[[link removed]]

A TEXAS UNIVERSITY BECOMES A PETRI DISH FOR A CONSERVATIVE OVERHAUL
 
[[link removed]]


 

Vimal Patel
August 18, 2026
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Texas Tech is using A.I. to cut left-leaning content in its
curriculum. Some say the effort to ferret out forbidden topics is a
dystopian academic nightmare. _

The Texas Tech campus in Lubbock is in a right-leaning part of the
state. Its leader is trying to clamp down on teaching about gender and
sexuality., David Kozlowski/Getty Images

 

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 A.I. slop,” a third said.

Texas Tech is using A.I. 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 ideologues are wielding technology to sideline subject-matter
experts.

That is not how the Texas Tech system’s leader, Brandon Creighton,
sees things.

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.

His course-review plan, he said, “will produce the best curriculum
in America. I also believe it will be a national model when we’re
finished.”

Mr. Creighton is tackling two of higher education’s most pressing
problems, at least in the eyes of its Republican critics and others
who argue universities need to be reformed
[[link removed]].
Academia needs to rebuild lost public trust as campuses have moved
left and to make itself more relevant in the era of artificial
intelligence, they say.

[A person with facial hair and short hair stands at a wooden podium,
speaking into a microphone. They are wearing a dark jacket over a
light-colored, patterned shirt.]
Brandon Creighton, the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System,
is a former state lawmaker who has been heading the five-university
system since November.Credit...USA TODAY Network, via Reuters Connect

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”
[[link removed]]
— sidelined conservatives in faculty hiring.

Politics aside, Mr. Creighton has said an A.I.-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 A.I. infrastructure.

But Mr. Creighton’s moves have tapped into existential anxieties
haunting professors. Many worry that limits on their academic freedom
are strangling their work even as technology moves faster to upend
education than they can keep up.

“There’s a level of stress that’s very hard to explain,” said
Lucy Schiller, a creative-writing professor who was asked to switch
out a book she wanted to assign. She said she broke down in tears when
she realized the scope of Mr. Creighton’s plans.

ACADEMIA’S REPUBLICAN WAVE

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 D.E.I. offices in
the state’s public universities.

Mr. Creighton, who is from Conroe, Texas, north of Houston, earned a
bachelor’s degree in government from the University of Texas at
Austin and a law degree from Oklahoma City University. He said his
views on higher education were shaped, in part, by his own
difficulties paying for college.

Texas Tech’s main campus, in Lubbock, part of one of the state’s
reddest districts, includes an agricultural and engineering college,
along with a center dedicated to free-market economics. The university
has a politically diverse faculty and student body.

But Mr. Creighton has argued that conservatives have been treated
unfairly on campus, and some faculty members have become rattled after
his administration issued a series of escalating directives.

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.

Sonja Stojanovic, a French studies professor, worried about her core
course, called Holocaust in Literature. Because it mentions that gay
and bisexual men were also targets of the Nazis, university leadership
suggested that the course become an upper-level course.

“Now the Holocaust becomes an elective,” she said.

Texas Tech is also making changes beyond the core. Jonathan Friedman,
with PEN America, a free-expression group, said that while other
universities across Texas are reviewing curriculums, Texas Tech has
gone the furthest. The university is “edging forward towards greater
and greater ideological control,” he said.

Last month, the American Association of University Professors sued the
university, saying the course-review effort is viewpoint
discrimination that violates the First Amendment.

Some students have voiced concerns. One student group started a
petition
[[link removed]]
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.

In the interview, Mr. Creighton said that only 60 or so courses of
more than 14,000 taught in the university system were recommended for
modification, and system officials have said that another 300 courses
were “proactively” modified by faculty members before review.

He also said that the course-review effort has been deliberative, with
many layers, including a Board of Regents committee, and that A.I. was
just one step to make it more efficient. Most of the work was done by
humans, he added.

SELF-CENSORING COURSES

Some professors are self-censoring to avoid running afoul of the new
guidance.

Ms. Schiller, the creative-writing professor, said the new directives
restrict teaching about “sexual orientation” and “gender
identity” but do not define those terms. “They’re making us do
the work of reading between the very obvious lines,” she said,
“and overcomplying out of fear that we might be reported or
separated from our work or disciplined.”

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.

When asked about Dr. Bell’s case, Mr. Creighton suggested that
professors not make pre-emptive decisions and rather submit materials
to the university system for review.

Dr. Bell went a different route. He believes that future Texas Tech
students will be “unprepared to deal with normal people in the world
that they’re going to interact with.” He recently accepted a new
job, at a public university on the East Coast.

A faculty senate survey from May found that about 50 percent of
respondents changed their course content without being asked to comply
with the new directives.

Survey respondents also said they worried about irreparable
reputational damage. One said Mr. Creighton’s directives amounted to
“using a chain saw to remove a splinter.”

Mr. Creighton shrugged off the concerns. He said many professors are
supportive of the changes, though they are less vocal, and noted other
university systems are implementing their own course-content reviews.

“Ours is absolutely the most deliberative and respectful of academic
freedom,” he said, adding, “It has never been more exciting to
have an opportunity to be a faculty member at the Texas Tech
University System.”

Sherry Sylvester, a fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a
conservative think tank, called Mr. Creighton’s effort “fearless
and meticulous” and said legislation authored by Mr. Creighton has
been critical in wresting control of universities from faculty
members.

“Texas is the model for the nation in returning our universities
again to places of open debate, free inquiry, getting rid of
ideological indoctrination and creating degrees of value for
students,” Ms. Sylvester said, adding, “Faculty members need to
remember that they are state employees.”

At the faculty meeting this spring, a couple dozen professors
questioned administrators, including Ronald Hendrick, Texas Tech
University’s top academic officer.

Dr. Hendrick, caught between his enraged faculty and Mr. Creighton’s
plan, said he did not know the Texas Tech system would be using A.I.
in the effort.

In an interview, Professor Schiller said her report hallucinated
information about a course she was not teaching.

It did refer to one book she teaches, however: “Voice of the Fish”
by Lars Horn, who says he is transmasculine. The book, which is
described by the publisher as exploring “the trans experience
through themes of water, fish and mythology,” must be switched out.

Ms. Schiller did not make the changes. Rather, she left the university
and started at Grinnell College this month.

“I loved my job here until this year,” she said.

_VIMAL PATEL_ [[link removed]]_ writes about
higher education for The Times with a focus on speech and campus
culture._

* Colleges
[[link removed]]
* censorship
[[link removed]]
* Texas Tech
[[link removed]]
* artificial intelligence
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]