Manoo Sirivelu/The Texas Tribune

At colleges across Texas last month, a series of viral campus videos, abrupt professor firings, confusing teaching restrictions and sudden course audits came in such rapid-fire succession that before the fallout was over at one public university, another scandal was upending norms at a school hundreds of miles away.

Many students and professors say the ground has shifted on speech and scholarship, creating confusion about what they can say, study and teach in the very places they once saw as centers of open inquiry.

But that changed atmosphere didn't happen overnight. Texas Republicans have been building toward it for years.

Long before the Trump administration began targeting institutions of higher learning, Texas officials passed laws, threatened uni

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