He refused to censor his syllabus — so Texas Tech cancelled his class

Texas Tech leaders have somehow convinced themselves that race and gender are not legitimate topics to discuss in a psychology class. That’s absurd on its face: You can’t teach human behavior while treating basic dimensions of human identity as off-limits.

Will Crescioni, a lecturer in Texas Tech’s Department of Psychological Sciences, submitted his course materials for his honors-level psychology course the same day the Texas Tech system issued a memo ordering universities to review courses and ensure faculty do not “promote or otherwise inculcate” certain ideas related to race and gender.

Just over a month later — and only two days before the semester began — his course was scrapped. His offense? Refusing to alter his course content. 

In emails with his department, Crescioni defended his approach. Instead of picking and choosing which of his course materials may violate the system memo, Crescioni submitted all of his course materials for review. He also explained a basic fact about teaching: In psychology, as in many disciplines, topics like race and gender are not confined to a single lecture slot. They surface throughout the semester because they are integral to the subject. Anyone who has taken a serious college course understands this. Classes are often wide-ranging and exploratory. They don’t always fit neatly into bureaucratic boxes. Forcing a professor to tiptoe around a ban on promoting such topics will inevitably warp a course, severely compromising a professor’s teaching. 

Stripping out discussion of race and gender that “enhances the quality of a course,” Crescioni argued, would mean abandoning his responsibility to “design the best courses” he can. He refused to teach a redacted version of his psychology course required by the system memo. In plain terms, he would not intellectually neuter his own class. 

The result: no more class.

This outcome serves no one, and is precisely why efforts to ban particular ideas from the classroom are so dangerous. As FIRE has long argued, targeting specific viewpoints for suppression infringes on faculty members’ constitutional rights and their authority to shape their own pedagogy. In some areas, it can make it impossible to teach a course with any academic credibility.

Crescioni’s case is only the latest in a disturbing pattern. And more cancellations are no doubt on the horizon. The Texas Tech Board of Regents is meeting at the end of February, when additional courses could face the chopping block. The nebulous process and lack of clear standards only deepen the chill already settling over campus.  

And the chill came on fast. According to the Texas Tribune, Texas Tech cancelled two upper-level psychological sciences courses — Ethnic Minority Psychology and Close Relationships — within days of the Dec. 1 memo. 

On Feb. 10, FIRE wrote to Texas Tech outlining our concerns: 

Under any basic understanding of academic freedom, faculty must have substantial breathing room to use a wide range of pedagogical techniques and materials to teach. Nor is academic freedom FIRE’s sole concern with Texas Tech’s decision; prohibiting faculty from discussing specific pedagogically relevant ideas or materials discussed in the classroom also constitutes unlawful viewpoint discrimination, an ‘egregious’ form of censorship.

Universities exist to test ideas, not to pre-clear them. When administrators begin combing through syllabi for disfavored concepts, the damage extends beyond any single canceled class. Faculty learn the lesson quickly. So do students. The result is a campus climate defined less by inquiry than by caution — and that’s a cost no serious institution of higher education should be willing to bear.

If you are a public university or college professor facing investigations or punishment for your speech, contact FIRE’s Faculty Legal Defense Fund: Submit a case or call the 24-hour hotline at 254-500-FLDF (3533).