Why Policy Matters: Ally Flores’ Call for Accountability to the UT System Board of Regents, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D. June 9, 2026

Why Policy Matters: Ally Flores’ Call for Accountability to the UT System Board of Regents, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., June 10, 2026

I want to elevate the powerful letter to the editor by Ally Flores published onMay 29, 2026 in The Austin Chronicle, “Demand Accountability," also published below.

A recent graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, Flores names something deeply important: policy is never neutral. The rules that govern who gets to speak, when meetings are held, how testimony is controlled, and who has the authority to eliminate departments or terminate faculty all shape the democratic life of a public university.

Ally Flores

Her letter raises serious concerns about the UT System Board of Regents’ recent actions, especially the newly introduced rule granting university presidents sweeping authority to eliminate departments and terminate faculty while removing existing appeal processes and the requirement to provide a rationale. This is not merely an administrative change. It is a governance shift with profound implications for academic freedom, shared governance, faculty rights, and the future of ethnic and gender studies at UT Austin.

Policy matters because it is the machinery through which values become institutional reality. It can protect democratic participation, transparency, and academic freedom—or it can be used to silence, consolidate, and control. Ally Flores’ letter reminds us that accountability begins with paying attention to the rules, because the rules determine what is possible.

Her voice not only deserves to be heard, but heeded—especially by those entrusted with the stewardship of our public universities.

Demand Accountability
Ally Flores, Austin Chronicle | May 29, 2026

Dear Editor,

Last week, the UT System Regents met after the academic year ended, when many students and faculty were already out of town. Between no same-day sign-ups for testimony, timed remarks limited to the “chairmen’s discretion,” requiring pre-approval of speaking topics, and a phone line for speaker registration and questions that was disconnected the day before the meeting, public input felt, at best, discouraged. More concerning, buried in the 228-page agenda was a newly introduced rule granting university presidents unchecked authority to eliminate departments and terminate faculty, removing the existing appeal process and requirement to provide a rationale for these decisions.

It is difficult to accept these changes as anything but censorship when a fully Abbott-appointed board, including a former Republican state senator and members with explicit partisan ties, reliably advance any conservative measure placed before them. With UT-Austin moving to consolidate its ethnic and gender studies departments this fall, faculty remain in limbo about its impending implementation and whether newly grouped departments will be forced to compete for already-limited resources.

However, this selective austerity seems convenient. Tech moguls Michael and Susan Dell recently crossed $1 billion in lifetime giving to the university, and as AI has become a consistent subject of praise from President Jim Davis, this year’s decision to automate the simple task of reading graduate names at commencement signals not only a disregard for the human foundations of academia but a growing institutional malleability. I implore those reading to demand accountability before a leading public university surrenders what remains of its integrity to the outside pressures it has shown no willingness to resist.

Ally Flores

A Report from UT’s College of Education, by Noah De Lissovoy and Deb Kelt, The Higher Ed Advocate June 3, 2026

Friends:

I am proud of my UT-Austin College of Education fellow colleagues, Dr. Deb Kelt and Dr. Noah De Lissovoy, for this powerful and timely The Higher Ed Substack Advocate post. Writing as educators, scholars, and members of our university community, they remind us that the struggle over academic freedom is not only a struggle over content, curriculum, or political ideology. It is also a struggle over pedagogy itself—over the conditions that allow teaching and learning to be intellectually honest, socially meaningful, and grounded in care, rigor, and relationships.

What Deb and Noah make especially clear is that these attacks do not remain confined to a single college, building, department, or program. In the College of Education, restrictions on teaching ripple outward into Texas classrooms through the teachers, counselors, principals, superintendents, and education leaders we prepare. In Liberal Arts, the consolidation of fields rooted in Ethnic Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and critical interdisciplinary inquiry similarly affects the future of knowledge production, civic understanding, and democratic engagement. In both cases, what is at stake is not simply institutional rearrangement. It is the university’s public mission.

Their post invites us to recognize the courage, solidarity, and clarity already emerging across campus. I am grateful to Deb and Noah for naming what so many of us know to be true: when we defend open and critical inquiry, affirming classroom relationships, and the knowledge traditions that speak to the lives of diverse students and communities, we are defending teaching itself.

May such reports from the front lines of our university continue to illuminate the stakes, strengthen our resolve, and remind us that defending education is a collective calling.

-Angela Valenzuela

A Report from UT’s College of Education

by Noah De Lissovoy and Deb Kelt, Members, AAUP@UT Chapter

In the field of education, we know something about what works in teaching. From this vantage point, the current attack on critical inquiry in higher education in Texas is not just ideological—it is also pedagogical.

Restrictions on academic freedom and on teaching about “controversial” topics (including race, gender, and sexuality) are not just a matter of moving the ideological center of gravity in the classroom; they fundamentally undermine teaching that starts from any perspective, since they make it difficult for teachers to explore with students the full scope of a subject and its social context and implications. But the current conservative attack is not just limited to these aspects of teaching. This attack also makes it hard to make connections between students’ lived experiences and class content, and to create a robust learning community that is grounded on care and solidarity. These pedagogical principles are supported by decades of research on K-12 and higher education teaching.

It should be no surprise then that even as legislators and university administrators in Texas seek to reorganize curriculum and teaching across the university, they have also turned their attention to colleges of education. Like our colleagues in other fields, faculty in education have felt pressure to self-censor and to limit the scope of classroom discussions. (Interestingly, in teacher education spaces, this pressure is felt doubly, since faculty are teaching about the pedagogy that they seek at the same time to embody.) And alongside our UT colleagues, we await the results of a shadowy curriculum audit connected to the passage of Senate Bill 37.

In addition, our College of Education dean, who has been dedicated to supporting faculty and reimagining education to better serve the state and its many communities, was not renewed in his contract despite broad faculty support and remarkable success. The search for his replacement, by a committee with limited faculty representation, has been shrouded in secrecy. At the same time, right-wing news outlets have vilified the college and called out specific courses and staff. A recent successful tenure-track faculty search was blocked at the last minute by the university for reasons that remain obscure to faculty. In the context of these developments, faculty are anxious for themselves and their students.

It is important to recognize that any move to compromise our freedom to teach -- and our students’ freedom to learn -- will not stay contained in the Sánchez Building on UT’s campus. Our students leave to teach in Texas and across the United States, mentoring children with care and rigor in numerous content areas. In this way, our graduates prepare young people for all professions. As teachers of teachers, we know that censoring our work ripples like a rock tossed in a pond: If our UT students receive a compromised education, so will their future students. When one considers the various departments in our college, we can see how the damage compounds further. Stellar superintendents and principals graduate from our programs, as do special education experts, health science specialists, and school counselors. Any move to stymie the work done in these departments will, undoubtedly, cause broad harm.

It is important to recognize that any move to compromise our freedom to teach -- and our students’ freedom to learn -- will not stay contained in the Sánchez Building on UT’s campus.

As educators and scholars dedicated to creating a better world for all people, we have organized to push back against the current challenges. Sixty tenured and professional track faculty in the college signed a letter of concern regarding the non-renewal of Dean Charles Martinez. (Neither the President nor the Provost responded.) We have grown our membership in AAUP in recent months, and we have met as a new college-based group to strategize against interference regarding our right to teach and research. We attend rallies, speak at state school board meetings, and network with like-minded colleagues across UT. We are also working to strengthen relationships with the community, as many of us have long histories with public school teachers here in Austin.

Our group knows the stakes are high for students, staff, and faculty. Though this work of resistance sometimes keeps us up at night, we don’t see any alternative. We have always advocated for our students, for their future students, and for schools in Texas and beyond. The times are certainly different – with aggressive forces working harder than ever to muzzle us -- but we are steadfast in our calling to serve.

Both the recent pressure applied to colleges of education and the resistance to it show that how we understand and organize the process of pedagogy is deeply consequential. This struggle is a reminder to faculty across the university that as we fight for content and courses that are critical and relevant to diverse students we are also fighting for enlivening and affirming classroom relationships, community, and collaboration– that is, for teaching itself.

The Quiet Dismantling of Academic Freedom in the UT System, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., May 28, 2026

The Quiet Dismantling of Academic Freedom in the UT System

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

May 28, 2026

The rule revision also allows the president to eliminate individual faculty positions
for “bona fide academic reasons.” Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman/Getty Images

Recent actions by the University of Texas System Board of Regents should alarm every faculty member, student, parent, and taxpayer who believes that public universities exist to pursue truth rather than political conformity. Under newly revised policies, university presidents now possess expanded authority to eliminate academic programs, terminate faculty positions, and bypass meaningful faculty participation in decisions that fundamentally reshape the university itself.

According to a recent report in Inside Higher Ed, the Board approved revisions to Rule 31003 that allow presidents to close programs not only for traditional academic or financial reasons, but also under vaguely defined “extraordinary circumstances” requiring “accelerated program closure” (Whitford, 2026a; Unglesbee, 2026). The revised policy further enables administrators to eliminate individual faculty positions for what are termed “bona fide academic reasons,” while sharply limiting appeal processes previously available to tenured faculty (Whitford, 2026a).

For many faculty across the UT System, these developments do not appear isolated. Rather, they represent part of a broader pattern of political encroachment into higher education governance in Texas. Earlier this year, the UT System adopted another controversial policy instructing faculty to “eschew topics and controversies that are not germane” to their courses (Whitford, 2026b). Faculty immediately raised concerns that the language was intentionally vague and would inevitably produce self-censorship in classrooms.

The danger of these policies lies not simply in the rules themselves, but in the climate they create.

Tenure was never designed to protect comfort or complacency. Its purpose is to protect intellectual independence—the ability of scholars to pursue difficult, unpopular, or politically inconvenient lines of inquiry without fear of retaliation. When dismissal procedures become easier and program closures can occur without meaningful faculty review, the likely outcome is not institutional “efficiency,” but anticipatory silence. Faculty begin asking not whether a topic is intellectually necessary, but whether it is politically survivable.

The consequences extend far beyond individual professors. Entire disciplines become vulnerable when political controversy can trigger administrative restructuring. Fields such as Ethnic Studies, gender studies, critical race scholarship, migration studies, environmental justice, and public health may increasingly be viewed not through the lens of academic standards, but through ideological scrutiny—towing the "party line," as it were. 

Indeed, faculty quoted in Inside Higher Ed expressed concern that the newly added “extraordinary circumstances” clause appears designed to anticipate future legislative interventions into what faculty may teach and research (Whitford, 2026a; Unglesbee, 2026).

Equally troubling is the continued erosion of shared governance. Faculty senates and governance structures historically emerged because universities are not corporations. Academic institutions require the expertise of scholars to guide curriculum, research priorities, standards of evidence, and educational integrity. 

Yet recent state legislation has already weakened faculty senates across Texas, reducing them to advisory bodies with little institutional authority. The newest UT policies further consolidate power upward into administrative and political channels while diminishing faculty participation in decisions that directly affect academic life.

This transformation should concern not only faculty, but the broader public.
The university is a public trust. Texans fund higher education not to produce ideological compliance, but to cultivate scientific discovery, historical understanding, democratic debate, artistic expression, and critical thinking. When political actors increasingly determine what can be taught, researched, or discussed, universities risk becoming instruments of state ideology rather than spaces of intellectual exploration.

Moreover, these developments threaten the long-term reputation and competitiveness of Texas higher education. Faculty recruitment becomes more difficult when scholars perceive universities as politically unstable environments. Graduate students and early-career researchers may seek institutions elsewhere. National collaborations weaken when academic freedom protections appear uncertain. Over time, institutional prestige suffers not through dramatic collapse, but through the slow erosion of intellectual credibility.

The broader context makes these changes especially concerning. Proposed legislation in Texas has already sought to weaken or eliminate tenure protections altogether. Texas House Bill 1830, introduced during the 89th Legislature, proposed prohibiting institutions from granting tenure or permanent employment status to future faculty hires while expanding grounds for dismissal. Although not enacted in its introduced form, the proposal signals an unmistakable political trajectory.

Faculty within the UT System should therefore recognize the current moment for what it is: not a series of disconnected administrative adjustments, but a larger restructuring of higher education governance itself. The cumulative effect of weakened tenure protections, restricted classroom discourse, diminished shared governance, and politically vulnerable programs is the normalization of fear within academic life.

And fear is incompatible with the mission of a university.

References

Whitford, E. (2026a, May 27). U of Texas makes it easier to fire faculty, close programs. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/shared-governance/2026/05/27/u-texas-makes-it-easier-fire-faculty-close-programs 

Whitford, E. (2026b, February 20). UT board policy asks faculty to avoid “controversial” topics in class. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/curriculum/2026/02/20/ut-policy-asks-faculty-avoid-controversial-topics

Unglesbee, B. (2026, May 21). UT System makes it easier to shutter programs, fire faculty. Higher Ed Dive. https://www.highereddive.com/news/ut-system-makes-it-easier-to-shutter-programs-fire-faculty/820932/

Texas House Bill 1830, 89th Legislature (2025). Relating to tenure and employment status at public institutions of higher education in this state. https://legiscan.com/TX/text/HB1830/id/3053324

All Eyes on Utah: Conscience, Control, and the Expansion of Shadow Censorship, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

All Eyes on Utah: Conscience, Control, and the Expansion of Shadow Censorship

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

What is happening in Utah may appear, at first glance, to be about protecting student conscience (Weissman, 2026). But look more closely, and it reveals something far more consequential: the continued expansion of state power into the classroom—and the next phase in the governance of higher education.

A newly passed bill would allow students to opt out of course assignments that conflict with their “sincerely held” moral, religious, or ideological beliefs. On its face, this may sound reasonable—even humane. Who could object to protecting conscience? But in practice, the bill introduces a mechanism through which academic content itself becomes negotiable, subject not to disciplinary standards or faculty expertise, but to individualized moral veto backed by state authority. Faculty who deny such requests must justify themselves to a “neutral arbiter.” Assignments that ask students to engage perspectives they disagree with—long a cornerstone of higher education—now risk being recast as coercion.

This is not simply accommodation. It is a restructuring of authority.

And importantly, it does not operate through outright bans. Instead, it produces what I have called shadow censorship—a form of anticipatory self-regulation in which institutions and faculty adjust their behavior in response to perceived political risk. As critics note, the law’s ambiguity—what counts as a “sincerely held belief”? what constitutes a “fundamental alteration”?—is precisely what gives it power. Under such conditions, faculty may begin to avoid assigning controversial material altogether. Why risk a complaint? Why invite scrutiny? The likely result is not a wave of formal opt-outs, but a quiet narrowing of what gets taught in the first place.

This is how governance becomes pedagogy.

Utah is not alone. This bill follows a familiar pattern seen across states like Texas and Florida, where governance overhauls, DEI bans, and curricular interventions have steadily redefined the boundaries of academic freedom. What is new here is the mechanism: rather than removing content directly, the state empowers individuals—backed by institutional review processes—to contest it from within. It is a subtler form of control, but no less effective.

And like so many recent policies, it is likely to travel.

As we have seen with book bans, DEI legislation, and curriculum mandates, once a model is established in one state, it quickly becomes a template for others. Utah’s “conscientious objection” framework may well become the next export in the growing policy ecosystem reshaping higher education nationwide.

The deeper issue, then, is not conscience. It is power—who decides what counts as legitimate knowledge, and under what conditions it can be taught. When that authority shifts away from educators and toward political frameworks of acceptability, the consequences are profound. Students are no longer asked to grapple with difference; they are permitted to opt out of it. Faculty are no longer empowered to challenge; they are incentivized to avoid.

Even if the bill does not become law, shadow censorship means that the university, once again, is quietly transformed.

Reference

Weissman, S. (2026, March 16). Utah could allow conscientious objection to class assignments, Inside Higher Education.

Utah Could Allow Conscientious Objection to Class Assignments

If signed into law, a bill recently passed by the State Legislature would permit students to opt out of coursework that goes against their conscience or religious beliefs.


Utah students will be able to ask to waive assignments based on their moral convictions if a recently passed bill is signed into law. Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Михаил Руденко, David Schaffer and NikonShutterman/iStock/Getty Images

By Sara Weissman

Utah representative Mike Petersen was inspired to introduce new legislation after receiving a call from his daughter, a master’s student in social work in Louisiana. She was disturbed that a professor had asked the class to write to a local lawmaker in favor of LGBTQ rights.

“She … said, ‘Dad, I just got told I needed to write a letter to my legislator advocating for some policies that don’t align with me,’” Peterson said. She didn’t raise her concerns to the instructor “because she was afraid.”

Petersen has since sponsored a bill, passed by the Utah Legislature this month, that would allow students in the state to opt out of some coursework that conflicts with their religious beliefs. The legislation now awaits the governor’s signature.

The bill creates a process by which students at Utah public colleges and universities could request to skip upcoming assignments for a mandatory class or major requirement that go against a “sincerely held religious or conscience belief.” For example, a student could ask in advance to opt out of watching a sexually explicit film required on a course syllabus. A professor who denies a student’s request would have to explain the decision to a “neutral arbiter” assigned by the university, according to the bill. That person would assess whether nixing the assignment—or subbing in an alternative—counts as a “fundamental alteration” to the class’s learning objectives.

The bill also states that professors can’t “compel a student to publicly take or communicate a specified position,” such as requiring them to write a letter to a lawmaker or publish an article espousing a particular viewpoint.

The bill leaves it to the Utah Higher Education Board to come up with more specific guidance on how these policies should be applied and requires the board to report back to the Legislature on how implementation goes.

The legislation would be the first of its kind to extend conscientious objection to higher education, though Petersen sees the bill as an extension of a previous law he advanced in 2024 that allows state government employees to abstain from work activities they object to on moral grounds. He emphasized that Utah’s state Constitution includes a provision that “the rights of conscience will never be infringed.”

“I think we have to live up to that promise,” he said.
Academic Freedom Concerns

Laura Benitez, state manager for U.S. free expression programs at PEN America, a free speech advocacy organization, worries the law could compel professors to change the assignments they give their students, out of fear of heightened scrutiny from university leaders and state lawmakers. She also argued the bill chips away at professors’ authority to decide what materials and activities they use to teach based on their expertise.

“We consider this bill to be an infringement on academic freedom, having sincere, significant consequences on professors’ ability to make decisions about what they can teach and assign in the classroom,” Benitez said. “A professor’s choices about how to achieve the learning outcomes of the course is part of what academic freedom is.”

Robin Wilson, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who helped craft and present the bill, said she believes academic freedom should be “balanced off” by the needs of students “trapped” in a course—and if that makes faculty reconsider certain assignments, so be it. She compared students with conscientious objections to students with post-traumatic stress disorder who might want an alternative to violent material.

As faculty, “I think it’s OK for us to be checked sometimes,” she said. “This is a mechanism for faculty to kind of stop for a moment and consider what the experience of their students might be.”


She also believes the law can prevent conflicts over course material from blowing up. She cited a recent incident at Texas A&M University, in which a student filmed an argument with a professor over reading material related to gender identity, resulting in the firing of the professor and two administrators. Wilson argued that a public battle—or a student quietly suffering moral discomfort—is less likely if there’s a process in place to handle these types of student objections.

“You’re going to have parties work things out” because “they’re going to have someone in the room that can lower the temperature of that conversation”—the neutral arbiter, she said. “We don’t need that in the newspapers.”
‘Disservice’ or Safeguard?

Critics of the bill also worry that students may opt out of readings and assignments that force them to engage with alternative perspectives in a way that could hamper their education.

Students benefit from “assignments that really require you to engage in critical thinking and grapple with perspectives and opinions that are different from your own—and sometimes that involves putting yourselves in the shoes of someone who you disagree with,” Benitez said. “To take away the professor’s ability to put students in that situation [is] a disservice” and a “betrayal and a mistrust of students’ … ability to actually grapple with things that they are going to grapple with out in the world.”

Petersen believes the provision that an accommodation can’t be a “fundamental alteration” to a course will prevent students from getting out of assignments that would benefit them. Universities have veto power.

“You can’t say, ‘I’m going to be a climatologist, but I don’t want to take a class on climate change,’ or ‘I’m going to study nursing, but I don’t want to learn about how to give a shot because I’m an antivaxxer,” he said. “It doesn’t work for that.” In a similar vein, “I don’t think learning about evolution is going to violate someone’s conscience.”

But in some cases, there’s more than “one way for a student to learn the information, and maybe we could be just a little more creative, a little more thoughtful about that,” he added.

Charles Russo, Joseph Panzer Chair in Education and research professor of law at the University of Dayton, said he disagrees with the bill and doesn’t think it should become law because it limits faculty’s control over teaching and isn’t specific enough about valid requests or alternative assignments. Still, he believes it raises some valid concerns.

“I think it infringes on academic freedom, but I think it’s a reaction,” Russo said. “More often than not, it would be the liberal perspective trying to get a kid who disagrees to write these kind of assignments, and I would like to get some ideological balance in there. I think educators have to be sensitive to the beliefs of their students … Respect needs to go both ways.”

He’d prefer state lawmakers stay out of it and stressed that, especially in law school, assignments that force students to engage with multiple sides of an issue are important. But he hopes that colleges and universities have internal conversations about how to accommodate students’ conscientious objections to coursework.

“Mandating that a student write a paper that’s antithetical to one’s deeply held religious beliefs, I think, can be problematic,” he said. “I’m not saying drop the assignment, but maybe come up with an alternative assignment for people who have such strongly held feelings,” as long as the alternative is “in keeping with the spirit, the goal.”
The Broader Impact

The bill offers a broad definition of conscience: “a sincerely held belief as to the rightness or wrongness of an action or inaction.”

That means the legislation extends beyond religious beliefs—which was intentional, Wilson noted. She believes the law could accommodate a wide range of objections, including political, philosophical and other ideological concerns about coursework.

“You’re just allowing everybody—believers, nonbelievers … to all say, ‘Wait a minute, I have a moral center, and my moral center matters to me,’” she said.

Russo said, ostensibly, a pacifist could argue they don’t want to do an assignment focused on studying war. He believes that complaint is unlikely to succeed if challenged in court, but it raises questions about how the bill could be applied.

Despite its broad nature, Petersen foresees the legislation as having “very little impact” on the state’s universities, because they can weed out unreasonable requests; in any case, only a “handful” of professors are likely to run into these issues with their students, he said.

But Benitez believes the bill could have more serious ripple effects.

She acknowledged there are ways to implement the bill that “wouldn’t be catastrophic”; for example, a law professor could ask a student to write an opposing argument on a less personal or sensitive topic if they conscientiously object to the original assignment. But in a heated political climate where higher ed leaders already feel pressure to “overcomply” with policymakers’ laws and guidance, she fears the consequences of the bill “will go further than what the bill text actually says.” And while the law could protect all kinds of objections in theory, she believes in practice it “will be used to target specific viewpoints,” like content related to LGBTQ+ issues, which “we ultimately see as censorship.”

She noted that while students opting out of coursework is a new concept for higher ed, it’s been a contentious issue in K–12 schools. Notably, the U.S. Supreme Court last year sided with religious families seeking to opt their children out of readings with LGBTQ+ themes in Mahmoud et al. v. Taylor.

She worries that Utah’s bill, which she expects the governor to sign, could become a model for other states, following the way such conflicts have spread in the K–12 sector.

“This is the first time we are seeing this particular kind of measure, but we have seen with every kind of censorship that we have tracked since 2021 that it might start in one state, but it will absolutely be copy-pasted in another state,” she said.

All Eyes on Iowa: Shadow Censorship in the Remaking of the University in Real Time, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

All Eyes on Iowa: Shadow Censorship in the Remaking of the University in Real Time

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 22, 2026

If we have learned anything over the past few years, it is this: what happens in one state rarely stays there. Florida, Texas, Indiana, Ohio, and Utah have each, in turn, served as testing grounds for a new model of higher education governance—one that moves beyond critique into control. Now, all eyes are on Iowa.

According to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in a single legislative cycle, Iowa Republicans have introduced more than 20 bills aimed at restructuring both public and private higher education. Taken individually, some proposals may appear technical or even reasonable—tuition guarantees, expanded community-college degrees, civics requirements. But taken together, they reveal something more consequential: a coordinated effort to redefine the purpose, governance, and boundaries of the university.

Governance boards would be reshaped, faculty authority diminished, general education scrutinized, DEI eliminated, and even land acknowledgments prohibited. Meanwhile, new curricular mandates would narrow how history and citizenship can be taught, explicitly restricting attention to subgroups. Excuse me? You mean Anglo male history only? To be sure, this is not only unconstitutional per the First and Fourteenth amendments (see Valenzuela, 2026), but an unmistakable signal about which knowledges are now considered legitimate and which are to be erased.

This is not simply reform. It is redesign.

And crucially, it is the kind of redesign that gives rise to what I have elsewhere called shadow censorship (Valenzuela, 2026)—a form of indirect, anticipatory suppression in which institutions begin to limit expression not because they are explicitly ordered to, but because they recognize the shifting boundaries of what is politically permissible. 

Policies like those proposed in Iowa do not need to ban every idea outright. Instead, they reshape the conditions under which universities operate: who governs, what is funded, what is taught, and what is deemed risky. Under such conditions, institutions internalize constraint. Faculty rethink syllabi. Programs narrow their scope. Administrators act preemptively to avoid scrutiny. The result is not always visible censorship, but something more insidious: a gradual shrinking of intellectual life.

This is how governance becomes culture.

Importantly, Iowa is not innovating in isolation. It is assembling. Nearly every element of its legislative package has been tested elsewhere: DEI bans in Texas, governance interventions in both Florida and Texas, curriculum mandates across multiple states, and ongoing challenges to tenure and faculty governance nationwide. What makes Iowa significant is the combination—the bundling of these efforts into a comprehensive policy regime. This is policy diffusion in real time: not simple replication, but refinement and consolidation into a more durable model of control based on what they have learned from other states like Texas and Florida.

The implications are far-reaching. When lawmakers gain the ability to influence spending decisions, reshape governing boards, dictate curricular content, and restrict hiring practices, the line between public accountability and political control begins to collapse. And as that line blurs, shadow censorship becomes normalized. Universities need not be told explicitly what they cannot do; they begin to anticipate it. They adjust. They comply. They silence themselves.

For those of us in Texas, this trajectory is all too familiar. Senate Bill 17 and Senate Bill 37 and related efforts have already demonstrated how quickly institutional landscapes can shift under political pressure. Iowa now offers a glimpse of what comes next: a more integrated model of governance—one that operates not only through policy, but through the cultivation of institutional fear and constraint.

So yes, all eyes should be on Iowa. Not because it is unique, but because it is indicative. What is being built there is not just a set of policies, but a governing framework—increasingly shared by a number of states, including Texas. It is one that produces compliance without always needing to command it.

And that is precisely how shadow censorship works. 

Reference

Valenzuela, A. (2026, March 20). Shadow censorship: How fear is rewriting higher education in Texas. Educational Equity, Policy & Politics in Texas. Politics and Policy. https://texasedequity.blogspot.com/2026/03/when-fear-governs-sb-17-shadow.html

All Eyes on Iowa

In recent years, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Texas, and Utah have taken turns leading conservative efforts to make colleges less woke, less expensive, and more work-force-oriented. Here comes the Hawkeye State.

Iowa Republicans are pushing an aggressive agenda to revamp public and private colleges. More than 20 bills have been introduced this month, The Chronicle’s Aisha Baiocchi reports. Among notable proposals:

• Community-college bachelor’s degrees: Two-year colleges could offer four-year degrees that fill unmet local work-force needs. Private colleges say that could put them out of business, The Chronicle’s Lee Gardner reports.
• Public-university governance overhaul: Regents’ terms would be shortened, a student regent would lose voting power, and lawmakers would be added as nonvoting board members, The Gazette reported. The Legislature could reverse spending decisions. Post-tenure review, program cuts, general-education scrutiny, and Faculty Senate limits would loom.
• Civics at public colleges: Undergraduates at public universities would have to take courses on American history and government that couldn’t be “devoted to the study of subgroups,” according to The Gazette. 
• Civics at private colleges: The House Higher Education Committee chair asked private colleges to adopt the same requirements pitched for their public counterparts, citing “a gradual erosion of foundational knowledge about our nation’s history, its founding principles, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship,” the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• State endowment tax: Lawmakers softened an initial proposal but still want to make endowments valued at $500 million or more subject to Iowa’s 7.1-percent corporate tax rate, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• Tuition guarantee: In-state tuition at public universities would be frozen for each incoming cohort of undergraduates, starting in 2027, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported.
• … and more: Other bills seek to tell regents to sign the Trump administration’s higher-ed compact, bar public universities from hiring Chinese citizens on H-1B work visas, prohibit land acknowledgments, and eliminate DEI from general-education courses.

The bigger picture: What’s proposed in one state inevitably resurfaces in another. Much of what’s being discussed in Iowa has been seen elsewhere, but this particular combination is worth watching as a leading indicator of how other big-government conservatives will try to flex their power over campuses.

🎓 Lee’s full story asks whether expanded community-college degrees could fix education deserts. Aisha’s full story explores the back-and-forth over other bills.

Professors Are Being Watched: ‘We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance’ by Vimal Patel, New York Times, Feb. 4, 2026

Friends:

In a recent New York Times investigation, reporter Vimal Patel documents a dramatic shift in the landscape of American higher education: professors are no longer simply teaching—they are being watched. From Texas to Florida to Indiana, new laws require syllabi to be posted in searchable public databases, while formal complaint systems and outside political groups invite students and activists to scrutinize, record, and report classroom speech.

The result, as Patel shows, is not greater intellectual diversity but a culture of surveillance. Faculty describe teaching in a climate of suspicion where vague “viewpoint diversity” laws and keyword searches create incentives for self-censorship. Some quietly maintain dual syllabi—one for public posting and one for students. Others remove words like “diversity” and “equity” under threat of course cancellation. What once unfolded within the professional norms of peer review and shared governance is increasingly subject to political oversight and viral outrage.

At stake is far more than transparency. As critics in the piece note, the pairing of publicly accessible databases with a politically charged environment transforms syllabi from tools of learning into instruments of surveillance. When classrooms are treated as arenas for ideological enforcement, the relationship between students and faculty shifts from one of mutual trust to one of guarded suspicion. The questions the article raises are urgent and unsettling: Can academic freedom endure when the lecture hall itself is deemed a suspect space? And how are these interventions—seen in Florida, Texas, and Indiana—spreading, shaping the contours of higher education across the country?

-Angela Valenzuela

Professors Are Being Watched: ‘We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance’

Scrutiny of university classrooms is being formalized, with new laws requiring professors to post syllabuses and tip lines for students to complain.

In Texas and elsewhere, professors must share their syllabuses online. Some faculty members worry about censorship. Callaghan O'Hare for The New York Times

by Vimal Patel | New York Times | February 4, 2026

College professors once taught free from political interference, with mostly their students and colleagues privy to their lectures and book assignments. Now, they are being watched by state officials, senior administrators and students themselves.

In Oklahoma, a student disputed an instructor’s grading decision, drawing the notice of a conservative campus group, Turning Point USA, that has long posted the names of professors criticized for bringing liberal politics into their classrooms. The instructor was removed.

In Texas, a student recorded a classroom lesson on gender identity that led to viral outrage and the instructor’s firing. Now, Texas has set up an office to take other complaints about colleges and professors.

And several states, including Texas, Ohio and Florida, have created laws requiring professors to publicly post their course outlines in searchable databases.

Ben Robinson, an Indiana University professor, teaches a class on the history of German thought. 

A student filed a complaint saying he talked about his personal politics.Credit:

Jeremy Hogan for The New York Times

The increased oversight of professors comes as conservatives expand their movement to curb what they say is a liberal tilt in university classrooms. In the last couple of years, they have found sympathetic ears in state legislatures with the power to pressure schools, and their efforts have gained momentum as the Trump administration has made overhauling the politics and culture on campuses a focus.

But all of this, some professors and free-expression groups say, is leading to a wave of censorship and self-censorship that they argue is curbing academic freedom and learning.

“We’ve never seen this much surveillance,” said John White, a University of North Florida education professor who was asked to remove words such as “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion” and “culture” from his syllabus. He said he changed his syllabus under threat of his course being canceled.

Lawmakers, and sometimes university administrators, argue that the new scrutiny and rules make for stronger universities at a time of widespread calls for more accountability.

Peter Hans, the president of the University of North Carolina system, announced in December that all 16 of its campuses, including the flagship in Chapel Hill, will create searchable databases of syllabuses starting in the fall. In a recent opinion column, he wrote that “more transparency” was the answer to increased scrutiny of higher education.

“Getting an honest, realistic look at how our faculty are trying to reach an anxious generation with depth and rigor should inspire more confidence in our public universities,” he wrote.

Conservative groups that have monitored campuses have applauded the moves. Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president of Defending Education, a group that has publicly posted college syllabuses, said more transparency will help parents and students decide which courses to take.

“Exactly what are you teaching that you’re ashamed of?” she said.

The scrutiny has been especially intense in departments like gender studies and Middle Eastern studies that touch on contested issues. Some professors say the new rules have turned teaching into a minefield in those disciplines, inviting online trolls looking for keywords and directing online mobs toward professors.

Jonathan Friedman with PEN America, a free-expression group, said in an interview that posting syllabuses so the public has a better grasp of what occurs in college classrooms may sound innocuous. But “publishing syllabi when it is coupled with this McCarthyist environment is really dangerous,” he said.

Some states, including Florida, have mandated that the syllabuses be in databases searchable by keywords. “There you see the clear aim to essentially scan and scrutinize for hot-button topics,” he said.

Professors are adapting to the new reality, in some cases looking for ways to provide only the bare minimum of information required or otherwise avoid scrutiny. One professor at a school where faculty must post their course plans said he now effectively has two syllabuses: one he will submit for public posting and another for students. He asked not to be identified for fear of retribution against his institution.

Isaac Kamola, a Trinity College professor who has studied right-wing websites, said the current surveillance follows efforts by Campus Reform and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which began singling out professors for their perceived liberal biases over a decade ago. Turning Point included a “watch list” of professors, leading to a torrent of critical and abusive emails to those who found themselves on it.

Now that governments and universities are involved, he said, “Everybody is walking on eggshells,” Dr. Kamola said. “Faculty are walking on eggshells. Administrators are walking on eggshells. Students are walking on eggshells. And what you get is the opposite of free speech.


Students at Florida State University. The state mandated that professors’ syllabuses be searchable by keywords.Credit. Erich Martin for The New York Times

At the annual meeting last month of the American Historical Association, the largest gathering of historians, a panel titled “Queering and Gendering Your Syllabi in an ‘Anti-Woke’ Era” explored how to convey to L.G.B.T.Q. students that the course will be welcoming while avoiding online critics trolling for keywords. A panel member, Dan Royles, a historian of modern America, said that he includes topics that indicate gay history will be covered without using words that conservatives have been trying to stamp out. For example, he notes that his class will include key events like the AIDS epidemic and the anti-gay backlash to disco.

“None of this is happening in good faith and we shouldn’t treat it as such,” Dr. Royles said during the panel. He later added, “Minimum compliance is a good guideline here." Some conservatives have pointed to efforts by left-leaning faculty and students to quell speech they disagree with — so-called “cancel culture” — that similarly sought to police and quiet right-wing speech. They say it upset the traditional balance, in which relatively conservative governing boards allowed faculties free rein over intellectual pursuits.

Professors should learn that “the lecture hall is not a place to push an agenda,” said Zachary Marschall, the editor in chief of Campus Reform.

Mr. Friedman, from PEN America, acknowledged that campuses faced free-speech threats from the left in recent years, sometimes leading to career consequences. But “nowhere in that was a serious effort to use the power of government,” he said, adding, “The stakes of this are simply much higher.”

Benjamin Robinson, an Indiana University professor, is one of those under the new microscope. In his class on the history of German thought, he touches on Kant, Hegel, Arendt and Nietzsche, connecting the thinkers’ big insights — “the aha moments” — to real-life experiences and contemporary politics.

In late 2024, a student anonymously complained, saying that Dr. Robinson — who has been vocal about his pro-Palestinian views — had spoken negatively about Israel, mentioned personal experiences like being arrested at a protest at the Israeli consulate in Chicago and “repeatedly spoke against Indiana University” during his classes.

The university found in favor of the student and reprimanded the professor, citing a recent state law meant to improve “intellectual diversity” and prevent students from being subjected to political views unrelated to the course.

The university’s provost, or top academic officer, said during a faculty meeting last month that Indiana’s Bloomington campus had received 10 complaints in 2025 under the new law.

Dr. Robinson said the vagueness of the law “is utterly chilling.”

“It establishes a hostile, suspicious relationship between faculty members and their students,” he said. Rick Van Kooten, the dean of Indiana’s liberal arts college, wrote in a letter of reprimand to Dr. Robinson that his concern was not so much the speech related to Gaza or that he brought his personal experience into a lecture. Rather, he explained, he did it repeatedly, which risks “shifting the focus away from the academic content and toward personal political narratives.”

The professor received a written warning, which he said put his employment at risk under another provision of the viewpoint diversity law, which weakens tenure and mandates periodic reviews of faculty members by trustees.

Dr. Robinson, who is Jewish, acknowledged that he referred to Israel’s conduct as a genocide in class but he insisted that he never asked students to agree with him. He said he brought up his personal experiences of activism during a discussion of Kant and the philosopher’s distinction between private and public stances.

“If I can’t appeal to people’s intuitions, what it’s like to publicly use reason versus to have a private feeling of conscience,” he said, “if I can’t evoke what that feels like, I can’t possibly teach Kant.”

Vimal Patel writes about higher education for The Times with a focus on speech and campus culture.

Stamped “DO NOT READ”: When a University like Texas Tech Tells Its Students What Not to Learn, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Stamped “DO NOT READ”: When a University like Texas Tech Tells Its Students What Not to Learn

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

February 11, 2026

Three weeks into the spring semester at Texas Tech University, students are opening syllabi stamped “DO NOT READ.” Assigned textbooks are withdrawn days after being listed. Required courses are canceled. Some readings are labeled “censored.” According to reporting by Jessica Priest with theTexas Tribune, this disruption follows a December 1, 2025 memo from new system chancellor Brandon Creighton restricting how race, gender, and sexuality may be discussed in classrooms. 

Faculty were instructed not to “advocate or promote” certain ideas, to recognize only two sexes, and to submit course materials for administrative review, with final authority resting in a governor-appointed board of regents. Failure to comply could result in disciplinary action.

The most consequential feature of this directive is less the fact of a single canceled class, but the vagueness of the policy. Faculty sought clarification and were told they would have to rely on their “professional judgment,” even as the threat of discipline loomed. When rules are unclear but penalties are real, institutions shift toward self-censorship. 

Administrators do not need to issue outright bans; a quiet warning—“If I were you, I wouldn’t teach this”—is enough. Within days, upper-level psychology courses were canceled, an honors class was withdrawn because topics of race and gender were woven throughout, and professors began stripping syllabi of readings they assumed regents might reject. Students nearing graduation were rerouted into less relevant coursework.

Let’s be clear about what this is. This is censorship, plain and simple. It does not matter whether it arrives through a formal prohibition or through administrative ambiguity that chills speech in advance. When readings must be routed through political appointees for approval, when faculty are warned away from certain topics, when students find whole areas of inquiry quietly disappearing, the effect is the same. Knowledge is being narrowed by executive directive rather than shaped through scholarly debate.

These developments do not exist in isolation. They follow the passage of Senate Bill 37, authored by Brandon Creighton during the 89th Texas Legislative Session before he became chancellor. That law expanded regental authority over curriculum and required academic programs to justify their workforce value. Now, as chancellor, Creighton is in a position to interpret and operationalize the very statute he authored. 

The December memo goes beyond the statutory language itself, reflecting his policy preferences and consolidating executive influence over curriculum. When the author of a law later assumes executive authority to interpret and implement it in ways that exceed its text, the line between legislation and administrative expansion blurs. That is not neutral compliance with state law; it is the extension of personal policy vision through institutional power.

Chancellor Creighton has framed these changes as ensuring “clarity, accountability and alignment” and emphasized the importance of delivering “degrees of value” tied to workforce demand. But reducing higher education to labor-market utility narrows its public mission. 

Texas Tech has housed a women and gender studies program since 1981. History, gender studies, immigration studies, and related fields are not ideological luxuries; they cultivate historical understanding, analytical reasoning, and democratic literacy. When a student asks the chancellor whether he should transfer because his field of study is implicitly devalued, that is not partisan drama. It is institutional destabilization.

Public universities were not designed to shield students from complexity. They exist to deepen inquiry, expand knowledge, and prepare graduates for democratic participation. When syllabi must flag knowledge as forbidden and professors must second-guess whether discussion is permissible, the university shifts from a space of intellectual exploration to one of administrative compliance. 

The real question facing Texas Tech is not whether it will produce degrees of value, but whether it will preserve the conditions that make higher education valuable in the first place.

Texas Tech struggles with new rules that changed what students learn about race, gender, sexuality
The system’s chancellor said he meant to instill clarity and accountability, but three weeks into the spring semester, some instructors say the standards are vague and have led to censorship.

Jessica Priest | Feb. 4, 2026, 5:00 a.m. Central | Texas tribune

When Henry Carter opened the syllabus for a spring class at Texas Tech University, he found “DO NOT READ” stamped next to page numbers in the middle of a required text. Another professor assigned a new textbook, then days later told students not to buy it. The syllabus for a third class labeled some readings as “censored.”

This is Carter’s fourth semester at Texas Tech but the first under restrictions set by the system’s new chancellor, Brandon Creighton, limiting how race, gender and sexuality can be discussed in classrooms.

Twelve days after starting as chancellor, Creighton issued a Dec. 1 memo directing faculty across the system’s five universities to refrain from advocating or promoting a belief that individuals are inherently racist or sexist by virtue of their identity, or that meritocracy or a strong work ethic are constructs of oppression. The memo also instructed faculty to recognize only two sexes, male and female, and to disclose course content related to race, gender identity or sexual orientation for review.

Creighton warned that failure to comply could result in “disciplinary action.”

When faculty sought clarification, administrators said they could offer little guidance, according to two internal emails reviewed by The Texas Tribune. One recounted unsuccessful attempts to get more information from the system. “Unfortunately, we only have the information provided in the memo,” said an email from an associate dean who suggested faculty will have to rely on their “professional judgment” in interpreting the restrictions.

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The second email said the university system had not provided information on what constitutes prohibited topics such as gender identity and sexual orientation. If a student asks about such “implicated content,” faculty were told they could provide answers one-on-one, “just not in class.”

The uncertainty had immediate consequences.

Two upper-level psychological sciences courses, Ethnic Minority Psychology and Close Relationships, with a combined enrollment of 139 students, were canceled within days of the memo’s release, according to another internal email reviewed by the Tribune.

“When they say faculty aren’t allowed to advocate for something, what we read that as is, they aren’t allowed to mention it,” said one academic adviser, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliatory discipline.

The adviser said some of the students affected by the cancellations were set to graduate in May.

“We were able to find solutions to get them enrolled in something else, but the classes they got into are not as relevant to what they’re hoping to do post-graduation,” the adviser said.

Texas Tech officials declined to discuss how many courses have been changed or canceled under the memo’s restrictions, saying the review process is still underway.

In a statement to the Tribune, Creighton said his memo was designed to ensure “clarity, accountability and alignment” across the system and that he has “full confidence in our campus leaders — presidents, provosts and deans — to carry out this directive appropriately and consistently,” with oversight from the board of regents.


Texas Tech University System Chancellor Brandon Creighton speaks at a Turning Point USA event in Lubbock on Oct. 7, 2025. Trace Thomas for The Texas Tribune


For the spring semester that began Jan. 14, faculty were directed to submit potentially affected course content for review by department and campus administrators. If administrators recommend that flagged material remain in the course, those recommendations are forwarded to the system’s nine regents, appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, who have final authority.

Unfortunately for instructors as well as students like Carter, the regents are not scheduled to meet until late February.
Consequences in the classroom

Carter is a history major with a minor in women’s and gender studies. He said he chose his courseload because the classes were required for his degree, leaving him frustrated over the series of late changes.

Removing a planned textbook left his feminist theory course relying on PDFs and more fiction-based works. The class also doesn’t have in-depth discussions of sexuality or transgender topics like he thought it would.

Carter said he feels parts of his education are missing.

“A lot of students sign up for these classes because this is what they want to learn and what they want to know, and now they’re unable to do that,” he said.

In the memo, Creighton defined advocacy or promotion as presenting certain beliefs as required or correct and pressuring students to affirm them, rather than analyzing or critiquing them as one viewpoint among others. But the memo did not specify how faculty or administrators should distinguish between the two concepts.

The Tribune spoke with more than a dozen faculty members over the past eight weeks who said they were uncertain where the lines were and worried about crossing them.

“I can find very few examples of any faculty member — and I’m in touch with many of them — who have, like, in writing an administrator saying, ‘You cannot teach this,’” a humanities professor said. “But I’ve encountered many examples of administrators saying, ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t teach this, because that might cause a problem.’”

The professor, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, responded by removing a book about historical trans experiences from a required reading list, assuming regents would not approve the book.

In a process created after the memo’s release, faculty on Dec. 19 received a link to an online submission form — derided by some professors as a “censorship portal” — to disclose instructional materials for review. That was after fall grades were due and instructors had gone off duty. Several said they felt pressured to work over the holiday to comply.

Will Crescioni’s honors-level psychology course was canceled two days before the semester began. Crescioni, a lecturer, selected a submission form option to have the entire course reviewed because topics of race, sex and gender were woven throughout the class. Under the process outlined in Creighton’s memo, only material required for professional licensure and patient care could remain without review, and the lecturer said the course did not meet that standard.

In late December, the department chair responded by requesting specific content to review, according to emails reviewed by the Tribune. In a follow-up exchange in January, the chair asked Crescioni whether he was willing to postpone “implicated content” while awaiting approval. Crescioni replied that doing so would not be “feasible or ethical,” so the chair canceled the course without forwarding the matter to the dean, provost or board of regents.

“I think our most important job as college educators is to teach people to be comfortable with uncertainty and to confront ideas that are challenging or uncomfortable,” Crescioni said. “If we’re not allowed to do that, if we’re muzzled in that way, then we can’t actually give our students a full education.”

The course, required for psychology majors, also fulfills a core curriculum requirement and was fully enrolled with 25 students.
Listing course work as “censored”

Matthew Pehl, a history professor, also filled out the submission form. His class was allowed to proceed after he signed a statement agreeing not to teach certain content unless approved by the board of regents.

Pehl disclosed two readings for review. One, assigned in a graduate history course, examines wage labor in 19th-century Baltimore. Pehl said he uses the book to teach historical methodology rather than ideology, showing students how scholars can work with limited primary evidence. He said the reading could violate restrictions because it compares enslaved and free workers, as well as men and women.

The second reading, assigned in an upper-level undergraduate immigration history course, focuses on immigrant women working in California canneries in the early 20th century.

Rather than quietly removing the material while awaiting the board of regents, Pehl labeled the readings as “censored” in the syllabi and emailed students explaining why the books could not be taught.

“I wanted the paper showing that I’ve been censored,” he said. “And I wanted students to understand this is happening.”

Carter is a student in Pehl’s immigration history class.

Zoe Wittekiend, a sophomore history and political science major and student senator, said professors are increasingly using disclaimer-style language when discussing topics that could be seen as controversial. In a class discussion about the relationship between health insurance and health outcomes, she said, a professor paused to stress that the idea being presented was “one viewpoint” and repeatedly urged students to consider alternate viewpoints.

Wittekiend said she is working on a student government resolution to raise awareness of the restrictions and formally oppose them. She said she has collected 35 responses so far to a short survey asking whether students were aware of the review process and whether they believed it would have a positive or negative impact. Most respondents, she said, viewed the changes negatively.

She said she was especially alarmed by the memo’s description of the policy as a “first step.”

“If this is the first step,” Wittekiend said, “how much further are you going to go in step two?”
From the Capitol to campus

Texas Tech University System’s restrictions took shape amid intensifying political scrutiny over classroom instruction across Texas.

During the spring and summer, professors traveled to Austin to oppose Senate Bill 37, one of Creighton’s final pieces of legislation after nearly two decades as a Republican in the Texas Senate and House.

The law expands regents’ authority over curriculum and requires academic programs to justify their value in preparing students to join the workforce.

The instructors argued the measure would weaken academic freedom and faculty governance. Republicans countered that universities had drifted from their core mission and should prioritize workforce preparation over ideological instruction.

SB 37 passed along party lines. Earlier versions of Creighton’s bill included language barring general education courses from “advocating or promoting the idea that any race, sex, ethnicity or religion is inherently superior to another,” but the language was removed during last-minute negotiations.

Within days of the law taking effect in September, a student’s recording of her professor teaching about gender identity at Texas A&M University went viral on social media, turning an abstract debate into a public test case.

The professor was fired, the university’s president resigned, and campuses across Texas began reviewing their course offerings.

That same month, Angelo State University, part of the Texas Tech University System, was the first to impose classroom restrictions. Before any systemwide directive was issued, faculty were told not to discuss transgender or nonbinary identities in the classroom, a move administrators said was meant to prevent a controversy like the one at Texas A&M.

Days later, then-Chancellor Tedd Mitchell issued a memo telling Texas Tech System faculty to comply with presidential and gubernatorial executive orders and a state law recognizing only male and female sexes. Faculty said the guidance was confusing because the orders and the law did not directly apply to classroom instruction.

Creighton, who left the Texas Senate to replace Mitchell in mid-November, said the restrictions listed in his Dec. 1 memo were to take effect immediately, with no formal faculty input, public vote or appeals process laid out.

That approach differed from the Texas A&M University System, where leaders initially focused on making sure instruction outlined in professors’ syllabi matched course descriptions. After a public meeting with comments from faculty and community members, the board of regents approved a policy prohibiting professors from advocating for race and gender ideologies or discussing topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity. The policy included a limited appeals process for non-core and graduate courses deemed to have a necessary educational purpose.

In previous statements, Creighton said public universities have an obligation to comply with state law and should focus on providing what he has described as “degrees of value,” rather than ideological or political debates.

Creighton reiterated that message in a January interview with NBC 5 / Lone Star Politics. Asked whether it was fair to say Texas Tech was “probably not the place to go” for students interested in gender studies, Creighton said undergraduate students would not find that kind of instruction in Texas Tech’s curriculum. He said Texas Tech instead focuses on providing a “degree of value,” one that allows students to fill high-demand jobs with strong pay. When asked whether he considered gender studies a degree of value, Creighton said he had not seen data supporting that conclusion.

Texas Tech has had a women’s and gender studies program since 1981. The interdisciplinary program offers an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate.

In later interviews, Creighton has said he was referring specifically to stand-alone undergraduate majors in women’s and gender studies.
“Should I drop out?”

For some students, Creighton’s comments felt like a dismissal of the degrees they had already invested time and money to pursue.

“I’m dedicating my life to learning this material and teaching it,” said a graduate student whose literature course was converted to independent study shortly before the semester began.

An email reviewed by the Tribune shows administrators approved the change, allowing the course to proceed largely as planned outside of the formal course content review process.

But the student, who is in the English department and requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the workaround felt temporary and worried similar options would not exist when teaching undergraduate courses next semester.

As a part-time instructor, the student said the policy has raised questions about whether to limit student research topics in advance; how to handle classroom discussions involving race, gender or sexuality; and how much feedback instructors can safely provide on that work.

The student described the degree as professional training and an opportunity to perform socially and intellectually valuable work.

“I think he’s talking about business degrees, STEM degrees, money-making degrees — degrees that are of value to the university,” the student said. “Just because Chancellor Creighton doesn’t care about my degree does not make it any more or less valuable than anybody else’s.”

Carter, who is from Albuquerque, New Mexico, said he chose Texas Tech because his parents met there.

“I like to say I was indoctrinated from a very young age to attend Texas Tech,” he said.

Carter, who is cisgender and white, said he is minoring in women’s and gender studies because he believes it will be relevant to his planned career in public labor policy.

He said if granted the chance to speak directly with the chancellor, he knew what he’d ask Creighton.

“I would like to look him in the eye and be like, ‘Should I drop out and change universities? Is that your opinion?’”

Student Henry Carter walks down the steps outside the library on the Texas Tech campus

in Lubbock on Jan. 29, 2025. Jacob Lujan for The Texas Tribune


The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

Disclosure: Texas A&M University, Texas A&M University System, Texas Tech University and Texas Tech University System have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.