The University of Texas at Austin Might Be the Future of Higher Ed

Grayson Oliver came to the University of Texas at Austin three years ago as a freshman. A closeted queer kid from a small, conservative community near Fort Worth, he was one in the long line of students who’ve flocked to this quintessential college town, for decades considered a mecca for slackers, misfits and artists. And, like many students before him, Oliver blossomed on campus: He came out, joined student government and found a close circle of friends.

It was a sunny winter day when we spoke—crop-top weather in February—and all around Oliver, students lounged on a grassy quad, headphones over their ears, scrolling. But the bucolic scene belied an underlying malaise at Texas’ flagship university, Oliver told me, a pervasive atmosphere of anxiety and confusion. “There’s a lot of uncertainty right now,” he said. “It’s sad, and it’s hard.”

Austin is still in many ways an exemplar of American college culture, but in a way that runs counter to the free-spirited experimentation that’s been the norm in higher education.

As a public university, UT-Austin is under the control of the state legislature. In an effectively one-party state like Texas, that means it’s under the thumb of Republicans, who are bent on changing what they see as woke college campuses. At the behest of the legislature, UT shuttered its diversity, equity and inclusion programs a full year before Donald Trump returned to the White House. (More than a dozen states have since passed similar laws.)

Scores of staff members, some of them with decades of service to the university, lost their jobs. Long-standing traditions, such as the bilingual graduation ceremony for students from Spanish-speaking families, were canceled. The administration defunded, at the state’s behest, the Asian/Asian American Faculty and Staff Association, a mentorship program for Black and Hispanic women and another that helped undocumented students negotiate the college experience. One of the 10 biggest universities in the country no longer has a dedicated center supporting LGBTQ students. Student-run groups have attempted to pick up the slack, but because they’re banned from receiving any university funding, they’ve found themselves scrambling for resources. “We’re losing so many programs,” says Elizabeth Tomoloju, a junior from Dallas. “Students are a lot more careful about what they say and do, because they don’t know what’s allowed anymore.”

The world of higher education increasingly seems like a winner-take-all system at all levels. Big state schools suck up the air in the room. Mirroring national trends, UT-Austin received a record number of applicants last year, while Austin’s smaller, private schools—including the Catholic St. Edward’s University and Huston-Tillotson, a historically Black university—are struggling with declining enrollment. The pandemic has accelerated these enrollment trends, but even before that there was a growing political gap in how the left and right perceived higher education. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll showed that Republicans increasingly saw colleges as having a negative effect on society. It’s maybe not a surprise then that Republican leaders in Texas are threatening to withhold almost $40 million from UT, because they say the unwokening process hasn’t gone far or fast enough. At the same time, the university is now home to a conservative think tank, the Salem Center for Public Policy, and the Population Wellbeing Initiative, an Elon Musk-funded project to study falling birth rates, one of his pet issues.

Texas is leading the way on another big threat to the norms of higher education: The legislature has set its sights on eliminating tenure. (Professors with tenure “feel immune to oversight from the state legislature,” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has complained.) This, along with UT-Austin’s approach to student protest, where students staging a walkout last spring to decry the war in Gaza were met by a phalanx of state troopers in riot gear, has made for an anxious campus. FIRE, a campus speech organization largely known for defending conservative professors, decreed that UT was one of the worst universities in the nation for free speech, largely owing to its attitude toward student protest. “You know those dogs in shelters that don’t want to be pet because they’ve been abused in the past? That’s what it’s like here—people are just scared to do anything,” one student activist told me.

Meanwhile, the city surrounding the university is changing, too. Austin was once known for its low cost of living and casually creative atmosphere. These days, rents are up dramatically and tech bros crowd the coffee shops. The city’s reputation as a blue dot in a red state is increasingly precarious; the right-wing heterodox crowd has flocked here, with Musk and podcasting king Joe Rogan joining ultraright radio host and longtime Austinite Alex Jones. In keeping with its general tendency toward educational separatism—Musk is funding his own school near the SpaceX offices outside Austin—the growing conservative cohort has established a postsecondary option, too: the fledgling (and unaccredited) University of Austin, founded in 2021 by a group including columnist Bari Weiss and historian Niall Ferguson. Last fall the school welcomed the 92 students of its first class to a campus that occupies a floor in an art deco building downtown. The aesthetic is self-consciously and expensively Old World. On a recent visit, students nestled in worn leather club chairs, frowning in concentration over a game of chess.

Some parts of UT-Austin are flourishing—namely its sports and business programs. No wonder, then, that some influential alumni and donors seem to prefer that the university be nothing more than a branded business incubator with an athletics program attached. UT-Austin recently dedicated tens of millions of dollars in seed funding to startups developed on campus. And, since new NCAA rules were adopted allowing college athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness, recruiting top prospects has become a multimillion-dollar endeavor, with UT football reportedly shelling out more than anyone else. (It’s still technically forbidden for a school to pay college athletes directly, but during the same session that Texas lawmakers banned DEI, they also made it easier to skirt NCAA rules. UT says it complies with all NCAA and SEC rules.) As sports become more fundamental to many schools’ enrollment push and fundraising, it’s no wonder that many big state schools, UT among them, spend more on athletics than academics.

Today’s UT undergraduates were teenagers during the pandemic lockdowns, and they’ve matriculated into a world that’s no less fraught. But there might be an upside. Tomoloju, the junior from Dallas, has an internship in Washington, DC, this semester. She says her experiences at UT have given her an unexpected advantage: Unlike some of her colleagues working on Capitol Hill, she’s not shocked by the tactics of the Trump administration; she’s seen them, or something like them, on campus. In that way, she’s perhaps better positioned to imagine change than older UT grads, who came of age in a collegiate world that might not exist anymore. “All that stuff that’s happening with the federal government—that happened [in Austin] first, and we dealt with that,” she says. “There are people who are not happy with what’s going on, and we are fighting it.”