{"id":44193,"date":"2025-11-11T02:32:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T02:32:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/44193\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T02:32:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T02:32:06","slug":"firing-violated-professors-academic-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/44193\/","title":{"rendered":"Firing violated professor\u2019s academic freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for The Brief<\/a>, The Texas Tribune\u2019s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.<\/p>\n

A Texas A&M University faculty committee created in the wake of two high-profile controversies that raised concerns about political interference in academic and personnel decisions found that the recent firing<\/a> of English professor Melissa McCoul violated her academic freedom.<\/p>\n

McCoul was fired in September after a video of her discussing gender identity in class was recorded without her knowledge and circulated online, drawing intense political and social media criticism. The university said she was fired because the content of her course did not match its catalog description. McCoul is appealing her termination.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a report dated Sept. 25 and obtained by The Texas Tribune on Monday, the Academic Freedom Council concluded McCoul\u2019s dismissal appeared to be based on what she taught rather than any failure to follow the course catalog. The council compared the course catalog entry, course description and McCoul\u2019s syllabus and said the materials were consistent with one another. The catalog describes the class broadly as covering \u201crepresentative writers, genres, texts and movements.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The council also found that former President Mark A. Welsh III did not follow university rules for dismissing her. Those rules require a department head to draft the written charges for dismissal, seek approval from the dean and give the faculty member a notice of intent to dismiss along with five business days to respond. Welsh said on Sept. 9 he directed McCoul\u2019s removal \u201ceffective immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe content of the course was the reason for the dismissal and not the stated reason: failure of academic responsibility,\u201d the council wrote in the report. \u201cGiven the timeline of dismissal, the political pressure brought to bear, and statements by Regents that the course content was illegal, President Welsh\u2019s assertion that the firing was for failure of academic responsibility appears pretextual.\u201d<\/p>\n

A five-member subcommittee conducted the review using publicly available information and acknowledged there may be materials related to McCoul\u2019s firing that it did not have access to. The full Academic Freedom Council includes more than two dozen faculty members drawn from colleges across the university.<\/p>\n

Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Blanca Lupiani rejected the council\u2019s conclusions in an Oct. 2 memo obtained by the Tribune. Lupiani said the Academic Freedom Council had acted outside its charge and that the matters it reviewed were \u201clargely unrelated to academic freedom.\u201d She said the complaint about McCoul had not been formally assigned to the council and that the group shouldn\u2019t have taken it up without consulting the university\u2019s Faculty Affairs office.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lupiani also said the council did not have jurisdiction because McCoul had already appealed her dismissal to the Committee on Academic Freedom Responsibility and Tenure. Under university rules, the Academic Freedom Council reviews academic freedom complaints and provides nonbinding advice to administrators, but it does not conduct hearings or make findings in dismissal cases. Those cases are handled by the Committee on Academic Freedom, Responsibility and Tenure, which is charged with gathering evidence and holding formal reviews.<\/p>\n

The council quickly responded to Lupiani on the same day to dispute her account. The group wrote that it received the complaint after it was routed through the university\u2019s ethics hotline and forwarded by Faculty Affairs. The council said its role is to evaluate academic freedom concerns regardless of whether a dismissal is under appeal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThese roles are parallel, not mutually exclusive,\u201d the group wrote. \u201cThe Academic Freedom Council was created as a tangible expression of the University\u2019s stated commitment to academic freedom. Seeking to gate-keep access to the Council undermines that commitment.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear whether Lupiani replied. The Faculty Affairs office said Monday that Lupiani was not available for comment and directed questions to a university spokesperson, who could not be immediately reached. McCoul\u2019s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

The Academic Freedom Council was created after the Tribune reported on two incidents that raised concerns about political influence at the university in 2023. One involved University of Texas at Austin journalism professor Kathleen McElroy, who rejected a job offer at Texas A&M after it was watered down following criticism of her diversity-related work<\/a>. The other involved Texas A&M pharmacy professor Joy Alonzo, who was placed on probation<\/a> after a student with political connections accused her of criticizing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick<\/a> during a lecture.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Public records show the council has evaluated other academic freedom complaints. In a June 2025 report, it concluded that Texas A&M violated a professor\u2019s and students\u2019 academic freedom when administrators canceled an on-campus screening of the documentary \u201cNo Other Land.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCoul appealed her termination to the Committee on Academic Freedom, Responsibility and Tenure, which held a hearing last week. It\u2019s unclear whether the committee has issued its recommendation to interim university president Tommy Williams, who has the authority to uphold or reverse the dismissal.<\/p>\n

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.<\/p>\n

Disclosure: Texas A&M University and University of Texas at Austin 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\u2019s journalism. Find a complete\u00a0list of them here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune\u2019s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44194,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,3097,29,28],"class_list":["post-44193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-am-university-college-station","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}