Policing Knowledge, Misrepresenting Scholarship: A Response to Brandon Creighton’s Latest Intervention in Texas Higher Education
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
March 16, 2026
Something troubling is happening in Texas higher education—not simply at the level of legislation, but at the level of logic.
According to a recent report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, policies— formerly advanced by former legislator Brandon Creighton who is now the President of Texas Tech University are getting operationalized systemwide.
Specifically, they seek to prohibit faculty from teaching that a person can be “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive,” that individuals should feel guilt for the actions of others because of their race or sex, or from acknowledging that gender identity might exist beyond a rigid binary.
Let us pause here.
Not because the issue is complicated—but because the framing is so profoundly misleading.
The premise underlying these policies is that universities are indoctrinating students into believing that individuals are inherently racist or oppressive and that professors are somehow in the business of assigning moral guilt based on race or sex.
This is a caricature. And it's offensive.
In logic, this is termed a "straw man" that resides at the center of the policy.
It bears little, if any, resemblance to what scholars in sociology, history, Ethnic Studies, gender studies, education, political science, or law actually teach. Across these fields, faculty engage students in rigorous inquiry into systems, institutions, structures of power, and historical processes—not as ideological exercises, but as empirically grounded and theoretically informed modes of analysis.
This begs the question: what, exactly, are policymakers reacting to—actual classroom practice, or a politically constructed narrative that bears little relation to the intellectual work taking place in universities?
These frameworks, developed over decades of interdisciplinary scholarship, equip students to examine how policies are made, how categories like race and gender are socially constructed and operationalized, how law and governance distribute resources and rights, how knowledge itself is produced and legitimized, and how inequality is reproduced, resisted, and transformed over time.
Students learn to interpret evidence, evaluate competing claims, and situate contemporary issues within longer historical arcs. In other words, the aim is not to assign blame or fix identities, but to cultivate intellectual curiousity, develop analytical capacity, promote epistemic humility, and foster a deeper understanding of the complex social worlds they inhabit.
What we teach is that systems can generate inequality even when individuals do not consciously intend it. That insight—central to modern social science—is not a moral accusation. It is an analytical observation.
Indeed, suggesting that universities teach students that they are inherently racist or oppressive misunderstands both the scholarship and the pedagogy.
Unlike scholars of earlier eras—who often took for granted the inheritability of IQ and other deeply flawed, biologically determinist assumptions—contemporary scholarship overwhelmingly rejects essentialist claims about race or moral character. The study of racism and sexism today proceeds from a robust interdisciplinary consensus that these are historically produced, socially organized, and institutionally mediated phenomena—not fixed traits lodged within individuals.
Indeed, the purpose of this work is to denaturalize inequality: to show how ideas once presented as “common sense” or “scientific truth” were constructed, contested, and sustained over time. That such outdated ways of knowing continue to circulate in public discourse only underscores the importance of this scholarship, not its excess.
Ironically, the policy bans the teaching of an idea that universities themselves overwhelmingly reject.
The Texas Tech memo to faculty reportedly encourages them to consult a flow chart to determine whether course content is “relevant” and “necessary.”
This is surreal.
In a research university—whose mission is the open pursuit of knowledge—faculty are now being invited to filter intellectual inquiry through an administrative decision tree designed to anticipate political scrutiny.
This is not how universities function.
Universities exist precisely because knowledge is complex, contested, evolving, and often uncomfortable. The study of race, gender, colonialism, power, and inequality has always generated debate. But debate is not a reason to suppress inquiry. It is the reason universities exist.
Reducing scholarship to bureaucratic compliance mechanisms does not protect students. It narrows the range of questions they are allowed to ask.
The broader political narrative surrounding these policies suggests that universities are “turning people gay” or confusing students about gender.
This claim is not only inaccurate—it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the research on human development and identity.
Universities do not manufacture sexual orientation or gender identity. Scholars study them. Students learn about them. Social science, psychology, history, anthropology, and public health research have long examined the complexity of human identity, culture, and embodiment.
Teaching about something is not the same as producing it.
If that logic were sound, teaching about capitalism would make students capitalists, teaching about war would turn them into soldiers, and teaching about religion would convert them into believers. At most, education shapes how students understand the world—it does not deterministically produce who they are.
Human development is far more complex, shaped by family, community, peer networks, media environments, and, in the case of sexuality, a growing body of research indicating that orientation is not something one is taught into being. To suggest otherwise is to confuse exposure with causation, and learning with indoctrination.
The argument collapses under the weight of its own absurdity and, in doing so, exposes the deeper agenda at work: not the protection of students, but the regulation of thought itself and with it—a coordinated legislative effort to restructure higher education governance, limit diversity and equity programs, and increased political oversight of curriculum and institutional decision-making.
The pattern is clear.
Programs that study race, gender, colonialism, inequality, or social justice are framed as ideological threats. Meanwhile, the policies themselves are explicitly ideological interventions into what faculty are allowed to teach and research.
The irony would be amusing if the consequences were not so serious.
So here is the question that Senator Creighton and others advancing these policies should answer plainly:
What exactly do you believe universities are teaching?
Because the picture presented in these policy justifications—a professor standing at the front of a classroom declaring that students are inherently racist or oppressive—is a fabrication. There may be outliers, for sure, but these are far and few between.
What actually happens in classrooms is something far more ordinary and far more valuable: students encounter history, data, frameworks, arguments, and evidence. They wrestle with competing interpretations. They learn to analyze institutions and power. In short, they develop the intellectual tools necessary for democratic citizenship.
One more thing. Senator Creighton has suggested that universities should focus primarily on careers and salaries rather than “contested ideas.”
But higher education has never been only about job training.
Universities prepare engineers and nurses, yes. But they also educate historians, journalists, teachers, lawyers, communications specialists, and public servants. They cultivate critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and democratic literacy.
A society that insists universities avoid contested ideas is not strengthening higher education.
It is hollowing it out.
The stakes here are not abstract debates about curriculum.
They concern whether public universities in Texas will remain places where scholars can pursue knowledge without political interference—and where students can engage complex social questions without state officials deciding in advance which conclusions are permissible.
If we care about intellectual integrity, democratic inquiry, and the future of higher education in Texas, we should be able to say clearly:
Misrepresenting scholarship is not a foundation for sound policy.
And governing universities through ideological caricatures will not strengthen them.
It will only diminish them.
By Jasper Smith, December 16, 2025
The university system encouraged faculty to consult a flow chart to help determine if their course content is both “relevant” and “necessary” to classroom instruction. Many faculty members have criticized the policy and its guidelines as vague and a violation of academic freedom.
Continue reading here.
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