UT Policy Asks Faculty to Avoid “Controversial” Topics

The University of Texas system board approved a policy Thursday that asks faculty members to “eschew topics and controversies that are not germane” to their classes. Faculty said the new standards are vague and will, by design, encourage self-censorship that will ultimately cheapen education at one of the largest university systems in the country.

Following a public comment period during which all 10 speakers, including Democratic state representative Donna Howard, criticized the policy, the nine-member Board of Regents unanimously passed it without discussion during its regularly scheduled meeting.

“Our Regents’ Rules affirm the freedom of our faculty to teach his or her subject in the classroom. However, that freedom comes with many responsibilities that faculty must adhere to in order to preserve academic integrity, ensure our students’ rights are protected and comply with state and federal directives,” board chair Kevin Eltife said about the “University of Texas System Expectations of Academic Integrity and Standards for Teaching Controversial Topics” policy Thursday. “An institution’s offerings in its general education core curriculum must include balanced and broad-based courses that allow students appropriate options to meet the general education requirements without a requirement to study unnecessary controversial subjects.”

The policy enshrines four teaching responsibilities that ask faculty to foster “cultures of trust” in their classrooms, to fairly present discussion and evidence on “disputed matters and unsettled issues,” and to equip students with critical thinking skills that allow them to come to their own conclusions about the material. The last standard asks that faculty “eschew topics and controversies that are not germane to the course.”

During the public comment period, few speakers took issue with the policy’s broad goals. Mostly they expressed concern about the policy’s vagueness; the terms “disputed matters,” “unsettled issues,” “controversies” and “germane” are not defined, and it’s unclear who—if anyone—will define them.

“When [the terms] aren’t defined, there are two things that are going to happen. First, faculty are going to self-censor and take out many things from their classroom teaching,” Ravi Prakash, a computer science professor and president of the University of Texas at Dallas AAUP chapter, told Inside Higher Ed. “And second, when students ask questions, faculty might say, ‘I don’t want to go there because it could get me into trouble.’”

A Trend Toward Censorship

The University of Texas system is the third public system in the state to implement a rule dictating course subject matter. In December, the Texas Tech University system began asking professors for information about whether their course “advocates for or promotes” specific race, gender or sexual identities, and faculty have reported resulting course cancellations. In November, the Texas A&M University system board adopted a policy that requires presidential approval for courses that “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity.” As a result of the ensuing course review, material ranging from LGBTQ+-focused literature to popular works by Plato have been censored and several classes related to gender, race and sexuality have been canceled.

“In designing course syllabi, readings, and assignments, instructors must carefully consider the topics to be covered to meet the standards of the course, 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,” the new UT system policy says. “When a course includes controversial and contested issues, instructors shall ensure a broad and balanced approach to the discussion and teaching of these issues.”

Spokespeople for the University of Texas at Austin and UT Dallas did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about implementation of the policy, including how it might influence the every-five-year general curriculum reviews mandated by Texas Senate Bill 37. As of Thursday afternoon, faculty members at both institutions said they hadn’t heard anything from administrators about the policy.

Because controversy is so subjective, the rules will ultimately water down course content in many disciplines, Prakash said. He gave an example from his internet and public policy class: Over the past couple of years, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton has taken legal action against several pornography websites that do not require age verification. “Unless they impose age verification mechanisms, [Paxton said] he will sue them and seek damages. In response, they’ve made their content unavailable in the state of Texas,” Prakash said. His students’ opinions on the matter varied. Some said they didn’t think the government should be involved in regulating internet pornography; others said, “‘Well, pornography is the product of and results in the exploitation of women, children and other groups, so this restriction by the attorney general is a good thing,’” Prakash said. “And then another group of people were horrified. They thought, ‘I thought we were going to learn about the internet, and here we are talking about pornography.’”

While it might not be a technical lesson about the internet, it’s a “very interesting issue in the intersection of technology and public policy,” he said. “If you take all of these things out, it dumbs down their education.”

Karma Chávez, a professor of Mexican American and Latina/o studies at UT Austin and president of the AAUP chapter there, said the policy language shows striking—and concerning—similarities to that in President Donald Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” The University of Texas at Austin never publicly signed the compact, yet its provisions are “infiltrating the way policy is getting made at the system level,” she said.

For example, the new board standards state that “instructors must not attempt to coerce, indoctrinate, harass, or belittle students, especially in addressing controversial subjects and areas where people of good faith can hold differing convictions.” This passage is similar to a line about conservative students in the compact, Chávez said, which reads, “Signatories commit themselves to revising governance structures as necessary to create such an environment, including but not limited to transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

“I think that we’re seeing the slow implementation of the compact, even if it was unpopular to sign it,” she said.

Who Defines Controversy?

Chávez also said she believes the policy is meant to target ethnic and gender studies faculty. Just last week, UT Austin announced that it is consolidating its gender and ethnic studies departments into one department. The policy does not call out gender or sexuality specifically, but Eltife alluded to gender in his remarks.

“I am directing [UT system] Chancellor Zerwas and [Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Archie] Holmes to continue working with our institutions to ensure compliance with this item as well as all federal and state directives related to gender identity,” Eltife said.

The consequences of the board policy will carry beyond gender and ethnic studies disciplines, Chávez added. At the board meeting Thursday, UT Austin physics professor Peter Onyisi highlighted the policy’s potential ramifications in the sciences.

“This document repeatedly invokes the words ‘controversial’ and ‘contested’ but does not define them. It is uncontroversial and uncontested among physicists, for example, but not the general public, that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere warms the Earth, and that evolution is compatible with the second law of thermodynamics,” he told the regents. “Are we going to be expected to teach the controversy regarding fundamental principles of science? If the answer is no, then which controversies are being referred to in this document? Which office will decide the range of opinions that can be held in good faith, as defined by this document?”

Brian Evans, president of the Texas conference of the American Association of University Professors, said he is also particularly concerned about the final paragraph of the policy, which states in part, “In support of these efforts, U.T. institutions must take steps to build appropriate breadth and balance in the faculty body and the curriculum so that students have access to a variety of viewpoints and perspectives and are not, as a practical matter, only exposed to a single viewpoint or perspective.”

This clause may prompt administrators to make hiring and firing decisions based on ideological views, he said.

“When they force these political directives onto administrators, hiring is no longer based on quality of past work or the ability of our university to compete with other programs for premier faculty and the grants they often bring with them,” Evans said.