A group of professors is suing Texas A&M University over a new policy implemented last year that restricts how race, sexual orientation, and gender can be taught in the classroom.
The policy has resulted in restrictions, censorship, and cancellations across several courses, including banning Plato’s writings on gender in a philosophy course.
The lawsuit was filed Monday on behalf of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), along with Texas A&M Professors Leonard Bright, Vanita Reddy, Landon Sadler, and Aaron George in the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas against the 12-university system.
The faculty is arguing that the censorship policy is “unconstitutionally vague” and violates the First Amendment by discriminating against certain viewpoints.
The coalition is emulating faculty and staff at Texas Tech University, who filed a similar lawsuit just last month over comparable policies implemented on their campus.
Texas A&M’s new policy was created after State Rep. Brian Harrison urged the university to fire a professor for discussing LGTBQ+ topics in class—a move that created a firestorm of censorship and turmoil across the university system.
After the professor was fired, university President Mark Welsh resigned amid Republican lawmakers’ criticism that he had not acted quickly enough.
The policy set off a rapid course review, and at the start of the new year the university shuttered its Women and Gender Studies program and several professors across different departments had their classes canceled.
“My ethics course—the only one of its kind available to graduate students—was canceled for noncompliance with a draconian censorship policy,” Bright said in a statement. “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. 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.”
Bright, who is also president of the Texas A&M College Station chapter of the AAUP, spoke with Courier Texas earlier this year after his class was cancelled, and said the university was “playing with democracy itself” and “creating an environment of fear.”
The university also cancelled Religions of the World; Introduction to Race and Ethnicity; Ethics in Public Policy; and a course focused on LGBTQ+ literature. Professors have been forced to edit their syllabi to comply with the policy, and remove works like Plato’s “Myth of Androgyne” or films like “Moonlight.”
According to the lawsuit, one history professor was allowed to teach Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, but not about how the Fourteenth Amendment expanded to protect women and LGBTQ+ people.
“By embarking on a campaign of censorship, Texas A&M has abdicated its responsibility to support students’ right to learn and faculty’s right to teach,” Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP, said in a statement. “A university that censors Plato—as well as other significant texts—abandons its obligation to truth, free inquiry, and the public trust.”
The lawsuit argues that the policy doesn’t make clear “what may or may not be taught, assigned, or said in a classroom, and allows virtually unfettered enforcement discretion such that disfavored viewpoints can be censored.”
Faculty and staff are asking a federal judge to declare the policy unconstitutional, block its implementation, and restore courses that administrators have canceled.
