The Censorial Asshats at Texas A&M Are At It Again

Dr. Leonard Bright

Yes, there are probably more important stories to write about, but Curmie was a college professor for a very long time, and taught multiple courses in which topics related to race and gender figured reasonably prominently.  Curmie has already expressed his relief that he’s now retired, because now the university doesn’t have to fire him for thinking he knows more about what’s appropriate reading and/or discussion material for his course than some administrator too busy kissing the ass of grandstanding politicians to actually care about education does.

So, here we are again, because, as the title of this essay suggests, the censorial asshats at Texas A&M University are at it again.  And in some ways it’s worse than ever.  Yes, demanding the removal of a selection from Plato’s Symposium from a Philosophy course is probably stupider, but this one may show even less regard for the way universities are supposed to operate.  It’s bad enough, in other words, that Professor Leonard Bright’s graduate level Ethics and Public Policy (PSAA 642) course was cancelled, but these idiots did so after the class had already met!

Dean John Sherman claims that Bright had declined repeated requests for more specifics about his course.  Bright says, quite reasonably, that issues of race, gender, and sexuality were likely to arise every day: “During discussions, book reviews, case studies, throughout the course. There is no one day. That’s how this class works.”  Well, duh.  Sherman, of course, had no relevant experience in an academic environment prior to being hired as dean, so, not to put too fine a point on it, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.  Curmie’s a reasonably smart lad, too, but you don’t want to put him in charge of a national security agency. 

Sherman is clearly far from stupid, but he is ignorant, and that may be even worse under these circumstances.  Let’s start with some basic facts.  First off, the more advanced a course is, at least outside the so-called “hard sciences,” the more it tends to be run as a seminar.  Students are actively engaged in discussing, debating, and interrogating course materials.  People who don’t understand how seminars work—and, unfortunately, this includes a good many university administrators—think this makes for a lesser load on the professor, even trying to claim that teaching a three-credit-hour seminar should count as less than three hours of courseload in lecture courses.  

In fact, of course, the opposite is true.  True, you do less of the talking, but you don’t know what direction a student wants to take the discussion, so you’d better be ready for anything.  That means more prep time and a greater need to clarify one’s own perspectives.  An analogy might be the difference between a speech (lecture) and a press conference (seminar).

Importantly, these are graduate students, who are curious by nature and both intelligent enough and scholarly enough to have been admitted to grad school at Texas A&M back when it was a reputable university (i.e., last year or earlier).  They’re going to ask questions.  They’re going to have, and state, their own opinions.  Even in the wet dreams of the Christian dominionists, there is no means to completely control what students say in a classroom.  The censors can claim that a faculty member’s mentioning the fact that gay people exist is somehow “advocating” for homosexuality, but they don’t have a rejoinder for a student who says, “I’m LGBTQ+, and this policy affects me in the following manner…” 

What is the professor to do in that scenario?  Sure, there’s an opportunity to open the floor for other student input, but what if there is none, other than perhaps a handful of nods in agreement?  Students deserve a response to their commentary, and they deserve to hear the professional perspective of a recognized authority (the professor), not some equivocation inspired by trying to obey an unconstitutional imperative.

In other words, Dr. Bright’s assertion that the verboten topics might arise in literally any class period is 100% accurate, and he would be compelled to respond.  Expecting him to be able to predict when and how often such conversations would happen is not merely unreasonable; it betrays a profound misunderstanding of how university coursework works, especially in advanced courses.  Yes, we can put much of the blame on the idiot state legislators (the usual apologies for redundancy) who passed SB37, but Sherman deserves plenty of criticism, too.

But that’s not all!  As Curmie wrote last October about the suppression of a high school play, “If you’re going to be a censorial asshat, at least be timely about it.”  As noted above, the course was cancelled after classes has already started!  Yeah, yeah, the university promises to help students find new classes, where, of course, they’ll already be behind.  If they as much as wrote their names on the inside cover of a textbook, they can’t sell it back to the bookstore for full price.  Most importantly, this was the course that best fit those students’ needs, which they chose, presumably in consultation with their advisors, for that reason.  It was the only ethics course to be offered in the department this spring.  Curmie won’t bother you with the obvious joke in that regard, Gentle Reader; he knows you can get there on your own.

There is precisely one legitimate reason to cancel a course after the semester has started: that the professor is unable to continue teaching it for reasons beyond the university’s control: serious illness, for example.  Clearly, that’s not the case here.  QED.

Oh, by the way, you know how Curmie mentioned in his blog post of January 8 that Dr. Martin Peterson, whose choice of a selection from Plato led to censorship, was the Chair of the Academic Freedom Council at A&M, “which makes him an especial target for the censorial asshat brigade”?  Well, the Texas Tribune article linked above reports that Dr. Bright, who is, by the way, a tenured Full Professor, also happens to be president of the Texas A&M Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, “a faculty group that opposes the system’s new race and gender ideology policy.”  What a coincidence, huh?  Dr. Bright argues that his “decision to speak out in defense of academic freedom and the integrity of higher education has clearly placed a target on [his] back.”  It is difficult to argue with that analysis.

Back when Curmie was teaching, he not infrequently expressed views that he freely admitted were not shared by the majority of theatre historians—about the motivations behind creating the Dionysian festival or about the demographics of Shakespeare’s audience, for example.  He made a point of explaining why most scholars thought the way they did, and why he disagreed.  He didn’t care which argument students regarded as more persuasive; he wanted them to think, to reach a conclusion based on all the available arguments.  In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must believe Dr. Bright when he says that students are not expected to agree with him.  It’s the administration that has clearly taken a side, and it’s not in favor of free inquiry.

Texas A&M has quickly turned into the Augean stables, and is desperately in need of a Herakles.

There's No 3-D Chess Here

Nope.

It had probably been months since Curmie had heard the term “3-D Chess” to describe someone so strategically brilliant as to leave the rest of us in the dust.  Then he encountered the metaphor twice on Wednesday of this week.  In both cases, Curmie’s response was, shall we say, skeptical.

The first occurrence was during the FIRE members-only webcast.  One of the viewers asked if it was possible that the administration at Texas A&M was in fact sympathetic with faculty who just want to teach their courses based on their professional expertise.  The argument, you see, was that censoring Plato in a Philosophy course was so remarkably stupid that it invites a lawsuit, which would, hypothetically, free the university from the grotesquerie that is SB37.  In other words, university policy-makers—the Regents and the administration—were hoping for a 1st Amendment challenge to an obviously unconstitutional law.  It would succeed, and control of the curriculum would thereby be wrested from idiot pols and returned to its rightful place, the university itself.

It was not an outrageous question, but FIRE’s General Counsel Ronnie London doubted that university officials were indeed “playing 3-D chess.”  He granted the possibility, but made it clear that such a scenario was unlikely.  Curmie agrees, not merely because he doubts that anyone would employ such a strategy, but because the Regents are appointed by ultra-right wing Governor Greg Abbott, whose fingerprints are all over the legislation in question… and they, in turn appoint the President.  The principal qualifications to be a Regent for a state university in Texas are simple: you must be a rich Republican who neither knows nor cares anything about higher education except as a means of advancing a political agenda.  Abbott certainly found his flock at A&M.

Remember, too, that last fall a young woman described by Curmie as “a single narcissistic and reactionary student” objected to a discussion topic because it violated an Executive Order from Dear Leader, and the professor, department chair, dean, and president all lost their jobs. 

By the way, it’s been reported that the reason that the department chair (and presumably those up the food chain) got in trouble was that they allowed the prof to teach something that wasn’t in the course description.  As a side note: when Curmie came to the university from which he is now retired, the catalog description for the second half of the Theatre History sequence said the course stopped chronologically at World War II.  Curmie said he was going to extend the timeline to the present, thereby including absurdism, the Angry Young Men, Off- and Off-Off Broadway, playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, feminist dramaturgy, deconstruction… well, you get the idea, Gentle Reader.  

And get this: Curmie’s boss agreed to it without any hesitation!  Such insubordination from a department chair!  We did, by the way, change the course description, but it took a couple of years to get the revisions through the system.  In the meantime, it would appear that Curmie and his boss were both very naughty, indeed.  Luckily, the statute of limitations has run out.

But revenons à nos moutons.  The powers-that-be had their chance to challenge or even circumvent the state’s censorial policy and passed on the opportunity.  If the Regents actually wanted to halt this unconstitutional idiocy, they would have done so.  Nope.  They’re absolutely complicit.

So now we turn to the other contender for “3-D chess” designation: 47’s stated intention of annexing Greenland through whatever means necessary.  Actually, the CNN story Curmie read references MAGA-dom’s belief that Dear Leader is playing 4-D chess, and similar inanities have apparently been uttered not infrequently for some time, especially with respect to events in Venezuela.  Curmie either just didn’t see them or succeeded in ignoring them.

Last Friday, Chris Cillizza’s YouTube post (which Curmie didn’t see until today) opened with some pretty open mockery of the idea that “Donald Trump is always playing 3- or maybe 4- or maybe 5-dimensional chess, while the Democrats, the reporters covering him, everyone else, is sort of playing checkers at best.  The essence of the argument is that Trump is so strategically smart that he’s always multiple moves ahead of everyone else.”  Cillizza proceeds to talk about the strategic stupidity involved in describing Susan Collins, the most vulnerable Republican Senator seeking re-election, as a “disaster” who “should never be elected to office again.”  Collins, of course, only votes against GOP directives when it won’t make any difference (a point Cillizza doesn’t raise), and of course her vote on a procedural matter that will lead to nothing substantive fits that description nicely.

So Cillizza has a point.  But the true coup de grâce came a couple days after Cillizza’s piece, when Greenland became the topic of conversation on Sunday and then again on Wednesday.  The apologists’ argument is that only by threatening to invade an ally could Trump get Western Europe to send troops to protect Greenland, even if the perceived enemy is… well… us.  Pursuing this policy is far stupider than attacking Susan Collins. 

Sure, Greenland has some strategic importance, and we’d rather not have it taken over by Russia or China.  But first of all, that isn’t going to happen, and secondly, the downside of 47’s bluster is enormous.  His recklessness on the international stage has already cost this country more than can be regained in a decade or more of actual diplomacy and ethical leadership.  What ally would possibly trust the US now?  The idea that there would actually be a US military operation against Greenland would be laughable if we had a sane President.  As it is, the possibility looms. 

And if such an invasion were to take place, the situation would change from bad to cataclysmic.  There’s commentary out there that has been attributed to Brent Molnar (although why it doesn’t appear on his Facebook or Bluesky pages is a mystery).  Regardless of who wrote it, it’s pretty scary.  Curmie suspects it may be a little alarmist (“the world as we know it ends” may be a bit much), but virtually everything mentioned in the piece is at least a possibility if not a probability: the destruction of NATO is virtually assured; closure of American military bases in Europe, economic retaliation from the EU resulting in staggering inflation, the expulsion of US corporations from European countries, cessation of trans-Atlantic travel: all well within the realm of possibility…  It’s not a pretty picture.  

More to the point, not only would the loss of status, economic stability, and the moral high ground be devastating, there would be no upside.  The only country to gain from this ill-begotten fever dream is Russia, since European powers would be distracted away from supporting Ukraine.  Curmie judiciously refrains from wondering if that was the whole point.

Curmie would like to think that military leaders would either talk Dear Leader out of doing something so suicidal to American interests, or that they would listen to Senator Kelly and refuse an illegal order.  But when the Generals and Admirals are our last line of defense against a sociopathic POTUS with the maturity of a pampered toddler, we are neck deep in the shit and sinking fast.  Suddenly, “Doctor Strangelove” doesn’t seem so funny anymore.

So, no.  Neither the folks at Texas A&M nor in the White House inner circle are playing 3-D chess.  They’d be lucky to handle the complexities of Go Fish.

One More Reason Curmie Is Glad He's Retired: So He Doesn't Have to Deal with Crap Like This

Regular readers of this blog will know that Curmie is a retired professor who taught for two decades at a state university in Texas.  He taught theatre, mostly the “academic” stuff like theatre history and play analysis.  As mentioned in a previous post, he taught plays and essays by a wide range of authors: some concentrated on race, others on gender, others on sexual orientation.  He showed a video of the Noble Call of Irish drag queen Panti Bliss after a performance at the Abbey Theatre. 

Some authors were communists; others were monarchists.  Their religious beliefs were Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or… you know, atheist.  Some wrote realism; others wrote anti-realism; others a hybrid.  Many wrote before the concept of “realism” existed except as mimesis, the “imitation of an action.”  Outside the classroom per se, Curmie directed at least three plays (As You Like It, The Breasts of Tiresias, and A Servant of Two Masters) which involved cross-dressing in one form or another, and at least three others in which a role written for a man was played by a woman.  Curmie’s job was to bring as much of the depth and breadth of theatre to his students as he could, to broaden their horizons, and ultimately to turn them loose on the world, whether they chose to pursue a career in theatre or not.

He was, and is, something of an intellectual snob: not in the sense that he believed himself to be the authority on all things theatrical, but in the confidence that he knew what material needed to be covered in a theatre history course or a topics course on Asian theatre or Non-Realism Between the Wars at least as well as, and probably better than, anyone up the food chain, certainly better than anyone more than one step up.  He was lucky enough to have deans and provosts who stayed out of his way, and department chairs who may have given the occasional piece of advice, but never commands.  And partisan political hacks would do well to steer clear.

Was Curmie further emboldened by being granted tenure and further still by reaching the point where he could retire as opposed to resign if things got too problematic?  Yeah, probably.  But he also remembers a moment in grad school when some idiot state legislator (there’s another kind?) demanded that the university submit a list of all the courses that contained any reference to homosexuality.  Curmie’s solution, articulated in a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper, was simple: send the asshole a copy of the course catalog.  You might be able to strike a math course here or there, but the chances that Pythagoras engaged in activity that would now be called homosexual conduct at some point in his life are actually pretty high.  Besides, the demand was for a list of those courses, not for only those courses, and it we wouldn’t want to inadvertently leave something out, now would we?

Anyway, yesterday was an interesting day in the world of 1st Amendment rights for university professors.  On the one hand, Darren Michael, the Austin Peay State University theatre prof who was fired for posting a link to an article about Charlie Kirk’s argument that the 2nd Amendment was worth preserving even at the cost of a few lives, settled his lawsuit with the university.  As Curmie predicted, he got his job back along with $500k and a couple other goodies.  (Curmie didn’t predict the amount, but he knew it would be substantial).  All told, it was a nice FAFO message for the Austin Peay administration.

On the other hand, we also learned of Martin Peterson, a Philosophy professor at Texas A&M being essentially told that he’d either have to stop teaching Plato in his Contemporary Moral Issues course or be re-assigned to a different course, one that meets at 8:00 a.m.  Well, that’s slightly over-stated.  He’d have to skip the parts of Plato that some idiot state legislator (or weenie dean, or whoever) believes are icky.  As usual, Gentle Reader, please excuse the redundancy of both “idiot state legislator” and “weenie dean.”

Two essential points here: First, Texas A&M is a state institution, which means that the 1st Amendment cannot be circumvented just because a university administration or state legislature wants to do so.  Second, this isn’t some grad student in charge of this course.  Dr. Peterson is not merely a Full Professor; he’s got an endowed chair.  His MA and PhD are from Swedish universities, and he taught both in Sweden and in the Netherlands before accepting his position at A&M.  Oh, and he was a Research Fellow for three years at some place called Cambridge University.  Curmie is pretty sure he’s heard of that one.  If this man says that a particular reading from Plato is essential to his course, Curmie is going to believe him.  Nor are we talking about some obscure writing of Plato’s: it’s the Symposium, which is hardly a minor work.  Of course, Peterson is also the Chair of the Academic Freedom Council at A&M, which makes him an especial target for the censorial asshat brigade.

Professor Peterson dutifully submitted his syllabus for what he called “mandatory censorship review.”  That probably didn’t win him any points with… well, with the censors, but his description is apt.  There is a new policy adopted by the Board of Regents, declaring that “No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”  Peterson is politic enough not to mention that forbidding discussion of race or gender ideology is in fact a means of advocating a position on those issues: that the social conservatives’ dogma and suppression of other viewpoints should be unquestioned.  Curmie, you will have noticed, Gentle Reader, is not similarly politic.

What Dr. Peterson does argue is that his course “does not ‘advocate’ any ideology.”  Rather, he “teach[es] students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussion of contemporary moral issues.”  No reasonable interpretation of the word “advocate” would suggest that Peterson should be forced to alter his course in any way.  Of course, Professor Peterson also cites a litany of legal precedents in support of his contention that the system policy in question is unconstitutional.  Needless to say, he’s right about that, too, but it probably did him more (short term) harm than good to point out that the emperor was in a state of deshabillé.

Texas, of course, has a terrible record with respect to 1st Amendment guarantees, especially during the regime of Grand Censorial Poobah Governor Greg Abbott.  There was the illegal suppression of student protests at the University of Texas in the spring of 2024; Angelo State’s banning of discussion of discussions of transgender issues and the spread of that attempt at thought control throughout the Texas Tech system; West Texas A&M’s ban on drag shows (subsequently ruled unconstitutional); the ongoing investigations of anyone deemed insufficiently hagiographic in describing Charlie Kirk; the horrific SB37, which restricts curriculum and radically reduces the faculty’s input into decision-making; and SB2972, which is downright silly, and so on.  And on.  And on.

Texas A&M itself, of course, was the site of a major contretemps last fall.  Here’s Curmie’s description (it’s the first link in this essay): “a single narcissistic and reactionary student circulated a surreptitious video of challenging a professor for including a discussion of verboten (by Trump/Abbott) topics like gender identity and transgender people.  A grandstanding pol got involved, and soon the professor was fired, the dean and department chair demoted, and the president at the very least under fire.”  This is not what universities are supposed to do.

And now there are perhaps as many as 200 Spring ’26 courses at A&M that may be subject to censorship, lest the cherubim hear something that challenges their ignorance.  Dr. Peterson’s case is the tip of the iceberg. 

The good news is that every free speech and academic organization you can think of is all over this story.  Here’s FIRE: “The board didn’t just invite censorship, they unleashed it with immediate and predictable consequences. You don’t protect students by banning 2,400-year-old philosophy.”  And PEN America: “Censoring classical texts in service of political orthodoxy is antithetical to the goals of education. Universities exist to engage students in difficult inquiry and not to suppress ideas just because they make some uncomfortable.”  And the AAUP: “A research university that censors Plato abandons its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust—and should not be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning.”  You get the idea, Gentle Reader.  Curmie, of course, is honored to join the chorus.

So, you may well ask, what is going to happen to Professor Peterson’s course?  Curmie was rather hoping that the good prof would sue the university, its president, its regents, Greg Abbott, and anyone else he could think of.  After consultations with his lawyer, however, Dr. Peterson has decided to revise his syllabus.  Instead of the readings from Plato, he’s going to substitute an article from the New York Times which deals more directly with contemporary moral issues.  Its title: “Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato.”  

Well played, Professor.  Well played.

FIRE's Failure and Curmie's Happiness in Retirement

 

One of the more troubling survey results.  Probably.

If FIRE, the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression is known for anything by the general public, it’s for their annual Free Speech Rankings of colleges and universities.  The new (2026: apparently they’re like model years for cars in this regard) list dropped this week, and it reveals some troubling information.

Nearly 2/3 of the 257 colleges and universities studied received a failing grade from FIRE, and none got better than a B-.  Of course, if what you want to do is to show the need for your organization, you’re likely to paint a rather gloomy picture of the status quo, so perhaps a grain of salt is called for.  Still, it’s chilling that FIRE President Greg Lukianoff’s could comment that, 

Rather than hearing out and then responding to an ideological opponent, both liberal and conservative college students are retreating from the encounter entirely. This will only harm students’ ability to think critically and create rifts between them. We must champion free speech on campus as a remedy to our culture's deep polarization.

A third of college students surveyed agreed that violence is acceptable, at least “rarely,” to stop speech.  A majority said they would oppose their school’s inviting any of six controversial speakers (three from the left and three from the right) to campus.  Note: these are not specific individuals, apparently, but hypothetical people who are quoted as saying something controversial, e.g., “children should be allowed to transition without parental consent” or “transgender people have a mental disorder.”  You get the picture, Gentle Reader. 

Of course, some of this gets into areas of fungible definitions.  Is grabbing and restraining someone who is inciting violence (i.e., engaging in non-protected speech) perpetrating violence against that person?  Or is the term limited to punching out someone you disagree with?  Does “rarely” mean “only in extremely rare circumstances” (such as just described) or just “not very often”?  And what is meant by “invite”?  Is that my tuition money that’s being spent on bringing in this person whose views I abhor, or is it the Young Republicans/Democrats/whatever footing the bill?

Similarly, it’s also difficult for a university to legitimately be blamed for students’ reluctance to discuss controversial issues in entirely social atmospheres outside the classroom.  If, for example, a student hears another student advocating a position on abortion or the conflict in Gaza which is radically different from their own, choosing not to express a contrary view may be appropriate if that decision comes not from fear but from simply not wanting to be bothered. 

Similarly, Curmie has three different responses to those who disagree with his posts, both here on the blog and, considerably more frequently, on the Facebook page.  (No one has really taken issue with anything he’s posted on BlueSky; that bridge will be crossed if/when reached.)  Usually, the comment simply remains with no counter-argument.  Curmie isn’t afraid of detractors, but sometimes they’re just not worth the trouble.  Sometimes, Curmie responds with a clarification or further argument.  Rarely (there’s that word, again), he’ll ban someone.  (He hasn’t done that in several years.)

For all this, FIRE’s work, whether arguing against speech codes, protecting research from government interference, or working to eliminate loyalty oaths (including towards DEI advocacy), is unquestionably a net positive, and the free speech rankings contribute towards this utility.

FIRE is, to be sure, enormously and not infrequently smugly proud of their work, and Wednesday’s webinar to hype the new rankings showed that off.  Curmie does not begin to profess to any expertise in surveying, data collection and analysis, and the like, but he does come by his soubriquet honestly, and there was more than one instance in which his eyebrow raised in skepticism. 

A couple examples, paraphrased to what Curmie was hearing (perhaps not what the speaker thought he was saying).  “Well, we have this totally subjective green/yellow/red light analysis, and we’ll give you points if you’re green and take them away if you’re not…. We don’t really pay any attention to the good things you’ve done unless you pro-actively tell us about them before the rankings come out….  If you sign on to the Chicago principles, you get points for that; actually following them is (apparently) of less importance….”

The whole process seems to be an attempt to make a fundamentally subjective analysis seem objective.  Curmie has been guilty of the same; he’s not pretending otherwise, but he at least tries to let the audience in on the extent to which the evidence is or is not trustworthy.  And he’d definitely be interested in how self-selecting respondents were.  He knows how course evaluations work, after all.  As soon as they became optional, they lost pretty much all credibility.  If there are 20 students in a class—5 loved it, 3 hated it, and a dozen thought it was OK, you’ll get two positive responses, three negative responses, and two “meh” responses.  How FIRE’s methodology addresses this problem would be worth knowing.

More problematic was the avoidance of the proverbial elephant in the room.  That’s a particularly apt expression, since the elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party, which, at least in states like Florida and Texas (there are others, no doubt), is the greatest threat to free speech on university campuses. 

As many readers of this blog know and others will have surmised, Curmie is a retired professor at a state university in Texas.  That makes him both a little more knowledgeable and, admittedly, a little more biased in his interpretation of what is transpiring.  But he finds it difficult to understand how a student’s willingness or unwillingness to discuss controversial subjects in a purely social setting is more relevant to free speech concerns than is a professor’s ability to determine what should and should not be taught in a course in their area of expertise.

This summer, Greg Abbott and his simpering acolytes in the Texas legislature passed SB37, which is as anti-intellectual, authoritarian, and generally reprehensible a piece of legislation as Curmie can recall, anywhere, ever.  Curmie hopes to write a longer essay on this, but let’s just say that articles like the ones linked here and here pretty well reflect Curmie’s thinking. 

The bill strips faculty of the right to elect their own representatives, de facto grants state government the right to overturn any decision made at a state university, and gives whatever local authority remains exclusively to the president.  The president is appointed, often unilaterally, by the regents, who are appointed by the governor.  In the over two decades that Curmie has been affiliated with the university from which he is now retired, not a single regent has not been a hard-core Republican.  Indeed, their political affiliations have often been trotted out as if they were credentials for the job.

But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, “Wait!  That’s not all!”  SB37 is, more than anything, an assault on academic freedom and, by extension, of freedom of speech.  Political hacks are scouring every syllabus, looking for anything that might challenge right-wing ideology or even suggest that different points of view might not only exist, but reasonably exist.

And now we circle back to that webinar, in which viewers were encouraged to submit questions.  So Curmie did so.  He can’t reproduce his question verbatim, but it was something like this: “In an environment in which state legislatures are exercising what amounts to absolute control over curriculum, why are you surveying only students and not faculty about free speech issues?”  His question was ignored, while the moderator cheerfully moved on a softball questions from someone she identified as her friend.  OK, there were probably more questions than could have been accommodated in the time frame, and the answer to my question, pretty much “it’s hard to do that,” was sort of hinted at in response to a different question.

But it wasn’t the avoidance of Curmie’s question that really stood out.  Someone asked about the news out of Texas A&M, where a single narcissistic and reactionary student circulated a surreptitious video of challenging a professor for including a discussion of verboten (by Trump/Abbott) topics like gender identity and transgender people.  A grandstanding pol got involved, and soon the professor was fired, the dean and department chair demoted, and the president at the very least under fire.

Edicts about what can and cannot be taught in a university classroom are clear violations of academic freedom and evidence of authoritarianism. Firing a professor without even the pretense of due process is illegal, or at least would be in any state with a governor or state legislatures that weren’t so proudly anti-intellectual.  Curmie is loath to use terms that exaggerate the gravity of a situation, but if this isn’t fascism, the footwear sure does seem to be the correct size.

Anyway, whoever asked the question didn’t go into any details, just that a professor at A&M had been fired.  Someone from FIRE acknowledged the situation in about a half a sentence, didn’t explain the context to listeners who might not have heard about the incident, and then proclaimed in the Q&A link that the question had been answered.  NO, IT FUCKING WASN’T!

FIRE still, as of this writing, hasn’t addressed the situation at A&M, just as they never addressed the question of religious charter schools in Oklahoma, but they did get out a brief statement about the shooting of Charlie Kirk, leaping to the conclusion that it was politically motivated.  (It might very well have been, but they certainly didn’t know that when the statement was released.)

PEN America, however, responded swiftly and surely.  Here’s Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms Managing Director of U.S. Free Expression Programs: 

We are witnessing the death of academic freedom in Texas, the remaking of universities as tools of authoritarianism that suppress free thought.  The decision to remove these academic leaders to satisfy politicians’ demands is an excessive punishment for the alleged violation of transparency requirements. When university presidents have little choice but to dismiss faculty members’ expertise and enforce ideological edicts, the space for free speech and open inquiry on our campuses is undeniably being suffocated.

As he writes this, Curmie is a member of FIRE but not of PEN America.  Both those situations are likely to change in the relatively near future.

Back when he was teaching, Curmie assigned texts by the likes of Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Augusto Boal, and Irish drag queen Panti Bliss (Curmie encourages you to look up any of these folks who are new to you, Gentle Reader): not to get students to agree with their ideologies, but because you can’t understand the entirety of the way theatre and the larger culture interact without acknowledging the voices that may be on the periphery in one way or another.

If he were still teaching, Curmie wouldn’t change his syllabus or his teaching style one iota to accommodate the dictates of petty tyrants like Abbott or Trump.  It’s a good thing he’s retired, then.  This way, they won’t have to fire him.