Texas A&M University System regents unanimously voted Thursday to approve a new policy that will require each campus president to sign off on any course that could be seen as advocating for “race and gender ideology or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”
The policy defines race ideology as “attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity” or anything that “promotes activism on issues related to race or ethnicity rather than academic instruction. Gender ideology is defined as “a concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex.”
Regents also approved a policy that will prohibit faculty from teaching material inconsistent with the approved syllabus for each course. Both policies go into effect immediately, but enforcement will begin in spring 2026.
The changes approved Thursday were largely in response to a student’s secret recordings of a professor discussing gender identity in a children’s literature course, a controversy that sparked conservative outrage and sent shockwaves through Texas’ higher education institutions.
Regents Chair Robert Albritton said the board had received 142 letters of written testimony on the new policies. Ten people — all professors — testified on the items, with eight speaking against and two in favor. Faculty and students also entered the room when the full board took up the items for consideration, overflowing the seats and leaving multiple people standing in the back of the room.
“The vagueness of the language is problematic,” Andrew Klein, a professor of geography, told the board. “Faculty are now assuming that all instructions in the topic of concern will be prohibited. Will subjects like medicine, public health and law, where such content is required to prepare professionals for the Texas workforce, be disallowed?”
Philosophy professor Martin Peterson told the regents that academics “seek the truth.”
“However, when we seek the truth, we sometimes have to explore ideas that touch on controversial issues,” Peterson said. “It is not always clear what counts as advocating for an ideology in those contexts.”
When asked the difference between advocacy and teaching, regent Sam Torn told the Tribune that he is “not going to go into the details with that because we made it very clear that the [presidents of each institution] are charged with that responsibility.”
“What we’re doing is pretty simple,” Torn added. “It’s not as complex. We’re simply making sure that we do educate, and we’re simply making sure that we teach what the course syllabus specifies that we teach.”
One European history professor, Miranda Sachs, told the board that by restricting topics related to race or ethnicity, she wouldn’t be able to teach about the Holocaust, the state-sponsored murder of more than six millions Jewish people.
“The new revised policy would, in fact, make it impossible for me in a classroom at A&M to teach this history,” Sachs said.
Later in the meeting, regent John Bellinger addressed Sachs’ concerns and said “there’s got to be some common sense in this.”
“I think we’re taking it a little bit too far when we talk about, that we’re not going to teach about what happened in world wars,” Bellinger said.
In addition, regents on Thursday previewed new rules and procedures to audit all course content in the system’s 12 schools every semester, steps that were also ordered in response to the recordings. The audits were announced by system Chancellor Glenn Hegar the day after the secret recordings went viral.
“It’s a serious system-wide review of every course, every syllabus,” regent Torn said Thursday at a meeting of the regents’ subcommittee on academic and student affairs. “We are examining the body of knowledge behind each degree, low-producing programs, workforce relevance and financial stewardship.”
James R. Hallmark, the system’s vice chancellor for academic affairs and whom Hegar tapped to lead the audit, told regents during the subcommittee’s meeting that each university will now be required to feed syllabi and course details into a database, which will then be examined by artificial intelligence for content not aligned with approved syllabi.
The AI analysis will consider things such as whether the course applies to the core curriculum or is a requirement for a major or elective. It will also take into account the syllabus and details such as where it’s taught and enrollment numbers.
“The purpose of attaining that level of detail was to understand if the course was truly an elective, a choice of the student or if in some way a student may have had no other choice but to take that particular course,” Hallmark said. “This depth of analysis is unprecedented in such reviews.”
The audits could aid review courses to comply with the new policies approved Thursday.
“These policy changes complement the academic review and transparency initiative currently underway,” Hallmark said. “And together they ensure clear course purposes, student accessible reporting mechanisms, regular review and continuous quality improvement.”
The proposals approved by the board Thursday mirror the concerns university officials raised when they fired professor Melissa McCoul over the videos that went viral in September.
University officials said McCoul refused to change her course content to match the catalog description, but she and other faculty have countered that course descriptions have historically been broad, and that professors are expected to design their own syllabi and teach according to their expertise.
McCoul has appealed her termination through the university’s Committee on Academic Freedom, Responsibility and Tenure, which concluded a hearing on the topic last week. The committee is expected to share a recommendation with interim university President Tommy Williams in the coming weeks on how to respond to McCoul’s appeal, but Williams is not obligated to follow it. A separate A&M faculty panel in September concluded that McCoul’s firing violated her academic freedom.
The system will also launch a 24/7 option for students “to report what they consider inaccurate or misleading course content.” Hallmark added that system staff will review any student reports and work with the appropriate university to address the concerns.
“Let it be noted that the Texas A&M system is stepping up first, setting the model that others will follow,” Torn said.
Since McCoul’s firing, other university systems have begun imposing their own restrictions on classroom content.
On Sept. 25, the Texas Tech University System instructed its faculty to ensure its courses comply with a federal executive order, a letter from Gov. Greg Abbott and a new state law that recognizes only two sexes. In the weeks that followed, other systems announced or began internal audits of their own. All said they were acting to ensure compliance with state or federal law, though few detailed what they were looking for or what changes might follow.
No state or federal law prohibits instruction on race, gender or sexual orientation in universities. However, recent state legislation has put direct and indirect pressure on how universities implement policies related to race and gender.
The proposals have come under fire by free speech experts and university faculty alike. Robert Shilby, special counsel for campus advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the proposal would “invite unlawful censorship, chill academic freedom, and undermine the core purpose of a university.”
“Hiring professors with PhDs is meaningless if administrators are the ones deciding what gets taught,” Shilby said. “Faculty will start asking not, ‘Is this accurate?’ but ‘Will this get me in trouble?’ That’s not education, it’s risk management.”
The changes are also causing confusion among some faculty. In an email sent to faculty on Monday that was obtained by The Texas Tribune, Simon North, the interim dean of Texas A&M’s College of Arts and Sciences, acknowledged the proposals raised questions about its implementation, “such as the criteria that will determine when course content is considered relevant, controversial, or inconsistent with a syllabus.” He added that he is working with the provost’s office to answer those questions and that he will seek input on the proposal from other leaders in the college and department heads.
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