The Texas American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers (Texas AAUP-AFT) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) have filed a lawsuit against Texas Tech University System Chancellor Brandon Creighton for imposing new restrictions on how faculty can discuss race and gender in the classroom, according to a report from the Texas Tribune.
In December, Creighton sent a memo stating that faculty who do not comply with new limits on race, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation topics in classroom discussions would be subject to disciplinary action. In April, Creighton released another memo that ordered the discontinuation of academic programs centered on sexual orientation and gender identity. According to Texas AAUP-AFT and AAUP, Creighton’s restrictions “violate the First Amendment right of Plaintiffs’ members to speak free of viewpoint discrimination, and the Fourteenth Amendment rights of Plaintiffs’ members to be free from impermissibly vague policies and intentional racial discrimination.”
The lawsuit includes several examples of how these new restrictions have been applied over the past several months. Among other incidents, the suit alleges that professors cannot teach the fact that gay and bisexual men were persecuted in Nazi Germany. At the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, faculty were instructed to remove course material about serving transgender patients and were told to refrain from treating transgender patients in the presence of medical students. Faculty at the Health Science Center in El Paso were also told to censor coursework about LGBTQIA populations.
The suit also claims professors have not been provided clear guidelines on exactly what is and what is not prohibited, and that Creighton’s restrictions “are clear in their intent to ban materials by Black authors and about Black people, including their experiences with racial inequality and the need to remedy those racial inequities.”
Texas AAUP-AFT and AAUP are represented by Lambda Legal, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Davis Wright Tremaine LLP.
“Chancellor Creighton is trying to do through fiat what he couldn’t accomplish in the Texas legislature: erase the history, identities, and lived experiences of LGBTQ people and people of color from the classroom,” said Nicholas Hite, senior attorney and McDonald/Wright Distinguished Counsel at Lambda Legal. “Faculty at Texas Tech are being barred from teaching that gay and bisexual men were persecuted during the Holocaust, medical students pulled out of exam rooms rather than learn to treat transgender patients, and an entire Women’s and Gender Studies program shuttered by administrative decree. That is viewpoint discrimination, and it’s unconstitutional. Lambda Legal is asking the court to put a stop to it.”
The Texas Tech University System encompasses five institutions: Texas Tech University, Angelo State University, Midwestern State University, the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, and the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso.