Chancellor Brandon Creighton issued an April 9 memorandum that would end virtually all teaching and research of any subject related to sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) at the five campuses of the Texas Tech University System, citing legislation that he himself authored while chairman of the Higher Education Committee of the Texas Senate. Courses at Texas Tech, located in the deeply conservative prairies of West Texas, already undergo mandatory review by the Board of Regents to remove objectionable content. The new memorandum would place an absolute ban on graduate theses centering on topics relating to SOGI, and would bar faculty from claiming, either in their teaching or writing, that gender identity is distinct from biological sex or can exist on a non-binary spectrum. It also phases out all courses centered on SOGI topics, as well as discussions of historical figures that center on their sexual identity. This would effectively make any serious discussion of Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Magnus Hirschfeld, Harvey Milk, and many others impossible; they would simply disappear from the literary or historical record at Texas Tech. Representatives from the American Association of University Professors and PEN America have questioned the constitutionality of these limitations on faculty and graduate student speech.
Texas University Bans Discussion of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
