Texas Tech sued over policy ‘erasing’ LGBTQ+ and Black history from classrooms
Texas Tech (Getty Images)
A coalition of academic freedom and civil rights groups is suing the Texas Tech University System, accusing it of restricting what professors can teach about race, sexual orientation and gender identity.
The federal lawsuit, filed in El Paso on Wednesday (8 July), challenges two directives issued by Chancellor Brandon Creighton, a former Republican state senator, in December 2025 and April 2026.
It was brought by the American Association of University Professors and its Texas affiliate, with representation from Lambda Legal and the NAACP Legal Defence Fund.
The complaint argues the directives breach the First Amendment by discriminating against disfavoured viewpoints, and were designed in part to target Black faculty and suppress the teaching of Black history.
It says Creighton had previously tried to pass similar restrictions through the state legislature and, when that failed, imposed them administratively instead.
Under the policy, faculty were required to submit course materials for review and flag any content that dealt with race, sexual orientation or gender identity.
Lambda Legal attorney Nicholas Hite said the policy lets professors teach the government’s position “that there are only two sexes” while barring them from acknowledging transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
“That’s viewpoint discrimination and a First Amendment violation in practice at its most basic,” he said. He added that medical students had been barred from interacting with transgender patients “for any reason”, not just in the context of gender-affirming care.
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the memoranda unconstitutional and block the system from enforcing them.
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