Today, the AAUP and its Texas affiliate, Texas AAUP-AFT, sued Texas Tech University System Chancellor Brandon Creighton and members of the board of regents over two system memoranda (the Creighton Memoranda) issued in the past eight months. These vague directives resulted in an ongoing chilling effect that stifles debate, undermines students’ education, and sidelines the expertise that university faculty have earned via years of education and cutting-edge research.
At the center of the case are two memoranda Chancellor Creighton issued to university presidents across the system, one in December 2025 and a second in April 2026. Together they set up a mandatory review process: Professors have to disclose whether their course materials touch on prohibited subject matter regarding race, sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity, and if a course gets flagged, the instructor has to stop teaching that material until the board of regents rules on it. This has led to banning Plato’s Republic in a philosophy course, prohibiting first year law students from receiving information about race related to Dred Scott v. Sandford, and barring students at Texas Tech’s health science center campuses from receiving medical education on treating racial and sexual minorities. Some professors say an AI tool was used to scan syllabi and reading lists for flagged content before any human review took place.
The lawsuit brings three claims. First, it argues that the prohibitions in the memoranda amount to viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment, since professors are barred from teaching certain ideas about race or gender but are free to teach other ideas about race and gender aligned with the memoranda’s preferences. Second, it argues the policies in the memoranda are so vague that faculty can’t reasonably tell what’s allowed and what’s not, which violates due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. And lastly, it argues the memoranda were created and implemented, at least in part, to target Black faculty, harming the students that they teach and suppressing instruction about Black people’s history and ongoing struggles with racial inequality. The complaint further highlights Creighton’s decade in the Texas Senate pushing similar restrictions that repeatedly failed to pass into law before he became chancellor and instead imposed them on the Texas Tech community administratively. The lawsuit asks the court to declare the memoranda unconstitutional and to block the university system from enforcing them.
“When we step into the classroom, professors make a commitment to our students. Students and their families trust us to deliver a truthful and complete education that prepares them for whatever path they take after graduation. If allowed to stand, the Creighton Memoranda marks the end of free, thoughtful college curriculum developed by experts in the field,” said Dr. TJ Geiger, vice president of the Texas AAUP-AFT chapter at Texas Tech University. “The world around us exists as it is, whether Chancellor Creighton likes it or not. Bending to politicians’ preferred viewpoints over what the experts know to be true and right sets a dangerous precedent for higher education nationwide.”
“This isn't academic oversight; it's a chilling, top-down attack on the freedom to teach designed to intimidate faculty into silence. By imposing vague, arbitrary, and AI-driven censorship, the administration is replacing academic judgment with bureaucratic surveillance, undermining constitutionally protected speech and reducing higher education to a compliance exercise. That's not education—it's ideological control,” said Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP.
“For over a year, higher education institutions across Texas have gone above and beyond what Texas and federal law requires in these restrictive curriculum crackdowns. In doing so, they satisfy politicians while failing their students and violating the rights of faculty,” said Dr. Teresa Klein, president of Texas AAUP-AFT. “This lawsuit is our commitment to Texas AAUP-AFT members that we will do everything in our power to defend them from these dangerous policies.”
"Public universities should be places where faculty can teach, research, and engage students without fear that political ideology will determine which ideas are permitted in the classroom,” said Antonio L. Ingram II, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund. “The vague Creighton Memoranda undermine the First Amendment rights of faculty and fall hardest on Black faculty and others whose scholarship, lived experiences, and expertise are too often singled out for scrutiny and exclusion. The First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause work together to safeguard both freedom of expression and equal treatment under the law. Every faculty member, including Black and LGBTQ+ faculty, deserves the freedom to teach truthfully without fear of being targeted because of their identity or the perspectives they bring to the classroom. We will fight to make Texas Tech inclusive for all Texans.”
“Chancellor Creighton is trying to do through fiat what he couldn’t accomplish in the Texas legislature: erase the history, identities, and lived experiences of LGBTQ people and people of color from the classroom,” said Nicholas Hite, senior attorney and McDonald/Wright Distinguished Counsel at Lambda Legal. “Faculty at Texas Tech are being barred from teaching that gay and bisexual men were persecuted during the Holocaust, medical students pulled out of exam rooms rather than learn to treat transgender patients, and an entire Women’s and Gender Studies program shuttered by administrative decree. That is viewpoint discrimination, and it’s unconstitutional. Lambda Legal is asking the court to put a stop to it.”
“This new policy claims to combat ‘prejudice,’ but its actual goal is to expel diverse viewpoints from the classroom,” said Leena Charlton, an attorney with Davis Wright Tremaine LLP. “The policy prevents important ideas from even being discussed or included in course work, regardless of whether professors are ‘promoting or advocating for’ them. As a result, the policy’s ulterior motive to rewrite history is made plain. Eliminating the discussion of true facts and censoring books that have been critical to the evolution of human thought is not protecting students, it’s indoctrination in the form of a thought and history ban—and it violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments. We are honored to represent the university professors in combatting this wrongheaded attack on the integrity of higher education.”
Plaintiffs allege that the fallout has reached well beyond any one classroom and does not follow any consistent pattern. Similar material submitted by different professors has been approved in one department and rejected in another, with insufficient explanation of what separated the two outcomes. Faculty have been asked to cut specific words and phrases from their syllabi without knowing whether the underlying ideas are still allowed, and even the university administrators responsible for enforcing the policy have, at points, been unable to explain what it requires. For professors needing to plan a semester months in advance, that uncertainty has pushed many to cut more than the rules technically demand, just to stay safe.
Texas Tech administrators reviewed roughly 8,500 courses at Texas Tech University alone by early May 2026. About 500 went to the board of regents’ Academic, Clinical, and Student Affairs Committee for review. Of those, dozens were modified or had material removed—some after department chairs, deans, and provosts had already recommended the material stay in place.
Public universities have long provided an opportunity for students to encounter the widest possible range of ideas, histories, and disciplines, often for the first time. That goal is only possible if the material in front of them reflects the world as it actually is, not a version filtered by whomever happens to hold power at a given moment. LDF, Lambda Legal, and Davis Wright Tremaine LLP are asking the court to give that space back to the faculty, students, and patients across the Texas Tech system who rely on it.