The “Creighton Memoranda” refer to two directives issued by Texas Tech University System Chancellor Brandon Creighton—one on December 1, 2025, and another on April 9, 2026. The first established a systemwide process requiring professors to disclose course materials involving race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity and to withhold flagged material while it underwent administrative and regental review.
The second went further, ordering the phaseout of academic programs “centered on” sexual orientation or gender identity, restricting such content in core and lower-level undergraduate courses, and requiring alternative materials in many instances. These directives apply across the five-institution Texas Tech system, including its universities and health sciences centers.
The consequences are neither abstract nor confined to a handful of controversial courses.
According to a federal complaint filed against Creighton and the Texas Tech Board of Regents, faculty members have been prevented or discouraged from teaching Plato’s Republic, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, the racial history of Dred Scott v. Sandford, and the persecution of gay and bisexual people during the Holocaust. Professors have reportedly been asked to remove words such as “systemic” and “disparity” from course materials.
Medical educators allege that restrictions have also interfered with teaching students how to understand health disparities and provide competent care to transgender patients and other historically underserved populations.
This is the harm produced when vague political directives replace disciplinary expertise. Faculty members do not know with confidence what they may teach, what language they may use, or whether material approved in one department will be rejected in another.
Because noncompliance can carry the threat of discipline or even termination, the predictable result is over-compliance and self-censorship.
Professors remove more than the policy may technically require simply to protect their employment. Students, in turn, receive an incomplete education—one filtered not by the standards of history, medicine, law, literature, or philosophy, but by the ideological preferences of those presently holding institutional power.
On July 8, 2026, the American Association of University Professors and its Texas affiliate, Texas AAUP-AFT, filed suit in federal court seeking to stop the memoranda’s enforcement.
The lawsuit advances three central constitutional claims:
First, that the policies discriminate against disfavored viewpoints in violation of the First Amendment;
Second, that their confusing and inconsistent language denies faculty due process under the Fourteenth Amendment; and
Third, that their design and implementation intentionally discriminate against Black faculty by disproportionately suppressing scholarship about Black history, racism, racial inequality, and efforts to remedy it. The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare the memoranda unconstitutional and permanently prevent Texas Tech officials from enforcing them or similar restrictions (Priest, 2026).
Texas Tech officials deny the lawsuit’s allegations and maintain that the directives protect academic integrity, comply with the law, and permit the teaching of historical events and incidental references to sexual orientation or gender identity. But those assurances do not resolve the fundamental problem documented in the complaint: faculty members are already changing courses, removing scholarship, and withholding instruction because they cannot reliably determine what those in power will permit (Priest, 2026).
This case therefore reaches far beyond Texas Tech. At stake is whether public universities will remain places where qualified scholars pursue evidence, confront difficult histories, and prepare students for the world as it exists—or whether university teaching will become a compliance exercise in which political officials decide which facts, identities, books, and bodies of knowledge may enter the classroom.
References
American Association of University Professors. (2026, July 8). AAUP, Texas AAUP-AFT sue Texas Tech over restrictive course content policies. https://www.aaup.org/news/aaup-texas-aaup-aft-sue-texas-tech-over-restrictive-course-content-policies
Priest, J. (2026, July 8). Faculty groups sue to block Texas Tech rules limiting instruction on race, gender, sexual orientation. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/08/texas-tech-lawsuit-creighton-race-gender-instruction/
Texas American Association of University Professors–American Federation of Teachers v. Creighton, No. 3:26-cv-01845 (W.D. Tex. July 8, 2026) (complaint).
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