Just when you thought higher education in the Hub City couldn’t get any more embarrassing, Texas Tech’s administration has managed to turn curriculum oversight into a dystopian comedy. According to a recent Faculty Senate survey, nearly half of the responding professors have had to alter their courses to comply with Chancellor Brandon Creighton’s sweeping war on “controversial” concepts like race, gender identity, and sexual orientation. In totally unrelated news, over half of those surveyed are currently looking for jobs literally anywhere else.
The administration, doing its best impression of an ostrich with its head in the West Texas dirt, quickly dismissed the survey because it didn’t align with their official narrative that only 60 courses system-wide were affected. Creighton’s office waved off the faculty’s concerns as “unscientific” self-selection, preferring instead to trust their own flawless internal reviews. Creighton, a former Republican state senator who apparently believes college is strictly for churning out compliant corporate cogs, claims these restrictions ensure students get “degrees of value.” Because nothing screams “high value” to a modern employer quite like a diploma from an institution that treats basic sociology like contraband.
But the absolute chef’s kiss of this academic dumpster fire is how Tech is actually policing these classrooms: they used an artificial intelligence tool to audit course content. The brilliant algorithm ended up flagging a graduate seminar on European history because it dared to mention how historians study gender. The AI completely hallucinated and mischaracterized the actual reading materials, but the provost’s office told the department chair to ax the texts anyway—with zero option to appeal.
But hey, look on the bright side: if the chancellor succeeds in driving out every qualified, free-thinking professor who refuses to bow to political preference, at least the campus parking situation might finally improve.
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