We can also thank basic scientific research that happened at universities throughout the 20th century – when everybody assumed that the theoretical physics being explored had little to no practical value.

People still talk like that about the human quest for knowledge and understanding – as if acquiring knowledge doesn't have intrinsic value, as if only obviously practical matters should be pursued as valuable.

I'm not surprised Texas is a center of this, given how popular Evangelical Christianity is there.

Fundamentalist Christians have a very deep distrust of higher education, even as they laud its practical benefits

I learned in church as a child (and Evangelical children still learn this) that the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to be deceived by Satan and to turn from God.

Just think about how many of these religious idiots sincerely believe that organisms do not evolve through natural selection or any other mechanism, and that Noah's global flood actually happened.

These are deeply stupid, willfully ignorant people.

But their stupidity runs through them in contradictory veins. They want the practical, economic benefits of education. They want to be highly skilled technical workers and managers.

They want the paychecks and the prestige, but they revile the academic free inquiry that led to the technology they crave to profit from.

So their solution is to control higher education, to limit free inquiry and the teaching of facts and ideas they disagree with on mostly religious grounds.

Obviously, tenure has to be a target. Professors mostly value free inquiry and often fight for the right to pursue knowledge to wherever it leads.

They fight to teach students anything and everything relevant to their course of study.

Conservatives, who in Texas as in much of the U.S. tend to be religious fanatics, cannot abide this. They value their religious superstitions far more than they value free inquiry and human knowledge.

In this, they are following a long American tradition of distrusting intellectualism, and they are taking it to highly dangerous extremes.

Any society that damps down curiosity and makes ignorance a value is doomed to wither and fail.