Texas Tech University System chancellor Brandon Creighton ordered campuses to phase out academic programs “centered on” sexual orientation and gender identity, a memo that also directs limits on course materials, graduate research topics, and future faculty hiring across the five-university system.
Creighton’s guidance, sent to provosts, sets a deadline of June 15 for identifying “targeted programs.” The memo calls for campuses to freeze admissions and halt students from declaring majors tied to the phased-out programs, while allowing students already enrolled to complete their degrees.
The memo also states that graduate theses and dissertations may center on gender identity and sexual orientation only as a temporary exception for students already enrolled, and that future faculty hiring will “prioritize recruitment in alignment with this memorandum.” In the same guidance, Creighton and the system require faculty to recognize only “two human sexes,” and to avoid teaching gender identity “as a spectrum” or more than two genders “as fact.”
University faculty and students said the policy could affect more than degree programs, including how instructors handle classroom content and how research gets proposed. Jen Shelton, an associate professor of English at Texas Tech who has taught there for 25 years, said the provost’s office had repeatedly assured faculty that their research would not be affected and called the move a “betrayal.” She told The Texas Tribune that “even the provost did not expect it to look like this,” noting that people from the provost’s office had been telling faculty, “Don’t worry. This part is all going to be fine.”
The memo defines how classroom instruction should handle the topics. It says course content and instruction can not be “centered on” sexual orientation or gender identity, and it provides a definition for “centered on” as when those topics are the primary subject, main theoretical framework, central narrative, or driving pedagogical purpose. It also defines “includes” as when sexual orientation and gender identity appear but only as secondary background context, demographic data points, or minor components of a broader academic subject.
Shelton and other faculty concerns also intersect with the memo’s handling of instructional materials. The guidance says that if an industry-standard textbook contains relevant content, faculty do not have to redact it, but they cannot highlight the material, test students on it, or spend class time focusing on it. The memo provides some exceptions for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses, including analysis of active public policy and legal disputes, historical subjects where sexual orientation or gender identity is inseparable from the topic, datasets that include those variables, and some clinical, counseling or psychology instruction.
In addition to course restrictions, the guidance addresses who may continue research. The memo says “currently employed faculty members may continue to research and publish topics of their choosing,” but future faculty recruitment and hiring should follow the priorities laid out in the memorandum. Paul Ingram, an associate professor of psychological sciences at Texas Tech, said students had been contacting him and told the story of graduate students reconsidering their plans, including one who he said already dropped out and another graduate student who he said was writing a dissertation on gender but could not propose it again under the new policy.
Legal and constitutional questions raised by civil rights advocates also surfaced in public reaction to the memo. Antonio Ingram, a senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said the memo appears to target perspectives on gender identity and sexual orientation for political reasons rather than academic ones, and he said it raises constitutional concerns because public universities cannot discriminate based on viewpoint. Ingram also questioned parts of the memo that require limits on how certain ideas are taught as “absolute truth,” arguing that the memo does not define “absolute truth,” which he said could deter teaching about systemic racism, reparations, and the history of enslavement.
Creighton, in a statement, said he and the system’s regents are focused on ensuring academic programs are “rigorous, relevant, and produce degrees of value,” and he said that support comes alongside “unwavering support for the First Amendment and the open exchange of ideas that define a public university.” He said Texas Tech would continue to be a “national leader” on both fronts.
The memo comes after earlier Texas Tech efforts to submit course content touching on race, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation for review. In December, Creighton ordered faculty to forward such course material for regents’ review if campus leaders wanted to keep it in the course and it was not required for professional licensure, certification or patient care. In public remarks at a Texas Public Policy Foundation summit on Thursday, Creighton also said Texas Tech had “built an AI algorithm” to help review courses and planned to release findings within days, while describing the goal as addressing what he called “academic drift” and “garbage in curriculum.”
The system’s latest statement said that, out of 1,403 courses initially identified, 92 were reviewed by the board of regents’ Academic, Clinical and Student Affairs Committee and fewer than 60 were recommended for modification. Another 299 courses were described as “proactively modified” before reaching the committee, as the chancellor continues to frame the push as steering degrees toward high-paying jobs in high-demand fields.
Shelton said that rationale overlooks the broader mission she said colleges serve in teaching students to interpret the world, ask hard questions, and think through unfamiliar problems. She said the memo “impoverishes” students “not just as future workers, but as human beings.”