While the Texas Tech Board Met, Students Attended a Funeral

Two black draft horses pulled a hearse across the Texas Tech University campus Thursday, driven by a solemn-faced coachman dressed in black. The hearse carried no coffin or body, just books. Titles included The Farewell Symphony by Edmund White, Reports From the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist by Larry Kramer and The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies by Vito Russo—books that are now banned, censored or threatened at Texas Tech after the system chancellor handed down sweeping policies that restrict content related to gender and sexuality.

Students Engaged in Advancing Texas

In the center of the hearse sat a scarlet urn, which “represented the spirit of Texas Tech,” said Sumya Paruchuri, development director at Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a statewide student-run organization that aims to get students involved in education policymaking.

“We had faculty, students, alumni and community members bring books that were meaningful to them, that they taught, that they were taught with, and they placed them in the carriage as a statement,” said Paruchuri.

Funeral services began at 8 a.m. Thursday outside the system Board of Regents meeting. One student, Aaron Texidor, was approved by the board chair to speak during the public comment portion.

“I’ve learned from the greatest professors here, who know me by name. When you get that connection with someone, you start to hear their story. Yet, the story that I’ve been hearing—specifically in the psychology and education departments—has been a story of fear,” Texidor said before the board. “We cannot with one hand say we support education and with the other cover the mouths of our professors.”

Board chair Cody Campbell thanked Texidor for his comments but did not otherwise respond to what he said. Texas Tech spokespeople did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment on the funeral.

After the open session of the meeting ended, students held a memorial service outside during which students and faculty members gave eulogies for various “deaths” at the university, including for the women’s and gender studies program and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The funeral procession began after that, and the 50-some people who gathered for the event walked for about an hour, Paruchuri said.

Students Engaged in Advancing Texas.

The funeral—half performance art, half protest—was accompanied by an art piece from ODEE Friðriksson, a fine arts Ph.D. student at Texas Tech and “culture jamming” artist from Iceland. Friðriksson—known simply as ODEE—is best known for “We’re Sorry,” a conceptual artwork that included an imitation website for the real-life Icelandic fishing company Samherji, on which Friðriksson, acting as Samherji, apologized to the Namibian people for the 2023 Fishrot Files scandal.

At Texas Tech, Friðriksson created “Death of Academic Freedom” by wrapping the university’s iconic Will Rogers and Soapsuds statue in strips of black crepe paper. Traditionally, the statue is wrapped in red crepe before every home football game, but it has been wrapped in black before to mourn national tragedies. Friðriksson said that, as far as he could determine, the last time the statue had been sheathed in black was to mark the 10-year anniversary of Sept. 11.

“I came here to be in the land of the free and the land of the First Amendment. I was quite looking forward to starting at Texas Tech and exploring my academic freedom and being able to do my research and work,” Friðriksson told Inside Higher Ed. Part of the reason Texas Tech admitted him was because of his previous protest artwork, he explained.

“When you apply for the school, you present all the work that you’ve done before. I was accepted here … and they were impressed by what I’d done before. So I didn’t really expect that they would start to impose all these censorships and start to limit academic freedom,” he said.

Five days ago, Friðriksson created another art piece on campus. This one was titled “Bowie at Texas Tech” and consisted of a video of David Bowie projected onto the red granite Texas Tech seal. He said he designed it in response to a meeting where he, along with other teaching assistants and professors, were told more about what they couldn’t teach under the new content restrictions. Bowie is not allowed, and neither is Elsa, the animated ice queen in Disney’s Frozen franchise who is widely rumored to be a lesbian, Friðriksson said he learned at the meeting.

“When I saw David Bowie on the [seal], I just felt goose bumps. I felt really emotional seeing him, thinking about him being restricted, about not being able to teach about David Bowie. He was a wonderful human being and such an inspiration for mankind in general,” he said. “It’s not an angry resistance. It’s more of a mourning.”