Teaching in Red State America

Teaching in red-state America can feel, to outside observers, like a high-wire act—dodging political land mines, watching your words, fearing the next culture-war ambush. But for me, a tenured professor at a relatively resource-rich public university, the day-to-day reality is more mundane—and, in some ways, more unsettling.

To those outside the academy—or outside red-state campuses—the threats often appear dramatic: book bans, political purges, gag orders. And yes, those things happen.

Entire DEI offices have been shuttered. An entire communications and marketing team was abruptly dismissed. A dynamic interim provost was removed after barely a month in office. Senior administrators—including the president, provost, vice president for research and police chief—have resigned, and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts was quietly not renewed.

But the deeper danger is quieter and more insidious. It’s not simply that we’re being silenced from above. It’s that we’re losing something more foundational: the institutional capacity, the shared confidence and the communal cohesion to speak with meaning at all.

No one has tried to censor my syllabus—even though I’ve been told that syllabi have been scanned for verboten words. Nor has any administrator told me what I can or cannot say in the classroom.

In many ways, my work continues as it has for years. And yet—for the first time in my career—I’ve taken out professional liability insurance. Not because I’ve done anything differently, but because the landscape has changed.

The classroom today feels fraught—not with open conflict, but with invisible risk. A stray comment, an ambiguous joke or a misread line in a historical text can spark a complaint from the left, the right or both. And increasingly, I’m no longer confident that my university would step in to defend me if that happens.

Sometimes the tension surfaces in small but telling ways. I often ask students to read historical texts aloud. Recently, one text included the word “Negro”—period-appropriate but jarring to modern ears. A student refused to say it, worried it would make them sound racist. I understood the hesitation, but the moment revealed something deeper: a discomfort not just with the word, but with the past itself.

At other times, the stakes are higher. In a 400-seat lecture hall, a student in the back row raised a hand to ask, “Isn’t it true that Africans enslaved other Africans?” The question wasn’t academic—it was meant to provoke, to test, to challenge the legitimacy of the entire discussion on race and slavery. And in that moment, the burden fell entirely on me to respond with care, clarity and authority—knowing that any stumble could trigger backlash.

But to focus only on free speech risks missing the deeper, more corrosive threats. The real crisis isn’t coming from outside pressure alone. It’s internal.

My department is shrinking, with whole centuries of history—premodern, early modern, global—now uncovered. Colleagues are increasingly siloed, not just by discipline, but by fatigue. Hallway conversations, once the lifeblood of academic community, are rarer than ever. The central administration seems to be in disarray, unsure how to balance legislative scrutiny, budgetary uncertainty and a changing student body. We have money—but we no longer seem sure what to do with it.

The Chilling Effect, Not the Crackdown

The threat to academic freedom in red-state America rarely takes the form people imagine. It’s not a censor at the door or a memo dictating which books we can assign. It’s quieter than that. It’s the gnawing uncertainty about what might provoke a complaint—not just from politicians or activists, but from students who arrive already politicized, wary and ready to take offense.

The risk isn’t limited to controversial topics. It extends to how we teach, the examples we use, the historical analogies we draw, even the tone we take in class discussion. Ironically, the danger doesn’t come from being provocative—it comes from being misunderstood. And in an era of social media amplification, where a classroom comment can be decontextualized and broadcast widely, that risk feels both omnipresent and impossible to anticipate.

Then there’s another challenge: Many students, especially in the post-pandemic era, seem to treat class attendance as optional and deadlines as negotiable. This isn’t just a matter of distraction or diminished focus—it reflects a deeper shift. The traditional balance of authority between professors and students has eroded. Students no longer see themselves merely as learners or customers, but increasingly as autonomous agents—free to opt in or out of academic expectations on their own terms.

We may not think of this behavior as political—and it isn’t, at least not in a partisan sense. But it does reflect a much broader skepticism toward professional expertise and institutional authority.

Tenure is supposed to protect us from these pressures, and in a formal sense, it does. But protections on paper don’t guarantee confidence in practice. When administrators are nervous and risk-averse—under pressure from boards, donors or legislatures—their first instinct is often self-preservation, not faculty support.

So even tenured professors like me start to feel the chill. We edit ourselves. We avoid certain topics. We overprepare for student complaints that may never come.

That’s the real danger—not silencing, but self-silencing. Not censorship, but a slow erosion of the trust that makes real teaching possible.

What’s Really Broken

And yet, if I’m honest, the political climate isn’t the biggest challenge I face. The larger crisis is institutional.

My department, like many others, is shrinking. We’ve lost coverage in vital areas—pre-20th-century history, for instance—without any clear plan to rebuild. Retirements go unfilled. Search authorizations stall. The curriculum narrows. Students now move through our programs without ever encountering major swaths of the human past.

Worse still, the intellectual culture that once animated campus life has thinned. COVID disrupted everything, and we haven’t recovered. The hallways are quieter. Informal conversations are fewer. Faculty retreat into their offices—or off campus entirely—to do their work in isolation.

Interdisciplinary dialogue, once encouraged, now feels like a luxury few have the time or energy to pursue.

Morale is a major concern. I’m not sure it’s any worse at red-state universities than it is at, say, Columbia or California’s public institutions, which are grappling with massive budget cuts. But in Texas, it takes on a particular edge.

Offices devoted to high school outreach have been shut down in the name of dismantling DEI. Freshman composition has been largely outsourced to community colleges. And now the College of Liberal Arts is seriously considering moving general education courses online and asynchronous—all in the name of cost savings, with little regard for regular, substantive interaction between students and faculty.

These may not make headlines, but they are deeply consequential. They don’t stem from partisan politics so much as from managerial drift, disconnection and burnout—and they’re quietly hollowing out the university from within.

Resource-Rich, Mission-Poor

There’s a particular irony to all this: I teach at a relatively well-funded institution. Compared to many struggling public colleges, we are lucky. And yet that good fortune hasn’t translated into clarity of purpose. Instead, we drift.

A university without a shared purpose leaves its faculty not just directionless but demoralized. When we no longer know what we’re here to do—beyond hitting retention targets or generating credit hours—we lose the sense of vocation that makes teaching meaningful. We become functionaries, not educators.

No one seems quite sure what our mission is anymore. Are we here to prepare students for the workforce? To serve as a center of research and innovation? To cultivate civic engagement and democratic values? To offer personal enrichment and intellectual awakening?

The answer, of course, is “all of the above.” But in practice, the university’s strategy feels reactive rather than visionary. We’re trying to do everything while struggling to articulate why any of it matters. We issue strategic plans full of bullet points and buzzwords, but we don’t offer a compelling story about who we are and what higher education is for.

This vagueness is particularly dangerous in red-state contexts, where universities are under heightened scrutiny and where the default assumption among many citizens is that higher education is broken, elitist and out of touch. If we can’t tell a persuasive story about our public value, we leave others free to tell a damaging one in our place.

Speaking Freely—While We Still Can

I realize I’m lucky. I have tenure. I have a platform. I can say what others—adjuncts, untenured faculty, staff—might hesitate to voice. That’s a privilege I take seriously. But it’s not just about speaking up when others can’t. It’s about speaking up while we still have institutions worth defending.

Because what worries me most isn’t political interference or student complaints. It’s the creeping normalization of institutional fragility—of empty departments, siloed faculty, disengaged students and administrators who no longer know how to lead.

It’s the feeling that we’re all waiting for something—an enrollment collapse, a funding crisis, a political crackdown—that will finally force a reckoning.

But maybe we shouldn’t wait. Maybe the reckoning is already here. And maybe the time to speak honestly about what’s at stake—about what we’re losing, what we value and what we want our universities to be—is now.

What We Owe the Future

The challenges I describe aren’t unique to the University of Texas at Austin or to red-state institutions. They’re more visible here—accelerated by political pressure—but they’re rooted in national trends: shrinking departments, retreating leadership, eroding faculty morale and growing skepticism toward the value of higher education itself.

That’s why the response must be collective. Faculty across the country need to resist isolation and speak with a shared voice—not just in defense of academic freedom, but in defense of academic purpose. And that means doing more than issuing statements. It means rebuilding community, reclaiming relevance and reasserting what higher education is for.

We’re not in free fall—but we are drifting. And drift, over time, hollows out even the strongest institutions. Reversing course will take more than resilience. It will take action.

We can start by reopening the conversations that once defined intellectual life—across disciplines, across ranks and across ideological lines. We can mentor one another more intentionally, speak openly about institutional pressures and push for leadership that values educational substance over metrics and messaging.

We can design curricula that recenter civic learning, cultural literacy and human development. And we must insist that teaching is not a delivery system, but a relationship grounded in trust and rich personal relationships.

If we want higher education to be more than a credentialing machine, we need to act like it’s worth saving—and prove it, in how we teach, what we fight for and how we stand together.

Because the real question isn’t how we endure as educators in politically complicated places. It’s whether we still believe in the transformative potential of what we do. If we give in to drift—if we quietly accept intellectual narrowing, mission erosion and administrative timidity—we risk becoming complicit in the very decline we fear.

But if we speak honestly—about the values we hold, the pressures we face and the kind of education we believe in—we can reclaim the university not just as a workplace, but as a public trust.

My call is simple: Let’s resist cynicism and self-censorship. Let’s advocate—loudly—for a broader curriculum, for stronger intellectual communities and for leadership that is both principled and brave. Above all, let’s remember that we are not just stewards of knowledge—we are builders of futures. What we say, teach and defend today will shape the university tomorrow. Let’s make it one worth inheriting.