Tag: Texas

  • Following Texas, Florida Drops ABA Oversight of Lawyers

    Following Texas, Florida Drops ABA Oversight of Lawyers

    Florida is now the second state to drop its requirement that lawyers in the state hold a degree from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association, The Tallahassee Democrat reported Thursday. 

    The Florida Supreme Court, which sets law-licensure requirements, said the decision is designed to open the door for more law school accreditors. 

    “The rule changes create the opportunity for additional entities to carry out an accrediting and gatekeeping function on behalf of the Court,” the Jan. 15 opinion read. “The Court’s goal is to promote access to high-quality, affordable legal education in law schools that are committed to the free exchange of ideas and to the principle of nondiscrimination.”

    The Texas Supreme Court made a similar decision last week, and Ohio and Tennessee’s high courts are also considering minimizing the ABA’s oversight of lawyers in their states. 

    Republicans, including Florida attorney general James Uthmeier, who called the ABA “a captured, far-left organization,” have targeted the ABA, which accredits the vast majority of law schools in the country, as part of a broader crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Last year, the ABA suspended its DEI standards in response to conservative criticism. 

    On Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis praised the state Supreme Court’s decision as a “Good move” in a post on X. “The (highly partisan) ABA should not be a gatekeeper for legal education or the legal profession.”

    For now, though, a new law school accreditor has yet to emerge. And experts say it’s unlikely most law schools will abandon their ABA accreditation any time soon, because it’s created reliable professional standards that make it easier for lawyers to practice in multiple states. 

    Justice Jorge Labarga, the only dissenting vote in the Florida opinion and the only justice who wasn’t appointed by DeSantis, cautioned that a new law school accreditor would have a tough time rivaling the ABA. 

    “[The ABA] has cultivated unmatched proficiency in dealing with Florida law-school-specific issues that would require decades for any successor to develop,” he wrote in his dissent. “Refinements can always be made. However, replacing an established entity with an unknown alternative is detrimental in the context of disputes.”  

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  • Texas just made it easier for students to report DEI, faculty senate violations

    Texas just made it easier for students to report DEI, faculty senate violations

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    Dive Brief:

    • Texas officials are encouraging college students, employees and the public to report violations of the state’s ban on faculty senates and diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
    • The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s newly created Office of the Ombudsman launched the Students First portal — separate from its existing student complaint portal — to give “the public easy access to file complaints and provide feedback” over colleges’ alleged legal violations.
    • Through Students First, college students and employees can submit formal complaints and are not required to have previously filed a complaint with the college. Members of the public can submit informal feedback.

    Dive Insight:

    The Students First portal focuses on violations of two significant Texas laws — 2023’s SB 17 and 2025′ SB 37.

    SB 17 prohibited colleges from having diversity offices or hiring employees to do DEI-focused work. It also banned mandatory DEI training for employees and students.

    While SB 17 functionally outlawed DEI at public colleges — making Texas one of the first to enact legislation growing increasingly popular in conservative states — SB 37 focused primarily on academic governance.

    The law stripped faculty senates of much of their authority and autonomy and shifted that power to political appointees. SB 37 also established the THECB’s ombudsman office. Earlier this month, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Brandon Simmons, the chair of the Texas Southern University Board of Regents, to lead the office.

    Republican state Sen. Brandon Creighton, author of SB 37, said in April that the bill is meant to affirm authority over public colleges lies with regents, not faculty. In Texas, regents are appointed by the governor.

    Prior to its passage, higher education advocates and faculty groups — including the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors and the Texas American Federation of Teachers — strongly opposed SB 37 and raised concerns over the erosion of academic freedom and increased political influence on college campuses.

    Creighton, who also wrote SB 17, resigned from the Legislature in October after being named the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System.

    In September, Abbott said Texas is “targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation.” The following month, Texas policymakers launched new select committees in the state House and Senate and tasked them with reporting on “bias, discourse, and freedom of speech” on college campuses.

    If the ombudsman office decides to investigate a formal complaint, the affected college will be notified within five days. From there, the college has 175 days to respond to the complaint — barring an office-granted extension — and 30 days to respond to any written requests for additional information.

    If the college is found to be out of compliance, it has 180 days to resolve the issues to the ombudsman office’s satisfaction.

    The ombudsman office will “submit to the Ombudsman and State Auditor a report on the noncompliance that includes the recommendations” if it determines the college “has not resolved issues and recommendations identified in the report,” according to the Students First portal.

    Simmons said Friday that he aims to foster a “collaborative, productive partnership with our institutional leaders and students” through the new “user-friendly website and engagement on campuses across Texas.”

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  • Texas Drops ABA Oversight of Lawyers Amid Anti-DEI Crusade

    Texas Drops ABA Oversight of Lawyers Amid Anti-DEI Crusade

    For the first time in 43 years, lawyers who want to practice in Texas will no longer be required to hold a degree from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association, the Texas Supreme Court decided last week.

    While the ABA is “continuing to work with the Texas Supreme Court—and all other state supreme courts and bar admitting authorities—to help preserve the portability of law school degrees throughout the country,” the policy “reinforces the authority that the Supreme Court of Texas has always had over the licensure of JD graduates,” Jenn Rosato Perea, managing director of the ABA’s accrediting arm, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

    Since 1983, Texas has ceded some of that authority to the ABA, whose Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar accredits the majority of law schools in the United States. Most other states have similar ABA oversight in place; it became a popular move in the 1980s because law was becoming increasingly national business. Widespread adoption of ABA accreditation as a licensure standard offered more uniformity and has made it easier for lawyers to practice in multiple states.

    The new Texas policy comes amid the broader crackdown on higher education accreditors by the Trump administration and its allies, and specifically on the ABA, which has become a target of the Republican-led anti-DEI crusade in recent years. Indeed, the ABA suspended its diversity, equity and inclusion standards last year. Now Texas has become the first state to say it will no longer rely on the accreditor to help to set law licensure standards.

    “[The Court] intends to provide stability, certainty, and flexibility to currently approved law schools by guaranteeing ongoing approval to schools that satisfy a set of simple, objective, and ideologically neutral criteria (such as bar exam passage rate) using metrics no more onerous than those currently required by the ABA,” read a Jan. 6 order signed by all nine justices of the Texas Supreme Court. “[It] does not intend to impose additional accreditation, compliance, or administrative burdens on currently approved law schools.”

    While the policy likely won’t change much in the short term, critics say it invites the creation of alternative law school accreditors, which could make it harder for lawyers to move their practice across state lines.

    Republican-controlled Florida, Ohio and Tennessee are weighing similar measures.

    “This could be the beginning of the end of the ABA as the accreditor of choice for law schools nationally,” Peter Lake, a law professor at Stetson College of Law’s Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy, told Inside Higher Ed. “It’s a little too early to call the game, but this is a significant step toward a goal the Trump administration and many states want to see happen.”

    Part of that goal involves asserting more control over higher education accreditors.

    In April, Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Education to suspend or terminate the federal recognition of accreditors found “to engage in unlawful discrimination in accreditation-related activity under the guise of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ initiatives.” It specifically called for an investigation of the ABA and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredits medical schools. In June, six states—Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas—announced the launch of a new regional accreditor, the Commission for Public Higher Education; at the time, Florida governor Ron DeSantis described it as part of an effort to root out “woke ideology” in higher education and break up the “accreditation cartel.”

    The federal government made adjacent arguments in supporting the Texas Supreme Court’s plan to minimize the ABA’s oversight of legal education, also announced last April. In December, the Federal Trade Commission submitted a public comment letter in support of the policy, accusing the ABA of having a “monopoly on the accreditation of American law schools” and of imposing “rigid and costly requirements” mandating “every law school follow an expensive, elitist model of legal education.”

    Texas Open to ABA Alternative

    While the Texas court stopped short of establishing a new law school accreditor, it acknowledged that it might in the future consider “returning to greater reliance on a multistate accrediting entity other than the ABA should a suitable entity become available,” according to the final version of the policy.

    Lake said that could happen eventually, especially if other states decide to follow Texas and ditch the ABA’s oversight. “This is an open invitation to form a [new law school–accrediting] organization,” he said. “And I suspect that whatever group forms will probably be a little more aligned with the Trump administration’s goals and ideas.”

    Educators and experts believe such a move will only impede the goals of legal education and practice.

    “ABA accreditation provides a nationally recognized framework for quality assurance and transparency; portability of licensure through recognition of ABA accreditation by all 50 states, which is critical for graduates’ career flexibility; consumer protections and public accountability through disclosure standards; and a baseline of educational quality that correlates with higher bar passage rates and better employment outcomes,” the deans of eight of the state’s 10 ABA-accredited law schools wrote in a letter to the Texas Supreme Court in June.

    The dean of South Texas College of Law Houston was among those that objected to minimizing the ABA’s oversight of law licenses in the state.

    JHVEPhoto/iStock/Getty Images

    A degree from an ABA-accredited law school is generally required to pursue a career as a lawyer, said Oren R. Griffin, a law professor at the University of Tulsa College of Law.

    “ABA accreditation is a national stamp of approval,” he said. “Law schools may differ on what they prioritize, such as curriculum or clinics they offer, but the standards have identified some basic requirements that allow all law schools to operate at an efficient, effective level.”

    And even if a state says it will license lawyers who didn’t graduate from an ABA-accredited law school, graduates from such institutions may still face limited opportunities.

    “Law schools have been very well served by these standards,“ Griffin said. “If other states were to follow suit and begin to not require ABA accreditation as a national standard, you could end up with some real disparities or differences among the 50 states, which could increase the complexities for students who are graduating and want to be able to practice in multiple states.”

    Regardless of the Texas Supreme Court’s new policy, law schools won’t likely abandon ABA accreditation anytime soon, said Austen L. Parrish, dean of the University of California, Irvine, School of Law and president of the Association of American Law Schools.

    “For example, a school like the University of Texas—where about 40 percent of students come from out of state and some 30 percent of graduates are placed out of state—cannot afford to not be ABA accredited. And I suspect that’s true for all of the ABA-accredited schools,” he said, adding that any school that eventually gives up ABA accreditation would be charting “a very dangerous path.”

    Students who are not held to the ABA’s national accreditation standards are less likely to receive a quality legal education, Parrish said—a result long demonstrated by the poor outcomes at California’s handful of non-ABA-accredited law schools, which have high attrition and low bar-passage rates, he added.

    “The unraveling of the national accreditation system would be really harmful to students and law schools,” Parrish said. “We’re in a world where schools need to recruit from all over and students end up practicing all over. To have a school that doesn’t do that makes them less attractive to students and more likely to create some of the problems at some of the unaccredited schools in California.”

    And even if Texas and other states do band together to form their own law school accreditor, rivaling the ABA’s influence would be a challenge.

    First, “it’s very difficult to set up an accrediting body and takes quite a bit of money,” Parrish said. “They could set up a regional accreditor, but it’s not necessarily clear who will see that as sufficient for licensing eligibility, which means the schools in those states will still have to go with ABA accreditation … I’m skeptical that more progressive states are going to buy into something that’s blatantly political.”

    For now, he interprets the Texas order as a placeholder.

    “There probably won’t be many changes right now,” he said, “other than keeping the pressure on the ABA, because [Texas] has signaled a willingness to move to a different approach, though it’s not clear what that is right now.”

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  • Plato Censored as Texas A&M Carries Out Course Review

    Plato Censored as Texas A&M Carries Out Course Review

    The censored Plato texts include passages from his Socratic dialogue Symposium that discuss patriarchy, masculinity, gender identity and the human condition.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Nice_Media_PRO/iStock/Getty Images | rawpixel

    At least 200 courses in the Texas A&M University College of Arts and Sciences have been flagged or canceled by university leaders for gender- or race-related content as the university undertakes its review of all course syllabi, faculty members told Inside Higher Ed.

    This is just the beginning of the system board–mandated course-review process. Faculty were required to submit core-curriculum syllabi for review in December, and some faculty members have yet to receive feedback on their spring courses, scheduled to begin Monday.

    So far, queer filmmakers, feminist writers and even ancient Western philosophers are on the chopping block. One faculty member—philosophy professor Martin Peterson, who is supposed to teach Contemporary Moral Problems this spring—was asked by university leadership to remove several passages by Plato from his syllabus.

    In an email from department chair Kristi Sweet, Peterson was given two options: either remove “modules on race and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these,” or be reassigned to teach a different philosophy course.

    “Your decision to bar a philosophy professor from teaching Plato is unprecedented … You are making Texas A&M famous—but not for the right reasons,” Peterson said in his response to Sweet, which he shared with Inside Higher Ed. The Plato texts include passages from his Socratic dialogue Symposium that discuss patriarchy, masculinity, gender identity and the human condition. In one excerpt, the “Myth of the Androgyne,” the Greek playwright Aristophanes says, “First, you should learn the nature of humanity … for in the first place there were three kinds of human being and not two as nowadays, male and female. No, there was also a third kind, a combination of both genders.”

    Peterson ultimately chose to revise his syllabus and replace the censored material with lectures on free speech and academic freedom. “I’m thinking of using this as a case study and [to] assign some of the texts written by journalists covering the story to discuss,” Peterson told Inside Higher Ed via text. “I want [students] to know what is being censored.”

    Another censored class is Introduction to Race and Ethnicity. Students enrolled in the sociology course this spring were told via email Tuesday that the class was canceled because there was no way to bring it into compliance with the system policy. One professor, who wished to remain anonymous, was asked in the fall to remove content related to feminism and queer cinema from their History of Film class. The professor refused, and the dean resubmitted the syllabus as a noncore “special topics” class, which enrolled students were notified of Wednesday.

    “I’m seeing the enrollment drops as we speak,” the professor said.

    The enrollment declines could have the same result as the course review.

    “The expectation is that a lot of those classes will ultimately be canceled, not because of content but because of underenrollment,” said another professor in the College of Arts and Sciences who wished to remain anonymous.

    English faculty members received an email Tuesday from senior executive associate dean of the college Cynthia Werner telling them that literature with major plot lines that concern gay, lesbian or transgender identities should not be taught in core-curriculum classes.

    In a follow-up email Wednesday, Werner said, “If a course includes eight books and only one has a main character who has an LGBTQ identity and the plot lines are not overly focused on sexual orientation (i.e. that is THE main plot line), I personally think it would be OK to keep the book in the course.” She also clarified that faculty may assign textbooks with chapters that cover transgender identity, so long as they do not talk about the material or include it on assignments or exam questions.

    In November, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents decided that courses that “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity” would be subject to presidential approval and launched a systemwide, artificial intelligence–driven course-review process across all five campuses. Faculty members are still confused about who exactly is reviewing their syllabi.

    “The university is doing different things in different departments and colleges. They’re interpreting these policies differently,” said Leonard Bright, a professor of government and public service at Texas A&M and president of the university’s American Association of University Professors chapter. “I’ve heard some say they were told that there are some committees [carrying out the review]. I’ve heard some say that it’s just the provost and his close affiliates. We really don’t have a real clear answer as to how these decisions are being made.”

    It’s also unclear whether Texas A&M is violating a rule from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board that requires institutions to seek its approval before revising its core curriculum and “deleting courses.” A spokesperson for the university did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about the review Wednesday, including a question about how many total courses have been canceled so far.

    The Texas A&M AAUP condemned the university’s decision to censor Plato in a statement Wednesday.

    “At a public university, this action raises serious legal concerns, including viewpoint discrimination and violations of constitutionally protected academic freedom,” the AAUP chapter wrote. “Beyond the legal implications, the moral stakes are profound. Silencing 2,500-year-old ideas from one of the world’s most influential thinkers betrays the mission of higher education and denies students the opportunity to engage critically with the foundations of Western thought. A research university that censors Plato abandons its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust—and should not be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning. We are deeply saddened to witness the decline of one of Texas’s great universities.”

    The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression also slammed the move.

    “Texas A&M now believes Plato doesn’t belong in an introductory philosophy course,” Lindsie Rank, director of campus rights advocacy at FIRE, said in a statement. “This is what happens when the board of regents gives university bureaucrats veto power over academic content. The board didn’t just invite censorship, they unleashed it with immediate and predictable consequences. You don’t protect students by banning 2,400-year-old philosophy.”

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  • Texas A&M to philosophy professor: Nix Plato or be reassigned

    Texas A&M to philosophy professor: Nix Plato or be reassigned

    Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson has a choice: Drop readings related to race and gender — including ones by Plato — from his course, or face reassignment. 

    Just weeks ago, FIRE warned that A&M policy banning professors from teaching issues of “race or gender ideology” and “sexual orientation” in core courses violates faculty academic freedom. The First Amendment prohibits public universities from deciding which viewpoints can be taught in a classroom, and which must be banished.

    The following can be attributed to Lindsie Rank, director of Campus Rights Advocacy at FIRE.

    Texas A&M now believes Plato doesn’t belong in an introductory philosophy course. The philosophy department is demanding that professor Martin Peterson remove Platonic readings because they “may” touch on race or gender ideology. He’s been given until the end of the day to comply or be reassigned. This is what happens when the board of regents gives university bureaucrats veto power over academic content. The board didn’t just invite censorship, they unleashed it with immediate and predictable consequences. You don’t protect students by banning 2,400-year-old philosophy.

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  • Texas A&M Won’t Reinstate Instructor Fired for Gender Lesson

    Texas A&M Won’t Reinstate Instructor Fired for Gender Lesson

    A faculty panel determined in late September that McCoul’s academic freedom was violated.

    McKenna Baker/iStock/Getty Images

    Texas A&M University will not reinstate Melissa McCoul, the instructor fired in September after a video showing a student confronting her over a gender identity lesson went viral, The New York Times reported. 

    In a Dec. 19 memo that McCoul’s lawyer Amanda Reichek shared with the Times, the Texas A&M system’s vice chancellor for academic affairs, James Hallmark, wrote that he had “determined that Dr. McCoul’s dismissal was based upon good cause.”

    A faculty panel determined in late September that McCoul’s academic freedom was violated and that former Texas A&M president Mark Welsh flouted proper termination processes when he fired her.

    McCoul was “disappointed by the university’s unexplained decision to uphold her termination but looks forward to pursuing her First Amendment, due process and breach of contract claims in court very soon,” Reichek said in a statement to the Times.

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  • Texas Universities Deploy AI Tools to Review How Courses Discuss Race and Gender – The 74

    Texas Universities Deploy AI Tools to Review How Courses Discuss Race and Gender – The 74


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    A senior Texas A&M University System official testing a new artificial intelligence tool this fall asked it to find how many courses discuss feminism at one of its regional universities. Each time she asked in a slightly different way, she got a different number.

    “Either the tool is learning from my previous queries,” Texas A&M system’s chief strategy officer Korry Castillo told colleagues in an email, “or we need to fine tune our requests to get the best results.”

    It was Sept. 25, and Castillo was trying to deliver on a promise Chancellor Glenn Hegar and the Board of Regents had already made: to audit courses across all of the system’s 12 universities after conservative outrage over a gender-identity lesson at the flagship campus intensified earlier that month, leading to the professor’s firing and the university president’s resignation. 

    Texas A&M officials said the controversy stemmed from the course’s content not aligning with its description in the university’s course catalog and framed the audit as a way to ensure students knew what they were signing up for. As other public universities came under similar scrutiny and began preparing to comply with a new state law that gives governor-appointed regents more authority over curricula, they, too, announced audits.

    Records obtained by The Texas Tribune offer a first look at how Texas universities are experimenting with AI to conduct those reviews. 

    At Texas A&M, internal emails show staff are using AI software to search syllabi and course descriptions for words that could raise concerns under new system policies restricting how faculty teach about race and gender. 

    At Texas State, memos show administrators are suggesting faculty use an AI writing assistant to revise course descriptions. They urged professors to drop words such as “challenging,” “dismantling” and “decolonizing” and to rename courses with titles like “Combating Racism in Healthcare” to something university officials consider more neutral like “Race and Public Health in America.”

    Read Texas State University’s guide to faculty on how to review their curriculum with AI

    While school officials describe the efforts as an innovative approach that fosters transparency and accountability, AI experts say these systems do not actually analyze or understand course content, instead generating answers that sound right based on patterns in their training data.

    That means small changes in how a question is phrased can lead to different results, they said, making the systems unreliable for deciding whether a class matches its official description. They warned that using AI this way could lead to courses being flagged over isolated words and further shift control of teaching away from faculty and toward administrators.

    “I’m not convinced this is about serving students or cleaning up syllabi,” said Chris Gilliard, co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute. “This looks like a project to control education and remove it from professors and put it into the hands of administrators and legislatures.”

    Setting up the tool

    During a board of regents meeting last month, Texas A&M System leaders described the new processes they were developing to audit courses as a repeatable enforcement mechanism. 

    Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs James Hallmark said the system would use “AI-assisted tools” to examine course data under “consistent, evidence-based criteria,” which would guide future board action on courses. Regent Sam Torn praised it as “real governance,” saying Texas A&M was “stepping up first, setting the model that others will follow.” 

    That same day, the board approved new rules requiring presidents to sign off on any course that could be seen as advocating for “race and gender ideology” and prohibiting professors from teaching material not on the approved syllabus for a course.

    In a statement to the Tribune, Chris Bryan, the system’s vice chancellor for marketing and communications, said Texas A&M is using OpenAI services through an existing subscription to aid the system’s course audit and that the tool is still being tested as universities finish sharing their course data. He said “any decisions about appropriateness, alignment with degree programs, or student outcomes will be made by people, not software.”

    In records obtained by the Tribune, Castillo, the system’s chief strategy officer, told colleagues to prepare for about 20 system employees to use the tool to make hundreds of queries each semester. 

    The records also show some of the concerns that arose from early tests of the tool.  

    When Castillo told colleagues about the varying results she obtained when searching for classes that discuss feminism, deputy chief information officer Mark Schultz cautioned that the tool came with “an inherent risk of inaccuracy.”

    “Some of that can be mitigated with training,” he said, “but it probably can’t be fully eliminated.”

    Schultz did not specify what kinds of inaccuracies he meant. When asked if the potential inaccuracies had been resolved, Bryan said, “We are testing baseline conversations with the AI tool to validate the accuracy, relevance and repeatability of the prompts.” He said this includes seeing how the tool responds to invalid or misleading prompts and having humans review the results.

    Experts said the different answers Castillo received when she rephrased her question reflect how these systems operate. They explained that these kinds of AI tools generate their responses by predicting patterns and generating strings of text.

    “These systems are fundamentally systems for repeatedly answering the question ‘what is the likely next word’ and that’s it,” said Emily Bender, a computational linguist at the University of Washington. “The sequence of words that comes out looks like the kind of thing you would expect in that context, but it is not based on reason or understanding or looking at information.”

    Because of that, small changes to how a question is phrased can produce different results. Experts also said users can nudge the model toward the answer they want. Gilliard said that is because these systems are also prone to what developers call “sycophancy,” meaning they try to agree with or please the user. 

    “Very often, a thing that happens when people use this technology is if you chide or correct the machine, it will say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry’ or like ‘you’re right,’ so you can often goad these systems into getting the answer you desire,” he said.

    T. Philip Nichols, a Baylor University professor who studies how technology influences teaching and learning in schools, said keyword searches also provide little insight into how a topic is actually taught. He called the tool “a blunt instrument” that isn’t capable of understanding how certain discussions that the software might flag as unrelated to the course tie into broader class themes. 

    “Those pedagogical choices of an instructor might not be present in a syllabus, so to just feed that into a chatbot and say, ‘Is this topic mentioned?’ tells you nothing about how it’s talked about or in what way,” Nichols said. 

    Castillo’s description of her experience testing the AI tool was the only time in the records reviewed by the Tribune when Texas A&M administrators discussed specific search terms being used to inspect course content. In another email, Castillo said she would share search terms with staff in person or by phone rather than email. 

    System officials did not provide the list of search terms the system plans to use in the audit.

    Martin Peterson, a Texas A&M philosophy professor who studies the ethics of technology, said faculty have not been asked to weigh in on the tool, including members of the university’s AI council. He noted that the council’s ethics and governance committee is charged with helping set standards for responsible AI use.

    While Peterson generally opposes the push to audit the university system’s courses, he said he is “a little more open to the idea that some such tool could perhaps be used.”

    “It is just that we have to do our homework before we start using the tool,” Peterson said.

    AI-assisted revisions

    At Texas State University, officials ordered faculty to rewrite their syllabi and suggested they use AI to do it.

    In October, administrators flagged 280 courses for review and told faculty to revise titles, descriptions and learning outcomes to remove wording the university said was not neutral. Records indicate that dozens of courses set to be offered by the College of Liberal Arts in the Spring 2026 semester were singled out for neutrality concerns. They included courses such as Intro to Diversity, Social Inequality, Freedom in America, Southwest in Film and Chinese-English Translation.

    Faculty were given until Dec. 10 to complete the rewrites, with a second-level review scheduled in January and the entire catalog to be evaluated by June. 

    Administrators shared with faculty a guide outlining wording they said signaled advocacy. It discouraged learning outcomes that describe students “measure or require belief, attitude or activism (e.g., value diversity, embrace activism, commit to change).”

    Administrators also provided a prompt for faculty to paste into an AI writing assistant alongside their materials. The prompt instructs the chatbot to “identify any language that signals advocacy, prescriptive conclusions, affective outcomes or ideological commitments” and generate three alternative versions that remove those elements. 

    Jayme Blaschke, assistant director of media relations at Texas State, described the internal review as “thorough” and “deliberative,” but would not say whether any classes have already been revised or removed, only that “measures are in place to guide students through any adjustments and keep their academic progress on track.” He also declined to explain how courses were initially flagged and who wrote the neutrality expectations.

    Faculty say the changes have reshaped how curriculum decisions are made on campus.

    Aimee Villarreal, an assistant professor of anthropology and president of Texas State’s American Association of University Professors chapter, said the process is usually faculty-driven and unfolds over a longer period of time. She believes the structure of this audit allows administrators to more closely monitor how faculty describe their disciplines and steer how that material must be presented.

    She said the requirement to revise courses quickly or risk having them removed from the spring schedule has created pressure to comply, which may have pushed some faculty toward using the AI writing assistant.

    Villarreal said the process reflects a lack of trust in faculty and their field expertise when deciding what to teach.

    “I love what I do,” Villarreal said, “and it’s very sad to see the core of what I do being undermined in this way.”

    Nichols warned the trend of using AI in this way represents a larger threat. 

    “This is a kind of de-professionalizing of what we do in classrooms, where we’re narrowing the horizon of what’s possible,” he said. “And I think once we give that up, that’s like giving up the whole game. That’s the whole purpose of why universities exist.”

    The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

    Disclosure: Baylor University, Texas A&M University and Texas A&M University System have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

    This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.


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  • Inside Texas A&M University’s partnership with Google for AI training

    Inside Texas A&M University’s partnership with Google for AI training

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      A long line of students wrapped around Texas A&M University’s academic plaza in early October to receive free training from Google employees on how to use the company’s artificial intelligence tools, such as its chatbot, Gemini, and its research assistant, NotebookLM.  

    That same day, about 400 faculty members huddled in a campus building for deeper training from Google on how they could use AI tools to improve teaching and learning in their classrooms and how to effectively and ethically help their students use them as well, said Shonda Gibson, Texas A&M System’s chief transformation officer.

    The daylong event was part of Google’s three-year $1 billion initiative to support AI education and job training programs throughout the U.S. The initiative, which launched in August, supports the tech giant’s AI for Education Accelerator that provides higher education students and educators with free access to tools and training and aims to create a community of institutions sharing best practices.

    Texas A&M is one of over 200 higher ed institutions that have signed up for Google’s accelerator, according to Lisa Gevelber, founder of Grow with Google, the company’s workforce development campaign.  They include higher ed systems like the University of Texas and University of North Carolina, as well as large institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan and University of Virginia. 

    “Every student deserves access to the digital tools and the skills and training to set them up for success. And this is our commitment to supporting that,” said Gevelber. 

    The initiative comes as colleges race to ensure their students are prepared to enter a workforce that is becoming increasingly shaped by AI. 

    “It’s not just about using the tools,” said Gibson. “We really want our students to have the best experience possible so that they’re fully prepared whenever they leave us to go on and do whatever they’re going to do in their future.”

    Professors that integrate AI into their lessons should follow guidance on how to use it to further student learning, said Alexa Joubin, director of George Washington University’s Digital Humanities Institute. 

    Without that guidance, students risk using AI as a shortcut by having it summarize information for them instead of actually reading the materials presented and experiencing their lessons, said Joubin. 

    Meanwhile, recent research suggests AI could be detrimental to students’ skills and outcomes.

    A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study released in June found that using AI tools to write essays can impact critical thinking skills and lead to lower cognitive performance. 

    Over four months, study participants who used AI tools to write essays underperformed at “neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” compared with those who didn’t, raising concerns about the long-term educational implications of relying on the technology, the study found. 

    Students are essentially “outsourcing key cognitive tasks to AI,” said Joubin. 

    The $1 billion initiative

    The Texas A&M System joined Google’s initiative, Gibson said, because officials viewed the tech behemoth as the only company offering assistance and guidance at that level. 

    Gibson also pointed out the free access to normally paid versions of Google tools, which will be available over the next two years to students attending the system’s 12 institutions. 

    Google’s tools can act as a personal tutor for students to help them work through problems and learn material in a customized way, said Gevelber. 

    Gemini, for example, has a guided learning feature that can accommodate their learning needs, said Gevelber. The guided learning tool, for example, asks students probing and open-ended questions to spark discussions and dig deeper into the subjects, and it also introduces images, diagrams, videos and interactive quizzes to help them learn topics. 

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  • Texas runs afoul of the First Amendment with new limits on faculty course materials

    Texas runs afoul of the First Amendment with new limits on faculty course materials

    In a major broadside against the First Amendment, public university systems in Texas are ordering faculty to watch what they say in the classroom, as state authorities have outlined ideas they want universities to stay away from when teaching their courses. 

    The Texas Tech University System ordered its five member-universities to comb through faculty materials to root out any of the state’s disfavored viewpoints, and Texas A&M ordered its faculty not to “advocate” for “race or gender ideology,” or topics concerning sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom, without getting approval for whatever they’re teaching first. 

    On Dec. 1, the Texas Tech University System issued a memo to faculty outlining the views faculty members cannot “promote or otherwise inculcate” in the classroom. Those concepts include:

    • 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 actions of others of the same race or sex; or
    • Meritocracy or a strong work ethic are racist, sexist, or constructs of oppression.

    The memo also requires that if faculty believe that their course materials may touch on these issues, they must submit the material to the Board of Regents for review. 

    At first glance, some of these concepts may appear innocuous on the surface. The memo attempts to hedge by cabining its impacts to “advocacy or promotion,” which it defines as “presenting these beliefs as correct or required and pressuring students to affirm them, rather than analyzing or critiquing them as one viewpoint among others.” 

    Meanwhile, at Texas A&M, the Office of the Provost issued guidance prohibiting faculty from “requiring or encouraging students to hold certain beliefs, particularly regarding gender or race ideology or sexual orientation, or to feel shame for belonging to certain racial or ethnic groups.” Faculty there also have to submit their course materials for review before teaching. That guidance hedges itself by specifying that faculty may still “present concepts and theories that are contrary to what a student believes.” 

    But a significant chilling effect remains. It does not take much to envision how broad, sweeping mandates like these chill faculty instruction. The state is singling out specific viewpoints that it does not want faculty to teach their students. If faculty wanted to impose the opposite viewpoint — say, the idea that moral character or worth is not determined by race or sex, that would presumably be fine with state authorities. 

    Those authorities may not like it, but the First Amendment prohibits the singling out of specific viewpoints for disfavor. When faculty discuss these issues, they will have to walk on eggshells to ensure that they aren’t perceived as advocating for a specific viewpoint. But if they want to just stick to pressuring students to adopt the state’s pre-approved position? No problem!

    That’s viewpoint discrimination, plain and simple. Preventing faculty — or anyone else — from speaking based on the ideas they express is “censorship in its purest form.” Academic freedom protects the right of faculty to determine how best to approach potentially sensitive topics. It does not abide administrators placing their thumbs on the scale for ideas they like or dislike.  

    The language in Texas Tech’s memo echoes language in Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, which FIRE is currently challenging to prevent the law from restricting the classroom instruction of faculty at colleges and universities in Florida. That act regulates classroom instruction on eight concepts regarding “race, color, national origin, or sex.” 

    In late 2022, after FIRE sued, a federal court halted the enforcement of the act’s components implicating higher education. The court described the act’s restrictions as “positively dystopian” and rightfully recognized that the First Amendment protects professors’ in-class speech, and therefore prohibits authorities from banning teaching certain ideas in the classroom.

    Now, FIRE is writing to all of the member universities of the Texas Tech system, and publicly flagging our serious concerns with these directives from authorities. We urge universities to remain steadfast in their commitment to the First Amendment. Those well-versed in their constitutional history know that decades ago the Supreme Court warned against “laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom,” Authorities in Texas would do well to remember this lesson.

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