Overview
- The Board of Regents approved restrictions that require presidential sign-off for courses that administrators judge as advocating race ideology, gender ideology, or topics tied to sexual orientation or gender identity.
- Instructors are barred from adding material inconsistent with approved syllabi, and complaint hotlines will take student reports of inaccurate or misleading content that departs from those syllabi.
- The system plans a semester-by-semester review of every course and is building an artificial intelligence tool to analyze offerings, following a pilot at Tarleton State University.
- Faculty groups, including Texas AAUP-AFT and the Texas American Federation of Teachers, denounced the policies as unconstitutional institutional censorship that jeopardizes academic freedom.
- Officials say the measures increase transparency and accountability, but the revision from banning “teaching” to banning “advocating” leaves how that line will be enforced unclear.