Our very own Chancellor Brandon Creighton—a man who apparently loved the censorship bill he wrote as a Senator so much that he moved into the Texas Tech System just to make sure the “Delete” key stayed warm—is back in the news. He’s currently doing a victory lap for his new course guidelines, which have successfully managed to turn the academic catalog into something as sterile and intellectually stimulating as a Sunday afternoon in a South Loop parking lot.
According to Creighton, scrubbing 60 courses of “ideology” (read: anything involving LGBTQ+ people) isn’t about a culture war—it’s about “efficiency” and “workforce readiness.” Because, as we all know, the modern global economy is desperately seeking graduates who have been trained to pretend that gender identity is a myth and that “diversity” is just a thing you see while walking to the Student Union, rather than a topic worthy of actual study.
While the folks at PFLAG are complaining about a “climate of fear” and a “scholarly traffic jam,” Creighton is busy assuring us that the First Amendment is doing just fine, even if it’s currently gagged and tied up in the basement of the Administration Building. He claims the university needs to “evolve” to keep up with the marketplace, which apparently involves using an AI bot to hunt down “garbage” sociology terms like it’s a digital version of Fahrenheit 451 set in the Texas Panhandle.
The Chancellor says he’s just looking out for the “value” of a Tech degree, ensuring that tuition dollars aren’t wasted on “inefficiencies” like empathy or social context. It’s a bold strategy for a “National Research University”: becoming a leader in the field by seeing exactly how much of the 21st century we can ignore before the accreditation boards notice we’ve officially reverted to 1954.
If we’re truly tailoring the curriculum to the “expectations of the workforce,” does this mean the Engineering department is adding a mandatory seminar on how to avoid eye contact with HR, or are we just hoping every employer in the world is as terrified of a rainbow flag as the Lubbock Board of Regents?
Source:
