More professors want to leave Texas this year, citing political climate, censorship, survey says, by Milla Surjadi, Dallas Morning News 9.15.26

Friends:

The piece suggests that what we are witnessing in Texas higher education is no longer simply faculty dissatisfaction with a single law or university administration, but the emergence of a broader climate of uncertainty about whether professors can continue to do their work with professional independence.

SB 37 gives governing boards substantially greater authority over curriculum and institutional governance, while recent system-level policies have intensified scrutiny of particular areas of teaching and scholarship. At the same time, faculty are increasingly reluctant to recommend Texas as a place to build an academic career. 

My own students have expressed discouragement about the current state of affairs, and I understand why. Without a doubt, this is a difficult moment to be a student or a faculty member, and we should not sugarcoat what is happening. 

I hope the broader public is paying close attention and remains civically engaged, because the consequences will extend well beyond university campuses. When talented faculty conclude that they can teach, research, and build their careers more freely elsewhere, Texas universities risk losing not only individual scholars but also the intellectual vitality, mentorship, research capacity, and institutional reputation that take decades to build—and are not easily recovered.

-Angela Valenzuela

More professors want to leave Texas this year, citing political climate, censorship, survey says

A larger percentage of Texas respondents said they plan to look for a job in another state this year compared to last year, according to a survey by the American Association of University Professors.

By Milla Surjadi,Staff Writer

Sep 14, 2026

The University of North Texas campus in Denton. 

The Dallas Morning News Staff
A greater percentage of Texas professors want to leave the state this year than last year, citing its political climate and concerns about censorship, according to a recent survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors.

Of more than 1,000 Texas respondents, about a third said they had applied for a job in another state in the last two years, and about 35% said they planned to do so in the next hiring cycle. That’s an increase from last year, where about a quarter of respondents answered that they had applied for a job or were planning to do so.

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A majority of the Texas professors, around 70%, also said they would not encourage graduate students or faculty colleagues to seek a job in the state. That percentage is up from 60% of respondents last year.

The annual survey from the professors union polled nearly 3,000 faculty members in public and private institutions in the South. Fewer professors responded to the survey this year. There were 2,763 total respondents this year, down from 3,926 last year. In Texas, there were 1,023 respondents, down from 1,126 last year.

Related: Republicans are remaking Texas' public universities. Some professors are leaving
Professors cited their state's broad political climate as the top reason they wanted to leave for another job. Many Texas professors who said they had applied for an out-of-state job cited the political climate, concerns about academic freedom, shared governance and DEI issues. Many also expressed frustration with recent restrictions at their institutions around how race and gender can be taught.

The survey provides a rare glimpse into how many professors are eyeing exits as Texas’ universities undergo a Republican-led overhaul to root out perceived liberal bias on campus and in classrooms. Public data on how many Texas professors have left the state or profession is sparse.

In the past year, a new state law has given governor-appointed regents more oversight over public universities, including course offerings. Several university systems are cutting classes and academic programs related to race and gender as Republican lawmakers target those fields.

Related: Republican lawmakers praise new college oversight law. Critics say it’s led to censorship

Many Texas professors have raised concerns university leaders have gone further than the law prescribes in restricting what can be taught. A third of Texas respondents said they had syllabuses or curriculum choices questioned or changed by administrators in the last year.

“I would suspect that the many events in higher education that have happened in Texas in the last year made those numbers go up in significant ways,” said Matthew Boedy, president of the Georgia AAUP chapter who oversees the survey. “Texas is at the center of a lot of attacks.”

He added that the survey also reflects professors who may want to leave their state, but cannot due to personal circumstances or academic discipline.

Some professors and Democrats have warned recent reforms could lead to a brain drain — an exodus of Texas’ most intellectually capable professors and years of tumultuous recruitment and retention. Supporters of higher education reform have pushed back on such predictions, arguing that addressing ideological biases and aligning universities with workforce needs will attract more professors, students and jobs to Texas.

Texas Tech University System Chancellor Brandon Creighton, a former senator and the architect of recent conservative laws reshaping higher education, told The Dallas Morning News in February the system was seeing record-high faculty interest.

The AAUP survey, which was open through August, polled professors from 13 states: Texas, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Arkansas. The survey has been conducted by the Georgia AAUP chapter since 2022, and added Oklahoma for the first time this year.

The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.

The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, Judy and Jim Gibbs, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Ron Steinhart, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks, and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab's journalism.

Milla Surjadi
HIGHER EDUCATION REPORTER

How to Occupy a University, by Deena Varner, The Higher Ed Advocate, Aug. 5, 2026

Friends:

Deena Varner’s powerful essay, “How to Occupy a University,” makes an argument that deserves far more attention: the political remaking of higher education does not always arrive through dramatic legislation, mass firings, or the outright closure of universities. Sometimes it happens quietly, through the ordinary machinery of administration.

That is precisely what makes the developments at Texas Tech so troubling.

Varner shows how Chancellor Brandon Creighton’s memoranda move authority away from faculty expertise and shared governance and place it increasingly in systems of review, compliance, certification, and political oversight. The university remains open. Classes continue. Degrees are awarded. Committees still meet. But the location of authority changes—and with it, the meaning of the institution itself.

Another useful concept for understanding this process is institutional capture, a term increasingly invoked by critics to describe what happens when institutions that are supposed to exercise some degree of independent judgment are brought under the control of political actors or ideological movements. Capture does not necessarily require eliminating an institution. More often, it involves taking control of its leadership, procedures, priorities, and decision-making structures so that the institution begins serving purposes different from those for which it was established.

This is where the connection to Project 2025 becomes especially important. Project 2025 is not simply a collection of conservative policy proposals. As Varner emphasizes, it is also concerned with how political change can be made durable through personnel, supervision, organizational design, and the relocation of institutional authority. What we are witnessing in Texas higher education may be a version of that same strategy.

The goal is not necessarily to destroy the university. It is to capture it—to make the university administer its own political transformation.

That distinction matters. A university can retain its buildings, departments, students, and public identity while steadily losing the professional autonomy, faculty authority, academic freedom, and independence of judgment that make it a university in the democratic sense.

Varner gives us another powerful word for what follows from institutional capture: occupation. The two concepts work together. Institutional capture identifies the transfer of power; occupation describes the condition that results when the institution continues to function outwardly while its internal authority has been redirected toward the priorities of those who captured it.

This is also why administrative procedures deserve far more public scrutiny. The gravest threats to higher education will not always announce themselves as attacks on higher education. They may arrive as memoranda, compliance procedures, curricular reviews, reporting requirements, personnel decisions, reorganizations, and seemingly routine administrative directives. As Varner puts it, the danger is that the university’s own mechanisms can become vehicles for its political transformation.

We therefore need to pay attention not only to what universities are prohibited from doing, but also to who is acquiring the power to decide what universities may teach, study, say, and become.

That is the deeper struggle now underway in American higher education. It is not merely a fight over particular courses, programs, or words. It is a struggle over who will govern the university—and whether our public universities will remain institutions capable of independent inquiry or become instruments of political power.

Please attend tomorrow's August 12th People's Hearing at the Texas Legislature If you are desirous of speaking your truth. 

-Angela Valenzuela

How to Occupy a University
Project 2025, Texas Tech, and the Administrative Remaking of Higher Education

The Higher Ed Advocate
Aug 05, 2026

by Deena Varner

Project 2025 is often described as a plan to dismantle the administrative state. Its public reputation rests on its policy proposals, but the document itself spends an astonishing amount of time elsewhere—on administration. It explains how agencies should be organized, how political appointees should be selected and managed, how civil servants should be evaluated and eliminated if they are not ideologically aligned, how authority should move through organizations, how priorities should survive changes in personnel. Again and again, it returns to the same practical problem: how does an institution continue to implement its ideological agenda in perpetuity?

That question does not end in Washington. It appears, in a different form, in the documents now reshaping public higher education in Texas.

Public debate about higher education in Texas has focused largely on legislation—restrictions on DEI, classroom speech, curricula, and faculty governance. But laws do not reorganize universities by themselves. They establish authority in the abstract. The work of transforming an institution begins afterward, in implementation documents that rarely attract public attention because they present themselves as ordinary administration.

Brandon Creighton’s memoranda are two of those documents.

Implementation

Last year, Creighton was a Texas state senator. He authored or co-sponsored much of the state’s recent legislation aimed at making the state more hostile to minoritized students, women, and LGBTQIA+ people, and dismantling public universities as we know them. In November 2025, he was appointed the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, which serves more than 65,000 students.

One of his first acts was to implement a course content review process in which all faculty were required to disclose whether their courses mentioned gender or sexuality. If a course did mention such topics, faculty were instructed to remove any such materials unless and until they were approved by the Board of Regents—a group of political appointees whose role historically has been fiduciary. On April 9, 2026, this system of prior restraint was replaced with a permanent and near total ban on classroom instruction of topics related to gender identity and sexual orientation.

While this level of censorship is unprecedented in American history, the significance of the Creighton memoranda lies also in the university it imagines. They shift judgment away from faculty and toward administrative oversight. They treat disciplinary expertise as something to be monitored rather than trusted. Questions that once belonged primarily to departments and faculty governance are now questions of compliance, review, certification, and institutional accountability.

Creighton’s memos reorganize how the university governs itself.

Occupation

The mechanisms the memoranda use are familiar: Universities already have administrators. They already produce guidance documents. They already certify compliance with state and federal law. The Creighton memos pervert these mechanisms such that they become vehicles for a political project that Creighton himself could not accomplish in the Texas senate.

The version of Texas Senate Bill 37 that Creighton authored proposed a sweeping reorganization of higher education in the state, including far-reaching restrictions on curricula and faculty authority. Even within the extraordinarily conservative Texas legislature, several of its most expansive provisions proved impossible to enact. The questions they raised, however, did not disappear. They reappeared in a different form—not as legislation, but as administration.

While this level of censorship is unprecedented in American history, the significance of the Creighton memoranda lies also in the university it imagines. They shift judgment away from faculty and toward administrative oversight. They treat disciplinary expertise as something to be monitored rather than trusted.

Under Creighton’s regime, the ordinary machinery of the university has acquired a new purpose: ideological capture. The point is no longer simply to administer the university but to align its ordinary operations with his preferred political vision.

From the outside, little appears to have changed: students attend classes, degrees are awarded, departments meet, and committees deliberate. The transformation appears in the relocation of authority, in the definition of what a university is, whom it serves, and what its members are allowed to say and learn.

This is the institutional imagination of Project 2025. Law and policy matter, but so do the mechanisms through which they become routine. Durable political victories require institutions that reliably reproduce a governing vision, and this is accomplished through personnel, supervision, and organizational design.

Creighton has applied these lessons to one university system, and he has plans to apply them to the national system of public higher education.

The genius—and the danger—of this approach is that it does not require dramatic confrontation. No loyalty oath announces the arrival of a new political order, as it did during the McCarthy era. No public purge signals that the university has entered a different era, as it did during the Stalin era. The transformation proceeds through memoranda, implementation guidance, reporting requirements, compliance reviews, curricular certifications, and administrative procedures. In the Creighton era, each document appears technical. Together they redefine the institution.

Creighton’s defining innovation is that the institution becomes the instrument of its own destruction.

For generations, political movements have sought to discipline universities from the outside—through funding cuts, legislation, purges, or public pressure. Those tools remain. But something equally ambitious is emerging alongside them: the effort to redirect the university’s own administrative machinery toward political ends. The institution is asked to preserve its legitimacy while gradually relinquishing the traditions of professional judgment that gave that legitimacy its democratic value.

Project 2025 imagines remaking the federal bureaucracy by reorganizing its internal structures. The documents now emerging from Texas suggest a parallel ambition for higher education. They point toward a university that looks increasingly familiar from the outside while operating according to a different sovereign logic.

That is not destruction. It is occupation.

The National Stage

Public universities occupy an unusual constitutional position. They are created, funded, and governed in part by the state, yet they have never been understood as ordinary state agencies. Legislatures appropriate funds and governors appoint regents, but the work of producing and evaluating knowledge has historically rested elsewhere—in disciplinary communities, faculty governance, and professional judgment. However imperfectly realized, that division of labor and authority has long defined the relationship between public universities and democratic government.

The Eleventh Circuit’s recent decision striking down key provisions of Florida’s Stop WOKE Act reaffirmed that arrangement. In protecting faculty speech against state-imposed orthodoxy, the court did more than vindicate individual expression. It preserved the institutional conditions under which universities can exercise independent judgment. In protecting speech, First Amendment doctrine has also helped preserve the institutional arrangements through which universities exercise independent judgment.

That is not destruction. It is occupation.

That constitutional tradition leaves a practical problem for political movements seeking to reorganize higher education. If professional judgment cannot simply be displaced by legislative command, then the institution itself becomes the site of ideological struggle. The question is no longer only what the law permits the state to do. It is how the university’s own procedures can be redirected toward different ends.

Creighton’s memoranda belong to this second category. They are implementation documents, and implementation is where abstract political authority becomes institutional practice. Every review process, every certification requirement, every layer of administrative oversight answers the same question: where does judgment reside? Every implementation document answers a constitutional question disguised as an administrative one.

Universities are not unique in this respect. The press occupies a similar constitutional position. Neither governs in the ordinary sense, yet both perform a public function by producing knowledge, testing political claims, and establishing standards of credibility that governments do not control. Their legitimacy depends upon their ability to reach judgments that are not merely extensions of partisan political power.

Authoritarian movements have long sought to subordinate institutions whose authority they do not fully control, and whose commitment to free thought and expression is an obstacle to their success. The occupation of Texas Tech illustrates one way that project can proceed: not by dismantling the university from without but by redirecting the ordinary procedures by which it operates.

Creighton’s memoranda are remarkable not only for their prohibition of ideas, speech, and expression but for the administrative architecture they construct. The institution continues to teach, deliberate, certify, and govern. But these activities no longer exist primarily to create and cultivate knowledge. Instead, the work of the university is concentrated on demonstrating fidelity to the political priorities of its occupying force.

The university remains. Its sovereign logic does not.

Project 2025 imagines reorganizing the federal bureaucracy so that its ordinary operations reliably reproduce a governing vision. The political project emerging from Texas demonstrates how that same organizational logic can be extended to institutions that constitutional traditions have historically insulated from direct political control.


Deena Varner is an assistant professor of practice in the English department at Texas Tech University. She is the author of From the Courtroom to the Boardroom: Privatizing Justice in the Neoliberal United States, which examines how legal and civic rights are eroded through administrative procedures. She is writing in her capacity as a private individual and not on behalf of her employer.

Academic Freedom in Texas Higher Education is also a Latino Struggle, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. July 9, 2026

Academic Freedom in Texas Higher Education is also a Latino Struggle

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. 

July 9, 2026

I am grateful to see attention given to this important lawsuit challenging censorship in the Texas Tech University System. I also want to thank Lily Kepner for her tireless coverage of Texas education politics. My concern here is not with the messenger—far from it. We need more journalists willing to cover these consequential struggles with care and persistence. May her kind multiply.

My concern is that the issues named here—academic freedom, faculty governance, classroom censorship, LGBTQ+ rights, and the teaching of race, gender, and inequality—are urgent and consequential not only for Texas Tech, but for all of higher education in Texas.

That said, I want to gently but critically note an omission that matters. Latino communities, scholars, students, and organizations have been deeply and tirelessly involved in these very struggles across Texas—shoulder-to-shoulder with Black communities, LGBTQ+ communities, faculty organizations, civil rights groups, students, and other allies. These fights are not new to us. They are the same fights over curriculum, representation, Ethnic Studies, DEI, academic freedom, and the right of students to receive a truthful and complete education.

Indeed, many of us have researched, documented, testified, organized, and published on these issues for years, including the harms produced by SB 17, attacks on DEI, the chilling of race- and gender-conscious scholarship, and the broader dismantling of democratic governance in Texas higher education. Latina/o students and faculty are not peripheral to this story. 

We are central to so much of it.

That is why it is disappointing to see the article frame the issue almost exclusively through Black communities and Black professors, without also naming the Latino communities and scholars who are likewise targeted by these policies and who have been in the struggle from the beginning. In Texas, this omission is especially consequential. 

Latina/o students make up a major share of the state’s public higher education population. Many of the programs, courses, histories, and pedagogies now under threat—Mexican American Studies, Latina/o Studies, Ethnic Studies, bilingual education, immigration studies, borderlands history, and critical policy research—speak directly to our communities’ lives and futures.

This is not a call to diminish the anti-Blackness at work in these attacks. Quite the opposite. Anti-Black racism must be named clearly and confronted directly. But in Texas, anti-Blackness, anti-Latino racism, anti-immigrant politics, anti-LGBTQ+ attacks, and hostility toward gender justice are intertwined in the same authoritarian project. The struggle for academic freedom is strongest when we name all of the communities whose knowledge, histories, and presence are being targeted.

So yes, this lawsuit matters. It deserves support. The chilling of faculty speech and the restriction of what students can learn should alarm everyone who cares about democracy.

But the public narrative should also reflect the full coalition of communities that has been fighting this fight. Latino communities are not bystanders. As reflected in this very blog, we are part of the intellectual, legal, pedagogical, and political resistance to censorship in Texas higher education—and have been for a long time.

And this is not about recognition for recognition’s sake. It is about accuracy, accountability, and coalition. When the state targets race, gender, sexuality, immigration, Ethnic Studies, and DEI, it is not targeting one community at a time. It is targeting the very conditions that allow for a multiethnic/multiracial democracy to exist in public higher education.

Professors' union sues Texas Tech System over LGBTQ, race teaching restrictions

By Lily Kepner,Staff WriterUpdated July 8, 2026 1:05 p.m.

Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, authored Senate Bill 26, which would invest more than $4 million in teacher pay increases.

Jay Janner/American-Statesman

A national professors' union and its Texas chapter are suing the Texas Tech University System’s chancellor and regents for restricting professors' ability to teach about LGBTQ identity, gender and race, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court.

Brandon Creighton, chancellor of the Texas Tech University System and a former Republican state senator, announced last academic year that the five universities he oversees could not teach courses that advocate for race or gender “prejudice” or mention that more than two genders exist.

In April, he canceled all academic programs “centered on” sexual orientation and said professors “generally” cannot teach courses that include LGBTQ themes.

Wednesday’s lawsuit, filed by the American Association of University Professors and its Texas chapter, alleges that the decisions violate the First and 14th amendments and censor course discussion.

“This case presents an extraordinary system of censorship in higher education, in which professors in the Texas Tech University System are prohibited from teaching the most basic scholarship, while at the same time not fully comprehending the contours of prohibitions that place them under threat of losing their employment and livelihood,” lawyers for the professors' union wrote in the filing. “To make matters worse, professors cannot reasonably make sense of what is and is not prohibited, further chilling their classroom speech.”

Creighton said in a statement that the university system is confident its policies are “lawful and compliant.”

“Our commitment to academic integrity and the First Amendment rights of our students and faculty will not be distracted by lawsuits as we continue our mission to deliver rigorous academic programs, relevant coursework, and groundbreaking research,” Creighton said.

What do the policies restrict?

Creighton, who championed legislation restricting faculty input and diversity, equity and inclusion practices at universities during his time in the Texas Legislature, has said the restrictions ensure the Texas Tech University System provides “rigorous” and valuable degrees.


There is no law restricting what can be taught in Texas higher education. In 2023, Creighton authored Senate Bill 16, which would have restricted teaching that compels students to adopt beliefs that one race or sex is superior. The bill did not pass.

A higher education reform bill he authored, Senate Bill 37, succeeded in giving regents more power over curriculum and defanging faculty governance in 2025, but it did not include specific restrictions on race and gender. Initial drafts included those limitations.


Regardless, university systems have increasingly adopted policies to restrict what professors can teach after a Texas A&M University professor was fired at Gov. Greg Abbott’s urging for teaching about gender identity.

The viral fallout ultimately resulted in the president of Texas A&M stepping down, and the A&M System restricting courses that “advocate” for gender identity or race. Before Creighton was appointed, the Texas Tech University System banned teaching that there were more than two genders, and the University of Texas System also announced an audit of courses concerning gender identity.

The professors' union lawsuit specifically targets two decisions from Creighton that go further. In one of his first acts as chancellor, Creighton banned advocacy or promotion of race or sex-based “prejudice.”

In April, when he announced the cancellation of programs that teach sexual orientation, or gender identity, Creighton instituted a “strict prohibition on (sexual orientation or gender identity) content in all core and lower-level undergraduate courses,” and on “instruction that advocates for concepts of inherent racial or sexual superiority, inherent bias, or collective guilt.” That order did not apply to teaching about historical events tied to LGBTQ and civil rights.

The legal filing states Creighton’s orders are too vague, “chilling” any speech that has to do with LGBTQ identity, gender or race. The Texas Tech System provided guidance on its restrictions, but the suit maintains that the orders suppressed professors' academic freedom.

TJ Geiger, the vice president of the Texas Tech University AAUP chapter, said that the policies have led to confusion across campus, leading to self-censorship and “inconsistent” directives to professors on what they can teach. The limits ultimately hurt students, who “are not getting a full, accurate, and complete education” if professors are censoring their teaching, he said.

“It’s just been a really tumultuous time leading to what I’ve characterized as intellectual and professional triage,” Geiger said. “Our otherwise good work and effort that would have gone into teaching and research has been directed toward trying to figure out where the lines are in terms of what we’re supposed to say or not say.”

What is the lawsuit seeking?

The 84-page court filing asks a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to prevent Creighton’s directives from being enforced.


Antonio Ingram, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, a legal organization focused on racial justice that is representing the professors' union, said the restrictions have prevented professors at Texas Tech University’s medical school from teaching about health disparities based on race, and left law professors unsure about how to teach about legal victories for racial equality.

A spokesperson for Creighton did not immediately respond to the claims.

“These are targeting Black communities, Black professors,” Ingram said. “We want the federal court in El Paso to declare the memorandums unconstitutional based on First Amendment violations, based on vagueness, and based on its racial discrimination.”

This is a breaking story that will be updated.


July 8, 2026|Updated July 8, 2026 1:05 p.m.

Lily Kepner

HIGHER EDUCATION REPORTER

Lily Kepner started at the American-Statesman in October 2023. She has appeared on BBC, NPR and Texas Standard to talk about her coverage, which has spanned the impact of state laws and politics on the University of Texas, pro-Palestinian protests, free speech, the anti-DEI ban, LGBTQ student belonging and more. Kepner graduated with honors from Boston University's College of Communication in 2023, where she received the college's highest awards for writing and journalism leadership and led the award-winning student newspaper as Editor-in-Chief. In her time with the American-Statesman, she contributed to reporting that won an Edward R Murrow Award for breaking news, won the School Bell Award for Outstanding Feature from Texas State Teachers Association, and Critics Choice for Best of Austin in the Austin Chronicle. Previously, she has been published in USA Today, The Boston Globe, The National Catholic Reporter and GBH. Kepner is passionate about accountability and service journalism and encourages anyone to reach out to her to tell their story or share a tip.

PRESS RELEASE: Students to Stage Funeral for Academic Freedom at Texas Tech Regents Meeting

 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 4, 2026

Contact: Cameron Samuels

press@studentsengaged.org

Students to Stage Funeral for Academic Freedom

at Texas Tech Regents Meeting

LUBBOCK, TX — On Thursday, May 7 at the Board of Regents meeting, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas

(SEAT) and Raiders Against Censorship will stage a funeral at the Texas Tech University System Board of Regents meeting, marking what organizers describe as the "death by a thousand cuts" to academic freedom and higher education in Texas.

Academic freedom, long considered a cornerstone of higher education, has succumbed after what can only be described as a slow and deliberate erosion. Its decline was not sudden. There was no single moment of collapse, no dramatic final breath. Instead, it endured a death by increments — policy by policy, decision by decision — until the thing itself became unrecognizable.

"In lieu of flowers, we ask participants to bring objects representing the blessed memory of academic freedom," said James Snoddy (he/him), a SEAT member and founder of Raiders Against Censorship. "This is not symbolic exaggeration; this is a serious response to a year of decisions that threaten the integrity of our universities."

Many have pointed to leadership decisions by Chancellor Brandon Creighton as part of this decline, describing a shift toward constraint rather than curiosity. Policies affecting marginalized groups — particularly transgender students — became flashpoints, interpreted by many as signals about who belonged and who did not.

The event will feature a memorial wake, press remarks, and a staged procession across campus. Visual elements will include funeral attire and a horse-drawn carriage carrying an urn and books, photographs, and other markers of academic life.

WHEN:

• Thursday, May 7, 2026

• 8 AM - Memorial Wake

• 9 AM - Testimony at the Regents Meeting

• 11 AM - Eulogy Press Conference

• 11:30 AM - Funeral Procession

• 1 PM - "The clock strikes thirteen"

WHERE:

• System Administration Building, 1508 Knoxville Avenue, Lubbock, Texas.

WHO:

• James Snoddy (he/him), Texas Tech freshman and Raiders Against Censorship

• Tara Findley (she/her), Texas Tech junior and Democrats for Texas

• Andrew Martin (he/him), professor of art and president of AAUP-Texas Tech

• T J Geiger, AAUP-Texas Tech

• Matthew Pehl, AAUP-Texas Tech

• Sumya Paruchuri (they/them), SEAT

• Cameron Samuels (they/them), SEAT

• And more

The university and its spirit of academic freedom is survived by those who still insist on asking difficult questions — and by those who believe universities should remain places where such questions are not only allowed, but exalted. May she rest in peace.

###

About Students Engaged in Advancing Texas

SEAT is a movement of young people developing transferable skills and demonstrating youth visibility in policymaking. Advocating for a seat at the table, SEAT is normalizing the presence of students in educational policymaking – nothing about us, without us.

Policing Knowledge, Misrepresenting Scholarship: A Response to Brandon Creighton’s Latest Intervention in Texas Higher Education, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

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.

The Man Behind Texas Tech's Controversial

Brandon Creighton believes colleges should focus on careers and salaries—not contested ideas about race, gender and sexuality.

By Jasper Smith, December 16, 2025

In a sweeping memo sent earlier this month, the Texas Tech University system sharply limited how faculty members can teach about race and sex. The policy bans faculty from teaching that a person can be inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive; a person should “bear responsibility or guilt for actions of others of the same race or sex”; or that there are more than two sexes when discussing gender identity.

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.

UT’s Gender and Ethnic Studies Shake-Up: Name the Pressures. Name the Politicians. Name the Agenda. by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

UT’s Gender and Ethnic Studies Shake-Up: Name the Pressures. Name the Politicians. Name the Agenda.

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Feb. 22, 2026

Austin American-Statesman reporter Lily Kepner’s article on the University of Texas’s decision to consolidate its ethnic and gender studies departments repeatedly invokes “pressure,” “politically unpopular programs,” and unnamed “conservative politicians.” Yet it never identifies who is applying this pressure, what specific actions they have taken, or how these programs have been deemed unpopular. That omission is not incidental—it is the central issue.

The story claims UT’s decision follows “months of pressure from conservative politicians to eliminate ‘liberal’ education and ‘gender ideology.’” Which politicians? What letters, hearings, budget threats, regent directives, or formal communications substantiate this assertion? If such evidence exists, it should be documented. This is not a reference to Senate Bill 37 or its author, former Senator Brandon Creighton, now president of Texas Tech University. He is one actor. The question concerns the broader agenda the article implies but does not name.

The characterization of these departments as “politically unpopular programs” is equally unsupported. By what measure? The article reports 307 undergraduate majors across the affected departments, notes national rankings placing UT at the top in Latin American History, and references decades of student demand dating to the 1970s. Faculty describe strong interdisciplinary enrollment from engineering, pre-med, and other colleges. These are indicators of institutional vitality, not marginality.

Meanwhile, departments unrelated to race, ethnicity, or gender remain structurally intact. If this were a neutral effort to address administrative “fragmentation,” consolidation would be evenly distributed. It is not. The selective restructuring of African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies, and Women and Gender Studies warrants scrutiny the article gestures toward but does not pursue.

The piece references Governor Greg Abbott’s intervention at Texas A&M, system-level restrictions on race or "gender ideology,” course audits on gender identity, and SB 37’s restructuring of faculty governance. Yet it stops short of connecting these developments to UT’s decision in a sustained way. The result is a narrative of diffuse cultural tension rather than a clear account of political and structural mechanisms.

Those mechanisms are concrete: SB 17’s dismantling of DEI infrastructure, SB 37’s weakening of faculty governance, and sustained public criticism of race and gender scholarship by state leadership. And now there is an additional layer. 

Last week, the UT System Board of Regents adopted new guidance regarding the teaching of so-called “controversial topics,” directing institutions to ensure such material is “germane” to course objectives and framed in ways that avoid perceived ideological advocacy. While presented as a reaffirmation of academic neutrality, the policy introduces new ambiguity: Who determines what is “germane”? How is ideological advocacy defined? And what mechanisms will be used to monitor compliance?

For faculty in fields already publicly targeted, this creates policy-induced precarity. When governance structures have been weakened, DEI offices dismantled, and course content subjected to heightened scrutiny, consolidation cannot be viewed in isolation. The cumulative effect is an environment in which academic decisions are made under the shadow of legislative intervention and board-level oversight.

University administrators invoke “balance,” “efficiency,” and “fractured fields”—whatever the heck this means. If anything, the administration is actively doing the fracturing in which case this must reflect a level of psychological projection at work. Go figure.

If consolidation is driven by enrollment metrics or financial concerns, comparable data across all departments should be released. Transparency would clarify whether this is pedagogical recalibration or politically shaped reorganization.

Instead, “pressure” functions as an unnamed force—shaping outcomes without accountability. Universities evolve. Units merge. Priorities shift. But when programs centered on race, ethnicity, and gender are restructured amid weakened faculty governance, legislative hostility, and new board directives on “controversial topics,” skepticism is not ideological; it is an analytical inference from the institutional and political conditions surrounding these decisions.

The public deserves clarity. If elected officials, regents, or donors are influencing curricular structures, that influence should be reported. If this is an internal decision grounded in measurable criteria, the data should be made public.

When actors remain unnamed and evidence unstated, “pressure” becomes a placeholder for power no one is required to own. In moments like this, clarity is not optional. It is the responsibility of both institutions—and those who report on them.

After anti-liberal pressure, University of Texas to consolidate gender and ethnic studies

Affected departments include those that focus on African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American Studies, Women and Gender Studies and American Studies.

By Lily Kepner, Staff WriterFeb 12, 2026 | Austin American-Statesman

A demonstrator holds up a sign at the base of the UT Tower during a protest at the University of
Texas at Austin on Monday, October. 13, 2025. About 150 people gathered to protest Trump's
compact and potential cuts to ethnic and gender studies programs in UT's College of Liberal Arts.
Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman

The University of Texas’s College of Liberal Arts will consolidate its long-standing ethnic and gender studies programs into one new department.

The university will immediately begin the process of creating the new Department for Social and Cultural Analysis Studies after months of pressure from conservative politicians to eliminate “liberal” education and “gender ideology” from the state’s flagship. There is no target date for the change to go fully into effect.

UT’s decision follows Texas A&M University move to close its Women and Gender Studies Department earlier this year. In a 9 a.m. meeting with department chairs Thursday, Interim Dean David Sosa said curriculum and degree programs in the departments are being reviewed.


The future of the centers and programs within the existing departments is not yet clear, two faculty in the meeting confirmed. It is also unclear if layoffs will eventually accompany the consolidations, but Sosa did not announce any immediate firings, two faculty said.

The college launched a committee last fall to explore the consolidation of overly “fractured” departments, prompting student protests to protect the programs.

Affected departments include those that focus on African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies, Women and Gender Studies and American Studies, which have a combined 307 undergraduate majors, according to UT data.

The Asian Studies department, which was not included in Thursday’s meeting, has 185 majors. Middle Eastern Studies, also not included in the call, has 80. Department chairs from Germanic Studies, Slavic and Eurasian Studies, French and Italian will be combined into a new department of European and Eurasian Studies. The departments teach foreign languages — a course requirement for COLA graduates.

Having an official designation as a UT department matters — it allows programs to receive funding for events, faculty and a greater voice in tenure and promotion decisions. Consolidating the programs effectively eliminates any institutional support for the politically unpopular programs, and further curtails faculty input in university decisions.

“There can be no reason for this decision other than an authoritarian takeover of Texas’ flagship university,” Lauren Gutterman, associate professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, said. “If this was about too much fragmentation or small majors, then why are departments like Religious Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Classics unaffected?”

UT Spokesperson Mike Rosen declined to comment by press time. Two hours after the meeting, UT President Jim Davis announced the changes in an email to campus. He confirmed that as the university reviews what majors, minors and certificates the new departments will offer, all students currently in the programs will be allowed to continue.

Davis said he asked the College of Liberal Arts to analyze what fields make sense to stand alone or come together based on student-to-faculty ratio, program size, student demand and resources. The consolidation doesn’t mean the subjects aren’t “worthy” of research and teaching, but allows them to be “researched and taught in the broader context of other fields, classes, disciplines, and departments,” he wrote.

“These two new departments reflect our ongoing commitment to academic excellence and our responsibility to ensure that every student at UT Austin has access to a balanced and challenging educational experience,” Davis said.

Sydney Jael Wilson, a women and gender studies graduate student, speaks at a protest at the University of Texas at Austin on Monday, October. 13, 2025. About 150 people gathered to protest Trump's compact and potential cuts to ethnic and gender studies programs in UT's College of Liberal Arts. Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman

Women and Gender Studies officially became a department at UT in 2023, but gender and ethnic studies classes have been taught at the university for decades. The centers that house the faculty and classes started in the 1970s and 1980s after students pushed for courses that better reflected their personal backgrounds.

Faculty say the decision is misguided and will gut departments that have brought UT prestige for decades. U.S. News and World Reports listed UT as the top program in the country for graduate studies in Latin American History. College Factual, an online data-driven college ranking site, listed UT as the top school in Texas to get an undergraduate degree in ethnic studies.

“We no longer seem to be a place where we value knowledge for the sake of knowledge,” Alison Kafer, director of LGBTQ studies in the women’s and gender studies department, said in an interview earlier this month. “If we close this department, we are closing it for political reasons, because our numbers are great.”

What does consolidation mean?

The university will begin preparing for the new departments immediately, though they will not officially consolidate until September, faculty said. Curriculum and degree programs are still being reviewed.

A new UT policy revised this September requires the school’s president to direct an “efficient in-depth and judicious review process” before deciding to abandon or reduce academic programs and positions. The president is not bound by the recommendation of the provost or a committee, according to the policy. The policy strongly recommends the preservation of existing degree programs until all current students can complete them.

A previous policy required UT’s president to consult with Faculty Council leadership before eliminating any academic program or position. UT System ended faculty senates and councils to comply with Senate Bill 37 this September.

Why is this happening?

While no law restricts what can be taught at public universities, conservative politicians have put pressure on universities to eliminate programs deemed too liberal.

Political pressure intensified last fall when Gov. Greg Abbott demanded that Texas A&M University fire a children’s literature professor who taught about gender identity in one of her courses. Since then, university systems across the state have scrutinized programs deemed overly political.

In January, Texas A&M University closed its Women and Gender Studies department. Regents also approved a new policy that bans courses that “advocate” for race or gender ideology without prior approval. Texas Tech University System also banned such courses and issued a directive to only teach that there are two genders.

Both policies have been criticized by civil rights groups who equate the measures to censorship, stifling academic freedom. Others insist academic freedom has limits, and the fields have gone too far.

The UT System confirmed last fall that it would audit classes for mentions of gender identity. Officials have since remained quiet on how the system will handle increasing pressure to police instruction related to gender and sexuality. UT Regents will meet next week at a planned quarterly meeting.

At the flagship, Provost William Inboden has openly critiqued education related to race and gender as fields of study “often accompanied by partisan activism.” He has said the fields “must be studied,” but suggested the studying leaves students with an “imbalanced view of the United States.”

UT President Jim Davis, who is not an academic, said in a university address last year that UT would look to broaden overly “fractured” fields and bring “balance” to curriculum.

But all the cut programs are known for being interdisciplinary and skills-based, attracting students across the university from engineering to pre-medicine, faculty said. Faculty in the departments each have different specialties, allowing for innovative and collaborative research.

UT’s African and African Diaspora Studies became a department in 2010. It offers a major, minor, certificate, graduate and PhD programs. American Studies, which became a department in 1998, focuses on cultural, intellectual and social life in the United States. Mexican American and Latina/o Studies became a department in 2014.

“Gender and ethnic studies have transformed the study of the humanities and social sciences, and now they are what they are,” said Lisa Moore, UT’s Chair of Women and Gender Studies, in an interview before the consolidation announcement. “We can’t unknow what we know… It’s just not the case that we can believe that only a small slice of human beings are responsible for everything that’s good about the world.”

The cuts come as UT expands its academic offerings in other humanities fields.

UT offers more than 170 fields of undergraduate study and 230 graduate programs. The university has added about a dozen more in the past five years. The School of Civic Leadership just announced a new donor-funded program in Western Civilization and Jewish Studies. The school plans to open two more majors focused on increasing civic education.

Meanwhile, UT is also exploring consolidation in the School of Information and College of Natural Sciences. UT System regents will vote next week on UT's plans to establish a new School of Computing within the College of Natural Sciences. The organizational change would turn the School of Information into a Department of Information. The new school would also hold the Department of Computer Science and Department of Statistics and Data Sciences, and offer the same degrees, according to the agenda released Thursday afternoon.

Faculty insist the consolidated fields at UT are being targeted and defunded for political reasons, not because of waning student interest, funding restrictions or the value of the scholarship. They fear it will hurt the future reputation of the university and students' freedom to learn.

“The changes that are happening are going to, and already have created damage that will last for, I don’t know, decades,” Moore said. “I’ve never seen the forces that want to break down higher education (be) so successful as now.”

This is a developing story and will be updated.