Texas A&M University ending women and gender studies

New York Times - Texas A&M University said on Friday that it would end its women’s and gender studies program, and that the syllabuses for hundreds of courses had been altered under new policies limiting how race and gender ideology may be discussed in classrooms.

The university said that six courses had been canceled entirely because of the new rules, out of the roughly 5,400 that were planned for this semester at one of the nation’s largest public universities.

The A&M system’s regents — all of them appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican — approved the restrictive policies late last year, and officials have been scrambling since then to interpret and enforce them. Supporters contend that the rules are appropriate measures to prevent political ideologies, especially those often associated with the left, from entering classrooms. Opponents say the approach encourages self-censorship and is itself ideological.

A top-down demand to scrutinize a university’s entire course catalog in so short a time is extraordinarily rare in the United States, where professors have long had sweeping control over their syllabuses.

“I have never seen anything like this,” said Leonard Bright, a professor in A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and the president of the American Association of University Professors chapter in College Station, where the A&M system has its flagship campus of more than 74,000 students.  The regents do not seem interested in the academic freedom of students and the faculty, he added, only the “freedom of their speech.”