Mary Ellen Klas: The Texas A&M purge takes a page from authoritarian playbooks

Across the globe, there’s a clear playbook for how authoritarians suppress academic freedom. The firing of an English professor, two university administrators, and the resignation of Texas A&M University President Mark Welsh last week took a page right out of it.

The playbook involves identifying some “enemy” as a cultural threat — as Hungary’s Viktor Orban did when he eliminated gender studies programs, or as Turkey’s former president Recep Tayyip Erdogan did when he purged universities of academics with pro-democracy leanings.

It encourages student informants to monitor faculty and peers to enforce ideological conformity — as China does to eliminate dissent within its universities. And it results in an environment of distrust and fear which, as researchers have found, leads academics and students to engage in self-censorship, thereby suppressing debate and weakening viewpoint diversity.

In Texas, this chapter in academic thought control started playing out at the state’s largest public university during the summer term. Professor of English Literature Melissa McCoul introduced the notion of gender as nonbinary in her class on “Literature for Children” and showed a slide depicting a purple unicorn, a symbol used by the nonprofit Trans Student Educational Resources. One student raised her hand — after first pressing “record” on her cell phone.

“I just have a question, because I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching,” the student is recorded as saying. “Because according to our president, there’s only two genders and he said that he would be freezing agencies’ funding programs that promote gender ideology.” The student didn’t seem to understand that President Donald Trump’s executive order governs federal agencies and contractors, not classroom instruction.

McCoul countered that what she was teaching was “biologically true.” She said she had the “legal and ethical authority (as well as) the professional expertise in this classroom” and urged the student to take her concerns to department officials and leave class.

What followed is not immediately clear, but news reports indicate the class was canceled, McCoul was never officially reprimanded for the incident, and by fall, she had started teaching the class again. On Sept. 8, the video surfaced on the X account of Texas state Representative Brian Harrison, a Texas A&M alum and member of Trump’s first administration. He demanded that heads roll.

Welsh, the Texas A&M president, initially defended McCoul and indicated that the university was looking to revise the course description to better match its content. It would be labeled as a course for LGBTQ literature studies instead of children’s literature, he said. But faced with pressure from Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Harrison, he quickly folded.

Welsh fired McCoul, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the chair of the English department. He said in a statement that it was because they “approved plans to continue teaching course content that was not consistent” with the course’s description.

When the American Association of University Professors and free speech advocate PEN America warned that Texas A&M’s decision was “the death of academic freedom,” Welsh countered that the case wasn’t about academic freedom but “academic responsibility.”

Welsh was forced to walk an impossible line. Over the summer, he had negotiated a change to the course description; he appeared to be taken aback that McCoul, who holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Notre Dame with specialties in children’s literature and gender studies, hadn’t explicitly included the gender topics in the course description.

He could have reprimanded McCoul for that. He could have chastised her for portraying nonbinary gender identity as an undisputed fact, instead of engaging students in a dialogue about it. And when Abbott and Harrison came to him with their demands, the retired four-star general and former chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force could have acknowledged the dispute, stood by his handling of it and defended the importance of academic freedom.

Instead, when Harrison demanded that Welsh be fired next, the university president caved. He turned in his resignation and became another casualty of the thought police.

Texas, like Florida before it, has steadily adopted an authoritarian approach to higher education. The goal is to target a marginalized group or racial minority whose ideas the Republicans in power find undesirable and use them as a cudgel to justify bringing state universities more firmly under governmental control. In the last year, the Lone Star State began enforcing a patchwork of policies aimed at purging diversity, equity and inclusion programs at state universities. It abolished independent faculty senates with faculty councils controlled by the governor’s appointees. And it banned a vague array of “expressive activity” and demonstrations on campuses.

But unlike Hungary and Florida, Texas has not yet imposed an outright ban on the teaching of gender studies. The Texas Tribune reported that Harrison himself told a conservative radio show that there is no Texas law that bans faculty from teaching about race, gender or sexuality.

Nonetheless, gender studies have become a convenient stalking horse for conservative Republicans eager to consolidate their influence over universities, where liberal-leaning thought has long flourished. Arguing that study of gender differences represents an existential cultural threat to the “traditional way of life,” Republicans have decided that it justifies the aggressive use of state power to suppress it. Rather than defending their conservative positions against the liberal political views on college campuses through scholarly research and honest debate, Republican hardliners have chosen expediency — and the strong arm of governmental power.

Welsh was in the job only two years, replacing former president Katherine Banks who was herself forced out amid another culture war fracas involving the hiring of a journalism professor. Welsh’s departure now opens the door for Abbott and others to employ another tactic in the authoritarian playbook: the administrative takeover. As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has done to universities throughout Florida, the Texas governor can now install a partisan to lead the state’s largest university and continue with his ideological purge.

The attack on educators at Texas A&M should be a reminder that although democracy is messy and consensus is slow, authoritarians in the second Trump term are moving very quickly.