Manufactured Outrage and the Assault on Academic Freedom in Texas, by Dr. Pauline Turner Strong

On September 18, 2025, Dr. Pauline Strong—professor of anthropology at UT-Austin and president of the AAUP chapter—published an urgent guest column titled “Manufactured outrage is killing academic freedom in Texas: Enough with the ‘gotcha’ attacks. Let professors teach. Let students learn.”

Dr. Strong recounts the troubling case of a Texas A&M faculty member who was fired after a student objected to a lesson on gender identity in a children’s literature course. The student wrongly claimed the content was “illegal” under a Trump-era executive order and framed the incident as a “gotcha” moment. Yet, as Strong notes, the professor was teaching directly from the syllabus and within her expertise.

The dismissal, backed by A&M President Mark Welsh and accompanied by the removal of a dean and department head, was made possible by recent Texas laws (SB18 and SB37) that eroded due process and faculty governance. Strong argues that these politically motivated attacks—often targeting those who teach race, gender, and sexuality—are designed to instill fear, weaponize syllabi against faculty, and undermine higher education’s mission.

She warns that if professors can be fired for not pre-listing every topic in a catalog description, countless faculty jobs are at risk, and Texas will face inevitable lawsuits. More importantly, students will lose opportunities to learn how gender and sexuality intersect with literature, history, law, health, education and so on.

Her message is clear: “Enough is enough.” Texas must resist the corrosive politics of manufactured outrage, defend academic freedom, and allow professors to teach and students to learn without fear of intimidation or retaliation.

If you are a faculty member, adjunct, graduate instructor, researcher, or higher education professional, you can stand in solidarity by joining Texas AAUP-Texas AFT. Membership offers:

• Collective protection in the face of politically motivated dismissals.

• Advocacy for academic freedom and shared governance.

• A community committed to defending higher education as a space of inquiry, not intimidation.

Together, we can resist manufactured outrage and affirm the right of professors to teach and students to learn without fear.

-Angela Valenzuela

Manufactured outrage is killing academic freedom in Texas

Enough with the "gotcha" attacks. Let professors teach. Let students learn.

By Pauline Turner Strong, Guest columnistSep 18, 2025

People cAross the campus at Texas A&M University, where a professor was fired last week after a student 

objected to a lesson on gender identity in a course on children’s literature.

The Washington Post/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Sep 18, 2025. Last week, Texas A&M University president Mark Welsh fired a faculty member after a student recorded herself objecting to a lesson on gender identity in a course on children’s literature. The student said the lesson was contrary to her religious beliefs, and she incorrectly claimed that the course content was “illegal” because it violated President Donald Trump’s executive order stating that federal agencies would recognize only two genders, male and female, defined “at conception.” 

The faculty member pointed out that the lesson was not illegal, and told the student “if you are uncomfortable in this class, you do have the right to leave,” which she did. 

The media has largely adopted a framing of this interaction as a “gotcha” moment, in which a student documented a faculty member doing something wrong. In fact, the teacher was following the syllabus and teaching in her area of expertise, just as she was supposed to do. 

Attacking faculty for teaching about gender identity is particularly easy, because gender has become a central lens for humanistic and social scientific fields of study. 

According to Welsh, the professor in question was fired because her lesson on gender identity did not align with the generic, sentence-long catalog description of the course. If faculty who teach about the wide range of gender identities that have existed across time and world cultures can now be fired for not flagging that content in a course catalog, with the long time lag that entails, there is no end to the number of instructors who may lose their jobs — and the number of lawsuits the state will face.

Moments like this — politically-motivated attempts to undermine faculty, especially those who teach courses on race, gender and sexuality — have become all too common in Texas and beyond. 

In accordance with House Bill 2504, passed by the Legislature in 2009, faculty members at public colleges and universities in Texas are required to publish their syllabi online during the first week of classes. Those critical of our teaching regularly point to these publicly available syllabi to attack professors, falsely claiming these materials are “revealing” something that has been hidden. 

The truth is, the syllabus for the Texas A&M class makes clear that gender and sexuality are among the topics considered in the course. 

Political leaders have similarly sought to undermine teaching and research around race, gender and sexuality by taking pictures of faculty members, campus events and scholarly books, in an attempt to “catch” faculty members secretly indoctrinating students. These tactics are designed to stir up a sense of outrage by claiming to “uncover” the daily workings of academic life that are not at all covert. They also seek to instill fear in faculty. 

What was especially disturbing this past week was the fact that Texas’ political leaders jumped aboard a disingenuous attempt to portray a faculty member as trying to get away with something, and they successfully pressured a university president to fire a professor. 

This dramatic action — as well as Welsh’s dismissal of a dean and department head from their administrative positions — was enabled by several laws passed by the Texas Legislature over the past three years. SB18, passed in 2023, weakened faculty members’ rights to due process, while this year's SB37 dramatically undermined their role in institutional decision-making. Together, these measures cleared the path for higher ed administrators to fire faculty members swiftly, on vague grounds, and without due process. 

Faculty who teach controversial subjects, such as gender identity, are now particularly vulnerable to politically-motivated “gotcha” attacks and expedited dismissals, even when they are teaching relevant course material in their area of expertise. This runs counter to Texas A&M’s own policies, which state: “Each faculty member must be free from the corrosive fear that others, inside or outside the university community, because their vision may differ, may threaten the faculty member’s professional career.” 

And Texas students will suffer the most, because they are being deprived of learning how gender and sexuality relate to many fields, including history, law, health sciences, mental health services and — yes — literature. 

Enough is enough. Texas must allow faculty and college students to explore freely the breadth of human knowledge, and administrators must support us in that time-honored quest. 

Pauline Turner Strong is a professor of anthropology and the president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter at the University of Texas at Austin. She is expressing her views as a private citizen.