it has long been obvious that this was the true agenda on the right. And sure enough, the news on the higher education front in the six months since that incident at Texas A&M has been littered with more stories about summary dismissals of non-compliant professors and other staff, while Republican-led states around the country have been falling all over themselves to enact laws making it illegal to say anything in a classroom that would bother a Trumpist true believer. Texas A&M even managed to make the news again in January:
Over the past six years, Leonard Bright has provoked hours-long discussions in his graduate-level “Ethics of Public Policy” course about the thorniest corners of contemporary politics: What is critical race theory? Is DEI dividing America? Should transgender athletes be allowed to compete in women’s sports?
So when Bright, a professor at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service, received an email earlier this month from a department head asking when and how he planned to teach about sexuality in the course, and whether he planned to advocate for race ideology, he knew he was in for a frustrating back-and-forth.
Under a new Texas A&M systemwide policy, professors are not allowed to advocate for race or gender ideology or teach about topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity unless they can prove to administrators that it’s required for accreditation or career preparation.
After a series of sharp and, at times, combative email exchanges, administrators decided last week to cancel his class.
They say Bright was being uncooperative.
In an interview with The Chronicle, Bright said administrators were using arbitrary definitions of “advocacy” and “controversial content” in their course reviews. Classroom discussions, he said, are impromptu and impossible to predict.
But one-by-one enforcement of right-wing viewpoint monoculture is laborious and takes time. How to speed up the assembly line to make sure that every university in every red state has a flattened intellectual life? One of the more shameless strategies to enforce the new groupthink is the creation of "civics" centers within universities. My most recent academic home, the University of Florida at Gainesville, has one such center, and the person who created it then moved to the University of Texas-Austin as provost. That once-great university now has one as well.
There is no longer even a robust attempt to say that they are not in the business of hiring conservatives, not just at Florida and in Texas but elsewhere. In my column last week describing how violence is becoming more and more acceptable on the right, I pointed out that the thuggery had recently spilled over into higher education. At The Ohio State University, a newly hired professor in the "Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society," attacked a reporter who had the temerity to try to ask a question after a speaker had said that he would take no more questions. A New York Times news story about the incident noted that the violent professor's "listed areas of expertise include the ethics of war and international human rights [and] is among the roughly two dozen academics on the Chase Center’s faculty." The article then added this regarding The Ohio State's center:
The state government created the center with the budget that was signed into law in 2023 to “conduct teaching and research in the historical ideas, traditions and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order and society.”
The law says the center’s mission includes educating “students by means of free, open and rigorous intellectual inquiry to seek the truth” and affirming “the value of intellectual diversity in higher education.” Republican politicians across the country have championed such centers, arguing that they can promote free debate and Western values on campuses that they believe have become hubs of liberal ideology.
Except of course there is no free debate about anything at those centers. It is all about being performatively anti-lib. Indeed, the professor in question decided to turn himself into an ad hoc bouncer at a speaking event by The Ohio State's former president, Gordon Gee, because Gee had been asked questions about Jeffrey Epstein.
(Aside: There have been calls to strip former Victoria's Secret owner Les Wexner's name from some of The Ohio State University's facilities, because Wexner had come up prominently in the Epstein files and was subpoenaed last month to testify before a congressional committee. In response, Gee predictably argued that "[t]his is the cancel culture gone wild." But wait. I thought cancel culture (which is a hyped-up myth, but stay with me) was supposed to be bad because it made students on campus feel marginalized. It is thus interesting to see that yelling "cancel culture" is the muscle-memory response from conservatives, even when the issue is a donor's ties to a convicted sex trafficker.)
Meanwhile, earlier this month we learned that North Carolina's heavily gerrymandered super-majorities in its state legislature also created a "School of Civic Life and Leadership," and it is not going well. The university paid $1.2 million for an outside investigation of the school, but the university now claims that it is not allowed to release the results. What was the problem?
Lee H. Roberts, the university’s chancellor, announced the investigation in September, as the school found itself mired in controversy over its hiring practices and other issues. [Dean Jud] Atkins was publicly accused by several former faculty in the school of inappropriately strong-arming job searches, ignoring the input of inaugural faculty for a number of external hires. ...
Public scrutiny of the school began long before the contentious faculty searches. When the school was originally announced in 2023, by a unanimous resolution passed by the Board of Trustees, many faculty and community members were taken by surprise.
Its founding was spearheaded by the university’s now-former provost, Chris Clemens, an outspoken conservative who helped write the initial proposal for the school to the legislature.
The school opened its doors in August 2024, soon announcing 11 new external hires in addition to an original slate of nine adjuncts. Four of the inaugural instructors left within months, some upset with how it was being run.
This is, in short, a sketchy new world that can barely maintain the pretense that it is anything other than a new reactionary monoculture. And it is being created by using a very old trick. During the intellectual battles over the future of economics departments in the 1970's and 1980's, for example, some universities created parallel departments that would hire conservative scholars exclusively. The old departments would then be bled dry of resources, denied the ability to run graduate programs, and essentially phased out by attrition.
I am not currently aware of any university that is engaged in outright firings of non-MAGA professors at scale (although the "post-tenure review" process at Florida is ready-made for that purpose), but that is not the only way to create their closed monoculture. All they have to do is shovel money into their new centers, adding courses and enrollments, and then say that "the customer is always right" (in this case meaning the students who enroll in the courses that are obviously being favored by the powers that be). The old departments and professional schools can then be axed.
So yes, college presidents are now micromanaging course offerings. Republican state legislatures are making it illegal even to say certain words. Politicians and right-wing donors to universities are creating "civics centers" that end up enforcing intellectual conformity through the hiring of illiberal thugs -- and in at least one case, that characterization is not metaphorical. At worst, the old world of higher education was a place where conservatives could get hired but felt outnumbered or disrespected. Now, their version of setting things straight is to make sure that they are the only game in town. Viewpoint diversity, my eye.
- Neil H. Buchanan