The American Association of University Professors and four individual professors have asked a federal court to block the Texas A&M University System from enforcing a policy that they argue amounts to censorship and stops them from teaching material critical to their disciplines.
This filing comes after the plaintiffs sued in August to challenge a policy the Texas A&M Board of Regents adopted last year that restricts professors’ ability to teach material related to race, gender and sexual orientation. The new motion seeks to stop the policy’s enforcement until the Houston-based court renders a final decision on its legality.
Educators said they have been forced to cancel classes and remove content from lesson plans in the wake of the new policy. What’s more, the system’s women’s and gender studies program was completely shut down because it couldn’t be reconciled with the policy change, they maintain.
“Texas A&M has been my academic home for over 15 years, and for the majority of this time, my students and I have enjoyed the academic freedom to pursue the truth in our learning and scholarship. But this censorship policy restricts our scholarly inquiry in the classroom and prevents me from fully preparing my students for their future lives and careers,” Texas A&M English professor Vanita Reddy said in a statement. “Public universities are pillars of our democracy, but when a university starts banning texts and censoring knowledge, it stops being a university and becomes a propaganda machine that serves certain political interests.”
The ACLU of Texas, which is representing the plaintiffs, said the Texas A&M System’s policy is overly broad, adding that university officials have provided little guidance on how educators should comply with the new policy.
“This situation is untenable for our clients, detrimental to their students’ learning and should be deeply troubling to anyone who values rigorous academic inquiry,” ACLU Senior Staff Attorney Emerson Sykes said in a statement. “We’ve asked the court to step in and safeguard the freedom to learn.”
The court filing includes statements from eight professors across a variety of academic disciplines who accuse the system of selective enforcement and unfairly targeting LGBTQ+ content.
For example, a history professor was barred from discussing the expansion of 14th Amendment rights to cover LGBTQ+ communities but was allowed to include work from an anti-feminist conservative activist titled “What’s the Problem with Equal Rights for Women,” according to one of the statements.
An English professor said they were prohibited from teaching the Oscar-winning 2016 film Moonlight, which deals with a character’s understanding of his homosexual identity. However, they were approved to teach the 2023 film Barbie and the musical Hamilton.
“Topics that related especially to queer or transgender identity appear to be subject to more exacting scrutiny even though the policy at no point states that,” the professor said in the statement. “I’m left wondering if I can teach any books with LGBTQ+ characters, or does the censorship hinge on how ‘major’ the identity of the characters are?”
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