Dr. Stacey Patton

11/14/2025

On Thursday, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents did something no major American university system has openly attempted in generations. They voted unanimously to require every campus president to pre-approve any course that could be “seen as advocating for race or gender ideology or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Let me translate that for the folks in the back . . .

No professor in the A&M system can teach about race, racism, white supremacy, gender identity, LGBTQ issues, or any contemporary framework of inequality without obtaining executive approval.

Executive approval means a single administrator, not the faculty, not the department, not the freakin’ experts with whole-ass Ph.D.’s, will now function as the gatekeeper of what knowledge is permissible in the classroom. Executive approval means the state now gets to insert itself between scholars and their own expertise and regulate education the way authoritarian regimes regulate dissent.

This is ideological policing of curriculum. Welcome to the new academic order. These policies go into effect immediately, with full enforcement in spring 2026. And it is now official system policy, one that conservatives would love to replicate nationwide as a model if people aren’t paying attention.

And here’s the part that should send a chill down the spine of anyone who cares about academic freedom: Faculty members across the Texas A&M System say they only learned about this policy two days before the vote. Two days, Y’all. There were no town halls, no serious faculty senate consultations, no open debates, no transparent processes. Just a sudden email, a rushed “review,” and then—BOOM—ideological pre-clearance for every course in an 11-campus university system.

I don’t know about Y’all, but that sounds like an ambush to me.

When a public university quietly moves to require executive approval before a professor can teach about any of these topics, that’s called pre-censorship, political gatekeeping, and it’s basically the academic equivalent of asking the state, Mother, may I tell the truth?

And the sneakiness is the point. If you wanna scrub race, gender, and sexuality out of higher education, you rush the policy through quietly, bury the details, and hope nobody reads the fine print until it’s too late.

And do not get it twisted, Y’all, Texas A&M is not an outlier. It is a prototype. A beta test. A proof-of-concept for a much larger authoritarian project. This is a university system signaling to every red-state legislature in America that race education can be controlled, gender can be forbidden, DEI can be erased, academic freedom can be throttled, and truth can be put on a leash.

Today it’s Texas A&M. Tomorrow it will be every public university in a red state. The day after that, it will be private universities bowing to billionaire donors who want to reshape campuses in their own image. And after that, it will be K–12. It will be the full cradle-to-college pipeline of manufactured ignorance.