A professor at Texas Tech who has taught there for 25 years said the whole university has been betrayed. A founding department chair drafted a resignation letter. The Texas Tech chapter of the American Association of University Professors said the Constitution of the United States has been rendered irrelevant. They are responding to a memo issued by Chancellor Brandon Creighton that represents one of the most sweeping acts of academic censorship ever imposed at a public university in American history.

The memo bans professors from discussing LGBTQ+ topics in core and lower-level courses. It requires instructors to skip over LGBTQ+ content in standard textbooks. It eliminates every major, minor, certificate, and graduate degree centered on sexual orientation or gender identity across all five universities in the Texas Tech system. And it extends content censorship to student research itself, permanently barring graduate students from writing theses or dissertations on LGBTQ+ topics once current teach-out programs conclude. No major American university has ever gone that far. Not even Florida's Don't Say Gay law, which a federal court called positively dystopian and blocked as unconstitutional, attempted to dictate what students could write about in their own research.

The educational damage is not abstract. A history professor cannot allocate instructional time to the Stonewall riots or the AIDS crisis. An English professor assigning Oscar Wilde cannot discuss the trial and imprisonment that defined his later work. A professor teaching Virginia Woolf's Orlando, a novel whose entire premise is gender fluidity, appears to be in direct violation. A psychology professor cannot discuss why homosexuality was removed from the DSM. A political science professor cannot examine Obergefell v. Hodges as anything more than a passing reference. The memo instructs that incidental references should be avoided and that if a textbook includes LGBTQ+ content the professor must not highlight, assess, or allocate instructional time to it. There are no exceptions for core undergraduate courses.

The Supreme Court has been clear on this for more than half a century. In Keyishian v. Board of Regents in 1967 the Court declared that the classroom is peculiarly the marketplace of ideas and that the nation's future depends on leaders trained through wide exposure to robust exchange. In Rosenberger v. Rector in 1995 the Court established that viewpoint discrimination at a public university is unconstitutional per se. The Texas Tech memo is viewpoint discrimination. It targets a specific set of ideas, removes them from the curriculum, and prohibits students from pursuing them in their own research. That is not an educational policy. It is a political purge dressed in administrative language.

Chancellor Creighton is a former Republican state senator whose previous campus protest restriction law was blocked by a federal judge as unconstitutional. He is now imposing a policy that legal scholars describe as so extreme it would appear to prohibit any professor from asserting that transgender people exist. The policy creates a permanent AI-powered surveillance apparatus for course content. Provosts must submit lists of programs to be eliminated by June 15 after which an admissions freeze takes effect immediately. The timeline is designed to move faster than legal challenges can catch up.

Texas Tech is a public university. It belongs to the students, faculty, and people of Texas, not to a chancellor pursuing a political agenda that courts have repeatedly found unconstitutional when applied to public higher education. The policy must be rescinded. The June 15 deadline must be stopped. And the students and faculty whose academic freedom has been stripped must have it restored.

Sign this petition to demand Chancellor Brandon Creighton rescind the Texas Tech censorship memo immediately and halt the June 15 program elimination deadline, call on the Texas Tech Board of Regents to override the chancellor's policy and restore First Amendment protections across all five universities, and urge federal courts to issue emergency injunctive relief blocking implementation of a policy that legal precedent makes clearly unconstitutional.