A national professors’ union has sued the Texas Tech University system’s chancellor and Board of Regents over policies that restrict professors from teaching about LGBTQ identity, gender, and race.
The lawsuit, filed last week by the American Association of University of Professors–American Federation of Teachers and its Texas chapter, names the system’s chancellor, Brandon Creighton, and Texas Tech System Board of Regents as defendants. The union alleges Creighton issued two memorandums that violate professors’ First and 14th Amendment rights.
Creighton’s move as chancellor is not a new one. Before being appointed to his current position, he served as a Texas state representative and authored Senate Bill 17, which bans diversity, equity, and inclusion offices at Texas public universities. Gov. Greg Abbott signed it into law in 2023, and it took effect January 2024.
The first memorandum, issued in December 2025, stated that the system would immediately remove course content that conflicts with the university’s standards. The memo specifically cited content promoting the ideas that one race or sex is inherently superior to another; that an individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive by virtue of race or sex; and that individuals bear responsibility or guilt for actions of others of the same race or sex.
The memo also stated that faculty should not teach or submit course content related to gender identity, citing Texas state law and federal policies that recognize only two sexes, male and female.
Creighton released a second memorandum in April 2026, stating that the system would phase out all sexual orientation and gender identity coursework. The memo also prohibited teaching that gender identity is a fluid spectrum, that there are more than two genders, or that gender can be decoupled “from biological sex as a factual or scientific baseline.”
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The professors’ union argues the memorandums have created “an educational environment replete with fear and confusion, rather than the academic excellence and free exchange of ideas that all universities endeavor to achieve.”
The lawsuit also claims Creighton and the Board of Regents’ memorandums suppress constitutionally protected speech across the university system.
“Plaintiffs’ members have First Amendment rights in the public university setting. The Creighton Memoranda run roughshod over them: entire viewpoints relating to race, sexual orientation, and gender identity are forbidden from being taught in the classroom or included in student coursework,” the lawsuit states. “The Creighton Memoranda violate not only the U.S. Constitution, but also the fundamental idea of what it means to be a public university in America: an institution of higher learning that promotes free expression and the rigorous exchange of ideas in service of the people and more importantly, the nation.”
Although the lawsuit claims Creighton’s memorandums infringe on professors’ academic freedom, Thomas Linsday, Ph.D., policy director of higher education at Next Generation Texas at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, recently wrote an article explaining the limits of academic freedom.
Lindsay explains that academic freedom does not mean “a blank check for individual professors to redesign public university curricula at will.” Instead, he wrote that it gives professors the right to pursue research, publish scholarship, and speak as a citizen without institutional retaliation.
“It [academic freedom] also safeguards the university’s institutional autonomy to determine its educational mission. But it does not grant individual faculty a constitutional right to override the state’s authority over the general education curriculum in taxpayer-funded classrooms,” Lindsay wrote.
Lindsay also references Senate Bill 37, authored by Creighton during his time in the Texas Legislature. The law took effect in September 2025 and requires governing boards to review general curricula, restore classical liberal principles, and spend taxpayer dollars responsibly.
“The legislation does not ban the teaching of history, slavery, civil rights, or cultural debates. It simply restores classical liberal principles, according to which higher education must prioritize intellectual clarity and student outcomes over conformity,” Lindsay wrote.
Lindsay told the Daily Signal that the union’s lawsuit is a “sham.”
“Both of Creighton’s memos and SB 37 explicitly preserve factual teaching of history, civil rights, biology, literature, and professional content,” Lindsay said. ” … Rightly, it targets only advocacy or promotion of divisive concepts such as the inherent superiority or collective guilt in core courses.”
“It doesn’t touch the upper division courses because the constitutional precedents have all established that state legislators have not only the right but the duty, as do boards, to be much more prescriptive when it comes to general education and core curriculum,” he added.
Mandy Drogin, a senior fellow for the Government Reform and Oversight Coalition at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, also told the Daily Signal that she commends Creighton for taking a stand for taxpayers and refusing to allow them to fund a political ideology.
“It’s important that we recognize that when a public institution, that is funded by the taxpayers of Texas [who] have voted and supported laws that eliminate the promotion of DEI and racist Marxist ideology, that we recognize that it is absolutely the responsibility of the leadership to say we can teach all about all different viewpoints, but we cannot be promoting and actually having entire classes that promote this oppressed-versus-oppressor ideology that we keep seeing throughout our university systems,” she said.
Drogin also addressed the lawsuit, saying the professors’ complaints about First Amendment restrictions are “fundamentally false.”
“Broad structural requirements on general education courses cannot promote these radical theories as being a standard for Texas students. And so, it doesn’t limit free speech. They are allowed to say whatever they want in their free time. They are allowed to study whatever they want in their free time,” Drogin said.
“But when they’re being funded by the taxpayers of Texas, and when they are breaking the laws of the land, it’s important that we support the leaders like Chancellor Creighton, who says we’re not pushing this propaganda into our schools.”
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