HOUSTON – A group of professors have filed a lawsuit challenging the Texas A&M University System’s new censorship policy that prohibits faculty from discussing certain topics and viewpoints related to race, sexual orientation, and gender.
The policy, which was implemented in late 2025, has resulted in prohibitions on everything from the Oscar-winning film “Moonlight” to Plato’s writings on gender.
“The Censorship Policy is an abrupt about-face for an institution with a long history of academic excellence developed through ensuring a robust marketplace of ideas in which free speech was not only respected but encouraged,” the suit states.
The faculty claiming to be impacted by this policy work throughout the Texas A&M System, which includes 12 universities and multiple departments, from the Bush School of Government and Public Service to the English department.
The American Association of University Professors, along with several professors, filed the suit on Aug. 3 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas.
“By embarking on a campaign of censorship, Texas A&M has abdicated its responsibility to support students’ right to learn and faculty’s right to teach,” said Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP. “A university that censors Plato — as well as other significant texts — abandons its obligation to truth, free inquiry, and the public trust.”
Represented by the ACLU of Texas, the plaintiffs argue that the censorship policy governing Texas A&M is unconstitutionally vague and violates the First Amendment by discriminating against certain viewpoints.
The censorship policy was implemented in November 2025 amid a sustained campaign to limit speech on certain topics in the college classroom. As a result of the policy change, numerous classes have been cancelled or forced to remove content.
The women’s and gender studies program has been shuttered altogether because the program could not be reconciled with the new censorship policy, the suit states.
“The First Amendment plainly prohibits this egregious attack on academic freedom at a public university,” said Emerson Sykes, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “This broad policy and the university’s opaque enforcement process makes it impossible to teach or to learn freely and endangers course content about everything from the history of slavery to Shakespeare to the hard sciences.
“Universities are sites of inquiry, debate, and discovery — banning entire categories of ideas is a betrayal of both their mission and the First Amendment.”
Case No. 4:26-cv-06268
