Texas A&M Votes That Professors Must Have Permission To Discuss Trans People, Sexuality or Race
The Texas Board of Regents said it wasn’t restricting “teaching,” but professors—and a university press release—says otherwise.
A policy for the Texas A&M University System—composed of 12 institutions of higher learning across the state—now requires prior review of any materials that “advocate for” race or “gender ideology.” It also tightened rules so that teachers are forbidden from straying from their CEO-approved syllabus.
The Board of Regents voted to pass the policy last week, branded as a more liberal iteration of the original proposal that banned anything that might even “teach” these things.
“It’s not a matter of discussing any of these things,” Bob Albritton said at a Nov. 13 board meeting. “It’s a matter, then, of expressing an opinion of one way or the other versus both sides of the equation.”
But this distinction is arbitrary—a smoke screen arguably meant to confuse, distract, and confound. The new rule seems to already be crumbling under the pressures of its own internal contradictions.
A press release from TAMU the day of the meeting stated that an academic course could not even “teach” the relevant topics without prior approval.
This is not merely a one-time audit; this is a semesterly review of every page, book, essay, film, or image that could conceivably land on a student’s desk. And it could impact almost any course imaginable.
“Where is the line between teaching and advocating?” sociologist Dr. Nancy Plankey-Videla, who serves as the director of graduate studies at TAMU, asked the board at the meeting, with no immediate response.
Dr. Leonard Bright, a professor of public policy and governance and head of the TAMU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said the new provision “restricts experts from discussing bonafide facts” about sex, gender and race. “These truths have shaped every academic field, from medicine and public policy to engineering, business and law.”
And Dr. Miranda Sachs, a historian with a focus on European history, said the rule would make her units on the Holocaust “impossible” to teach—her work necessitates recognizing that the genocide fell along ethnic and racial lines. (It also targeted LGBTQ people, who were interned in death camps alongside Jews, disabled people, and political dissidents.)
Board member John Bellinger chided this assertion. “I think we’re taking it a little bit too far when we talk about, that we’re not going to teach about what happened in world wars,” Bellinger said. However, Bellinger can’t actually make this claim authoratatively—under the rule he just ushered in, only a university “member CEO” can do that.
The policy adoption follows a media firestorm, in which a student surreptitiously recorded an English professor’s lecture about gender identity in children’s books. After a MAGA congressman posted the video to X (formerly Twitter), the right-wing press caught wind. The ensuing fallout was swift and ruthless. The professor was fired without due process, the faculty union said. A department head subsequently had to step down. Under pressure, the longtime President of Texas A&M University resigned.
Another major university system, Texas Tech, attempted to ban “transgender topics” in September. The Texas A&M System is even larger and more consequential. It serves approximately 175,000 students every year.
Experts note that such policies make schools and students less competitive, drive fresh talent to other universities, and pose a fundamental risk to the very premise of academic freedom. Such a sweeping prior review process also stands to bog down already-encumbered college administrators and faculty. And it sets up a dangerous precedent, providing a convenient veil for political indoctrination. It canonizes certain ideological perspectives as “fact”—for example, the idea that sex is binary, when the biological reality is much more nebulous.
Only “ideologies” surrounding gender that question the conservative status quo would evidently fall under TAMU’s policy on “gender ideology,” a phrase Human Rights Watch has called a “global conspiracy myth” used by the religious far-right to degrade LGBTQ and women’s rights worldwide.
As TAMU sociology professor Dr. Joan Wolf said in her own speech at the meeting: “Gender is a concept, not an ideology.”
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As a former student, the TAMUS Board of Regents has always been a constant thorn in the side of progress. They aren’t appointed based on ability or experience, but based on loyalty to the “conservative” governor and his cronies. I’m heartbroken that this is happening, but not surprised in the slightest.
Why anyone would want to teach or attend any Texas A&M college I'll never know.