Adam Serwer writes:

Sara Spurgeon, an English professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, has been teaching literature for 20 years. But preparing for the spring 2026 semester was the first time she was forced to submit her course materials through a portal to be evaluated by an artificial-intelligence program. It flags anything that might violate new rules laid out by the university chancellor, including a prohibition on the “advocacy/promotion of race or sex-based prejudice,” and a requirement—now Texas state law—that “only two sexes, male and female, are recognized.”

At Texas Tech, medical students no longer learn about racial disparities in medical care. Faculty at the university’s medical center in Lubbock were advised to “refrain from treating transgender patients, for any medical condition, if a medical student was present,” according to a lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors. (When asked for comment, a spokesperson said that the university’s “written guidance is publicly available and expressly protects instruction necessary for licensure and patient care.”) According to the same lawsuit, the censorship bot—officially known as the Course Content Review Process—ordered a Tech philosophy professor to remove Plato’s Republic from a syllabus because “it references Plato’s beliefs concerning gender roles and homosexuality.”

Professors in the Texas A&M system have had to strip their syllabi too. According to an ACLU lawsuit, last January, Aaron George, a professor at Tarleton State University, was told by administrators to remove A Gay Manifesto, a Stonewall-era LGBTQ-rights pamphlet, and White Flight, a history of urban segregation, from his American-political-history course. After a student complained that a different class the professor taught violated university policy, George was informed by administrators that it would be canceled if he did not make “necessary” (but unspecified) changes. He cut a reference in the course description to the significance of the Fourteenth Amendment for LGBTQ rights, and the class was allowed to proceed.

The University of Texas at Austin, the flagship school of the UT system, announced last month that it was eliminating majors in Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and migration studies. More than 100 courses have been flagged for removal from the core curriculum, primarily ones relating to slavery, race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. Consolidating majors isn’t necessarily nefarious, nor is rethinking a core curriculum (a central group of courses from which students must take a certain number to graduate). But these changes are happening, Lauren Gutterman, an American studies professor at UT, told me, “entirely because of the political context.”

The changes to Texas public-university systems are being presented as a necessary corrective to left-wing orthodoxy on campus. Over the past decade, many Americans have come to believe that academia is too ideological and too intolerant of conservative views and arguments. Censoriousness is not an exclusively left-wing phenomenon, but it is real. And some conservative speakers on college campuses met with protests that, while themselves a form of speech, occasionally deteriorated into violence.

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” President Trump declared in 2019. “One of their political weapons is ‘Cancel Culture’—driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values.”

Perhaps it’s less alien than Trump supposed. In the name of fighting propaganda and indoctrination, Texan politicians have established strict state controls on what can be taught, researched, and even discussed in the classroom. However bad left-wing censoriousness is or was, the Republican response in Texas has been to ensure that what is taught in the state’s universities is itself propaganda and indoctrination. Ellen Schrecker, a historian of McCarthyism at Yeshiva University, told me that this campaign goes beyond even the repression of the McCarthy era, when censorship led to firings and purges but the government did not interfere directly with what students were taught. After all, American politicians understood that there was a Cold War to win, and that it could not be won if the universities themselves were destroyed. By outlawing or banning forms of speech and inquiry, and by eliminating faculty independence, today’s Republicans are doing much more damage. [Continue reading…]