Texas A&M professors and union sue over ban on teaching pro-LGBTQ+ material

Four A&M professors and their union call the new rules viewpoint discrimination and overly vague censorship.HOUSTON (CN) — Four Texas A&M University professors have filed a First Amendment lawsuit claiming censorship for teaching about LGBTQ+ material.The four professors, joined by the American Association of University Professors union and represented by attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union, filed the suit in the Southern District of Texas late Monday to block a university policy barring from teaching anything that would “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity,” according to the language adopted by the A&M Board of Regents in November 2025.Texas A&M adopted that policy in response to a major wave of right-wing backlash that started this past September. On Sept. 8, Texas state Representative Brian Harrison shared a video on X that a student had secretly recorded of her English professor’s lecture during a summer course several weeks before. The student interrupted the professor’s lecture on the novel “Jude Saves the World,” which features a young nonbinary protagonist, to claim that the subject matter might violate some of President Donald Trump’s executive orders. The professor canceled the rest of the course, but the university did not take any action at the time.But Harrison’s post went viral in the right-wing circles of the internet. Within hours, figures across conservative media and the Republican Party, up to and including Governor Greg Abbott, not only called for Texas A&M’s then-president Mark A. Welsh to fire the professor and the head of the whole English department, but also pushed Welsh to alter university policy.Welsh caved to the demands the same day, removing the English professor, the head of the English department and the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Less than two weeks later, Welsh resigned as university president.In November, the A&M Board of Regents unanimously amended the university’s Civil Rights and Compliance section to read: “No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO.” They also required professors to submit their course syllabi and materials for review.Then in a January 2026, the board shifted the language from preventing professors from advocating those topics to saying they “must not teach or advocate race ideology or gender ideology, sexual orientation or gender identity.”The new policy imposes an overly broad and vague form of censorship on their teaching and courses, the professors say in their lawsuit, because it bans specific viewpoints and allows university officials to censor courses and professors arbitrarily.“The censorship policy restricts what instructors at one of the nation’s largest public university systems can teach, barring instructors from ‘advocacy’ of ‘race or gender ideology,’ and topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity, but allowing criticism or denigration of those viewpoints — all while providing no guidance as to what many of those terms mean or what faculty may or may not do or say under the censorship policy,” the professors say in their complaint.The professors also note the policy’s disparities. “Because it forbids ‘race ideology’ and ‘gender ideology,’ as those terms are loosely defined, an instructor may teach that a person’s sex and gender are the same, but not that they may differ; may present the case that systemic racism does not exist or is a sham, but not present the case that it does exist or how it impacts social groups, even to explain the diverging viewpoints to students," they say in the complaint. “And, in practice, the censorship policy’s prohibition on teaching topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity allows a professor to teach about heterosexual and cisgender relationships and families, but not their same-sex or transgender counterparts.”Since the policy has been implemented, the plaintiffs and other professors have had to cancel several courses for potential violations of the policy. Three courses in the College of Arts and Sciences were canceled outright for the fall 2026 semester, while seven others were censored under “mitigation” required by the board before they were allowed to continue.One of the plaintiff professors who faced that “mitigation” for a literature course was allowed to show the movie “Barbie,” which has cisgender and heterosexual protagonists and themes, but was blocked from showing the film “Moonlight,” a Best Picture-winning film depicting a Black man in Miami coming to terms with his homosexuality.A history professor was forced to remove “The Gay Manifesto,” written in 1970 by gay activist Carl Wittman, from one of his U.S. history courses. He can, however, teach the essay “What’s Wrong with Equal Rights for Women?” by Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative activist known for her anti-gay stances in the 1970s.The professors also claim the policy is vague, lacking specific definitions of terms like “advocate” or “gender ideology," leaving room for university officials to subjectively enforce the policy so the professors are afraid to teach that material in the way they want.“This policy directly harms Black, brown, LGBTQIA+, and all other Texans who have historically been discriminated against by subjecting discussion of their rights, identities, and indeed very existence to heavy-handed censorship," ACLU Foundation of Texas staff attorney Chloe Kempf said in a statement, “What’s more, it undermines all Texans’ First Amendment rights. If public officials can abuse their power to ban these topics and perspectives today, there’s nothing stopping them from targeting other subjects and points of view, including your own, down the line.”The professors’ attorney Jamie A. Aycock with Yetter Coleman said the lawsuit underscores “the bedrock First Amendment principle that America is strengthened by and depends upon open public debate, even on the most controversial topics. Nowhere is this more important than in our public academic institutions, which are charged with developing and teaching our future leaders to think critically and broadly about pressing issues affecting society.”The Texas A&M Board of Regents did not respond to a request for comment by press time.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads