Dear American Literature Association,
We, faculty members in the English department at Texas Tech University, write to ask that you share with your members the disturbing situation we face: the censorship of faculty teaching and student learning at our institution.
On December 1, 2025, the Texas Tech University System Chancellor, Brandon Creighton, issued a memorandum demanding all TTU faculty comply with a censorship review process by signing in to a censorship portal to affirm whether or not any of their course material “advocates race- or sex-based prejudice” or included “course content that promotes activism on issues related to race or sex, rather than academic instruction.” The memo declares that “Faculty are required to submit course content related to sexual orientation,” and claims, “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.”
The memo insists all faculty must comply and warns both that “Noncompliance may result in disciplinary action” and that “This directive is the first step [emphasis in original] of the Board of Regents’ ongoing implementation of its statutory responsibility to review and oversee curriculum under Senate Bill 37 and related provisions of the Education Code.” While Senate Bill 37 does give Boards of Regents some authority to review core curricula at Texas universities, it does not provide for broad oversight of all courses, nor does it provide that any specific topics should be censored.
Faculty in Texas Tech’s Department of English responded by asking for written clarification, to no avail. As all humans have a sexual orientation and a gender identity, faculty wondered, is the university demanding that any course content that includes human-produced texts or human subjects be submitted to the censorship portal? Or are only some sexual orientations and identities subject to censorship? If the latter, which sexual orientations and identities are acceptable, and which must be submitted for censorship review? As the memo’s claim about sexes is in direct opposition to medical, scientific, and other disciplinary understandings of sex, is the memo attempting to compel TTU faculty to deliberately misstate or misrepresent widely accepted disciplinary knowledge, making it impossible for faculty to uphold the highest scholarly standards expected of our research and our classroom teaching? No written response has been forthcoming.
Shortly after the Chancellor’s December 1 memo, Texas Tech University introduced a censorship review portal (officially named “Course Content Oversight and Review”) to which all faculty were required to report any and all course materials referencing more than two human sexes, content related to “gender identity,” and content related to “human sexual identity.” If faculty indicate any of the forbidden topics may be present in any of their lesson plans or assigned texts, an escalating censorship review process is triggered, requiring faculty to justify their inclusion of each example of forbidden content, with all content to be reviewed by several administrative layers and, ultimately, the Board of Regents for the Texas Tech University System. An affirmative answer also triggers an immediate directive to remove or omit such materials from our syllabi until completion of the review. Although it is unclear when that might happen, the Board of Regents does not meet until February 26.
The plain effect this process is classroom censorship of all ideas related to gender and sexuality for at least the first six weeks of the spring semester.
This is not a narrow compliance exercise. It functions as prior restraint: a directive to silence lawful, discipline-relevant teaching in advance, under the threat of discipline and termination.
The course review process we are subject to this spring is being extended at least into the summer and fall of 2026, and as stated above, the memo warns this is just the first step. We view this as a significant progression in the state’s attempt to dismantle the humanities, social sciences, and public education as we know them.
Texas Tech is a public R1 with an enrollment of more than 40,000 students. Widescale compliance with this censorship regime means that our students are deprived of learning essential skills and concepts across the disciplinary spectrum. This policy punishes some colleges and disciplines more than others, especially the College of Arts & Sciences—and within it, the humanities and social sciences—because those fields more directly analyze culture, identity, law, history, and public life. However, any discipline can land in the crosshairs when faculty address the lived realities of patients, clients, communities, organizations, and human behavior. The chilling effect reaches far beyond a single department or college: it changes what instructors feel safe to say, narrows what students feel safe to ask, and replaces discipline-based judgment with fear-driven self-censorship.
Traditionally, American universities have championed academic freedom, that is the freedom of faculty to carry out research and teaching without political control over their classrooms. This is, in part, a First Amendment issue involving the right to free speech of all Americans, but it is also a scholarly issue, in the sense that American universities agreed that scholarly and scientific advancement would happen most freely when neither students nor scholars fear being repressed, punished, or fired. Sadly, that is no longer the case at Texas Tech University. We, the undersigned, have refused to comply with the demand to censor our course content, and are teaching our spring classes based on our subject matter expertise, having let our students know that at any day their courses may be canceled and/or their instructor subject to discipline or termination. We ask you to join us in condemning these infringements of academic freedom and the politically motivated censorship of faculty speech and student learning.
We request that you send our message to members, and we welcome the opportunity to speak with you and the membership about how we might work together to oppose censorship in higher education and protect the right of students to access the subject matter expertise of their instructors and to engage in the free exchange of ideas in their classrooms.
In solidarity,
Deena Varner, PhD
Assistant Professor of Practice
Department of English
Texas Tech University
ACADEMIC FREEDOM DIES IN DARKNESS