Texas Tech University System Chancellor Brandon Creighton, in a memo yesterday to the presidents of the universities in the system, announced a policy to “ensure that classroom instruction fully complies with state and federal law, Board of Regents policy, and Chancellor directives.” The memo includes a remarkable flowchart.
Among other things, it includes passages on sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation:
Two Sexes Recognized Under the Law and in Course Content
State law and federal policy dictate only two sexes, male and female, are recognized. Faculty are expected to comply with these standards when instructing students in their professional capacity, which includes submitting course content related to gender identity through the course content review process overseen by the Board of Regents.
Review of Sexual Orientation Content Required
Faculty are required to submit course content related to sexual orientation through the Course Content Review Process overseen by the board of regents.
Any professors who plan on teaching about sexual categories, gender identity, and sexual orientation are instructed work through the following bureaucratic nightmare of inefficiency and micromanagement:
By the way, the phrase “academic freedom” does not appear in Creighton’s memo.
The flowchart seems to suggest that issues related to gender identity and sexual orientation will almost never be taught outside courses aiming to prepare students for “professional licensure / client care.”
Look at the first question, which asks about whether course materials are “relevant and necessary.” (I take “course material” to include readings and other media, as well as lecture notes, class discussion prompts, etc.)
Consider a typical philosophy course on “contemporary moral problems.” Various issues related to gender identity and sexual orientation are routinely on the syllabi of such courses. They are certainly “relevant” to the course. But are they “necessary”? Of course not. There are countless issues one could cover in a contemporary moral problems course and countless combinations of such topics that would make for a good course. All of those combinations will fail to cover most relevant issues—there’s only so much that can be taught in one course—and sometimes what they will fail to cover will be gender identity or sexual orientation. Since one could teach a perfectly good contemporary moral problems course without teaching about gender identity or sexual orientation (and yes, one could), those topics are not “necessary.” If they’re not necessary, the flowchart says: “remove from course content.”
What can be said about courses on contemporary moral problems can be said about many courses across the humanities and social sciences.
What about courses that are specifically about gender identity or sexual orientation? Wouldn’t material on the topics then be necessary? Perhaps, but are such courses necessary, in the eyes of the Texas legislature or the Chancellor? In the memo, Creighton notes that the course content review process is the “first step” the Board of Regents is taking to implement “its statutory responsibility” under Texas Senate Bill 37. The aim, he says, is to “ensure each university is offering degrees of value,” and it would not be surprising if his “ongoing” curriculum review resulted in attempting to eliminate such courses.
Related: A Mess at Texas A&M, The Charade of Banning “Advocacy”
I teach undergraduates, many of whom go onto graduate school, most commonly law school. This year I’ve started advising my students to consider avoiding Texas A&M because its reputation is potentially going to be sullied by administrative and political intrusions into curriculum. Purely from a careerist perspective, I don’t see how Texas A&M can still be trusted to be the kind of university that will be taken fully seriously by certain employers that my students may one day want to work for. (If I were hiring a newly minted lawyer, I would not be confident that the applicant’s curriculum was soundly decided upon by the faculty alone.)
I guess I now should add Texas Tech to the warning list.
I hope the people behind these intrusions into curricular governance realize the reputational damage they are doing to their institutions. And I hope prospective students are especially aware of the risk.
This may appear specific to Texas institutions right now, but the GOP has used Texas as a petri dish (in secondary education this has been running for a decade). My guess is it’s only a matter of time before such policies are handed down in institutions in other states. So in addition to warning them of the risks I hope we can equip them for life and civil disobedience under fascism.
Yes, fine, but no individual piece of content (a particular topic, e.g.) is necessary, of course. What is necessary is only that the course have some content. By this logic, then, any piece of individual content (a particular topic) is removable, but since the course must have some content, that could be any content (since they are equally not necessary), and as such it can also be content that discusses gender issues. Weird.
But race and gender are the only topics subject to this procedure, so they’re the only topics liable to be excluded on the basis of not being necessary.
The flowchart itself looks general, so my point was only that it is absurd. If it is then added that it actually only concerns these two subjects, then the situation is even more absurd.
If you begin the flowchart with only discrete, small pieces of course content (e.g. Do the flowchart for reading A, then do the flowchart for in-class activity B, then do the flowchart for in-class activity, then do the flowchart for reading C), you should just be standing in the classroom doing nothing for six hours a week. If you think there’s something absolutely necessary, break it into a smaller chunk and it, too, will become unnecessary. Think Book I of Politics is necessary? Surely no individual sentence is necessary.
Is there a way to be maliciously compliant in these cases (A&M and now TTech)? Obviously, I wouldn’t ask someone who is in no position to weather repercussions to do it, but I’ve been wondering if there are ways to comply with these ridiculous rules (like no “gender” in the classroom, no discussion of race, etc…) that makes clear how ridiculous the rules are.?
Assuming the school allows professors to engage in banter with students before, after, and during class, it will be acceptable for a professor to mention and “wax philosophical” about some real-world gender-related issue they were confronted with recently (unless this is also banned). But, if this happens, they’re just talking about themselves and trying to make sense of what happened to them (or someone they know), as people do. They’re not teaching or relaying course content. Doing that would be a no-no. But surely you can say things to your students that are unrelated to course content, right?
If yes, then you can talk about it in class but you can’t talk about it in class as part of the course.
I don’t know if I explained that well.
The gist: it might turn out that you can talk casually about gender in class but you can’t talk about gender as part of the class.
That, to me, would be ridiculous.
I think one natural interpretation of this is that every use of gendered pronouns for every author should be forwarded to the Provost, and until they’ve signed off on them, professors should insist on using singular “they” for everyone.
Yeah, I was trying to think of something that would flood their office. This sort of thing exactly.
Is anything in the memo specific to humans? Should biologists be flooding the provost with articles about clownfish and snails?
Flooding the office with requests seems like a reasonable response. Obviously I am not privy to the inner workings of administration, but based on the flowchart itself it seems like you’d only need to convince the department chair to go along with it. It might also be worth using a concept of what is necessary that is less strict than the one philosophers use in their own work. Besides the fact that it leads to the absurd consequences mentioned above, almost no one outside of philosophy really means necessary when they say necessary.
All this is nice, but of course, most people are not fighters, they just want to ‘soldier on’ and be left in peace. And this is exactly what this kind of piece of autocracy builds on: self-censorship and anticipatory compliance are the main objectives here. If your skills are easily marketable and you are also mobile enough, you can get around this insofar as there are still places to go to. Otherwise, however, the autocratic mechanism kicks in and does its job. (And that is why it also does not matter whether there are ways to subvert the mechanism and that the mechanism is evidently absurd: the transactions costs are too high to do anything but comply.)
I think this particular sub-thread was based on the presupposition that there are some philosophers who are fighters or curious about dabbling in fighterdom. That doesn’t mean anything you said is wrong. But it’s a strange place to say it and has the effect of drowning out conversations like this about forms of resistance.
My approach would be to submit a proposal to teach students *why* this content has been subject to such a stringent process. The proposal would state that clearly this is a significant contemporary moral/political issue (depending on the class), since the university has implemented a process that is not required for any other content. So in class we are going to examine the arguments on both sides, to understand why the university has adopted the policy it has. The administration’s denying such a request would make for interesting headlines.
In another place, not cited in the OP, the memo makes the sweeping claim “It should also be noted that, in addition to the three categories listed above [race, sex, and orientation], faculty members must adhere to the general standard of only utilizing course content that is relevant and necessary for classroom instruction.” This claim has no qualifiers, and as other posters here have pointed out, since most course content is not necessary (because it could be replaced with alternate content like different authors writing on the same topic), the only possible conclusion is that courses must contain very little content!