Texas Is Destroying Its Own Universities

Sara Spurgeon, an English professor at Texas Tech University, has been teaching literature for 20 years. However, in May 2025, she was forced to submit her course materials to an artificial intelligence program for evaluation. The program flagged any content that might violate the university’s new rules, including prohibitions on promoting race or sex-based prejudice and the state law that recognizes only two sexes: male and female.

In Lubbock, medical students are no longer taught about racial disparities in medical care, and faculty at the university’s medical center were advised to refrain from treating transgender patients if a medical student was present.

The censorship bot, known as the Course Content Review Process, ordered a philosophy professor at Texas Tech to remove Plato’s Republic from a syllabus due to references to gender roles and homosexuality. Faculty at Texas A&M have also had to alter their syllabi. In January, Tarleton State University professor Aaron George was instructed to remove two books from his American-political-history course after a student complained about the class violating university policy. He removed a reference to the Fourteenth Amendment for LGBTQ rights, and the class resumed.

The University of Texas at Austin announced last month the elimination of four majors, including Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and migration studies. Over 100 courses have been flagged for removal from the core curriculum, primarily those relating to slavery, race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. These changes are being framed as necessary to combat left-wing ideology on campus.

The censorship in Texas universities is being presented as a corrective to perceived ideological intolerance. Conservatives have claimed that academia is too ideological and unwilling to tolerate conservative views. However, the Republican response in Texas has gone beyond mere censorship, establishing strict state controls on what can be taught, researched, and discussed in the classroom.

Texas passed its first education gag law in 2021 to restrict the teaching of 'critical race theory' in K–12 classrooms. Attempts to ban books dealing with racism or LGBTQ themes from public and school libraries followed, while diversity, equity, and inclusion offices were closed at state-funded institutions in 2023.

Senate Bill 37, passed in 2023, curtails shared governance in universities, granting political appointees and administrators unchecked power over hiring and curricula. The seven Texas public-university systems, serving over 700,000 students, face these strict controls.