Over the past month, a new wave of challenges has swept across public higher education, targeting funding, course content, academic freedom, and the speech rights of faculty.
At the University of Texas at Austin, the university has remained silent after failing to meet the Nov. 21 deadline to accept or reject the Trump Administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. Under the compact, institutions would receive “preferential access” to federal grants and contracts in exchange for adopting policies that define sex strictly by “reproductive function,” cap international student enrollment, freeze tuition, and ensure academic departments include a politically balanced mix, among other ideological requirements.
Some UT and system officials previously expressed support and the lack of a public response does not amount to a rejection of the compact. Unless the UT System explicitly declines to adopt it, the possibility of these measures taking effect remains very real.
Meanwhile, at the Texas Tech University System, new policies under Chancellor Brandon Creighton– former chair of the Senate Committee on Education K-16 – require that any class content addressing race, gender identity, or sexual orientation undergo a multi-layer approval process — from department chairs up through the Board of Regents.
Creighton included provisions in Tech’s new policies that did not make it into the final version of Senate Bill 37, which he authored. The memo explicitly forbids “promoting” concepts like systemic racism or the idea of more than two genders and warns that noncompliance “may result in disciplinary action consistent with university policies and state law.”
At Texas State University, the Board of Regents unanimously upheld the firing of tenured history professor Tom Alter after remarks he made during an independent virtual conference, concluding his comments “incited violence.” As Aimee Villareal, president of the AAUP Chapter at Texas State, says “Dr. Alter’s dismissal exposes a flagrant disregard for the system’s own policies.”
However, in a stunning development at Texas A&M University, the university’s own Academic Freedom Council concluded that the firing of faculty member Melissa McCoul likely violated her right to academic freedom. The council compared McCoul’s syllabus with the course catalog and found them consistent, contradicting the university’s claim that her class content diverged from catalog description. Moreover, the council concluded the abrupt “effective immediately” firing, ordered by then-President Mark A. Welsh III, failed to follow the institution’s own required procedures for dismissal, suggesting the stated reason was a pretext for penalizing her classroom teaching.
As political pressure builds in Texas higher education, our union has been fighting to make sure our colleges don’t crumble. If you teach or work at a college or university, now is the time to join the fight alongside your colleagues.