Overview
- The chancellor’s memo, issued Friday, directs provosts to name programs for elimination by June 15 and freezes new admissions while current students complete teach-outs.
- The policy requires recognition of only two sexes and bans teaching a gender spectrum as scientific fact in core and lower-level courses, with limited upper-level or graduate exceptions tied to licensure or student-led research.
- Exemptions permit self-directed study, faculty scholarship, instruction on intersex and other DSD biology, and historically inseparable topics like the AIDS crisis or Alan Turing, but the memo forbids using these to validate fluid gender frameworks.
- Texas Tech’s AAUP chapter condemned the plan as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, and faculty and students reported confusion, a graduate withdrawal linked to earlier memos, and concerns that some instructors and learners may leave.
- The move follows Texas laws that expanded course reviews and curtailed DEI and faculty governance and echoes a 2025 presidential order recognizing only two sexes, with Chancellor Brandon Creighton having authored Texas’s 2023 DEI ban before taking the post.