When University Classrooms Become Political Battlegrounds

A recent case in Texas puts myriad academic freedom threats on display

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On September 9th, Texas A&M fired professor Melissa McCoul for teaching about transgender identity in her Children’s Literature course. The controversy began when a student confronted McCoul mid-class, citing her religious beliefs and Trump’s executive order as reasons the material was “illegal.” The student, who said she would not participate in the class, claimed to already have a meeting scheduled with university officials.

Texas Representative Brian Harrison defended the student in an interview. Governor Greg Abbott publicly urged the university to fire McCoul. Days later, Texas A&M president Mark Welsh complied, insisting the decision was about “academic responsibility” and course alignment, rather than “academic freedom”.

This event is one of many lately that are chilling speech on campuses across the nation, but this is a specific case in which myriad academic freedom issues are on full display all at once.

First, it shows a clear general education issue among students: they don’t understand academic freedom, expertise, or the role of legislation and executive action in the classroom. When the student in McCoul’s class said, “I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching because according to our president there's only two genders,” she was presuming that an executive order can dictate what a professor can teach in a college classroom. That’s simply wrong.

This case also exemplifies a growing tactic in many red states: portraying professors at public universities as government employees who therefore speak as mouthpieces of the state—an argument that negates academic freedom in teaching. The strategy draws on Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), in which the Supreme Court ruled that public employees’ on-the-job speech is the government’s speech and therefore not protected under the First Amendment. Conservative officials have since argued that this means states can dictate what professors at state-funded, public universities may or may not say in class.

Florida invoked this rationale to defend the Stop WOKE Act; Indiana used it to justify legislation controlling university curricula. Now Texas officials are using the same logic in McCoul’s case when Harrison argued, for example, that the student was “ordered to leave by the government officials. […] This was a government official acting on behalf of the government of Texas," in reference to McCoul.

But legal scholars disagree—and for good reason. Keith Whittington, David Boies Professor of Law at Yale Law School, director of the Yale Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech, and HxA member, argues persuasively in his new book about academic freedom in the classroom that “academic speech should be understood to be an exception to the Garcetti framework,” because we should “understand that the particular kind of speech that professors are employed to engage in as part of their job responsibilities is speech that is of ‘special concern for the First Amendment’.” Politicians’ attempts to censor them, he explains, stem not from workplace concerns but from ideological motivations to control teaching.

Then, even if one accepts Welsh’s claim that the firing was about “course alignment,” or the professor not making satisfactory changes to her course, the timing makes this defense suspicious to an outside observer. Faculty regularly expand course topics beyond catalog blurbs, which tend to be so concise and vague as to permit wide latitude to the professor to shape the course to their academic specialties. McCoul has previously taught the class a dozen times and even provides a syllabus statement alerting students to the inclusion of contentious issues and asking not for agreement, but respectful discussion in class.

There's room to question the course alignment with its (broad) catalog description, and the content of the lesson is fair game for academic debate. But McCoul's academic background in English and gender studies makes the topic entirely relevant to her scholarly expertise; firing her is an extraordinary step and a clear violation of academic freedom.

The simplest and most obvious explanation is that this is a case of partisan pressure by political actors, try as they may to dress it in the language of banal administrative procedure.

When administrators prioritize political appeasement over protecting faculty autonomy, such capitulation transforms classrooms into political battlegrounds where students, activists, and politicians dictate what can be taught. Perhaps administrators cave under political pressure thinking they would lose their jobs otherwise. President Welsh stepped down anyway (after having originally defended McCoul) late last week amid the media fallout from the controversy. There seems to be no good way to handle these political battlegrounds, which only benefit the political actors.

We’re now seeing the political right embrace what was once a cancel culture tactic on the progressive left. Where progressive activists once pushed retractions for “wrongthink” research, for example, conservatives are leveraging misinterpreted case law to purge disfavored ideas from the classroom. The result is the same: a culture of fear on campus wherein education is reduced to ideological policing rather than free inquiry and learning.

Academic freedom does not mean professors have unlimited license; it means they retain professional authority to teach and research within their expertise, without political interference. When politicians redefine them as government officials, when administrators cave to social media political pressure, and when students are emboldened to act as culture war enforcers, the losers are professors, students, and the integrity of higher education itself.

The classroom must remain a place of open inquiry free of political interference. Otherwise, we all lose.