Texas Tech Establishes Draconian New Censorship Policies on LGBTQ Topics |
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A new memo at Texas Tech University establishes a sweeping and draconian censorship policy toward LGBTQ people, creating a campus equivalent of “Don’t Say Gay” in one of the most extreme anti-speech policies ever imposed at a public university. The memo bars professors from discussing LGBTQ topics in core and lower-level courses and eliminates entire fields of study across the five-university system. It even requires that if an industry-standard textbook includes content on sexual orientation or gender identity, instructors must skip over it and avoid discussion around it. Most troubling, however, is that the censorship regime extends beyond professors to students themselves: the memo states that “no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI topics,” a total ban on LGBTQ mentions in dissertations or graduate thesis work.
The memorandum, which was issued by Chancellor Brandon Creighton —a former Republican state senator who authored Texas’s ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at public universities and a campus protest restriction law that a federal judge blocked as unconstitutional — went out to the presidents of all five universities in the Texas Tech University System this month. The system serves approximately 64,000 students across Texas Tech University, Angelo State University, Midwestern State University, and two Health Sciences Centers. Under the new policy, all majors, minors, certificates, and graduate degrees “centered on” sexual orientation or gender identity will be eliminated. Provosts at each university must identify every affected program and submit finalized lists to the chancellor’s office by June 15, 2026, at which point an immediate admissions freeze will take effect — no new students will be allowed to enroll in or declare any of the targeted programs. Currently enrolled students will be allowed to finish their degrees through a teach-out process, but once the last of them graduates, the fields will cease to exist at Texas Tech entirely.
The censorship policy directly targets all sexual orientation and gender identity content. “The Alternate Materials Rule requires that… in courses where course materials (inclusive of all assigned works, readings, case studies, peer-reviewed research, videos, etc.) are centered on or include sexual orientation or gender identity, alternate materials must be utilized,” reads the memo. “If instructors choose permissible works that do not center on or include these topics, instructor-led discussions, class assignments, and instructional materials must not focus on sexual orientation or gender identity.” Even passing mentions are policed: the memo instructs that “incidental references should be avoided” when selecting primary materials for core courses, and that if a history book or novel happens to include LGBTQ content, professors “must not highlight, assess, or allocate........