Texas A&M University has ended its Women’s & Gender Studies program in the wake of a recent policy change limiting discussions of race, gender identity, and sexual orientation in its classes.

As the New York Times reports, the independent state university system made the announcement limiting course discussions on January 30. It also announced that six courses have been canceled, while the syllabuses of hundreds of others have been altered to comply with new policies approved by the university system’s board of regents.

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In a statement, Texas A&M interim president Tommy Williams said that the Women’s & Gender Studies program had been closed due to low enrollment and “the difficulty of bringing the program in compliance with the new system policies,” according to the Times. Students already pursuing degrees in the program would be allowed to complete them, Williams added.

In November, the nine-member board unanimously approved the new policies banning A&M courses from advocating “race and gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.” A separate policy prohibits faculty from teaching material inconsistent with the approved syllabus for each course. Additionally, regents imposed new rules and procedures to audit all course content in the statewide system’s 12 schools each semester.

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As the Times notes, all nine members of the board of regents were appointed by the state’s anti-LGBTQ+ Gov. Greg Abbott (R). The board of regents had previously ordered the university system to do away with its minor in LGBTQ+ studies in 2024.

The sweeping policy change comes in the wake of a controversy involving English professor Melissa McCoul, who was fired from her position at Texas A&M after a video — secretly recorded by a student who objected to McCoul discussing gender diversity in a class on children’s literature — went viral last summer. As the Texas Tribune reported in November, a faculty committee unanimously found that the university did not have good cause to dismiss McCoul. But, the Times reports, Texas A&M has refused to reinstate her.  

Last month, two other Texas A&M professors reported that they had been forced to alter or cancel courses to comply with the new policies.

In early January, Prof. Martin Peterson shared emails with the website Daily Nous detailing orders he received from the school’s administration to “remove the modules based on race ideology and gender ideology and the Plato readings that may include these” from an introductory philosophy course on contemporary moral problems.

According to the Times, university officials have accused Peterson of including the Plato material in his syllabus as a provocation. Philosophy department head Kristi Sweet told the paper that Plato’s Symposium continues to be taught in its entirety in the university’s Philosophy of Art course.

Later that same month, Prof. Leonard Bright told the Texas Tribune that the university had forced him to cancel his “Ethics in Public Policy” course after he explained that topics related to LGBTQ+ people, race, and so-called “gender ideology” were sure to come up frequently in the class’s discussions.

“They sent out a chilling message to the faculty that we were engaging in woke ideology, and … that people were gonna be fired as a result of teaching these topics that some conservatives certainly disagree with,” said Bright, according to ABC News.

Bright, who is also the president of the American Association of University Professors at the A&M system’s flagship campus, told the Times that he had never seen anything like the university’s mandate to overhaul its entire course catalogue in such a short time. He added that the board of regents seem uninterested in students’ and faculty’s academic freedom.

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