The Head of a University System Should Not Be a Knuckle-Dragging Bigot

Chancellor Brandon Creighton

Curmie started a piece a couple of weeks ago about the North Carolina community college whose administration demanded changes to the set for a production of Euripides’ Bacchae only hours before the show was to open.   He thought about perhaps appending some commentary on Utah Valley University’s withdrawal of the offer to best-selling author Sharon McMahon to deliver the commencement address because, although she described herself as “gutted” by the assassination of Charlie Kirk on that campus, she said she understood why some people weren’t grieving as loudly as the some other folks wanted.  She had the audacity to quote directly Kirk’s reprehensible statements about gays, Muslims, and blacks.  That, in the world of fawning obeisance to Dear Leader and his minions, is apparently inexcusable.

Anyway, Curmie didn’t get very far with that essay that night, but he did get a start: “Sometimes Curmie thinks there are tests of intelligence, integrity, and courage for people who want to be college presidents.  You have to fail at least two to get the gig.”  Curmie expresses all due disrespect for the stupidity, over-reaching, and cowardice of Jim Morton at Cape Fear Community College and Astrid Tuminez at Utah Valley (to be fair to the latter, the rabid responses of those who regarded a smug asshole like Kirk as akin to the Second Coming might indeed have suggested the possibility of legitimate security concerns).  But the easy winner of the Censorial Asshat Tournament (post-A&M edition) goes to Texas Tech (TTU) Chancellor Brandon Creighton, whose antics Curmie read about when a friend posted a story from the Erin in the Morning page to her Facebook page, describing a litany of restrictions on, well, teaching and learning at all TTU affiliated campuses.

A little background:

There are, in fact, three different state university systems in Texas (Curmie has no idea why): the University of Texas (UT), Texas A&M (TAMU), and Texas Tech.  Curmie’s former school was independent of control from Austin, College Station, or Lubbock until a couple of years ago (when Curmie was already retired from full-time teaching), but has now been absorbed into the UT network.  UT is not without its censorial impulses (see here and here, for instance), but so far, at least, it’s the least problematic of the three systems in terms of restricting curriculum.  That’s relatively speaking good news for Curmie’s former colleagues (it could be worse!), but Curmie waits with some trepidation for the other shoe to drop.

Even apart from enacting laws any reasonable person would call 1st Amendment violations, the governor and state legislature pull all the strings.  The governor, the despicable Greg Abbott, appoints the Regents, who appoint the Chancellor and university Presidents.  Back in the Dark Ages when Curmie was a lad, such appointments were based on who could best serve the interests of the school, its people (faculty, staff, students, and alumni), and the state. 

Curmie has mentioned a few times that his father was a President in the State University of New York system.  The chair of the College Council (the equivalent of the Regents) for several of his years in office, was appointed by a Republican governor; he was the chair of the Democratic Party in an adjoining county.  Back then, both the governor and the council chair cared more about education than about pushing a political agenda (or stifling someone else’s) in the state colleges.  Curmie can’t speak for other states, but in the two he’s most familiar with, Kansas and Texas, such an attitude would now be regarded by every politician in sight as hopelessly naïve, even quaint.

Even a decade or so ago, although prospective Regents in Texas had to be active Republicans, at least some attention was paid to the ways they might benefit the institution.  Now, the only requirement is stolid sycophancy.  And it probably goes without saying that Creighton, like his compatriots at Texas A&M, has no damned business heading any educational institution, let alone a system of colleges and universities.  He has no relevant experience: he’s a lawyer and former hard-right state legislator.  He neither knows nor cares anything about education, except as a tool for propaganda. 

One more point that sort of makes this personal.  As you probably know, Gentle Reader, Curmie came out of retirement to teach two sections of Theatre History as a sabbatical replacement in the fall of 2024.  It was an intriguing return to the classroom.  Far too many students were unwilling or unable to do the level of work expected in an upper-division course, but, as Curmie noted at the end of that semester: 

...it’s extremely important to note that my best students were not only more numerous than average, but they were really outstanding.  They’d not only done the reading; they’d thought about it.  They asked pertinent questions and made intriguing comments, often analogizing (appropriately!) to other plays, novels, films, or historical events.  Most of all, and this was especially true of a couple of them, they were intellectually curious.  They’d read things that hadn’t been assigned, and then they’d ask me questions.

After a couple of decades in this business, one learns to identify students who not only excel at the undergraduate level, but show considerable potential for success in graduate school, as well.  One young woman in particular was everything you could want in a budding scholar.  I was happy to help her navigate the process, and although Texas Tech wouldn’t have been my choice for her, she was enthusiastic about her interactions with the department, and I wrote a very positive letter of recommendation for her.  I warned her about the prospect of censorship, and she took it seriously, but she was thrilled to have been offered an assistantship there.  That was all, of course, before this latest round of anti-intellectual shenanigans.  I heard from her a week or so ago; she plans to go ahead with her studies at TTU.  Curmie may wish she’d chosen a different school, but he sincerely hopes never to have the words “I told you so” form in his mind in this regard.

The white robe was at
the cleaners.

I will say this: if Creighton and his evil minions mess with her—whether by censoring professors’ ability to present the full range of information required of a course or by limiting what she could choose as a thesis topic—he’d do well to be careful out there.  Curmie makes no threats, but there just might be an angry old man (like the one at the left) with long grey hair, a beard, and a Gandalf staff, parked in Creighton’s outer office.

So… is the memo sent out by Creighton really as bad as Erin in the Morning would have us believe?  Probably not quite.  It does, for example, differentiate between course content which is “centered on,” “includes,” or contains “incidental reference” to SOGI (that’s Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, for those of you not au courant with the latest alphabet soup).  But there’s always one sentence too many.  It’s expressly permitted, for example, to discuss “chromosomal variations” or “intersex biological conditions,” but not to make the obvious inference, that there might be more than two genders, or that “gender identity is a fluid spectrum.”

Curmie also wants to tease out the implications of some of Creighton’s definitions.  An example of an “incidental reference,” for example, is “a single sentence in a larger text.”  That hardly qualifies as a reference at all, and is most likely a side comment rather than part of a prepared lecture.  Curmie never taught a course that would qualify as “centered on” SOGI topics, but he has a number of good friends who have done so, and most if not all of Curmie’s classes are in the “includes” range.  This is especially true if we look at the “SO” part of “SOGI.”  Most of the hoopla of late has centered on trans or gender-fluid people, but if sexual orientation is also part of the equation, then anything related to homosexuality also figures into the mix.

But notice that the course need not be “centered on” one of those impermissible subjects.  It’s enough if some “course materials” do so, and Curmie can’t remember ever teaching a course that didn’t cross over that threshold.  Moreover, “in courses where course materials (inclusive of all assigned works, readings, case studies, peer-reviewed research, videos, etc.) are centered on or include sexual orientation or gender identity, alternate materials must be utilized.”  (emphasis added)  Must, mind you. 

It’s important to point out, of course, the implicit assumptions here.  Cishet relationships, because they are in the majority (and because that’s the world inhabited by the censors), are de facto not considered to be about sexual orientation, thus conflating the statistically probable with the normative.  There’s a pretty wide range of statistics concerning what percentage of the population self-identifies as LGBTQ+.  Let’s go with the Williams Institute report that puts that figure at 5.5%.  (The rate in Texas is slightly lower, at 5.1%, but that still means that well over a million Texas thus identify.)  Two things are significant here.  First, nationwide, university-age (18-24) respondents self-reported at nearly three times that figure, 15.2%.  Second, we’re going to pretend for a moment that everyone who didn’t say they were LGBT self-identified as straight, whereas a significant number of people didn’t give a yes/no answer to the question (e.g., they listed themselves as asexual, refused to answer, etc.).

Even using this probably artificially low percentage of LGBT people in the population, the chances are better than even that a class of a mere 14 Texas students includes at least one LGBT individual.  If we use the national figure for 18-24-year-olds, a class of 25 students is almost 98.5% likely to have an LGBT student, and the likelihood would be three or four.  Curmie has taught core classes of 73 (the capacity of the room) several times at a Texas public university.  Using the estimate for university-aged individuals, the chances that all 73 of those students are straight is about .0006%.  Not very damned likely, in other words.  And those LGBTQ+ students might like to see themselves treated with at least respect if not representation.

Of course, Creighton wants to leave himself some wiggle room.  This manifests in two forms: selective enforcement and prior restraint.  No matter how precise the language tries to be, it can never allow everything it wants to allow and disallow everything it wants to disallow.  There will be judgment calls every semester, and the criteria will seldom be limited to course content.  You will perhaps recall, Gentle Reader, that the two Texas A&M professors who most ran afoul of that university’s censorial dictates were the Chair of the Academic Freedom Council and the President of the A&M chapter of the American Association of University Professors, an organization that’s very close to being a faculty union if indeed it isn’t one: people most likely to think that faculty ought to have a say in university governance, in other words.  Coincidence, huh?

But Curmie is most concerned about prior restraint.  Most faculty would like to… you know… keep their jobs, and not everyone has a sufficiently high profile that they can just pack up and leave for a private university the way Martin Peterson (he of the infamous reading from Plato in a philosophy course) did.  That means looking over your shoulder a lot. 

Will I get into trouble if I talk about the piquancy of a boy playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl in As You Like It?  What about the theory that Peace in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata may have been played by a (nude) female slave, thereby not following the tradition of women being played by men?  Can I talk about John Lyly’s Gallathea at all?  (Or do I get a partial exemption because I wrote my Master’s thesis about Lyly?)  Should I not show that video about the onnagata when discussing Kabuki?  Or mention the only Chinese Opera actor most Americans have ever heard of, Mei Lanfang, who played exclusively women’s roles?

Can I, as an acting teacher, assign roles to student actors which may not conform to their sexual orientation or gender identity?  Must a production of Jean Genet’s The Maids cast all three roles as women (the play is written that way), or could a director cast the play with men, as Genet suggested he might like to do?  Is the farcical element of, say, The Breasts of Tiresias, in which the female lead grows a full beard in a matter of seconds and the male lead gives birth to 40,000 babies overnight, enough to exempt it?  Is The Children’s Hour verboten?  Is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?  Is Rent?  Or Some Like It Hot?  Is it trans actors or trans roles I can’t use?

It’s easier to avoid that confrontation, to submit, to water everything down to accommodate the stolid and the bigoted.  But that’s not education; that’s capitulation.  Far better to suggest to Chancellor Creighton that he perform an exercise best suited to particularly limber hermaphrodites.  (Easy for Curmie to say…)