The firing of a Texas A&M professor, two administrators, and the university president’s subsequent resignation ignited a firestorm over LGBTQ instruction on college campuses in Texas, The Hill reported Thursday.
What began as the recording of a confrontation with an English literature professor during a summer class has embroiled Texas in a fight over the indoctrination of students versus the free speech rights of professors.
The flap began in Texas A&M’s summer “Literature for Children” class. Professor Melissa McCoul led a discussion of “Jude Saves the World,” a novel about a nonbinary 12-year-old, and used the “gender unicorn” graphic to explain gender identity, expression, and sexuality, The Texas Tribune reported.
A student secretly recorded the lesson and challenged its legality, citing a Trump-era executive order that recognizes only two biological sexes. McCoul disagreed and asked the student to leave. The class was subsequently canceled, according to the report, but McCoul was back for the fall semester.
Months later, Texas GOP legislator Brian Harrison shared a video of the incident and of a follow-up meeting between the student and university president Mark A. Welsh III, who initially defended McCoul, according to the report.
Republican critics quickly demanded action. Within days, Welsh fired McCoul and demoted two academic leaders, fueling political backlash. Under intensifying scrutiny, Welsh resigned, thrusting Texas A&M into a broader state debate over teaching LGBTQ issues at public universities.
“There’s several different theories about gender that could be discussed maybe, but the professor did not do that. She said to the student, ‘I have an opinion. If you don’t agree with my opinion, you can leave the class.’ And that’s not open inquiry, that’s not academic freedom, that’s indoctrination,” Sherry Sylvester, distinguished senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told The Hill.
Angelo State University in San Angelo is now adopting policies that strip LGBTQ content and discussion from classrooms. Faculty may not include pronouns in email signatures and are barred from using students’ preferred names if they differ from legal ones.
The rub is that there is no state, federal, or university policy against LGBTQ instruction, only President Donald Trump’s executive order earlier this year on two genders.
“The governor and lieutenant governor and speaker have been telling everybody for two years now that we passed bans on DEI and transgender indoctrination in public universities,” Harrison told a conservative radio program about the incident.
“The only little problem with that? It’s a complete lie. … The state of Texas — despite what the governor said in his tweet yesterday, that this is a violation of law, there is no state law that we passed.”
Harrison this year introduced a bill to ban universities from offering LGBTQ+ studies or diversity, equity, and inclusion courses, degrees, or certificates. The proposal did not advance.
“These policies are being rolled out aren’t necessarily coming directly from the government. They’re sort of indirectly coming from government pressure. But then institutions of higher learning or private businesses are making decisions to comply with these mandates that are above and beyond the letter of the law,” Jonathan Gooch, communications director for Equality Texas, told The Hill.
Newsmax wires contributed to this report.
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