{"id":7243,"date":"2023-04-17T18:58:01","date_gmt":"2023-04-17T23:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=7243"},"modified":"2023-04-20T19:23:25","modified_gmt":"2023-04-21T00:23:25","slug":"will-ut-austin-and-texas-am-survive-beyond-this-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=7243","title":{"rendered":"Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Update (April 20):<\/mark><\/strong> Alas, the Texas Senate has approved SB 18<\/a>. The survival of higher education in Texas now hinges on this bill not being taken up or passed in the House, or not being enforced as written (e.g., because UT’s existing post-tenure review system is judged to satisfy it). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This week, the Texas Senate will take up SB 18<\/a>, a bill to ban the granting of tenure at all public universities in Texas, including UT Austin and Texas A&M. (Those of us who have tenure would retain it, for what little that\u2019s worth.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Update:<\/mark><\/strong> I\u2019ve learned that, even if this bill passes the Senate, there\u2019s a good chance that it will get watered down or die in the House, or found to be satisfied by UT\u2019s existing system of post-tenure review. That\u2019s the only reason why people in the know aren\u2019t panicking even more than they are.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I find it hard to imagine that SB 18 will actually pass both houses and be enforced as written, simply because it’s obvious that if it did, it would be the end of UT Austin and Texas A&M as leading research universities. More precisely, it would be the immediate end of our ability to recruit competitively, and the slightly slower end of our competitiveness period, as faculty with options moved elsewhere. This is so because of the economics of faculty hiring. Particularly in STEM fields like computer science, those who become professors typically forgo vastly<\/em> higher salaries in industry, not to mention equity in startup companies and so on. Why would we do such a nutty thing? Because we like a certain lifestyle. We’re willing to move several economic strata downward in return for jobs where (in principle) no one can fire us without cause, or tell us what we’re allowed to say or publish. The evidence from industry labs (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.) suggests that, in competitive fields, for Texas to attract and retain top faculty without<\/em> tenure would require paying them hundreds of thousands more per year. In that sense, tenure is a bargain<\/em> for universities and the state. Of course the situation is a bit different for art history and English literature, but in any case SB 18 makes no distinction between fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Texas Senate is considering two other bills this week: SB 17<\/a>, which would ban all DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, offices, and practices at public universities, and SB 16<\/a>, which would require the firing of any professor if they “compel or attempt to compel a student … to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.” (The language here seems sloppy to me: is liberal democracy “inherently superior” to Nazism? Would teaching students about the horrors of Nazism count as “attempting to compel them” to accept this superiority?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taken together, it’s clear that the goal is to hit back hard against “wokeness” in academia, and thereby satisfy the Republican base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s the thing: there really is<\/em> an illiberal ideology that’s taken over parts of academia (not all of it)—an ideology that Tim Urban, in his wonderful recent book What’s Our Problem?<\/em><\/a>, usefully terms “Social Justice Fundamentalism” or SJF, to distinguish it sharply from “Liberal Social Justice,” the ideology of (for example) the Civil Rights movement. Now, I’m on record as not a fan<\/strong> of the SJF ideology, to put it mildly, and the SJF ideology is on record as not a fan of me. In 2015, I was infamously dragged through the mud of Salon<\/em>, The New Republic<\/em>, Raw Story<\/em>, and many other magazines and websites for a single blog comment criticizing a form of feminism that had contributed to making my life miserable, even while I proudly called myself a liberal feminist (and still do). More recently, wokesters have written to my department chair trying to get me disciplined or fired, for everything from my use of the now-verboten term “quantum supremacy,” to a reference to female breasts in a poem I wrote as a student that was still on my homepage. (These attempts thankfully went nowhere. Notwithstanding what you read, sanity retains many strongholds in academia.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyway, despite all of this, the Texas Republicans have somehow succeeded in making me more afraid of them<\/em>, purely on the level of professional survival, than I’ve ever been of the Social Justice Fundamentalists. In effect, the Republicans propose to solve the “problem of wokeness” by simply dropping thermonuclear weapons on all Texas public universities, thereby taking out me and my colleagues as collateral damage—regardless of our own views on wokeness or anything else, and regardless of what we’re doing for Texas’ scientific competitiveness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t expect that most of my readers, in or out of Texas, will need to be persuaded about any of this—nor am I expecting to change many minds on the other side. Mostly, I’m writing this post in the hope that some well-connected moderates here in Austin will link to it, and the post might thereby play a tiny role in helping Texas’ first-rate public universities live one more day. (And to any such moderates: yes<\/strong>, I’m happy to meet in person with you or your colleagues, if that would help!) Some posts are here on this blog for no better reason than, y’know, moral obligation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update (April 20): Alas, the Texas Senate has approved SB 18. The survival of higher education in Texas now hinges on this bill not being taken up or passed in the House, or not being enforced as written (e.g., because UT’s existing post-tenure review system is judged to satisfy it). This week, the Texas Senate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"{title}\n\n{excerpt}\n\n{url}","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nerd-interest","category-rage-against-doofosity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7243"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7257,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7243\/revisions\/7257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}