How can you teach the history of the Civil War without mentioning race? And how can you discuss the Holocaust without condemning Hitler, which could be seen as unacceptable “advocacy” by university administrators — or by the artificial intelligence bots that assist in reviewing curriculum.
These are just some of the questions professors are asking, especially those teaching history, in Texas following new academic policies censoring any discussions of race, gender or sexuality.
In November, Texas A&M’s Board of Regents approved a policy silencing professors and requiring prior approval for course material and changes to syllabi.
The unanimous board decision “will require each campus president to sign off on any course that could be seen as advocating for ‘race and gender ideology’ or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”
In a 21st century twist, Texas A&M is tasking Artificial Intelligence to review the course materials to look for forbidden advocacy.
Origins of the policy
Some on campus pointed to a student’s secretly recorded and now viral video of a Texas A&M professor discussing gender identity in a children’s literature class. The professor, Melissa McCoul, assigned students readings from the book “Jude Saves the World”, which features a non-binary, middle school protagonist, according to the Tribune. As part of the discussion, McCoul showed the class “The Gender Unicorn,” a diagram popularly used in trainings, classes, and among nonprofit organizations showing the spectrum and differences between gender identity, sexuality and gender expression.
The recording shows the student taking the video accuse the professor of violating the law by suggesting that gender is a spectrum, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order claiming “there are only two biological sexes.” McCoul calmly tells the student that this is a misunderstanding and the discussion and teaching are not illegal, she tells the student that if she is uncomfortable, she is welcome to leave. As the discussion continues with the student saying she would be showing documentation to the university president the next day, McCoul asks the student to leave so they could continue the class discussion.
Although the video was taken months ago, it resurfaced during the fall semester, gaining traction among right wing supporters and politicians and being featured on Fox News.
McCoul was fired shortly after the video went viral and University President Mark Welsh resigned.
But other professors on campus say this was in the works for quite some time and is largely political.
Dr. Leonard Bright, who is a professor at the university, but spoke as a citizen and president of the American Association of University Professors Texas A&M Chapter (AAUP-TAMU), said the video and others like it have been used as a pretext to open the door to these policies. And, he added, the videos themselves really just show professors having a reasonable discussion within the scope of their expertise.
“We are concerned about political interference,” Bright said. “It is clear that, both implicitly and explicitly, that this is a political order, that this came from members of the Conservative Party of Texas who have been fighting even with themselves over their desire to now remake our institutions in their image.”
Texas Governor Gregg Abbott is responsible for appointing regents to the system’s board because it is a public university.
“Governor Abbott believes colleges and universities should focus on high-quality education — not political agendas,” Abbott’s press secretary Andrew Mahaleris said in a statement to GJR. “Radical DEI and gender-ideology policies will not be forced on students by Texas higher education institutions. Governor Abbott expects his appointed Boards of Regents to ensure that our higher education campuses continue to focus on developing our students into the best and brightest in the world.”
Texas A&M is not the only university in Texas introducing policies meant to censor what faculty can and cannot teach. Earlier this month and just weeks after A&M’s policy, Texas Tech’s University System Chancellor Brandon Creighton “imposed restrictions on how faculty discuss race, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation in classrooms and introduced a new course content approval process, underlining that instructors could face discipline for not complying,” according to the Tribune.
Free speech advocacy groups and activists for academic freedom have denounced the policies and say that, especially considering both universities are public and therefore bound by the First Amendment, the universities will likely be taken to court in the near future.
Texas A&M and Texas Tech refused to comment for this story and would not say how these policies might impact academic freedom and free speech.
Free speech at the university gate
Free speech doesn’t stop at the schoolhouse gate. That is the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court from its 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines when the court ruled on a case determining the free speech rights of students who were suspended for wearing black arm bands protesting the Vietnam War.
If free speech doesn’t stop once a K-12 student steps onto public school property, the same should absolutely be true for public universities where the students are all, typically over the age of 18, experts say.
There is Supreme Court precedent from Missouri that backs that up. In 1969 the University of Missouri School of Journalism expelled Barbara Susan Papish for distributing a left-wing publication that showed police officers raping the Statue of Liberty and the Goddess of Justice. The Supreme Court ruled that content-based discipline could not be justified and the public universities couldn’t punish students for offensive speech that didn’t cause disruption.
Experts point out, Texas A&M’s policy censors professors from having open and free conversations with students if they hope to keep their jobs.
“Texas A&M assumes as its historic trust the maintenance of freedom of inquiry and an intellectual environment nurturing the human mind and spirit,” the university states in its mission statement. “It welcomes and seeks to serve persons of all racial, ethnic and geographic groups as it addresses the needs of an increasingly diverse population and a global economy.”
Faculty and AAUP-TAMU cited this mission in an open letter to university administration maintaining that the new policy violates this standard. They called the censorship “One of the most consequential moments in its modern history.”
“When a public university adopts policies that limit what can be taught, how it can be taught, or which perspectives may be expressed, it steps into territory the United States Supreme Court has long warned educational institutions to avoid,” the letter adds. “Indeed, for more than half a century — since Keyishian v. Board of Regents (1967) — the Court has recognized that academic freedom is “a special concern of the First Amendment,” and that the university classroom is not merely a workplace, but a space where ideas are tested, challenged, and refined. It is a space where democracy itself is shaped. Perhaps the State of Texas and Texas A&M are on a brazen mission to challenge this precedent for all of America.”
The policy’s requirement to submit syllabi for review and approval prior to teaching course material is a form of prior restraint, one of the most “disfavored instructions,” on free expression, the letter stated.
“When such restraint is directed not at personal opinion, but at core disciplinary content on race, gender, and sexuality — subjects foundational to the social sciences, humanities, public health, law, and countless other fields — the violation becomes even more stark. It reconfigures the university from an institution of learning into an arm of ideological and political enforcement.”
The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas has also been outspoken about the policy.
“Texas A&M’s new policy — requiring government pre-approval for curricula about race, gender, and LGBTQ+ topics — is misguided, discriminatory and an insult to academic freedom,” said Staff Attorney Chloe Kempf. “The freedom to learn, teach, and explore is what makes Texas universities strong and prepares our students for their futures. Texas A&M should immediately rescind its policy and instead allow for the uncensored exploration of all ideas on its campuses.”
The faculty letter warned administrators that the legal ramifications of censoring speech on the basis of viewpoint are not hypothetical and political preferences are no excuse to censor these broad topics.
“A public university cannot tell faculty which scholarly frameworks are acceptable and which are forbidden without crossing the line into unconstitutional governance. Nor can it, as an employer, require its faculty to surrender constitutional protections in order to remain employed,” the letter said. “This is known as imposing an unconstitutional condition, and courts have repeatedly struck it down.”
Robert Shibley, special counsel for campus advocacy with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) said Texas A&M’s policy opens the door to political pressure. Of particular concern is the veto power it provides the university’s president or designees over what can and can’t be taught.
“It provides a one stop shop to politically pressure the university to get rid of classes or subjects or (anything) that you might not like,” Shibley said. “I think that is a very clear invitation to political interference and mischief having to do with university curriculum.”
As soon as a university employee is censored on what they teach on the basis of politics, you’ve got a First Amendment violation, Shibley said. Legal challenges to the policy are inevitable and will possibly be quite frequent while it remains in place.
“Academic Freedom traditionally protects the ability of faculty to teach the material they think is appropriate for the subject (they are) teaching and also, when it comes to research, to follow their academic conscience, which means they’re able to follow the results of their research or experiments the way they think is correct, and not be told that they have to come to conclusions that will satisfy either donors or politicians or anybody else at the university,” he said. “People rely on universities to produce information that is true and that’s accurate, and you can’t do that if it’s being warped by outside forces. And so academic freedom is a way of protecting, ultimately, the source of truth.”
AI and intellectual property
At Texas A&M this one “designee” who will be reviewing course curriculum for its conformity to the policy is actually artificial intelligence, which raises a multiplicity of concerns, not only about bias, free speech and academic integrity, but also professors’ intellectual property.
James R. Hallmark, the system’s vice chancellor for academic affairs told regents during the subcommittee’s meeting that each university “will now be required to feed syllabi and course details into a database, which will then be examined by artificial intelligence for content not aligned with approved syllabi,” according to the Tribune.
“The AI analysis will consider things such as whether the course applies to the core curriculum or is a requirement for a major or elective,” it reported. “It will also take into account the syllabus and details such as where it’s taught and enrollment numbers.”
The AI analysis is troublesome for researchers and instructors looking to protect their intellectual property.
“Our syllabus is our intellectual property, and even Texas A& M states in its policies, it does not own our intellectual property when it comes to our syllabus or anything like that,” Bright said.
Though professors provide open access to their course materials, to some extent at the university, AI reviewing that intellectual property is uncharted territory, Bright said.
“What part of that is going to be lost when we give it to an AI that can essentially take what you have developed and just give it to someone else,” Bright said. “(It’s) another area of potential legal jeopardy for the university.”
Teaching history when history repeats
Walter D. Kamphoefner is a history professor at Texas A&M and although he is “white, male, straight, married, tenured, on the glide path to retirement, and even a church member,” he feels compelled to speak out against the university’s policy. He said it is coming from the top down and is a result of President Donald Trump’s anti-woke agenda.
“How are you going to teach the civil war without talking about race? I mean, the only way you can do it is not to take Confederates by their word,” he said. “It’s a bit Orwellian, really.”
One of the best ways faculty may be able to protect their courses from interference or political scrutiny is by relying on primary sources, he said. But even still, the idea that anything outside of a neutral position could be considered advocacy is disturbing.
“How are you going to teach the Holocaust neutrally? It’s just a bit absurd,” he said.
It’s also unclear how administrators will define “advocacy” in the classroom.
“(It’s) a very new policy, so that is probably too soon to tell and that will be a very crucial issue deciding how much of a chilling effect these new policies are going to have,” Kamphoefner said. “But it may be like what one Supreme Court Justice said about pornography, ‘I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.’ In other words, it’s in the eye of the beholder. And if you have conservative administrators being the beholder, it’s certainly dangerous.”
Kamphoefner said the impact of the policy and the anti-woke agenda is reminiscent of the McCarthy Era.
In all of his years of teaching, Bright said he has never seen a state institution censor professors so explicitly, though he has read about the tactic in Nazi Germany.
“We give students the ability to understand the topics, understand the facts behind those topics, how to distinguish between misinformation, lies or information, to equip them to make their own decisions about these contested areas,” Bright said. “I’ve never seen it where the state institution now is saying, ‘no, they get to answer what these contested ideas should mean, what the truth of the matter is in their political opinions.’ And then force the experts who understand the other perspectives here to be silent on what those perspectives are and then tell us that we are somehow indoctrinating and injuring students by giving people, giving our students the full truth, and not just their truth.”
As part of AAUP-TAMU, Bright is informing faculty of their rights, but at the end of the day the policy may need to be reviewed by the courts.
“Given the political veracity and the brazenness of this, it’s going to be something that we believe the courts are going to have to finally answer,” he said.
Kallie Cox is a St. Louis-based journalist and a graduate of Southern Illinois University Carbondale. They are a contributing writer for the Gateway Journalism Review and a member of the Trans Journalists Association.
