After criticism from Republican lawmakers and right-wing media outlets, Texas A&M University at College Station may disband its nascent minor in LGBTQ+ studies and over four-dozen other minors and certificate programs.
The changes are being made through a new process that administrators say was created to review minors and certificates that enroll few students. Per the university, those that don’t meet a certain enrollment threshold may be subject to “inactivation.”
But some faculty members allege that the process violates academic norms by subverting faculty authority over the curriculum, and say that it represents yet another troubling instance of political influence on their campus. The speaker of the Faculty Senate wrote a letter to the president and provost last week, arguing that the review of minors was “deeply flawed and lacked meaningful input from many stakeholders.”
The 52 minors and certificates under review make up about one-sixth of the 320 total offered by the university. A Texas A&M spokesperson told The Battalion, the student newspaper, that the university wouldn’t provide a list of the programs until changes have been finalized.
A spokesperson didn’t answer The Chronicle’s questions about how the review process works. According to the student newspaper, once “inactivation” of a minor or certificate is approved by the program’s corresponding department or college, the decision goes to the Faculty Senate and the president for a final review. The Faculty Senate is expected to vote on the inactivation of eight of the 52 programs — including a minor in Asian studies, a certificate in diversity, and a certificate in cultural competency — during a meeting next week.
Faculty members in the women’s and gender studies program, which houses the LGBTQ+ studies minor, voted 30-0 last week to object to its possible elimination.
“I’ve been an academic for almost 25 years, and I don’t remember ever thinking that something like this could happen where a university directly responds to outside questions about curriculum,” said Theresa Morris, the program’s director.
Republican lawmakers nationwide have targeted what they see as progressive orthodoxy in higher ed with legislative efforts to ban or limit offices and programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Their bills typically haven’t addressed classroom instruction explicitly; doing so is legally tricky. But politicians have frequently made comments about courses they don’t like.
That’s what happened in the case of the LGBTQ+ studies minor at Texas A&M.
The minor, first added to the university’s course catalog in the fall of 2022, teaches students about “the history and practice of social activism” and examines the “extensive scholarship on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds,” and “homophobia and transphobia’s relationship to forms of power (colonialism, sexism, ableism, classism, etc.).”
In June 2023, the university put out a news release touting the new minor as a “major victory for LGBTQ+ scholars.” Morris said the program received “huge support” from students, faculty, and administrators.
Then the criticism started rolling in. One vocal opponent was Rep. Brian Harrison, a Republican, who said in January that the minor was promoting “liberal indoctrination.” Harrison, who has become an outspoken critic of higher education, vowed to demand answers on why his constituents should be “forced to subsidize” the minor. “Texas A&M is offering a MINOR in this??” Harrison wrote on X. “What. The. Hell.”
Harrison later told The Daily Caller that Texas A&M was “one of the most conservative major public institutions of higher education in all of America” and that the existence of an LGBTQ+ studies minor suggested the university had gone “far off the rails.”
“The purpose of taxpayer-funded higher education is to train the work force of tomorrow and to strengthen the economy of the state of Texas, not for wasteful indoctrination,” Harrison wrote in a statement to The Chronicle. “If you want to go learn about transgenderism, that’s fine, but do it with your own money.”
According to Harrison, he had a “lengthy discussion” with Alan Sams, the provost, and asked him to defend the LGBTQ+ studies minor’s value and justify its continuation.
Harrison said he was told curricular changes are “driven by faculty and follow a standard administrative process,” which he described as a “nonresponse” to his concerns. According to the lawmaker, the university said “no faculty” had requested a change; there was “currently not a state process” for minor degree programs, only for majors; and the university was “going above state requirements and developing a process to include the university’s 156 minors in a similar review.”
Sams and the university’s deans had been discussing plans to identify “low-producing” programs in August 2023, according to reporting last month in The Battalion.
Plans for the review came together soon after the Texas Scorecard, a conservative website, published an article criticizing the LGBTQ+ studies minor. The Scorecard’s piece ran less than two weeks after the university put out its news release praising the program.
(Texas A&M has frequently come under fire in Texas Scorecard articles. In August, the university halted gender-affirming health care for transgender students after the publication accused the institution of promoting “transgender ideology.” Last July, the university rescinded a job offer made to Kathleen O. McElroy, a journalism professor, after the Texas Scorecard labeled her a “DEI hire.” The university later paid McElroy a $1-million settlement.)
Under Texas A&M’s new review process, minors and certificates must reach thresholds modeled after state standards for degree programs, which classify a bachelor’s program as “low-producing” if it awards fewer than five degrees per academic year and fewer than 25 degrees in five years. Neither the Texas A&M system nor the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board requires the university to set enrollment thresholds for certificates or minors.
Curricular decisions should not be secretive. There was no transparency.
According to the student newspaper, the new thresholds also require departments to award minor degrees and undergraduate certificates to at least 10 graduates in the last two years or have a minimum current-year enrollment of five students. Graduate certificates must have at least six graduates in two years or a minimum enrollment of three students.
Morris said the LGBTQ+ studies minor missed the new enrollment threshold by one student. Two more students had submitted application requests for the minor this fall, Morris said, which would have brought the program up to the standard. But the provost has directed departments to “kindly refrain” from admitting students to programs it identified in its review as low-producing.
Morris said she was “blindsided” by the review. She said she wasn’t aware of the change until a September meeting with an associate dean and other liberal-arts faculty. According to Morris, the same associate dean later said that information about the review committee’s members and meetings were “confidential.”
“Curricular decisions should not be secretive,” Morris said. “There was no transparency. There’s been no feedback. No one knew they were reviewing these minors.”
Criticisms of the LGBTQ+ studies minor from Harrison, the Republican state lawmaker, have largely focused on the misuse of taxpayer funds. He said last week that he “did not know” how much money the university would save by cutting it and other low-enrollment programs, according to the Austin-American Statesman.
A Texas A&M spokesperson didn’t respond to The Chronicle’s questions about how much the university would save on program cuts, but has previously said that current courses related to the potentially eliminated programs will not be affected.
Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, a sociology professor who was a co-chair on the committee behind the LGBTQ+ studies minor, said the minor did not cost anything because the courses already existed.
“I think the attacks on what they call ‘woke education’ is actually critical thinking, and if we cannot teach our students how to think critically, we can’t produce citizens who will be able to ask questions that will help all of us,” Lakkimsetti said. “It is dangerous to attack any curriculum or any knowledge.”
