Dive Brief:
- The Texas Tech University System plans to close all academic programs focused on sexual orientation and gender identity, according to a Thursday memo from Chancellor Brandon Creighton to the system’s five institutional leaders.
- Creighton’s memo establishes a course policy that requires “recognition of only two human sexes and strictly prohibits the endorsement of a gender spectrum or fluid gender identities as empirical biological science.”
- The memo is in line with a 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump declaring that the federal government would only recognize two sexes, male and female. However, health experts have pushed back against that order, arguing it is out of step with scientific understanding of sex and gender.
Dive Insight:
Public higher education leaders across Texas have been moving to limit instruction on race, sex and gender over the past year amid intense political pressure.
Last year, Texas passed legislation mandating reviews of public colleges’ general education courses and limiting faculty bodies to advisory roles. Gov. Greg Abbott has also declared that the state is targeting professors “pushing leftist ideologies.”
Texas Tech’s action comes after Texas A&M reviewed over 5,000 of its courses to ensure they didn’t violate the system’s new policy that limits content related to race, gender and sexual orientation.
The Texas A&M review led to six courses being canceled and faculty members updating hundreds of courses. In one headline-making case, a professor — who has since resigned over the content policy — was asked to excise certain passages from Plato from his introduction to philosophy class because they touched on gender.
Now, Texas Tech is moving to eliminate any programs “centered on” sexual orientation or gender identity, defined in the memo as those topics comprising the “primary subject, main theoretical framework, central narrative, or driving pedagogical purpose.”
Provosts across Texas Tech’s five institutions must submit to Creighton by June 15 the degree programs, majors, minors and certificates they plan to eliminate based on the new memo. Afterward, the system plans to freeze admissions into those offerings, though currently enrolled students will be able to finish their programs, according to the memo.
Texas Tech’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors slammed the memo in a Friday statement, arguing that it amounts to viewpoint discrimination, violates the constitutional rights of faculty and students, and will prevent the system from delivering a “legitimate curriculum.”
“The policy handed down in today’s memo is shocking in its brazen disregard for our commitment to delivering a meaningful, complete, and truthful education, and finally demonstrates the true agenda: the accusations of ‘indoctrination’ were nothing but an excuse to inflict a preferred indoctrination,” Andrew Martin, the chapter’s president, said in a statement.
In a statement, Brian Evans, president of Texas AAUP-AFT, likewise criticized the memo from a “politician-turned-higher-education-administrator.” Before becoming Texas Tech’s chancellor, Creighton was a state lawmaker and the sponsor of Texas’ 2023 law barring diversity, equity and inclusion across the state’s public colleges.
Even programs that aren’t cut could still be affected. That’s because the memo bars core and lower-level courses from having content focused on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Upper-level and graduate courses can get exemptions in some cases, such as for student-directed research or where material must be learned for professional licensure, certification or patient care.
The memo, meanwhile, also prohibits instructors from teaching “that gender identity is a fluid spectrum,” endorsing “the existence of more than two genders,” or decoupling “gender from biological sex as a factual or scientific baseline.”
But it does permit instructors to discuss “objective scientific instruction of anatomy, genetics, or endocrinology.” As an example, the memo cites instruction on intersex individuals, who have physical traits that don’t align with the typical characteristics of males or females.
“However, faculty may not use these biological conditions to advocate for or validate sociological frameworks of fluid gender identities,” the memo states.
The memo also carves out exceptions for instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity where those topics are “inextricably linked” to a historically significant event.
It lists as examples the AIDS epidemic and Alan Turing, a British mathematician who decrypted Nazi code during WWII. In 1952, Turing was outed as gay, charged with “gross indecency” under Victorian law and forced to undergo chemical castration.
“However, the instruction must remain focused on objective literary/historical analysis,” the memo says, and not “contemporary” advocacy on sexual orientation and gender identity.
