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Faculty Groups Sue to Block Texas Tech Chancellor’s Rules Limiting Race and LGBTQ Instruction

The plaintiffs say the Creighton memoranda have censored classroom content, created vague review rules, and already forced faculty to remove texts and restrict clinical training.

Texas Tech University System Chancellor Brandon Creighton walks back to his seat during a board of regents meeting at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Dallas on Feb. 26, 2026.
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Texas Techn University System Chancellor Brandon Creighton limited how professors could teach about race and gender at the system's five universities. On Wednesday, a national professors union sued the system for the limits.
Students and faculty held a mock-funeral outside of the Texas Tech Board of Regents meeting on May 7 in protest of recent policy changes.

Overview

  • The Texas AAUP-AFT and the national AAUP filed a federal suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas on Wednesday, July 8, seeking a judge’s order to stop enforcement of two memoranda issued by Texas Tech System Chancellor Brandon Creighton.
  • The complaint targets a Dec. 1, 2025 memo that required faculty to disclose and submit course materials addressing race, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation for review and an April 9, 2026 memo that ordered the phase-out of programs “centered on” sexual orientation and gender identity and barred such topics in many core or lower-division courses.
  • Plaintiffs document concrete effects on classrooms and training, saying professors were forced to remove works such as Plato’s Republic and Between the World and Me, omit Dred Scott material in a law course, cut Holocaust instruction about gay and bisexual victims, and limit medical students’ exposure to transgender patients.
  • The lawsuit argues the memoranda amount to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment and are unconstitutionally vague under the Fourteenth Amendment while also alleging the directives reflect discriminatory intent against Black and LGBTQ+ faculty and students.
  • The case, backed by Lambda Legal, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Davis Wright Tremaine, is positioned as a key legal test of new Texas policies that expand regent power and could determine whether the system may enforce these curriculum rules while the litigation proceeds.