A national advocacy group for university professors has launched an inquiry committee to investigate Texas colleges they say have enabled attacks on academic freedom.
The American Association of University Professors counts the University of North Texas among the state’s public higher education institutions that are being undermined by political interests.
Jennifer Ruth, a member of the AAUP committee on academic freedom and tenure, said she believes the organization “owes it to our colleagues in Texas” to investigate shrinking academic freedom. She said the group also owes it to philosopher and AAUP “founding father” John Dewey to advocate for academic freedom.
Dewey “would turn over in his grave if he learned that Plato was being censored, as happened recently at Texas A&M.”
“He believed, and we believe, that democracy requires the professionalization of knowledge. Not its politicization,” Ruth said.
Ruth said attacks on academic freedom have come in a number of ways, laid out by Texas Senate Bill 37. She said they are happening through violations of:
- Academic freedom
- Faculty freedom
- Faculty research, teaching and public expression
- Faculty participation in major academic decisions
- Tenure protection against dismissal for political reasons
- Shared governance between boards of regents, administrators and faculty senates
“All of these things are being violated and radically undermined,” Ruth said. “According to reports from UNT, Texas A&M and Texas Tech ... course review, curriculum review, is leading to the censorship of concepts.”
Ruth said legislators in Texas wrote SB 17, a 2023 bill that bans offices, trainings, programs and initiatives related to race, gender, sexual orientation or ability, in such a way that curriculum and research wouldn’t be impacted. Chapters of AAUP said they didn’t believe teaching and research would be spared, and worried about what the state might do next.
“Sure looks like that was the case,” Ruth said.
Ruth said Texas faculty have reported their concerns, with one professor saying “we live in fear of using the wrong word.”
The investigation will include surveys and conversations with faculty, staff and students. Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said “the issues in Texas have been piling up” and that firings and closures of academic programs prompted the investigation.
“The purpose of this investigation is straightforward,” Wolfson said. “To document, analyze and evaluate what appear to be serious abridgments of academic freedom and shared governance across public Texas colleges and universities.”
In addition to studying Texas schools’ overcompliance with SB 37, which gave governing boards more control over curriculum and limits faculty senates, the committee will examine other state actions, including “growing political control over curriculum and teaching, restrictions on faculty governance, the closure of academic programs,” and increased governing board intervention into academic affairs, Wolfson said.
SB 37 was authored by former state Sen. Brandon Creighton and went into effect in September. Creighton is now the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System.
“We’re not simply looking at isolated actions taken by individual institutions, though there are those; we are examining also whether state government is increasingly working through institutions to reshape the mission, governance and intellectual life of public higher ed,” Wolfson said.
Rana Jaleel, the chair of AAUP’s committee on academic freedom and tenure, and Ruth said they expect the investigation to reveal adverse affects on Tier 1 research as a result of overcompliance with anti-DEI laws.
Hank Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay, and the former chair of the AAUP committee on academic freedom and tenure, said it’s likely scientific research is being affected.
“Given the national atmosphere, given the attacks on science that have been coming from the same political forces in the national government and other state governments that we’re seeing, I would be incredibly surprised if we did not uncover scientists of the traditional sort — physicists, biologists, climate scientists, geneticists — who feel that, in one way or another, not only their teaching and expression as citizens, but their fundamental research is being deeply affected in a negative way, not only by the federal government, but the Texas state government,” Reichman said.
Wolfson said it will take time to confirm the outcomes, but AAUP leaders believe that researchers who write and win large grants will avoid Texas or leave the state because of the interventions.
“We think it’s safe to assume that the best and brightest will not choose Texas, and will leave Texas,” Wolfson said.
The committee will focus on the experiences of faculty, staff and students at Texas universities. Wolfson said restrictions on academic freedom have made their way to Prairie View A&M University and Texas Southern University, the state’s two public historically Black universities, and that the committee will talk with faculty, staff and students there, too.
Before commencement this year, at least three public Texas universities saw students organizing to stage mock funerals for academic freedom — Texas Tech, the University of Texas at Austin and UNT. In March, a strategic campaign specialist for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said Texas universities have become hot spots of censorship, and described the removal of art from campus spaces as part of ”an alarming trend.”
Jaleel said the investigation is meant to provide the public — the taxpayers who support state universities — “a holistic picture of what’s at stake when teaching and research are no longer driven by curiosity and the desire to pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but whose outcomes may well instead be constrained — if not predetermined — by the government.”
The committee investigating Texas schools will include members outside of Texas, Reichman said, and the committee will invite participation from administrators to get as broad of a picture as possible.
Wolfson said Texas lawmakers followed their peers in statehouses in Florida and North Carolina when they marshaled their power to restrict public universities, insisting they needed to act against what they called indoctrination.
“We also believe this will serve as a warning to the nation,” he said. “What happens in Texas does not stay in Texas. The policies being implemented there are increasingly being proposed and replicated elsewhere across the nation.”
The committee hopes to complete the inquiry in the fall and submit their findings prior to November, but there isn’t a formal completion date.
LUCINDA BREEDING-GONZALES can be reached at 940-566-6877 and cbreeding@dentonrc.com.
For more than 120 years, the Denton Record-Chronicle has been Denton County’s source for locally produced, fact-based journalism. Your support through a tax-deductible donation or low-cost subscription is vital to our ability to deliver credible, relevant, unique coverage of our community.
