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Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson is leaving the university after administrators told him in January that he couldn’t teach Plato’s Symposium in his philosophy class; they said the ancient Greek philosopher’s work violated the system’s restrictions on gender and sexuality content. Peterson’s colleague Linda Radzik, a philosophy professor and associate department head, is jumping ship with similar concerns about academic freedom. Lucy Schiller, a nonfiction writing professor at Texas Tech University, also has plans to leave her job.
They are just a few of the faculty members giving up their jobs at Texas public institutions as the systems deploy escalating censorship policies that restrict or explicitly ban any instruction, writing, research or discussion on gender identity and sexual orientation. Earlier this month, Texas Tech chancellor Brandon Creighton announced plans to close all gender and sexuality programs across the system and prohibit graduate students from researching the topics. Texas A&M similarly closed its women’s and gender studies program in January. The University of Texas ordered faculty in February to refrain from teaching ill-defined “controversial” topics in class. Nearly all Texas public university systems have conducted some kind of course-review process that screens instructional materials for gender and sexuality content.
Texas Tech faculty are “close to the brink,” Schiller said. “It’s a nightmare … Tears are commonplace. I have a colleague who told me recently that going to campus felt like attending a wake.”
Schiller will depart this summer for Grinnell College—her undergraduate alma mater. She spoke to Inside Higher Ed on Friday while house-hunting in Iowa. Currently in her third year on the tenure track at Texas Tech, she was planning to go up for early tenure. Her job hunt started as market research to help her determine what kind of salary and benefits she should ask for with her tenure award. When Creighton sent out his Dec. 1 memo—the first step of the system’s effort to police gender and sexuality content—Schiller’s casual search for counteroffers turned into a wholehearted job hunt.
“Texas Tech increasingly felt hostile to the types of teaching that I wanted to do, and also to my own work,” Schiller said. “I was worried that these policies would eventually reach into my research and my writing.”
Texas Tech’s policies led Jacob Bell to remove Romeo and Juliet from his syllabus.
Other faculty have expressed similar concerns. Creighton’s April memo contained a carve-out for current faculty research, but noted that the system will “prioritize [faculty] recruitment in alignment with this memorandum,” suggesting that faculty research may not be exempted forever. Given the pace at which the system has moved so far to control curriculum, Jacob Bell, a history professor who is also leaving Texas Tech this summer, said he wouldn’t be surprised if the chancellor sent a memo soon that expands the censorship policies to faculty research.
Beyond state legislators and other Republican politicians, it’s unclear who, if anyone, is supporting these policies, Bell said.
“I have yet to meet anyone—from the highest levels in the administration to the [youngest] students that I know—that is OK with this. Students are deeply, deeply upset about this,” Bell said. “I’ve had members of the Turning Point USA chapter here at Texas Tech express complete dissatisfaction that this is happening.”
Bell, who teaches medieval history, is headed to the City University of New York, where he will “be teaching the exact same thing, but unredacted.” In order to keep his spring classes from getting held up in an opaque, monthslong course-review process, Bell removed Romeo and Juliet from his syllabus because “in Act III, Romeo and Juliet have sex, and that falls under this very broadly defined sexuality [topics ban].” He also didn’t teach about Joan of Arc this semester.
“She’s not a terribly controversial figure these days—she was in the 14th century—but that was part of my lectures that had to be removed” because her story is so intertwined with gender identity, he said.
Like Schiller, Bell is also in his third year on the tenure track at Texas Tech, and his clock will restart at CUNY.
Bluer Pastures Ahead
Radzik, who has spent nearly 30 years at Texas A&M, accepted an appointment at Binghamton University in New York starting in September. Her effort to leave the university began after former president Mark Welsh was pressured to resign following state Republicans’ outrage that nonbinary and transgender identities were discussed in a class on children’s literature.
“I think that was the wrong decision. I think he was very good for the university, and I think he really understood academic values and the academic mission. When they pushed him out, that was a very bad sign,” Radzik said. “Then, when the censorship policy came through, that was the last straw.”
At Binghamton, a public university in a solidly blue state, Radzik said she expects to feel “a lot safer.” The job is also a better fit for her research and teaching interests, she explained. Schiller’s new home, Grinnell, is in a red state, but she said she feels more comfortable at a private institution that isn’t subject to the whims of state politicians.
“It’s a bittersweet change in a lot of ways,” Schiller said. “I feel really lucky to have had this job [at Texas Tech]. It was a total dream job for me. Entering my third year, I did not plan on leaving Lubbock.”
Peterson is taking his Plato lessons to Southern Methodist University. Though it’s still in Texas, like Grinnell, it’s private, and state legislators cannot “micromanage” the curriculum, he said.
“No other serious research university maintains a policy on ‘prohibited instruction,’” Peterson wrote in his resignation letter. “I admire the many federal prosecutors across the country who have chosen to resign rather than carry out illegal or immoral orders. To my knowledge, no department head, dean, or other administrator at Texas A&M has taken any meaningful action to defend academic freedom.”
Private colleges in red states are “more insulated, but they are not bulletproof,” said Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware. She used to work at Southern Methodist before leaving Texas during the COVID-19 pandemic, citing concerns about how the university caved to the State Legislature on pandemic safety.
Bell also took Joan of Arc out of his syllabus this semester.
She has also been tracking the political changes in the state for some time, and does not find the censorship policies surprising at all.
“I have been very concerned about the direction of Texas universities for a significant period of time,” she said. “But it has accelerated at a rate that I think a lot of people that work at those institutions did not expect.”
On top of Peterson’s and Radzik’s departures, the Texas A&M philosophy department also lost an incoming faculty member in Elek Lane, a current postdoc at the University of Vienna who in September withdrew his acceptance of a faculty job. His research focuses heavily on the social significance of names, which are inextricably tied to gender, he said, and he worried about what might happen to his work if he were to keep his appointment at Texas A&M. That said, he hasn’t ruled out the whole state.
“I would just have to be sure that I would have the kind of basic, standard academic discretion over course content that professors have traditionally enjoyed, and obviously it has to include the ability to discuss LGBTQ+ topics and topics related to race,” Lane said.
Whether they’re staying in the state or not, all of the professors departing Texas’s public institutions expressed concern for their students. At Texas Tech, Schiller said, her graduate students are “really freaking out.” Many are considering transferring to other Ph.D. programs.
“Many of them, if not all of them, have expressed to me that they worry about the value of their degree from Texas Tech given the fact that Texas Tech is making national headlines at this point for censorship,” she said.
But it’s students, not faculty, who will be most harmed by these censorship policies, Bell said.
“I’m lucky enough that I was able to get another job. But the students here—people in West Texas, especially the Texas Tech University system—are the ones who are going to bear the thrust of this. It’s not going to fall on anyone making this decision. It’s going to fall on 18-year-olds who are not getting the same education they were able to get this time last year.”
(This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Linda Radzik’s name.)
