‘Like a dystopian novel:’ U.S. universities are slashing gender studies programs

On June 15, in the middle of Pride Month in many major cities, a significant academic shift went into effect across the Texas Tech University system, a network of three Texas public universities and two health institutions: all academic programs “centred on” sexual orientation and gender identity must be phased out.

The new restriction was the result of an April memo from the university system’s chancellor, Brandon Creighton, a former Republican Texas state senator who spent nearly two decades in Texas politics before becoming the university head in November 2025. About a month into his role, he issued a directive ordering faculty to submit course material that touches on race, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation to the Board of Regents for review.

“ In April, they really cracked down on gender identity and sexual orientation,” says Christy Rogers, an associate professor  in Texas Tech’s department of human development and family sciences.

The new policy requires faculty to teach in line with a 2025 Texas law recognizing only two biological sexes: male and female, and those who are intersex or have a disorder of sex

development “are not considered to belong to a third sex.” There will be a “strict prohibition” on teaching about sexuality and gender identity in most undergraduate courses, requiring professors to swap in alternate materials if their courses previously addressed these topics. “Upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses are restricted but feature clear exemptions for strictly defined academic purposes,” reads the memo. Admissions will be halted for the programs identified to be not in compliance with the new rules, though students already enrolled can finish their degrees. 

Across the state, many faculty and students are dealing with related issues. In January 2026, Texas A&M University abolished its women’s and gender studies degree program. Similar restructuring of programs and academic censorship issues are playing out at the University of Texas, Texas State University and University of North Texas.

The situation within Texas higher education is one of the most stark examples of how colleges across the U.S. are shifting how they approach gender and sexuality on campus. 

“Dozens of LGBTQIA+ college resource centers have closed over the past 10 months following the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, particularly on college campuses,” journalist Nick Fulton wrote in Prism, a U.S.-based movement-journalism outlet, in October 2025. “Universities have changed their public-facing language to exclude overt mentions of queer people. Funding for health care resources for transgender and gender-nonconforming students has been cut.”

Florida is another hot spot for this right-wing playbook. In 2023, the New College of Florida eliminated its gender studies program following Governor Ron Desantis’s anti-DEI push. Earlier this spring, student journalists at Pensacola State College had their magazine temporarily lose funding after administrators learned there would be articles related to LGBTQ2S+ issues, which administrators said would violate Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. After teaming up with the free speech non-profit, the students won back their right to print the magazine.

Texas Tech’s memo not only impacts instruction but also student research. Currently enrolled students may still produce graduate theses and dissertations on gender- and sexuality-related topics. There are also exemptions for independent student research, such as term papers.

Rogers, a queer researcher who teaches many queer students, sees the move as a major threat to her students’ work. 

 ”My student who graduated a year ago did a really amazing master’s thesis on sexual identity concealment and disclosure,” she shares.

In this environment, he would not have been able to complete that.

Rogers’s husband, Paul Ingram, is an associate professor in the university’s counselling psychology program. He also teaches many queer students, which he says is likely due to his area of research, which centres around masculinity and gender roles.

“My students are speeding up to try to get out,” Ingram says. “Almost half of my students came from Tech as undergraduates. They don’t want anything to do with it.”

@xtramagazine This June, we’ve all read about and seen the evidence of corporate Pride’s backslide, as brands and companies seem keen to roll back inclusion efforts compared to past years. There are markedly fewer outward indications of support for queer people, from the shelves of Target to Pride Nights at sports games. But the impact is hitting the businesses involved too. That’s according to new research from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which found that nearly three out of every four LGBTQ2S+ customers are buying less from companies perceived as reducing inclusion commitments. And LGBTQ2S+ consumers in general represent more than US $3.9 trillion globally in purchasing power according to the HRC—so that’s a lot of lost money. The data was pulled from the HRC Foundation’s 2025 Annual LGBTQ+ Community Survey, which examines “the experiences, attitudes, and well-being of LGBTQ+ adults in the United States.” And it’s a notable time to be talking about this. According to Gravity Research, about two in five corporations are decreasing recognition of Pride Month as executives bow to pressure from U.S. president Donald Trump’s administration. “Businesses are afraid to go against this current administration in any way,” Eve Keller, co-president of United States Association of Prides, told USA Today in May. And that lines up with other data we’ve seen in Canada too. In a survey commissioned by Omnisend in March 2026, 33 percent of respondents said they have noticed companies pulling back from Pride sponsorship activity during the 2025 and 2026. We break down what you need to know. #pride #lgbtqnews #pride2026 #marketingnews #lgbtq ♬ original sound – Xtra Magazine

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Sara Spurgeon, who teaches American literature at the university, told NPR that Texas Tech’s English department was told they can’t teach texts by gay authors and have to censor novels featuring gay characters. Matthew S. Pehl, a Texas Tech history professor, said, “Academic freedom at Texas Tech has been murdered,” at a student-led mock funeral for the university’s academic freedom. Andrew Martin, president of the Texas Tech chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said in a statement that the new policy is a “brazen disregard for our commitment to delivering a meaningful, complete, and truthful education.”

Amy Reid, a program director for the non-profit PEN America, which has been monitoring these types of academic policies for a few years, told Inside Higher Ed that Texas Tech’s new rules are the most extreme case of student censorship they’ve seen so far.

“The limits this will place on what faculty can teach, what students can learn, and what graduate students can research shows just how afraid the pro-censorship movement is of students exercising their right to learn and research in the pursuit of knowledge and truth,” Reid wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

Rogers says she also sees it as academic censorship, and that many of her colleagues feel the same. The faculty senate conducted a poll surveying 367 professors. About half of the respondents said they altered course content on their own after the memos, and approximately a quarter said administrators or other university personnel asked them to make changes.

In terms of Texas Tech faculty’s research endeavours, those currently employed will be allowed to continue to research these topics, though the university system will “prioritize recruitment in alignment with this memorandum” for future hires.

The faculty senate survey also found that more than half of respondents said they were considering jobs at other universities after the memos.

Rogers says she knows several academics who made it clear that they don’t want to be at a university where their research or their teaching is being restricted, and where the identities of their students, peers and the scientists they study are being erased. 

“ If you look around, everybody knows everybody’s looking to leave,” Ingram says. “The conversations are open in the hallway.”

The issues at Texas Tech are emblematic of a larger problem at public universities across Texas. Before Creighton became Texas Tech’s chancellor, he wrote Senate Bill 37, which gives regents’ boards more power over what course material is taught. It went into effect in September 2025.

Rogers feels like that bill was the first attack on Texas Tech. Rogers says that when Creighton became chancellor, her colleagues realized they were going to start “living a dystopian novel.”

Shanea Thomas, who uses she/he pronouns, was the executive director of accreditation at the Council on Social Work Education when the Trump administration moved in for the president’s second term. After Trump’s executive orders addressing what the president refers to as “gender ideology extremism” and DEI’s “illegal discrimination,” Thomas helped steer over 962 schools represented by the Council on Social Work Education to stay compliant with the council’s standards. She says gender and sex was the first thing on the chopping block for many programs.

“Some of the schools who were pulling back from [these topics], I can honestly say it wasn’t because they wanted to,” Thomas explains. “It was out of protection. It was because they were being threatened.”

She says these faculty members were trying to save their programs as well as their own jobs, while allowing students to get the education needed to be the best social workers they can be. Looking back, he says he doesn’t “know if we did that well.” 

“The people who are being pushed out are the ones that were trying to hold the line”

Thomas recalls sitting in an Iowa state committee meeting listening to arguments from people who were saying they didn’t want DEI in their schools.

“Those people who were being loud about it were not social workers,” Thomas says. “They were not clinicians. They were not educators. They were not going to the universities. They were just mad that students were learning this.”

Now he’s worried about the quality of health services LGBTQ2S+ patients will receive.

“ I get worried as a clinician about how people are being trained,” Thomas says. “When you do have a queer person in front of you, what happens? How do you treat them?”

Thomas says she feels she was pushed out of her role due to how outspoken she was about advocating to keep social work programs diverse. 

“The people who are being pushed out are the ones that were trying to hold the line,” he says. 

Over at Texas Tech, faculty members are preparing for how they’ll teach courses come fall. 

Ingram says his plan is to spend the first week of the fall semester talking about what’s going on and explaining he’ll be making revisions as he teaches. “My inclination is probably just to include blank slides where information would have been,” he says, noting he will be “a pain in the ass” about the changes.

Rogers says this past semester she was very transparent about what was going on at the university with her own students.

“No other faculty in any of their other classes were talking about it out of fear,” she says, which she thinks is causing confusion among students. 

“ We’ve been heavily discouraged from sharing this information with students from the level of the provost office,” she adds.

Rogers says she feels really depressed about the entire situation. “It’s just a very disturbing, disgusting feeling to be in a space where you feel that your identity—and the identity of your colleagues and your students and your staff—are being erased as if they don’t matter.” 

She says she wants students who choose to stay to know there are still professors at the university who support them being there. Both queer faculty and students have to still get their work done as they watch their inclusion in academia slowly, quietly unravel across the country.

“ I don’t think we’re being loud enough about what’s happening,” Thomas says. “I think that people are only gonna care when it affects them, and by then it’s too late.”