Texas Tech strips courses of race and queer themes, faculty lawsuit alleges
Two academic freedom groups have filed a lawsuit against Texas Tech on behalf of faculty members alleging widespread censorship.
Law and Crime
Texas Tech ordered a professor to cut four songs about gay relationships from a French class taught through pop music while leaving songs about straight couples, a new federal lawsuit alleges.
It is one of several arts examples in the suit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas.
Two academic freedom groups, the Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors and its national parent, brought the case. They allege that two memoranda Chancellor Brandon Creighton issued in December and April forced faculty across the system's five campuses to remove race, sexual orientation, and gender identity from their teaching or lose the right to teach it.
A Texas Tech Faculty Senate survey this spring found that professors in the visual and performing arts reported changing course material among the most of any college, while engineering faculty reported the fewest changes. The lawsuit includes specific examples showing that pattern.
Beyond the class French Conversation: Popular French Music, dance courses also drew scrutiny. In a course called "Pedagogy," administrators told the instructor to drop bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress because the syllabus framed schooling as a structure of racial and sexual oppression.
In a literature course, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ National Book Award-winning Between the World and Me was also dropped.
An administrator also asked the professor to remove the word "systemic" from the syllabus. The word would be "a trigger word for them," the administrator said, referring to the Board of Regents.
In a survey of popular music offered through the Fine Arts Doctoral Program, the regents required an instructor to cut passing references to androgynous stage personas — the complaint names Alice Cooper, Kiss, and David Bowie — and to the role of gay nightlife in disco history. The university's provost had recommended keeping the material. The board overruled him.
Some cuts rested on reasoning the plaintiffs say was invented. The lawsuit describes an artificial-intelligence tool the system used to scan syllabuses that flagged French literary works for relying on a "sex-based ecofeminist framework" and a "gendered ecofeminist framework," labels the lawsuit calls references to concepts that do not exist.
The arts college has faced a racial reckoning before. In 2020, 160 students signed a call to action accusing the School of Theatre and Dance of tokenism and racist depictions on stage. That pressure helped produce a Black Cultural Center the system defunded about a year after it opened. The current review, the plaintiffs argue, runs in the opposite direction.
Texas Tech has defended the policy in a statement to KCBD. The system said it was "confident its policies are lawful, constitutionally sound, and fully compliant with state and federal law."
Creighton, a former Republican state senator who wrote the 2025 law expanding regents' authority over curriculum, has cast the review as restoring a "diversity of viewpoint" he says the system lost.
Asked by the Chronicle of Higher Education in December whether restricting how professors teach race, sexuality and gender identity helps achieve that, Creighton said yes.
"If you list the specific bullet points in our guidance memo, it's a continuum of common sense, and I believe it is consistent with what Texas and American families would be looking for in a university experience," he said.
The professors are asking a judge to declare the memoranda unconstitutional and block their enforcement.
Follow along with other lawsuits at Urgent Matter's art lawsuit tracker.
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