The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and a group of professors are suing Texas A&M University over a school policy that limits how faculty can discuss race, sexual orientation and gender identity in classrooms, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
In a suit filed in a Houston federal court, four Texas A&M professors sued the university’s board of regents over a policy enacted last fall that prohibited professors from “advocating” for what regents called “race and gender ideology.” Under that new mandate, Texas A&M has followed other Texas colleges in auditing courses and scrubbing classes and syllabi of references to race and LGBTQ+ people, as well as other issues that may be considered controversial to conservatives.
That policy came in the wake of online outrage after a professor taught a book in a children’s literature course that featured a nonbinary character. A student secretly recorded the professor, Dr. Melissa McCoul, and sent the video to a right-wing lawmaker who subsequently posted it online and garnered attention from Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Eventually, Texas A&M’s president Mark A. Welsh III resigned over the affair, and the regents enacted the new prohibition and ordered the school to undergo a course audit. In January, A&M shuttered its women and gender studies program entirely as a result of the audit.
Classes and whole degree programs were cut at A&M, and some professors were asked not to teach certain topics. That included Texas A&M professor Leonard Bright, who is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit and is represented by the American Association of University Professors. Bright, the president of the AAUP chapter at Texas A&M, had a class canceled three days after the spring semester began because he couldn’t tell the university when gender and sexuality might arise in his classes.
“This policy has impacted my ability to do my job, my students’ ability to learn, and my colleagues’ ability to teach without fear of reprisal,” Bright said in a statement. “The chilling effect of this policy is vast and immeasurable, and it poisons the very soul of what a university should be: a place where ideas are free to roam, and debate is uninhibited by the political winds.”
The professors asked a federal judge in Houston court to block the regents’ gender and race policy and declare it unconstitutional, alleging the restrictions violate their First Amendment rights and are so vague that professors may self-censor otherwise routine lessons to avoid discipline. The ACLU of Texas, the national ACLU and Houston law firm Yetter Coleman represent the faculty members.
“The First Amendment plainly prohibits this egregious attack on academic freedom at a public university,” Emerson Sykes, an attorney with the ACLU, said in a statement. “This broad policy and the university’s opaque enforcement process make it impossible to teach or to learn freely and endanger course content about everything from the history of slavery to Shakespeare to the hard sciences.”
Cited in the lawsuit is professor Martin Peterson, who made headlines this year when he was told not to teach Plato’s Symposium because it may run afoul of the new university rules. Peterson is not a plaintiff in the suit. Other professors in the lawsuit allege they were told they could not teach about the 14th Amendment expanding civil rights protections to women and LGBTQ+ people. In a statement to Chron, a spokesman for Texas A&M University said that the claims in the suit were unfounded.
“We believe this lawsuit is without merit and the System will vigorously defend its policies and procedures,” Chris Bryan, the Vice Chancellor for Marketing and Communications at Texas A&M, said in a statement. “The A&M System remains focused on the important work of supporting our students and fulfilling our duty to the state.”
The university is the second Texas school to face a suit over new rules around what topics can and cannot be discussed in college classrooms as Republican lawmakers have increasingly pressured public schools over what they claim is liberal overreach in classrooms. Last month, the AAUP chapter at Texas Tech University sued that college over similar rules implemented throughout the Texas Tech system following the upheaval at Texas A&M. One school in the Texas Tech system went as far as to tell professors they may be fired for teaching about the existence of transgender people, and cited a state law rigidly defining sex as the basis for that policy.