In a state dominated by conservatives, the University of Texas at Austin stood out.

Its leadership had often been a thorn in the side of the state’s politicians, resisting efforts to erode faculty power and championing diversity efforts. The university successfully defended its race-conscious admissions policy all the way to the Supreme Court in 2016. It has long been a magnet for liberal students and student activism.

Today, the conservatives are winning. State Republicans have passed laws to curtail what is taught in college classrooms and installed new university administrators with partisan affiliations, among a host of new strategies to remake a public higher education system that they argue has been held hostage to left-leaning ideas and become hostile to conservative ones.

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The campus is no longer led by an academic, but a Republican lawyer who worked for the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton. The president has promised curricular changes, and the system is now conducting an audit of all gender studies courses, after a State House bill passed in May enshrined in state law that there are effectively only two genders. Another piece of legislation, Senate Bill 37, gutted faculty control of universities, tightened a grip on what can be taught and gave appointed governing boards the power to approve academic leaders, including academic deans.

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