\n<\/p>\n
A Texas A&M University faculty council determined in late September that Melissa McCoul, an instructor fired for teaching about gender identity in a children\u2019s literature class, had her academic freedom violated and that former president Mark Welsh flouted proper termination processes when he fired her, The <\/em>Texas Tribune<\/em> reported Monday.<\/p>\n McCoul was dismissed in September after a video went viral, showing a student confronting her in class and claiming the professor\u2019s gender identity lesson was illegal. McCoul is actively appealing her termination. The documented justification for her dismissal was that McCoul\u2019s course content and material did not match the description in the course catalog, but the faculty council said this was false.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe content of the course was the reason for the dismissal and not the stated reason: failure of academic responsibility,\u201d the council wrote in its report. \u201cGiven the timeline of dismissal, the political pressure brought to bear, and statements by Regents that the course content was illegal, President Welsh\u2019s assertion that the firing was for failure of academic responsibility appears pretextual.\u201d<\/p>\n In an Oct. 2 memo obtained by the Tribune<\/em>, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs Blanca Lupiani rejected the council\u2019s conclusions and said the council acted outside its charge to review matters that were \u201clargely unrelated to academic freedom.\u201d The complaint about McCoul was never assigned to the council, Lupiani said in the memo.\u00a0<\/p>\n University rules require the department head to write charges for dismissal, seek approval from the dean and give the faculty member a notice of intent to dismiss with five business days to respond, but Welsh requested McCoul\u2019s dismissal on Sept. 9 \u201ceffective immediately,\u201d the Tribune <\/em>reported.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Texas A&M University faculty council determined in late September that Melissa McCoul, an instructor fired for teaching about gender identity in a children\u2019s literature class, had her academic freedom violated and that former president Mark Welsh flouted proper termination processes when he fired her, The Texas Tribune reported Monday. McCoul was dismissed in September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33302,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[4106,6883,3350,189,5874,19096,1010,7829],"class_list":{"0":"post-33301","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-academic","9":"tag-dismissed","10":"tag-faculty","11":"tag-finds","12":"tag-freedom","13":"tag-profs","14":"tag-texas","15":"tag-violated"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33301\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}