Texas Universities’ Crackdown on LGBT Courses and DEI Is Getting Worse

Students at both the University of Texas and University of North Texas held mock funerals in May 2026 outside of meetings of the board of regents for their respective universities, where they mourned the loss of open discussion and academic freedom and integrity due to years of a right-wing legislative and institutional onslaught.

Cameron Samuels, a law student at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as co-founder and executive director of Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, helped organize the funeral for UT. They said the event was motivated to protest recent changes at UT, such as restructuring of academic programs, and to spark a conversation about the decline of the “academic spirit” of the university.

The mock funerals included students, faculty, and other attendees dressed in funeral attire. The event at UT-Austin included a funeral procession, complete with a horse-drawn hearse, from the university to the UT System Board of Regents office in downtown Austin. When the procession reached the office, organizers gave speeches criticizing UT for a decline in academic freedom and not taking input from students and faculty before making major changes to degree programs and staffing.

Texas public colleges and universities have been cracking down on LGBTQ courses; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies; and academic freedom after multiple bills passed in the 2023 and 2025 Texas legislative sessions imposed sweeping restrictions on those topics and Republican politicians at both the state and federal level pressed higher ed to comply.

Passed in 2023, Senate Bill 17 (SB 17) banned diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Texas higher education. SB 17 meant that all higher education institutions had to abolish any program related to DEI, such as support groups for LGBTQ, Black, Latino, or other marginalized students and faculty. This led to universities laying off or transferring employees and changing requirements for funding some student organizations. According to KUT, The University of Texas at Austin laid off 60 staffers and closed multiple programs to comply with the law in 2024. Other universities, such as the University of North Texas, went even further, eliminating or changing over 90 programs, activities, and even class syllabi, despite SB 17 explicitly exempting “academic course instruction,” The North Texas Daily reported.

In 2025, Texas passed Senate Bill 37 (SB 37), which limited faculty governance, gave boards or regents more say in what curriculum is permitted, required regular curricular reviews, and created a Higher Education Ombudsman to investigate complaints against colleges and universities and ensure compliance with SB 17, SB 37, and other state higher education laws. Pressure from politicians such as President Donald Trump, Gov. Greg Abbott, Congressman Chip Roy and Texas State Representative Brian Harrison has compelled universities and university systems to go beyond compliance with the new laws — a phenomenon known as “anticipatory obedience.”

In the 2025-26 academic year, LGBTQ studies and race and ethnic studies came under renewed attacks even before institutions began complying with the new requirements under SB 37. In September, state Representative Harrison, an A&M alumnus, posted to X, sharing a video of Texas A&M University professor Melissa McCoul asking a student to leave her class after a student accused her of violating Trump’s executive order that recognizes only two biological sexes. Along with the video, Harrison posted a letter he sent to Abbott calling for McCoul’s firing, along with a letter to the Trump administration calling for a formal investigation into A&M.

“Since the Texas government has not ended this taxpayer-funded liberal indoctrination, I am writing to respectfully request that you or other agencies take any appropriate action(s) to ensure that Texas universities receiving federal funds are complying with President Trump’s Executive Orders,” Harrison wrote in a letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Education Secretary Linda McMahon.

Shortly after Harrison’s X post, McCoul was terminated from A&M; the head of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Dean Mark Zoran and the chair of the English department Emily Johansen were demoted, according to the Texas Tribune. The incident also led to A&M President Gen. Mark Welsh resigning.

McCoul is currently suing A&M in federal court for wrongful termination, according to an American Association of University Professors press release.

McCoul’s firing was followed by a crackdown on LGBTQ curriculum across the state. In September The Texas Tribune reported Angelo State University had limited discussion on transgender identities and later the entire Texas Tech System limited discussion on race and gender identity, while providing little guidance to faculty on how to practically implement those limitations.

In September, Texas public university systems launched sweeping curriculum reviews amid political pressure from state officials and to comply with the newly implemented SB 37. The curricular reviews have drawn criticism from faculty across the state, who accuse the review process of targeting LGTBQ classes, minority studies classes, and other courses that Republicans have targeted. While SB 37 does ban LGBTQ topics in its texts, education officials have interpreted House Bill 229, a law that recognizes only two sexes based on traits at birth, along with Trump’s executive order doing the same, as banning references to the idea that there are more than two sexes or genders or that someone may change their sexual or gender identity.

Jessica Pliley, the Ingram Professor at Texas State University, said the reviews have caused faculty at Texas State to self-censor.

“If we look at the women’s studies classes that exist as of two years ago, and look at the ones that are being taught this spring and this fall, there’s less that are being taught,” Pliley said in an interview. “That does seem to be coming from faculty who are choosing not to do this because they’re scared and they want to protect themselves from being targeted by politicians or student organizations that disagree with the content of those classes.”

Pliley said many faculty members at Texas State are afraid of being recorded in the classroom like McCoul was.

“I think that one of the things that’s most striking to me about this culture of fear that’s descended on our campus is the ways that it’s eroded the ways the faculty used to trust students, and I think that this erosion of trust is really problematic, because it’s very difficult to teach if you don’t trust,” Pliley said.

Even before curricular reviews were launched at Texas State, the university began cancelling LGBTQ courses due to political pressure. On September 16, 2025, Harrison made an X post calling out the Texas State for offering a class that looked at how communication fueled discrimination against members of the LGBTQ community and LGBTQ justice and identity. Shortly after Harrison’s post, Texas State cancelled the class.

After the cancellation, Congressman Roy issued a letter to Texas State President Kelly Damphousse accusing the university of offering classes that indoctrinated students. Roy then demanded the cancellation of a graduate level LGBTQ+ Communication Studies class, a list of all LGBTQ related courses at Texas State, a justification for why they existed and commitment to ending LGBTQ advocacy or activism.

Cassie Cook, a Texas State alumna who minored in Women and Gender studies, said the classes for her minor felt different in the 2025-26 academic year due to the culture of fear created by federal, state, and university decisions. She doubted she would receive the same quality of education for her minor if she took the classes again.

“I think even this last semester a lot of my teachers did cut curriculum they thought would be too triggering for some folks,” Cook said. “I would not at all, especially with all the classes being canceled.”

According to Pliley, course cancellations and professors refusing to offer classes out of fear risks delaying the graduation dates of students who have minors in the Center for Diversity and Gender Studies.

At the University of North Texas, curricular reviews are causing some faculty to choose retirement over teaching censored versions of their classes. Tracy Everbach, a journalism professor at UNT who teaches about race and gender in media, said that SB 17, SB 37, and course audits led to her decision to accept a contract buy out and retire.

“I found out in January that all of our syllabi are being run through an AI program to identify a number of keywords, such as gender, women, and race. I don’t even know all the words,” Everbach said in an interview.

Everbach criticized SB 17 for dissolving groups like the Women and Gender Equity Network at UNT, which she said supported “women faculty, non-binary faculty and anyone else who wanted to join” and made it harder to attend certain conferences that may be flagged for being DEI-related.

“The university doesn’t care about these different groups, and they don’t care about these groups reaching equity,” Everbach said. “They’re more interested in submitting to what the politicians are saying they want, and I understand it’s because they want to get their money from the state, but it’s a sad day when politicians are dictating things that are running universities.”

At its December 18, 2025, special telephonic meeting, The Texas A&M Board of Regents revised its Civil Rights Protections policies to ban courses from “advocating” for race or gender ideology and topics related to sexual orientation. At its February 18-19, 2026 meeting, the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents passed an item restricting classroom discussion around “controversial topics” and only to things “germane to the course.” In April, Chancellor Brandon Creighton of the Texas Tech system sent out a memo restricting discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom and what students can research and write about for their thesis and dissertations.

“What does ‘controversial’ mean? They don’t describe it, and so that’s left to the discretion of those in positions of power who can be swayed or pressured by the governor, by the regents,” said Samuels.

UT-Austin and UT San Antonio have restructured their diversity and gender studies programs, while A&M eliminated its women and gender studies programs and UNT eliminated women and gender minors and a master’s degree, along with 70 other programs.

According to faculty at Texas State, there are plans to sunset the university’s Center for Diversity and Gender Studies, though a university spokesperson said there was no information on a change in the center’s status.

Pliley and Everbach both pushed back on the narrative that teaching LGBTQ+ related courses were indoctrinating students, instead emphasizing that the courses provided real world benefits to students.

“I’ve had hundreds of students, tell me that [Race, Gender and the Media] was the best course they took at UNT, the most important course they took at UNT, because it opened their eyes to different groups of people that they did not know much about and made them much more empathetic and compassionate and sensitive to the needs of different groups or to the kind of stereotypes that different groups are subject to in the media,” Everbach said. “It made them better journalists, better media professionals, because they could look at those groups and say I want to represent those groups in the fairest, most accurate way possible.”

On May 21, the UT Board of Regents approved a measure to make it easier to remove degree programs from its constituent universities and even for “expedited process in limited extraordinary circumstances to meet regulatory requirements,” though that phrase was not defined in the agenda.

Samuels said they weren’t surprised by the regents’ decision, saying the regents act like they are kings and noting that they are political appointees acting in the interest of the governor.

“It’s incumbent upon us to remain involved where these decisions are made, keep raising our voices, not letting them think that their decisions are justified,” Samuels said.