Reputational fears at Texas A&M amid latest programme cut

The cancellation of the Women’s and Gender Studies programme (WGSP) at the notoriously conservative Texas A&M University in College Station, which sits in a rural county that gave Donald J Trump 61% of its votes in the 2024 presidential election, has been denounced by organisations such as the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and PEN America.

Less anticipated, perhaps, was the protest it triggered by some 400 of the university’s students and strong criticism from one of its most notable alumni, Jon L Hagler, a wealthy financier who has served as a Texas A&M University (TAMU) trustee and who has donated millions of dollars to the university, including a US$20 million grant for the founding of the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study.

The announcement of the termination of the 40-year-old WGSP came in a statement by TAMU’s interim president Tommy Williams on 30 January.

It said TAMU had completed reviewing 5,400 courses to ensure they were in compliance with new policies passed by the board of regents last December, and that while some courses needed modification, only “six courses were cancelled due to non-compliance”; neither Williams’ statement nor a similar one from the university’s marketing and communications division specified that the policies referenced banned the teaching of “gender ideology and racial ideology”, neither of which is defined in the policies.

Neither statement named the six courses, one of which, as University World News reported on 22 January, is Ethics in Public Policy which was to be taught by Leonard Bright, a professor who teaches in the university’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and is president of TAMU’s AAUP chapter.

The cancellation of Bright’s course came a week after TAMU banned the teaching of Plato’s Symposium in Professor Martin Peterson’s Contemporary Moral Issues course because the 2,500-year-old text ran afoul of the same regulation.

‘Epicentre of censorship’

Responding within hours to these announcements, PEN America stated that with the cancellation of WGSP, “TAMU is staking out turf as the epicentre of higher education censorship nationwide”.

Combined with “banning Plato in one class to culling materials related to race and gender from syllabi, and now ending a well-established interdisciplinary program . . . There seems to be no limit to how far they are willing to go,” PEN said.

AAUP-TAMU condemned Williams’ administration for using the “syllabus review process as a bait-and-switch to secretly eliminate the university’s distinguished program in Women’s and Gender Studies and eliminate all associated majors, minors, and graduate [level] certificates.

“Its gender and health minor . . . has been particularly impactful in preparing students for careers in healthcare, public service, and community-based work,” said part of the statement.

Lynn Pasquarella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), also denounced the cancellation of WGSP.

“Courses in Women’s and Gender Studies contribute meaningfully to students’ understanding of history, society, health, culture, and civic life. The forced elimination of such programmes on ideological grounds prevents students from exposure to diverse perspectives, current scholarship, and thoughtful engagement with the complexities of a multifaceted world, necessary for thriving in work, citizenship, and life,” she said.

In an essay in the Dallas Morning News on 4 February, Hagler wrote that by buckling to pressure from the state government and passing regulations against gender and racial ideology, the board of regents appeared to be “failing their sworn duty to uphold state law”.

The education code says that the governing board will “preserve institutional independence and … defend its right to manage its own affairs through its chosen administrators and employees”. As well, the code states that the “university must protect intellectual exploration and academic freedom” as well as “strive for intellectual excellence”.

Hagler goes on to cite TAMU’s Vision 2020, which remains university policy, which, he writes, “call for the regents to take the policy high ground and make decisions through a process characterised by openness and appropriate faculty participation”, before quoting from the policy that says, “academic progress is fragile. Enlightened, shared governance and leadership are elemental to its achievement.”

In 2025, Hagler continued, “the Legislature formally curtailed the faculty’s role in governance while spelling out an explicit role for governing boards in overseeing curricula … the law did not force Texas A&M to eliminate entire fields of study related to race, gender and sexuality. That was a choice made by our regents,” he wrote.

“They are overachievers in their subservience to powerful politicians.”

Erasure of difference

That same morning, 30 January, Williams appeared on the Houston, Texas-based The Amigos (“The Voice of Texas”) radio show hosted by Paul Bettencourt.

For Bettencourt, a conservative Republican who served as majority leader in the Texas State Senate from 2016 to 202, 1and his co-hosts, the termination of the WGSP was a laughing – and unintentionally revealing – matter.

About ten minutes into the interview, co-host Ben Struesand, a small businessman and unsuccessful Republican candidate for the US Congress, asked: “Once you get one of these degrees, in what did you call it, gender …[women and gender studies] what do you do with it, exactly?”

To which Bettencourt answered: “Well, you go to work. I mean, you go to work for a DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] operation. And then you become vice-president,” leaving open whether he meant a university or whether he was referring to America’s first Black vice-president, Democrat Kamala Harris (2020 to 2024), who conservatives often criticised as a DEI hire.

Williams, a former conservative Republican member of the Texas legislature from 1997 to 2013, was more sedate. In measured tones he explained that TAMU was merely following the directives of the Board of Regents responsible for TAMU, one of Texas’s seven university and college systems, to ensure that “race and gender ideology” was removed from all of TAMU’s 5,400 core courses (the number is so high partly because many courses have multiple sections).

The cancellation of the WGSP, he said, flowed from two facts. The first was that the programme was vastly undersubscribed, with only 26 students enrolled for either a degree or certificate.

Secondly, given the mandates the board of regents passed last December, “We couldn’t bring this program into compliance with the new board policy. It was just going to be too difficult, given the subject matters that they had in their courses.”

It turns out Williams was correct about the number of majors but disingenuous about the other enrolment figures.

There are approximately 40 graduate students pursuing graduate certificates in WGSP, making it “one of the largest enrolled certificates in the College of Arts and Science”, one professor who spoke on the condition of anonymity told University World News.

There are another 30 undergraduates pursuing a minor in WGSP, and, last year, 1,200 students took courses in the programme either as a standalone course or through the course being cross-listed with another department; some of these students may have taken several such courses.

While no new students will be allowed to enrol in WGSP, Williams explained, there will be a six-semester “teach-out” starting in September, which, he said, will allow students currently in the programme to complete it.

“We’ll continue to work on that as we go forward,” he said about monitoring subject matter compliance, “and we're going to teach out the people who are in the programme, and then it’ll go away.”

These words confirm the fears that several professors and students interviewed for this article have about women, LGBTQ+, and racialised minorities being erased.

“For a lot of cisgendered women on campus, it’s not a big deal,” Hunter Voitier, a fourth-year mathematics major and second-generation “Aggie” (the nickname given to Texas A&M students which is derived from the A in TAMU), told University World News, “especially if you align yourself with Christian or traditional values.

“But I think for queer people on campus, it’s just being told they don’t exist. They’re being removed from the curriculum.”

Bright agreed. “They’re going to keep doing it. They’re going to wipe the university clean of these topics” – with “they”, he explained, being the board of regents and those in authority who would “make this organisation in the image of white male, conservative, far-right people intolerant of a diverse society.”

Lack of clarity

The decision to shutter the WGSP has enraged professors like sociologist Joan Wolf, who, as TAMU’s website says, conducts research in the area of “race, class and gender” and who had taught in the programme for 17 or 18 years.

“They’ve made it very clear that we don’t teach that anymore, and they have refused to be clearer on what they mean by race and gender ideology. I’ve never heard of them, and I’ve been teaching about this and I’ve never encountered what they call ‘race and gender ideology’,” she said.

The lack of clarity casts “a pall”, she said. “Everybody is self-censoring, and that is exactly what they were trying to do.”

Pasquerella is also concerned about “the vague and expansive nature of recent curricular mandates and review processes”, which create uncertainty about what content may be subject to scrutiny or sanction.

“When policies rely on undefined or broadly framed terms and are enforced without transparency, faculty are left to guess where boundaries lie, often without clear guidance, due process, or consistent standards,” she said.

“This vagueness produces a well-documented chilling effect. Rather than encouraging thoughtful teaching and rigorous inquiry, it incentivises risk avoidance through overcompliance and the pre-emptive removal of material, the narrowing of discussions, and the avoidance of topics, not because they lack merit, but because of the unpredictable consequences of misinterpretation or complaint.”

According to Voitier, the pall descended days after the board of regents passed the regulations against the teaching of “gender and racial ideology”.

“I was taking a philosophy course right when the BoR (board of regents) made the amendment to Section 8.01.2b [the regulations changed in December], and the class took a complete 180 [degree turn]. We were talking about different definitions of racism. We were talking about arguments for and against abortion, and when the BoR made their decision, the class pivoted to talking about whether or not the decision was moral and whether it was good.

“The professor was impassioned, talking about how this material might have to be removed from the course – which is insane to me because half of the final was about race and gender.”

And this semester, Voitier continued, the effect of the policy changes is starkly seen in his communications class.

“We watched a scene from To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) in which Atticus is outside the jail and the mob comes,” with the intent of lynching Atticus’s client, Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping a young white woman in a small segregated Southern town.

“There was maybe a 15-minute class conversation about argumentation techniques in the scene – and not one discussion of race or how Atticus Finch was in a racist town defending a Black man from the mob. No talk of race relations at all.

“The scene makes no sense without it,” Voitier said, shaking his head.

For her part, Leah Tolan, a sophomore sociology student who was raised in Texas, recalled that it became very tense in one of her sociology classes “when topics such as non-conforming genders” came up.

A professor she asked to check a survey that Tolan had constructed to judge students’ reactions to the new policies banning the teaching of gender and racial issues declined, citing the subject of the survey.

“Because of the agenda that has been enacted, we have been zip-tied,” said Tolan, who, like Voitier, was part of the 400-strong student protest against the axing of the WGSP and appeared before the board of regents to challenge its termination. Before the board, she argued that as a “student of sociology [she should have] access to information and the ability to consider all relevant factors, which include race, gender, and sexual orientation”.

The board responded by saying: “There are 83,000 students that attend here [at College Station], and your rally only accumulated 400. Well, I wanted to say, ‘I see six of you sitting there’,” she told University World News.

As a professor who spoke to University World News on condition of anonymity said, “It makes me sick that for a community that prides itself on ‘Aggies forever’, and we stand by one another, that [they] so easily would dismiss these students for what they are, what they believe …They just want to make it like they don’t exist and they’re not welcome here.”

Not an isolated trend

The chill that Tolan and Voitier feel in their classes has extended to other universities in other higher education systems in Texas.

“Everything that happens at Texas A&M, at the University of North Texas, at the University of Houston [where similar rules have been put in place], even though these are separate university systems … this is all contributing to conditions where, even at a campus like the University of Texas at Austin that has been relatively protected in terms of academic freedom in the past, people are making decisions to take themselves out of the line of fire,” said University of Texas, Austin (UT), English professor Lisa Moore, who was hired in 1991 to fill a feminist theory position in the English department.

“This is all just straightforward censorship and denial of our First Amendment rights and our academic freedom,” she told University World News.

“You see it happening on so many other campuses … state legislators are having the ability to reach right into your syllabus and ask for changes, to reach right into your classroom and try to determine what can and can't be said there.”

Bright took it further: “They can’t get to the professors right now,” he said. “But they’re going to get our classes and hope that this encourages us, to say it lightly, to leave the state.”

Some professors, whom Moore considers brave, are continuing “to teach the classes they were hired to teach and are now out of political favour”, such as transgender studies, LGBTQ studies, and women’s reproductive justice, “until somebody physically stops them,” she said.

While acknowledging that every professor has a different tolerance for risk – some are withdrawing courses, changing syllabi, and scrubbing their websites of references to gender and ethnic studies – drawing on her literary background, Moore discussed this all-too-human defensive measure.

“We have really good studies, including literary accounts like Orwell's, of the psychology of authoritarianism [in 1984 in which the official censorship regimen is designed first and foremost to train the individual to censor themselves].

“So, in books like Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny (2017), there is a reason that the very first item in his list is, ‘Don't comply in advance’, because that's the first thing you want to do, because you hope that you can continue to do what you're doing if you just stay out of the eye of the malevolent authority.”

Yet, she said, “students understand how important this knowledge is when they see how hard top-down force is attempting to try to make it unavailable to them. They get it that this is high-stakes knowledge that they need,” said Moore.

While Texas is the focus now, Florida blazed the way, and the same is happening in Indiana, Iowa and South Carolina, she said.

“It's really part of a larger culture war, and it really is about pushing back on 50 or 75 years of progress [intended to] actually create more equitable resource distribution among people based on gender.

“The reason that women's and gender studies entered the university, like ethnic studies and other fields, was on the heels of the understanding that there was no rational basis for denying women jobs, credit, bank accounts, inheritance, rights, and economic sovereignty” – denials that some academic studies (for example, eugenics) had been used to justify.

“We needed more people producing new knowledge from different backgrounds and experiences and with different motivations than just maintaining a status quo, wanting to really understand what it is to be human,” she said.

Reputational damage

Both professors and students interviewed for this article are concerned that the reputational damage that TAMU is inflicting on itself will negatively affect how TAMU’s diploma is perceived.

Tolan told the board of regents that she is considering transferring from TAMU because of the policies.

Outlining a new and permanent institutional reality, Wolf said: “This is now who Texas A&M is. They are a censoring institution. They censor what students can learn … They are planning to surveil every course every semester.

“They’re going to be censoring from now on. They're going to put each course, each syllabus through a test to see if somehow there is something about race or gender in the course, and so that it’s not a one-time thing.”

Another TAMU professor, who asked not to be identified, suggested that TAMU was on the road to becoming a Texas version of Liberty University (Lynchburg, Virginia), founded by Reverend Jerry Falwell as an evangelical alternative to what he considered corrupt liberal universities.

“No one took people from [that institution] seriously because it was considered to be an overly politicised university that didn't allow independent thought (which runs counter to the principles of higher education in a democratic society).”

This professor admitted to telling students that, ultimately, they are the ones being damaged by the ideological cuts and cancellations that have occurred at TAMU.

“If you don't agree with it, you need to speak out because you are what's at stake here. It’s your degree, and the reputation of this institution you need to be very much invested in, because what happens today is going to follow you for the rest of your career. And I think that many students realise that and that’s why they're beginning to speak out,” said the professor.

Voitier voiced his concerns by saying: “I’m a math major, and I’m about to graduate from a university where readings from Plato are banned. That’s absurd to me.”

After a long pause, the 22-year-old said quietly: “I don’t wear my Aggie ring because I can’t wear it with pride. I’m ashamed to be an Aggie.”

* As this article was being written, PEN America led a delegation of writers to TAMU to hear directly from those affected by the closure of the WGSP and other actions by TAMU’s administration.