Texas Republican Snowflakes Are Butchering Public University Curriculum in the Most 21st Century Way Possible

4 min readLet us go then, you and I, down to Lubbock, where academic freedom and common sense lie etherized upon a table. From The New York Times:The Texas Tech faculty meeting began amicably this spring, with offers of refreshments. Then administrators handed out reports, created partly by artificial intelligence, listing the lessons professors needed to stop teaching. “What?” one professor asked. “I don’t even teach those things.”“There are factual errors,” added another. “It’s AI slop,” a third said. Texas Tech is using AI to ferret out books and other materials that touch on topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. Professors describe the effort as a dystopian academic nightmare, in which ideologue wielding technology to sideline subject-matter experts. That is not how the Texas Tech system’s leader, Brandon Creighton, sees things.Because he is a Texas wingnut who, while in the state senate, filed a bill to protect Confederate monuments, he has thereby demonstrated a commitment to a certain, ah, style of teaching history.Mr. Creighton, a former state lawmaker who has been heading the five-university system since November, is the force behind the effort. He has said there was “quite a bit of garbage in curriculum” at universities.We pause for a moment here so the Times can be the Times.In an interview, Mr. Creighton fired off a litany of concerns about higher education shared by Republican politicians across the country. He said that diversity, equity, and inclusion offices discriminated against Asian students, campus protests often turned antisemitic, and diversity statements—which he has called “leftist loyalty oaths”—sidelined conservatives in faculty hiring.Politics aside, Mr. Creighton has said an AI-fueled wave will forever reshape higher education in the years ahead. He said he wanted the campus to be well positioned to take advantage of that paradigm shift by focusing on degrees that employers want and eliminating low-enrollment programs. He touts a partnership with Nvidia to invest in AI infrastructure.Now, back to Mr. Creighton.Mr. Creighton represents something of a trend in red states like Florida and Texas: a former Republican lawmaker tapped as higher education leader. In Florida, at least seven college presidents are former Republican politicians, as are the heads of both the Texas A&M and University of Texas systems. Even so, Mr. Creighton sticks out. He was behind some of the state’s most consequential legislation targeting higher education. He wrote a bill enacted last year that sidelined the role faculty play in governing universities and tightened the state’s grip on curriculum. He also wrote a bill enacted in 2024 that abolished DEI offices in the state’s public universities.Memos in December and April outlined the closures of programs centered on sexual orientation or gender identity, required the recognition of only two sexes and outlawed student dissertations on gender identity. The administration also created a portal in which professors must submit their course materials for review. The strictest prohibition at Texas Tech is on classes in the core curriculum, which are a menu of lower-level courses that students must select from in order to graduate. Mr. Creighton has banned any course in the core that includes material related to sexual orientation and gender identity.Cue the walking martyrs.Some students have voiced concerns. One student group started a petition to remove Mr. Creighton from office, saying he was unfit to serve. But some conservative students support the chancellor. Mr. Creighton is bringing ideological balance to a sector that is overwhelmingly liberal, said Preston Parsons, the local chapter president of Turning Point USA, a conservative group. “Is it necessarily a bad thing that we have universities that sit a little different on different issues?” Mr. Parsons asked.This is Texas Tech, remember, not Harvard. This is Lubbock, remember, not Berkeley. If our young conservative snowflakes feel threatened there, is there anywhere they will ever sleep peacefully?(By the way, if Preston Parsons isn't the perfect young Texas wingnut name, I'll eat my copy of Campus Battlefield.) To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the AI vetting of the class syllabuses was done sloppily and with a clear bias in the general direction of Sean Hannity. The results would be comic if they hadn't already caused professors to barber their class presentations.Jacob Bell, a Medieval historian, said he worried about how to discuss Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake for, among other reasons, cross-dressing. Mr. Creighton’s memo about gender exempts biographical details of historically significant figures. Still, any references must be “purely incidental,” according to the April memo. Dr. Bell removed two weeks of study about Viking men and women. He said Viking mythological poems often featured gender-changing gods like Loki and Odin, material he no longer felt comfortable teaching.They can't discuss cross-dressing even when the cross-dresser in question got burned at the stake because of it. Sooner or later, they all run over their own feet.