Inside Texas A&M’s Scramble to Censor Its Curriculum
Documents reveal widespread uncertainty, even among administrators, over what professors could teach.
February 27, 2026
Less than a month before the start of the spring semester, the head of the sociology department at Texas A&M University’s College Station campus wasn’t sure if she’d be able to offer one of the department’s core courses, “Introduction to Race and Ethnicity.”
The chair, Jennifer Glanville, couldn’t discern whether that course’s curriculum would violate a newly enacted Texas A&M system
policy that banned the teaching of “race ideology,” “gender ideology,” or “topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” in core courses and required senior administrators to certify that upper-level classes have a “necessary educational purpose” for doing so.
The policy, passed by the system’s Board of Regents in December, marked an expansion of a
November rule that prohibited “advocacy” of the same subjects. It came as a “gut punch,” as one administrator described it to another in an email, to representatives of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, who now had weeks to “mitigate” the relevant material in their syllabi and apply for limited exemptions, or face canceling classes students had already enrolled in.
While the policy was originally drafted to head off one academic-freedom controversy — in which an instructor
was fired after a student secretly recorded her teaching about gender — it quickly sparked another. A philosophy professor, Martin Peterson,
was told to remove readings from Plato from his syllabus, a move that drew criticism from across higher ed.
Emails and documents obtained by
The Chronicle via a public-records request show widespread uncertainty, even among senior administrators, about whether certain topics were permissible. As negotiations progressed, faculty members suspected administrators were willfully interpreting the board’s stipulations more broadly than necessary. Administrators referred professors to flowcharts about the decision process that only confused them more. And associate deans worried about how to explain final decisions to students.
Glanville, the sociology department head, outlined in an email to administrators seven possible “pain points” in the “Introduction to Race and Ethnicity” course.
For example, she asked, “Does any discussion of white privilege violate policy, even if the instructor is explicit that the goal of discussing privilege is not to assign guilt or blame, or to tell any individual student that they are an ‘oppressor’?” Would a reading that describes a privilege walk “violate policy even if the reading is criticizing that approach?” (Glanville did not return a request for comment from
The Chronicle.)
Administrators didn’t have ready answers to Glanville’s questions. Their guidance came in the form of complicated flowcharts and matrices, which were themselves based on murky instructions from the system. “We are sort of stuck here, since the guidance we received is both overly wordy and unclear,” one associate dean acknowledged.
That ambiguity, combined with the compressed timeline for making changes, sent the college into a tailspin. “Please help me understand whether it is likely that my two courses violate system policy and, thus, should be canceled — despite the fact that they are both degree requirements?” one faculty member implored.
A small group of College of Arts and Sciences administrators were tasked with reviewing courses to determine whether they complied with the revised policy. In back-and-forth exchanges with college deans, faculty members questioned how many core courses, and in which departments, needed to be assessed for compliance.
Weeks before the start of the spring semester, the head of the English department asked if a faculty member must seek an exemption for a course that includes a book that “does contain some parts about the author’s identity as a lesbian.”
In response, Cynthia Werner, an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, said that as long as the faculty member used the book to cover topics not related to sexual orientation: “I personally think that it is okay to keep the book in the course.”
In other instances, clarification on what was allowed was elusive.
Claire Katz, an associate provost, asked Werner and Simon North, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, how they were advising faculty members to respond when students raised questions about gender. “Are we telling faculty that they simply can’t have these discussions in class?” Katz asked.
“There are too many different factors to provide a single answer to your question about responding to a student question during a class discussion,” Werner replied. “Depends on topic prior to the question, existence of course exception approval, how the question is framed (including the tone).”
Emails also reveal confusion among professors about who was making the decisions on potential policy violations — regents or college-level administrators?
On December 23, days after the board instated the policy, Ira Dworkin, an associate professor of English, wrote to North that the scrutiny into courses that touched on race and gender went beyond the policy’s intended target: race and gender
ideology. The board rule defines gender ideology as teaching that self-assigned gender identity should “replace the biological sex” and race ideology as “a concept that attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity” or “accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy.” He argued that North’s interpretation of the policy weakened humanities courses.
cont.
