Editorial: Don't let Dan Patrick dictate what professors can teach in Texas

Born and bred on the Chesapeake, Young Danny Goeb was never meek; Bound for Texas like Davy Crockett Dan fit right in like ball and socket; Chasing fame, he changed his name, Our Lone Star State was never the same. … Oh, sorry, we got carried away with the legend of Danny Goeb, the native Baltimorean who has anointed himself supreme arbiter of Texas history. We’re pretty sure that the man now known as Dan Patrick did not study Texas history in the seventh grade, as youngsters raised in this state traditionally do. We doubt he gave much thought to Austin, Travis, Houston and their fellow Texians as an undergraduate at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Nevertheless, he has determined that teachers in Texas, from kindergarten through graduate school, must answer to him when they presume to teach the history of that “big wonderful thing” known as Texas, to borrow Austin writer Stephen Harrigan’s title for his 2019 history of the state. Harrigan’s superb book took its title from Georgia O’Keeffe’s description of the state and all 925 pages should be required reading for the lieutenant governor. He would discover that Texas history is so much richer, more complex and more interesting than his own “Song of the South” notions of antebellum Texas or his John Wayne hagiographic rendering of the Texas independence struggle. Maybe Patrick has read Texas history — we hope so — but we see little evidence of any learning. More likely he’s been too busy to read, too busy digging through his toolbox of disputatious cultural issues, assiduously searching for yet another hammer he can wield to raise welts of animosity and divisiveness. That’s the Patrick way, whether he’s trying to unleash the bathroom cops on transgender students or pushing extreme abortion laws and even more extreme gun notions. He may be our all-powerful lieutenant governor, but the statesman’s mantle has never hung naturally. Basically, he's still the self-promoting radio and TV shock jock who painted himself Houston Oiler-blue and underwent a vasectomy during a live broadcast. Wading into Texas history not long ago, it was the Battle of the Alamo that earned his ire, after a recent book offered a revisionist history of that iconic battle. Presently it’s critical race theory. Although we suspect Patrick has only the vaguest notion of its meaning, critical race theory is a handy tool to bash any educator audacious enough to suggest that maybe Texas hasn’t always been the paragon of racial equality and equanimity. “I will not stand by and let looney Marxist UT professors poison the minds of young students with Critical Race Theory,” he tweeted recently, doing his best to look Texas Ranger tough. “We banned it in publicly funded K-12 and we will ban it in publicly funded higher ed.” His Twitter rant was in response to a vote by the Faculty Council of the University of Texas at Austin approving a resolution rejecting “any attempt by bodies external to the faculty to restrict or dictate the content of university curriculum on any matter, including matters related to racial and social justice.” The vote was 41-5, with three abstentions. Patrick then doubled down on his assault on academic freedom, a bedrock tradition in academia that is as useful to conservative professors and liberals ones. “During the upcoming 88th Legislative Session, one of my priorities will be eliminating tenure at all public universities in Texas. Additionally, we will define teaching Critical Race Theory in statute as a cause for a tenured professor to be dismissed.” The lite guv’s threat brings to mind a venerable aphorism, one that Patrick presumably has forgotten, never knew or chooses to ignore. “Those who do not learn history,” said the writer and philosopher George Santayana, “are doomed to repeat it.” Every Texan, not just Patrick, needs to know that we have been here before. In the early 1940s, members of the University of Texas board of regents, appointed by Gov. Coke Stevenson and his predecessor, Pappy O’Daniel, decided that so-called liberal professors were themselves in need of a hard lesson. Scouring syllabi and curricula, the regents found evidence of professors who seemed to be sympathetic to labor unions and the “socialist” programs of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In Harrigan’s words, the regents were “men disposed to regard the professors in Austin as agents of a ‘far-reaching evil.’” They demanded that UT President Homer Rainey fire four economics professors with New Deal leanings. Rainey refused. He also refused to bounce the English professor who had included John Dos Passos’ critically acclaimed but “obscene” novel, “The Big Money,” on an undergraduate reading list. In addition, the regents determined that UT harbored a “nest of homosexuals.” In 1944, at a meeting held at Houston’s Rice Hotel, they fired Rainey. Protests by thousands of students, professors and Rainey supporters included a mock funeral replete with pallbearers carrying a coffin labeled “Academic Freedom.” The protesters were accompanied by the Longhorn Band playing Frederic Chopin’s “Funeral March.” The protests were darkly humorous, in a way, but there was nothing amusing about the issue itself — academic freedom. It took years for the University of Texas to shed its reputation, deserved or not, as an intellectual backwater, a plaything of governors and their big-money supporters who knew indoctrination, not education. UT historian Bill Brands, the author of a number of books about Texas, expects that Patrick’s assault on academic tenure is likely to prove an empty threat. “And after the elections,” Brands observes, “the realistic members of his party will remind him that Houston became a world leader in medicine, Austin a midcontinent alternative to Silicon Valley and Dallas the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the country in no small part because of the quality of higher education in the state of Texas.” Let’s hope the professor is right. If Patrick is not distracted by some other culture-war cudgel between now and the next legislative session, Texas higher education could see universities from around the world swooping in to lure away academic talent. One more thing about our would-be academic arbiter: His complaints borne of ignorance demean his fellow Texans — and our forebears. If teachers and students are not allowed to engage those who came before as actual human beings, with flaws, foibles and shortcomings just like ours, then students can only learn of them; they can’t learn from them. Young Texans can’t identify with granite statues. Annette Gordon-Reed, who grew up in Conroe and is now a Pulitzer Prize winning historian at Harvard, writes that she is often asked to explain what she as an African-American woman loves about her native Texas, “given all that I know of what has happened there …” “Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections,” she writes in her most recent book, “On Juneteenth.” “In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places — and people, ourselves included — without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses. That often demands a willingness to be critical, sometimes deeply so.” It's a good book, Patrick, one that every Texan ought to read, particularly a native Marylander who presumes to write the one-and-only syllabus of Texas history. Also, Gordon-Reed’s book is short, Patrick, only 146 pages.

Editorial: Don't let Dan Patrick dictate what professors can teach in Texas

The sign in service is not functioning right now.

Please try again in a few minutes

Profile Settings

Activate Digital Access

Subscription & Billing

Subscriber Benefits

Big Sale. Great Deal.
Get an Entire 12 Weeks for 99¢

Enjoy the many benefits
of being a subscriber.

Keep reading with
unlimited digital access.