Restore Academic Freedom at Texas Public Universities

Investigate and reverse Chancellor Brandon Creighton's directives restricting what professors at Texas Tech University can teach about race, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. These policies go beyond what the Legislature required under SB 37, effectively reimposing restrictions that lawmakers explicitly removed from the final bill. Faculty groups have already challenged them in federal court, arguing the directives violate professors' constitutional rights and are too vague for faculty to know what they're even allowed to say in class. The damage is concrete. A psychology professor can no longer fully teach suicide risk differences between men and women. An English professor was pressured to drop "The Silence of the Lambs." A tenured biology professor left Texas Tech entirely, saying she would rather be untenured with academic freedom than stay. As PEN America's Amy Reid put it, vague prohibitions are a design principle, not a design flaw. They expand the chilling effect far beyond any written rule. Texas students are paying tuition to receive a rigorous education, not a politically filtered one. When professors self-censor out of fear of disciplinary action, students lose access to the full breadth of knowledge their fields offer. That is a failure of the university's core mission, and it demands a legislative response.