The Academic Building at Texas A&M campus in College Station, Texas on Wednesday, June 20, 2018. (Rose Baca/The Dallas Morning News)
Rose Baca/Dallas Morning News
A group of professors filed a federal lawsuit Monday to block the Texas A&M University System from implementing its policies that limit how faculty members can discuss race, gender and sexual orientation in the classroom.
Under the policy, Texas A&M professors cannot teach courses that “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” without prior approval.
Four professors and the national American Association of University Professors argue the policies, first introduced in November by the Texas A&M Board of Regents, are unconstitutional and violate their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
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They want a federal judge to order system leaders reinstate any canceled classes and roll back the policies.
“The First Amendment plainly prohibits this egregious attack on academic freedom at a public university,” said Emerson Sykes, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, in a news release. “This broad policy and the university’s opaque enforcement process makes it impossible to teach or to learn freely and endangers course content about everything from the history of slavery to Shakespeare to the hard sciences.”
Representatives from the Texas A&M System did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
Monday’s suit is the second major legal challenge brought against a Texas university system over increased restrictions around what can be taught. In July, the national AAUP chapter sued the Texas Tech University System over its policies.
Related: Faculty groups sue Texas Tech to block restrictions on race, gender teachings
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Who is named in the Texas A&M lawsuit?
The lawsuit names the system’s nine Board of Regents members, who have described the policies as a way to ensure students are learning things that align with their degree and that faculty are “educating, rather than advocating.”
“Curriculum is created and approved based on the accepted body of knowledge needed for our students to be successful in their chosen profession,” Regent Sam Torn said during a November board meeting. “It is unacceptable for other material to be taught instead.”
The policies apply to the Texas A&M System’s 12 universities, which serve approximately 175,000 students.
The policy came after Texas A&M faced months of intense scrutiny after a state lawmaker posted a video on social media of a professor discussing gender identity in her course. The incident, which Texas A&M Chancellor Glenn Hegar referred to as “indoctrination,” led to the professor’s firing and President Mark A. Welsh III’s resignation.
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What does the lawsuit allege?
The suit is being brought by four professors — Leonard Bright, Vanita Reddy, Landon Sadler and Aaron George — who have seen their courses altered or canceled because of the policies.
The professors argue that the policies censor their free speech and are so vague that it is unclear “what faculty may or may not do or say” without risking their jobs.
A&M’s policy allows for some faculty in graduate or non-core classes to teach the topics after the university president reviews and approves the course. Professors in those courses have to show that the topics serve a “necessary educational purpose.”
It defines race ideology as a concept that “attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity” and “accuse them of being oppressors.” It also includes course content that “promotes activism on issues related to race or ethnicity, rather than academic instruction.”
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Gender ideology is defined as “a concept that self-assessed gender identity should replace the biological category of sex or that biological sex has less value or legitimacy than self-assessed gender identity.”
The policy does not define what “advocacy” is. It also does not define what constitutes a “necessary educational purpose.”
The insufficient guidance, which bans advocacy but allows “criticism or denigration” of topics related to race, gender and sexual orientation, is aimed at “suppressing politically disfavored viewpoints,” the professors argue.
The result, the lawsuit alleges, is that the policies have “cast a pall of orthodoxy” in classrooms as they have “determined that certain perspectives must be banned in courses systemwide and that students cannot handle differing professional and academic viewpoints,” according to the suit.
What has been the impact of the policies?
University officials have said that the policies resulted in the review of 5,400 course syllabi and cancellation of six courses. Faculty in the suit, however, argue that the impact of the policies goes beyond the six canceled classes: some of them were told to remove content or alter classes to comply with the policies, according to the filing.
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The fallout of the policy has attracted national attention, most notably when a philosophy professor was told to remove Plato readings or be reassigned to another class.
Related: He was blocked from teaching Plato at Texas A&M. Now he’s leaving to teach at SMU
The suit alleges that Reddy and Sadler’s class on LGBTQ literature was canceled for the fall 2026 semester without an explanation or a chance to submit their syllabus for review, according to the suit. Sadler also said that he was required to remove Moonlight, an Academy-Award winning movie which features a gay Black man, from an English course during the review process.
The lawsuit also alleges that content that teaches “viewpoints that favor traditional, anti-egalitarian gender roles” are allowed while “viewpoints that the Board disfavors” are being censored.
According to the complaint, George, a Tarleton State professor, was told to remove readings about LGBTQ rights and racial injustice but was allowed to keep Phyllis Schlafly’s “What’s Wrong with Equal Rights for Women?”
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The professors and AAUP are represented by the national American Civil Liberties Foundation, the ACLU of Texas and Houston-based law firm Yetter Coleman.
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