Texas A&M is being sued by a group of professors and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas over a policy that led to, among other things, a professor being banned from teaching Plato’s Symposium, the cancellation of an “Ethics and Public Policy” course, and the closure of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program.

The policy, instituted by the university’s Board of Regents in the fall of 2025, prohibits courses from “advocating race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” The policy does not define “advocating” but the university appears to have interpreted it to mean “including”. The results of this have been a number of academic freedom violations and some faculty fleeing the university.

According to the lawsuit, the university’s policy and its implementation of it “violate Plaintiffs’ First Amendment free speech and Fourteenth Amendment due process rights. The Censorship Policy imposes unconstitutionally vague, viewpoint discriminatory, prior restraints on First Amendment protected academic speech throughout the Texas A&M University System.”

The lawsuit refers to the policy in question as “the Censorship Policy” and states:

On its face, the Censorship Policy imposes a complete prohibition, in all core curriculum courses, on courses “advocat[ing]” particular disfavored views of race or gender, or any topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, but the Policy does not impose any corresponding ban on opposing views on these issues. For non-core and graduate courses, any “teaching” at all—not just “advocacy,” though the Censorship Policy does not define either term—on disfavored viewpoints of race or gender or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity is prohibited. Exceptions are only permitted through a standardless pre-clearance process available “in limited circumstances,” upon a showing of a “necessary educational purpose” that the Policy does not define. 

The lawsuit makes clear that the policy involves the kind of viewpoint discrimination incompatible with the free speech protections, and that it intends to “cast a pall of orthodoxy” over A&M classrooms:

While there is considerable ambiguity about what is allowed and what is not, it is clear that the Censorship Policy is asymmetric on its face. As written and enforced, the Censorship Policy burdens only one side of each contested question. Because it forbids “race ideology” and “gender ideology,” as those terms are loosely defined, an instructor may teach that a person’s sex and gender are the same, but not that they may differ; may present the case that systemic racism does not exist or is a sham, but not present the case that it does exist or how it impacts social groups, even to explain the diverging viewpoints to students. And, in practice, the Censorship Policy’s prohibition on teaching topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity allows a professor to teach about heterosexual and cisgender relationships and families, but not their same sex or transgender counterparts.

That asymmetry is a feature of the Policy’s plain text and its enforcement. In implementing the Censorship Policy, the College Station University’s College of Arts & Sciences instructed the English Department that Policy 08.01 “will not be applied to heteronormative orientation and identity”—what the Board prescribed as politically favored. This leaves no question that only disfavored views of each subject—race, gender, and sexual orientation—are prohibited. Under this Orwellian approach, one professor was allowed to discuss a variety of contexts in which the Fourteenth Amendment applies, but his course was not approved until he dropped references to how it applies to sexual orientation. In another instance, a philosophy professor was told that he could either remove readings from Plato from his Contemporary Moral Issues course or halt the course altogether. In particular, the University flagged Plato’s Symposium, which discusses a theory that humans were one—containing all sexes and genders—until they were split by Zeus. Because of the Censorship Policy, the professor removed the Plato works from his syllabus. And, in another instance, a professor was permitted to assign readings discussing an anti-gay activist, while another professor was barred from teaching an Academy Award winning best picture that focused on a gay character.

According to Chron, “the professors asked a federal judge in Houston court to block the regents’ gender and race policy and declare it unconstitutional, alleging the restrictions violate their First Amendment rights and are so vague that professors may self-censor otherwise routine lessons to avoid discipline.”

You can read the whole lawsuit here.