As restrictions on teaching gender and sexuality spread across higher education, one Texas Tech professor offers a firsthand account of what this crackdown looks and feels like.
I teach at a major research university in Texas, where higher education has become a testing ground for state censorship. Our censorship regime is led by Brandon Creighton, a former Texas state senator appointed chancellor by the Board of Regents. As a senator, Creighton authored the state’s sweeping anti-DEI law and legislation that increases political oversight of public institutions. He also authored or supported some of the Texas legislature’s most restrictive anti-LGBTQIA+ measures.
Now, as chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, which serves more than 65,000 students, Creighton has made clear that he wants our institution to model a new future for higher education nationally: one in which politically appointed regents exert greater control over what professors teach, and the study of gender and sexuality is sharply restricted.
Faculty, students and staff are the proving ground for that model. But they’re also pushing back: The restrictions are now being challenged in federal court by faculty organizations that argue they violate constitutional protections for free speech and academic freedom.
In December 2025, faculty were instructed to disclose spring semester course content related to gender and sexuality for review by the Board of Regents and to remove politically disfavored topics while review was pending. By April 2026, that audit had escalated into sweeping restrictions. Core and lower-division courses were generally prohibited from teaching material involving gender identity or sexual orientation, with narrow exceptions. The directive also ordered the phaseout of academic programs centered on those subjects and barred future graduate theses and dissertations centered on them, following temporary exceptions for currently enrolled students in designated programs.
What began as surveillance of course content has become a ban on whole areas of teaching and inquiry.
… Coercive power is often exercised … through forms, policies, reporting requirements and bureaucratic routines that make surrender appear voluntary.
We shouldn’t be required to pretend that restrictions on our academic freedom are legitimate simply because a university has built them into a checkbox.
But that is exactly what is happening.
Last spring, I drew a line that felt narrow but necessary: I would comply with my university’s procedures by completing required forms, meeting deadlines and documenting my courses as instructed. But I would not comply with censorship. I would not remove lawful, discipline-relevant material from my classes simply because the state had declared gender and sexuality suspect. I would follow ordinary workplace rules, but I would not surrender my rights as a scholar or my students’ rights as learners.
The newest compliance portal erases that line. After displaying a list of prohibitions outlined in the most recent system-wide directives, there is a single tick box, which must be selected in order to remain in compliance with university regulations: “I affirm that I have reviewed the requirements above and that my course content, instruction, and materials comply with all applicable Texas Tech University System policies for this course and term.”
The system does not allow me to comply with reporting requirements but not with censorship. It offers only one path: Certify compliance with censorship or be noncompliant with employment requirements.
This is not a paperwork problem. It is a model of coercive governance.
The portal does not merely ask faculty to follow university rules. It asks us to participate in the relinquishment of our rights through administrative procedure. It transforms a profound violation of academic freedom into an ordinary workplace task. It makes censorship look like compliance by requiring the people subject to it to click yes.
What is happening in Texas will not stay in Texas. It is a blueprint. … It will be refined exported, and normalized.
This is how coercive power is often exercised: not only through spectacular acts of repression, but through forms, policies, reporting requirements and bureaucratic routines that make surrender appear voluntary. Rights are rarely taken all at once. More often, people are made to sign them away, one administrative step at a time. Sometimes they are told that if they object to the substance of the restriction, they are merely failing to follow procedure.
This is a warning about the future of higher education nationally. If a public university system can force faculty to certify compliance with censorship as a condition of employment, academic freedom becomes conditional on political obedience. If faculty can be made to affirm that whole areas of knowledge are impermissible, then students can be trained to understand state censorship as institutional common sense.
The targeted subjects are not incidental. Teaching about gender and sexuality is part of how students learn to understand literature, history, law, medicine, education, social life and themselves. Feminist theory, queer studies, women’s writing, trans studies, reproductive politics, family structures, and gendered violence, labor, embodiment and identity are not fringe topics—thyey are central to the study of the human experience.
To ban or chill these subjects is to tell students that some questions may not be asked, that some people are inconsequential.
When graduate students cannot freely pursue research on gender and sexuality, the state is not only censoring today’s classrooms. It is trying to determine what scholarship—and what knowledge—will be possible tomorrow and for generations to come.
I checked the box because the portal required it. But I did so under duress.
Compliance under duress is not consent. It is what happens when continued employment is made contingent on participating in the fiction that censorship is ordinary workplace policy.
What is happening in Texas will not stay in Texas. It is a blueprint. If we do not organize to stop it—through faculty governance, unions, professional organizations, accrediting bodies, litigation, public pressure and coalitions that bring higher education together with feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements—this model will travel. It will be refined exported, and normalized.
The state can force us to participate in the fiction that censorship is legitimate. We must insist, publicly and collectively, that the fiction is not true.
Ms. Classroom wants to hear from educators and students being impacted by legislation attacking public education, higher education, gender, race and sexuality studies, activism and social justice in education, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Cue: a new series from Ms., ‘Banned! Voices from the Classroom.’ Submit pitches and/or op-eds and reflections (between 500-800 words) to Ms. contributing editor Aviva Dove-Viebahn at adove-viebahn@msmagazine.com. Posts are accepted on a rolling basis.
