Beneath a veneer of “neutral oversight,” university leaders are weaponizing audits and red tape to silence feminist and queer scholarship.
Professor Melissa McCoul was dismissed in September after teaching LGBTQ+ themes in her children’s literature course at Texas A&M. Just this week, a faculty council determined McCoul’s firing violated her academic freedom.
But politicians and activists who oppose what they call “woke gender ideology,” are galvanized and doubling down, using this Texas A&M case to push for curricular reviews aimed at eliminating women’s, gender and sexuality studies from public colleges and universities across Texas. On Thursday, the university system’s board of regents will vote on a proposal that could forbid faculty across its 12 universities from teaching about “race or gender ideology” without first receiving approval from the campus president or their designee.
From Policy to Purge: Texas Campuses Crack Down on Queer and Gender Studies
Less than a week after McCoul’s dismissal from Texas A&M, Angelo State University informed its faculty that it would comply with House Bill 229, which states that there are only two biological sexes. The law was intended to apply only to government data collection, but faculty were instructed to remove all LGBTQ+ content from their syllabi immediately.
Within days, this policy had spread to the entire Texas Tech system, of which Angelo State is a member. Administrators at community colleges like San Jacinto College, Blinn College and Alvin Community College communicated the same message: Remove all queer content, though the mechanisms differed in each case. Some administrators highlighted the obscenity clause in Senate Bill 412; others cited the prohibition on discussing gender identity in Texas K-12 education outlined in Senate Bill 12, noting that numerous courses at these institutions are dual credit offerings.
The University of North Texas, Texas Women’s University, Texas A&M system and the University of Texas (UT) system soon followed suit.
UT faculty were told that all “gender identity” sources would undergo an “audit.”
The Texas State system announced a system-wide curricular review, to be completed by Jan. 20, 2026, to ensure that 1.) course descriptions match syllabi, 2.) courses meet “evolving student needs,” and 3.) courses are “grounded in disciplinary expertise and established review processes.” The lack of clarity and objectivity in these directives threatens academic freedom and risks chilling the teaching and scholarship of faculty working in gender, sexuality and other interdisciplinary fields.
This sweeping review process raises serious questions about both its validity and its intent.
How, and by whom, will these audits be conducted? Will faculty with subject matter expertise carry them out? Or will it be administrators who aim to appease ambitious and opportunistic politicians, such as Texas state Rep. Brian Harrison (House District 10), who has largely taken credit for McCoul’s firing?
The Bureaucratization of Censorship: Turning Audits Into Ideological Weapons
Anyone who has worked on university curricula knows that completing such an ambitious audit within a short timeframe is impossible.
This campaign, however, extends far beyond Texas and the field of gender studies—it represents a broader assault on scholars and academic freedom, a global attack on gender and other intersectional areas of inquiry.
These curricular reviews represent an alarming intrusion of political authority into the domain of higher education. Framed as bureaucratic oversight, they seek to eliminate gender studies and related fields through procedural mechanisms that evade public scrutiny.
When legislative bodies dictate curricula in this manner, they erode university autonomy, suppress academic freedom, hinder student development and weaken the democratic values that education sustains. Texas’ actions are part of a broader national—and increasingly global—assault on gender scholarship, one that has largely escaped mainstream media attention despite its profound implications for higher education and democratic discourse.
The reviews underway in Texas violate the very protections of academic freedom established in the 2023 Texas Senate Bill 17. Authored by Brandon Creighton, now the chancellor and CEO of Texas Tech University System, the law initially aimed to eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs at state universities. However, it included a crucial exception—allowing academic courses and scholarly research to continue unimpeded, safeguarding the intellectual independence that is vital to higher education.
The mere threat of a review has prompted faculty across various public universities to refrain from offering classes that have been on the books for some time, fearing they may become targets of coordinated social media campaigns. To take one example, conservative activist Riley Gaines posted a list of courses on X offered at Texas State University with the caption, “Charlie Kirk was right. College is a scam.” Unsurprisingly, all the courses listed included content related to race, gender and sexuality, suggesting that not only are these courses without academic merit, but they should also be purged from course offerings.
(Editor’s note: Despite political attacks, new data shows graduates of cultural and gender studies programs are thriving—equipped with the skills most in demand in today’s workforce.)
Curricular reviews threaten to undermine students’ fundamental right to choose their educational paths—an increasingly urgent issue in an era when a dynamic, ever-evolving workforce demands adaptability. Students have compelling reasons for choosing degrees, minors or general education courses that include gender studies. As highlighted in a recent report by Ms., the skills acquired in these courses—such as communication, critical thinking and leadership—are highly prized by employers, with 90 percent valuing qualities like equity and inclusion. Moreover, accreditation standards from bodies like the Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs and the American Counseling Association Code of Ethics require counseling students to demonstrate cultural competence, often through coursework in gender studies.
The future of women, gender and sexuality studies—and frankly, any work that engages with the complexity of gender—and its scholars is perilously uncertain, facing an increasingly bleak and insecure outlook.
A National—and Global—Assault on Gender Scholarship
Earlier this month, the Trump administration invited the University of Texas, along with eight other universities, to sign the “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education.” This nine-page letter, which the feds have since sent to all institutions, demands that universities recognize only two genders—“man” and “woman”—and prohibits them from considering sex or gender identity (along with other factors like race) in admissions, hiring or programming. In short, the administration’s Higher Education Compact fundamentally enforces a binary view of gender, effectively stifling any efforts toward LGBTQ+ inclusion. It hampers the academic and institutional freedoms essential for open inquiry and dialogue on gender diversity.
The assaults on gender studies in Texas are not just a local issue; they are a national bellwether. They signal a coordinated effect to dismantle feminist and queer inquiry and remind us that silence, in the face of repression, is complicity.
Take Action
What immediate steps can we take to protect our history, educators and students from growing threats?
We must contact our legislators and pack town halls and university governance meetings. Alumni of these institutions need to stand up and make their voices heard—reach out to your advancement offices now and decisively withhold future donations. Everyone connected to universities outside Texas should stay alert to the changing attacks in their own states, where Texas’ bold, and often troubling, strategies to suppress the rights of women, LGBTQ+ individuals and marginalized communities are often a warning of what’s to come.
The time to act is now—our future depends on it.
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 for our series, ‘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 will be accepted on a rolling basis.
Great Job Traci Parker & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
