September 10, 2025 Advocacy Update

As the academic year kicks off, we are seeing more evidence of censorship on campus. One example: this summer, a student at Texas A&M filmed a professor discussing gender in a children’s literature class and posted it on social media, leading a Texas state legislator to call for the professor’s resignation. This week, the professor was fired and the Dean of the College and the chair of the English department were removed from their posts.

In the video, the student tells the professor: “I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching, because according to our president, there’s only two genders and he said that he would be freezing agencies’ funding programs that promote gender ideology. And this also very much goes against, not only myself, but a lot of people’s religious beliefs, and so I am not going to participate in this because it’s not legal, and I don’t want to promote something that is against our president’s laws as well as against my religious beliefs.”

When a student silences a faculty member by applying the president’s definition of gender to faculty speech, that is a transgression of academic freedom. In this particular case, the student is explicitly using personal religious beliefs to censor classroom discussion. Elected legislators in Texas and the university president are falling into line, not only justifying censorship (and implicitly endorsing student harassment of faculty on social media) but terminating the faculty member involved. This is not the way a responsible university in a democracy should handle speech on campus.

As a 501(c)3, ACLS does not engage in lobbying. We are a nonpartisan organization, and we do not have the capacity to respond to all attacks on academic freedom and threats to free speech. We believe it is important to state—and restate—our own commitment to academic freedom and raise readers’ consciousness of the crisis of democratic speech simmering on many American campuses. We are proud of our partnership with PEN America, and we strongly encourage all readers to support organizations dedicated to reporting on and resisting censorship.