Texas’s Tip of the Spear

Higher-education reform has a new hero, and he hails not from the self-styled patrician environs of the Ivy League but from Texas.

We all know how tough it is to reform higher education given the ideological capture that permeates many universities. But the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System has exerted himself in a way that should establish him in the official pantheon of friends of higher education. If such a pantheon does not exist, well, let Chancellor Brandon Creighton be the first illustrious inductee.

In one fell swoop, Chancellor Creighton excised the cancer of pseudoscientific academic fakery plaguing the five-campus system. What did the good chancellor do to merit this honor?

In one fell swoop, Chancellor Creighton excised the cancer of pseudoscientific academic fakery plaguing every university in the five-campus system and did much to ensure that it won’t return. He asserted much-needed oversight over a carping faculty and DEI hangers-on, who have had their way in the curricula for far too long—enough time to politicize and degrade the value of a college degree. That degradation is something that none of us wants. Now, someone with integrity, the desire to stop the decline of our universities, and the power and will to use it has finally emerged.

This is a long overdue correction that almost all colleges and universities need desperately. Creighton sent a memorandum on December 1 to the presidents of all five institutions in the Texas Tech system, directing them to—deep breath—“ensure that classroom instruction fully complies with state and federal law, Board of Regents policy, and Chancellor directives.”

That’s it: a directive to obey the law of Texas, particularly where “race- and sex-based prejudice” and transgenderism are concerned. The directive includes a mechanism, backed by the recently passed Texas Senate Bill 37, whereby the law cannot be skirted by the less scrupulous among the faculty. (Sadly, bad eggs exist in every profession, and methinks the professoriate has more than its share, particularly in the liberal arts and in some of the social sciences.)

This is a long overdue correction that almost all colleges and universities need desperately. The race-and-gender situation in the “studies” classrooms and in other assorted social work and education offerings on campus has become increasingly untenable. Political partisans and fake academics have long smuggled their own pseudoscientific racialist and sexualist doctrines into classrooms as the truth, not just as one of several perspectives that have been in academic contention for some time.

The memorandum, an exemplar of brevity and clarity, can be found here. Its lucidity lends itself to reproduction in whole, which is why the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed could have—and probably should have—simply published the entire thing instead of doing what they did, which is unfortunately what they always seem to do.

You likely already know that both publications have a perpetual bee in the bonnet when it comes to sober oversight of the university, particularly from outsiders. For its part, the Chronicle swung and missed with the mendacious headline “At Texas Tech, Professors Now Need Permission to Teach About Race and Gender.” In that article, Jasper Smith gives a sour take on Texas Tech’s pathbreaking rollback of racialist doctrines in the classroom:

“There’s continued use of very vague wording which are combined with threats of disciplinary action that are undoubtedly curtailing the First Amendment rights of the faculty in the classroom,” said Andrew W. Martin, president of the Texas Tech AAUP chapter. “There’s no doubt in my mind that that’s the intent, and ultimately, perhaps the worst thing is that politically mandated ideas will be taught instead of scientifically accepted concepts in our disciplines, or concepts that are recognized by the disciplinary experts.” (emphasis added)

But this is the crux of the issue, isn’t it?—the unlimited discretion of “disciplinary experts” who are anything but expert. The only courses affected by the Texas reform are those that offer primitive racialist and sexualist ideologies as fact and exclude serious treatment of the issues, which are the subject of much academic debate. I have written elsewhere (here and here) of this domination of disciplines by pseudoscience and quackery. Texas Tech has had enough of it, as well it should.

This is the crux of the issue—the unlimited discretion of “disciplinary experts” who are anything but expert. This spectacular pushback against the racialists and their absurd Farrakhanian doctrines comes on the heels of reform at Texas A&M curtailing the classroom carte blanche of faculty who abused the trust of the university. Not exactly the most controversial of propositions.

Meanwhile, Inside Higher Ed now offers a similarly deceptive headline and a story that buries the lede: “Texas Tech Puts Its Anti-Trans Rules in Writing.” The publication contends that “Texas Tech is far from alone in its efforts; public systems across Texas have taken on varying politically motivated course reviews, leaving faculty members in the state angry and confused.”

Texas Tech is at the forefront of universities acting honorably and clearly. In fact, Texas Tech is challenging politically motivated courses that propound problematic pseudoscientific perspectives as “truth” while excluding debunking evidence. Any faculty “angry and confused” about that might find comfort in the environs of Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, currently ranked #6,890 in the world.

In point of fact, Texas Tech is at the forefront of universities acting honorably and clearly, holding faculty and, more importantly, bureaucratic underlings accountable to U.S. civil-rights law, the U.S. Constitution’s equal-protection guarantees, and biological truth.

Here’s an excerpt from the actual memo:

Advocacy/Promotion of Race or Sex-based Prejudice Prohibited

A faculty member, in their official capacity, may not promote or otherwise inculcate the belief that:

• One race or sex is inherently superior to another;

• An individual, by virtue of race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, consciously or unconsciously;

• Any person should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of race or sex;

• Moral character or worth is determined by race or sex;

• Individuals bear responsibility or guilt for [the] actions of others of the same race or sex; or

• Meritocracy or a strong work ethic are racist, sexist, or constructs of oppression.

Advocacy or promotion means presenting these beliefs as correct or required and pressuring students to affirm them, rather than analyzing or critiquing them as one viewpoint among others. This also includes course content that promotes activism on issues related to race or sex, rather than academic instruction.

Creighton’s Texas Tech memo recognizes that, when radicals talk about “teaching about race,” they are referring to a primitive Farrakhan-like doctrine of racialism. It is this doctrine that Texas Tech will no longer countenance, and that’s a victory for higher education.

What might students expect now? They can expect a more rigorous and less deceitful propagation of controversial issues, and they can also expect not to be browbeaten with balderdash. In short, the problem is fixed.

Chancellor Brandon Creighton deserves all of the lavish praise that can be mustered for reform that essentially expunges much of the academic fakery, pseudoscience, and outright racialism from the campuses under his imprimatur. This is exactly what strong and effective reform of higher education looks like.

Let’s encourage other universities to follow Texas Tech’s lead.

Stanley K. Ridgley, Ph.D., IMBA, is clinical full professor at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business. He is a former military intelligence officer with a Ph.D. from Duke University and has taught in Russia, China, India, Spain, and Colombia. He is the author, most recently, of DEI Exposed: How the Biggest Con of the Century Almost Toppled Higher Education.