Censorship Is Bigger in Texas

In recent months, Texas universities have inflicted some of the worst repression of academic freedom we’ve ever witnessed at American colleges, with gag orders, speaker bans and arbitrary firings of dissenting faculty.

Texas A&M limited teaching about race and gender, even banning Plato from a class. They fired a professor at the command of the governor. Texas State fired a professor for giving a speech over zoom to the Revolutionary Socialism conference. Texas Tech prohibited class discussions about trans identity and banned a speaker who supports abortion rights. The state launched a portal for complaints about universities that allow free speech.

Now, the University of Texas is getting the opportunity to add its ugly float to this parade of censorship. This week, University of Texas regents are expected to vote on radical changes to the university’s academic freedom policy to suppress free expression in the classroom with its new “University of Texas System Expectations of Academic Integrity and Standards for Teaching Controversial Topics.”

One terrible provision for the University of Texas declares, “Instructors must not attempt to coerce, indoctrinate, harass, or belittle students, especially in addressing controversial subjects.”

If a law professor cold-calls on students, that’s coercion—and it’s entirely appropriate, even when the legal issue is controversial. If a professor criticizes what a student says, someone could think that’s belittling—even though criticism is an essential component of a good education. And “indoctrinate” is one of the most ill-defined, vague concepts around. It can mean almost anything anyone wants it to mean—and plenty of conservatives imagine that entire fields of study are inherently guilty of “indoctrination” and the mere utterance of a “divisive concept” is proof of indoctrination.

The language of this new policy is especially dangerous because it’s not a moral guide for regents to advise professors about their proper roles; it says “instructors must not” rather than “should not,” putting it in the realm of repression and control. And even if no students complained about actually being indoctrinated or belittled, even the “attempt to coerce” (whatever that means in this policy’s undefined terms) is a violation that can get you fired. Instead of calling for faculty to have their teaching judged by experts according to their overall quality, the regents are imposing a highly restrictive set of broad political bans on how professors teach. Making professors scared to say what they really think is an explicit goal of these Texas censors.

The policy gets worse in its regulation of class content: “In designing course syllabi, readings, and assignments, instructors must … exclude unrelated controversial or contested matters, clearly disclose in the syllabus the topics to be covered, adhere faithfully to the contents of the syllabus in teaching the course, and avoid introducing undisclosed material that is not clearly relevant and grounded in the topic of that course.”

Once again, the word “must” imposes severe and irrational limits on academic freedom. If an issue is deemed “contested” (what isn’t?) and perceived by someone as “unrelated” to the course, the professor will be found guilty even if they encourage a wide diversity of viewpoints. If an instructor adapts the syllabus to respond to the requests and needs of the students, that professor can be automatically found guilty for even the slightest change for failing to “adhere faithfully” to the syllabus, which the regents apparently think must be a sacred text that can never change.

And the syllabus is so sacred that the purity of a class must never be sullied with any “undisclosed material” if it could be deemed “not clearly relevant.” A political science professor who tries to help students connect current events to the theories presented in the class must now fear every word they utter. The regents clearly have little experience with teaching; a syllabus is a bare-bones outline of what gets covered in a class, not a comprehensive description of all the material that could be discussed in a class.

There’s a catch-22 here as well. If a student brings up an issue that might be “not clearly relevant” to a course, the professor is obligated to shut down the discussion or risk violating the “undisclosed material” standard. But in doing so, the professor will be violating the standard that prohibits any attempt to “coerce” or silence students. It will be safer in Texas never to allow any discussions and simply read from an approved textbook. This is a disaster for both good pedagogy and freedom of expression.

It’s no surprise that the Texas regents want to compel professors to be intellectual cowards, scared to utter an “unrelated” word in their classes. That’s because the regents are themselves cowards, afraid to stand up for principles of free expression against the politicians in Texas who want to silence dissent. This new regulation is their obedient submission to those Republican censors.

The 1940 AAUP Declaration of Principles is the most famous statement about academic freedom, and many opponents of controversial speech cite this: “Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.” Even though this declaration includes the crucial “should” (rather than the Texas “must”), it still marks an awful denigration of controversy in teaching.

But it’s important to understand that the 1940 declaration was not a pure statement of AAUP principles; it was a compromise brokered with its co-signer, the administrators represented by the Association of American Colleges (now the American Association of Colleges and Universities). In return for colleges recognizing the fundamental importance of academic freedom and its bulwark, tenure, the AAUP allowed some dubious ideas (such as the warning against “controversial matter”) to be added on a voluntary basis.

The error of this decision became apparent during the McCarthy era, when censorship of left-wing professors with controversial ideas was common. As a result, in 1970 the AAC&U and the AAUP agreed to amend the 1940 declaration to remove any implicit ban on controversial material: “The intent of this statement is not to discourage what is ‘controversial.’ Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.” This voluntary ethical standard against “persistent intruding material which has no relation to their subject” has been the fundamental doctrine agreed to by both administrators and professors for more than a half century. And this core academic standard is radically different from Texas’s proposed mandatory ban on anything “not clearly related” to the class topic, which is a terrible act of repression.

Texas officials apparently think Texas students are stupid snowflakes who must be protected from hearing controversial ideas. This is not just an insult to every college student in Texas, it’s also a severe threat to their freedom to learn. While pretending to protect students from censorship, these new rules will actually silence them. When professors aren’t allowed to say anything controversial, students won’t have the opportunity to express their own ideas.

Higher education organizations must speak out forcefully in defense of controversial ideas. Colleges that use the outmoded 1940 language against “controversial” classroom speech need to show their support for academic freedom by amending their policies to reflect the current 1970 position. And the regents of the University of Texas must show the courage to reject the false doctrines of censors who wish to ban controversial ideas from our colleges.