Texas “now controls what professors can teach.” So screams the latest edition of The Atlantic.
In reality, its complaint that Texas has begun to police what its public universities may teach mistakes the recovery of reason for the suppression of it. It somehow sees in the state’s modest restraints on race and sex ideology a species of totalitarianism worse than McCarthyism.
What it doesn’t see is that the university’s first obligation is the pursuit of truth. In America, that pursuit serves the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence: equal opportunity (= meritocracy), inalienable rights, and popular consent. But when entire fields of study systematically deny these truths—treating equality as a “construct of oppression,” sex as a spectrum of self-identification, and historical inquiry as a vehicle for collective guilt—they turn education toward ideological instruction.
The citizens who fund public universities have good reason to object.
Texas has accordingly sought to restore the conditions under which genuine inquiry is possible by enacting Senate Bill 37 (2025). Those conditions include the recognition of nature (nature = that which exists always and independently of human invention). Human beings are male and female; the binary is not a legislative fiat but a biological fact observable by any competent physician or geneticist. To require that public universities acknowledge this fact is no more “censorship” than requiring them to acknowledge that the earth revolves around the sun. Doctrines that deny it amount to a refusal to accept the evidence.
Likewise, the prohibition on “advocacy or promotion of race or sex-based prejudice” is simply the academic corollary of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which requires government to treat individuals as individuals, not as members of racial or other groups. Teaching the history of slavery or Jim Crow is one thing; teaching that merit is a racist construct or that individuals bear collective guilt simply by ancestry is another. The former is history. The latter turns the Declaration’s natural rights doctrine into a narrative of historical grievance.
The Atlantic bemoans the removal of Plato’s “Republic” from a Texas Tech syllabus. In truth, Texas SB 37—the bill that authorized the policies The Atlantic abhors—does not require the removal of Plato’s “Republic”—or any other specific text. SB 37 is a higher-education governance law (authored by then-Texas state Sen. Brandon Creighton, now Texas Tech chancellor). It strengthens the review authority of governor-appointed governing boards (regents) over curricula, degree programs, hiring, and faculty governance.
Chancellor Creighton’s December 2025 and April 2026 campus memoranda impose detailed standards against “advocacy/promotion” of certain race- or sex-based concepts, require recognition of only two sexes, create a mandatory review/escalation process for sexual-orientation and gender-identity content, and direct the phase-out of programs centered on those topics.
Critically, the actual guidance expressly states that adopted, industry-standard texts do not require physical redaction. This means faculty are not required to take a marker, digital tool, or other means and cross out, black out, or otherwise alter the pages of standard textbooks or other commonly adopted books that have already been chosen for courses. But this important distinction vanishes in The Atlantic’s rush to manufacture another “censorship” headline. The guidance establishes guardrails on how certain content is addressed in instruction—rules about presentation, advocacy, and the recognition of biological reality—rather than requiring faculty to alter or eliminate the source texts themselves. The former preserves the materials while insisting on academic integrity in their presentation; the latter is the caricature advanced by smear-seeking critics.
SB 37 does not forbid anything in the two memoranda. It contains no prohibition on boards or chancellors adopting additional standards, review processes, or content guidelines as part of exercising the oversight authority the bill confers. Public university systems have long possessed substantial discretion to set academic policies, subject to constitutional limits, other statutes, and accreditation requirements. The memoranda therefore do not conflict with any positive command or prohibition in SB 37.
As mentioned in the article, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has filed a lawsuit against Texas Tech over its implementation of SB 37. (Readers should know that the national AAUP announced its first-ever political endorsement in its roughly 110-year history this July—backing Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed for U.S. Senate.) Filing a complaint does not prove AAUP’s claims, and the mere generation of controversy does not answer the underlying question of academic accountability. Allegations in a lawsuit do not become established fact through repetition in the press. However the AAUP’s lawsuit is ultimately resolved, the underlying principle behind Chancellor Creighton’s two memoranda is sound: Public universities may not compel students to accept as settled what remains rationally contestable, nor may they substitute activism for argument.
Academic freedom has never been a license to proselytize. It is the freedom of competent scholars to pursue truth within the purposes of the institution. When those purposes are defined by the Declaration’s “laws of nature and nature’s God” rather than by the latest social theory, the scope of permissible advocacy narrows.
This is not the destruction of the university; it is the recovery of what the university once was. That recovery centers on academic integrity and the Board’s responsibility to ensure that our public universities deliver a rigorous education rather than ideological instruction. Governing boards exist precisely to uphold the institution’s core mission—the pursuit of truth and the formation of citizens capable of free inquiry—when internal incentives drift toward activism. Insisting on these standards is how the Board fulfills its duty to the citizens who fund and depend on these institutions.
The Atlantic’s invocation of McCarthyism is instructive—for the opposite reason it intends. McCarthyism, whatever its excesses, was a response to an ideology committed to the destruction of America. Today’s progressive doctrines are no less hostile to America’s first principles. They subordinate individual equality under law to claims about group identity and historical grievance. They also encourage students and faculty to regard certain conclusions as morally mandatory, leaving less room for genuine disagreement. A 2024 analysis of over-10,000 faculty job ads showed that approximately 22% required DEI statements—effectively functioning as ideological filters.
Once the shared premises of free government are abandoned inside the university—which they have been—the political community, through its elected representatives, has the right and duty to reassert them. Public universities are not private associations. They are instruments of a free people, and a free people may insist that their institutions refrain from teaching the moral legitimacy of their own destruction.
In the final count, Texas Tech’s ambition to protect real liberty is far from a flaw. Refusing to take a firm stand for justice is no virtue, either. Plato’s “Republic” presents the “Allegory of the Cave,” which imagines prisoners chained in a dark cave so they can see only shadows cast on the wall in front of them by objects passing behind them. They take the shadows for reality. When one prisoner escapes and climbs out into the sunlight, he sees real objects and the sun itself, which is the true source of light and understanding. But when he returns to the cave to tell the others, they reject him and prefer the familiar shadows.
The Atlantic’s lament reflects the same mistake—taking the shadows in Plato’s cave for the light of the sun.