The President of Texas A&M has issued an additional statement (An Update from President Mark A. Welsh III) wherein we find that the faculty member has been fired, and wherein the only explanation is, again, deviation from the course catalog.
This afternoon, following full consideration of the facts related to this situation, I directed the Provost to terminate the professor involved, effective immediately. Please understand that these decisions were mine alone and were not made lightly. While I cannot provide all the details at this time, I will share the following facts.
This summer, a children’s literature course contained content that did not align with any reasonable expectation of standard curriculum for the course. After this issue was raised, college and department leadership worked with students to offer alternative opportunities for students to complete the course, and made changes to ensure this course content does not continue in future semesters. At that time, I made it clear to our academic leadership that course content must match catalog descriptions for each and every one of our course sections.
However, I learned late yesterday that despite that directive, the college continued to teach content that was inconsistent with the published course description for another course this fall. As a result, I took the above administrative actions, and deans and department heads will conduct an audit of course offerings to ensure they align with the course descriptions.
Our students use the published information in the course catalog to make important decisions about the courses they take in pursuit of their degrees. If we allow different course content to be taught from what is advertised, we break trust with our students. When it comes to our academic offerings, we must keep faith with our students and with the state of Texas.
Let me be as clear as I can be based on the known facts: a human being, Dr. Melissa McCoul, formerly a Senior Lecturer at Texas A&M University, has had her livelihood taken away because politicians have decided that certain topics are verboten, and a student was empowered by those politicians to police the classroom.
Side note: Do we really want to allow single students to decide what appropriate course content is? And why is one student’s beliefs more important than other students in the room? Shall we have the class vote on each PowerPoint slide to determine what will be discussed?
This is not about a specific student; it is about the political class empowering individuals to subvert education.
Back to the specifics.
The punishment does not fit the alleged transgression, unless one assumes that any sociological or politically controversial topic is supposed to be controlled by partisan politicians. If you have gotten this far and still don’t see what the big deal is, please stop and think about this. If you are in favor of this, do you want Governor Newsom putting pressure on the UC and Cal State systems to fire faculty who say things that liberals don’t like? Do we want to live in such a country? (Sadly, many do).
Dr. McCoul has now lost her livelihood, and not only is it hard to get such a job in the first place, given the way the academic calendar and hiring process work, it isn’t like she can get a new one immediately. At best, a new job wouldn’t start until January, and probably not until August.
This is meant to send fear into the minds of every member of the TAMU faculty, and really to anyone teaching at a public institution in the state of Texas. Make sure you hew to the accepted orthodoxy, or else face the real prospect that your life’s work will be ruined.
Let me dwell on that last sentence, because it sounds like hyperbole. People who go into academia put their lives in a kind of weird limbo for four to six (or more) years after they have earned their undergraduate degrees (I, for example, took six and a half years: 4 of coursework, 1 year researching abroad, and 1.5 years to write my dissertation). In doing this, a person is foregoing years of earning to either scrape by or to go into debt. Once finished (if you finish, at least 50% of those who start don’t finish, with some programs seeing as high as ~70% not finish, which tracks with my experience in Government at UT) you go on a a brutal job market wherein there are simply not enough jobs (I think I applied to roughly 200 openings over a multi-year period, and that was 30 years ago).
None of that is to ask anyone to cry a river for the poor academics. But the point is that if you get through that gauntlet and get a job, you have a lot to lose. In my experience, academics as a whole tend to be a bit anxious and more than a little paranoid under normal conditions.
Take all of that, and a lot of professors will end up capitulating to the authoritarian force being rained down upon them from the White House and the Governor’s Mansion.
Threatening something precious is a classic authoritarian way to gain compliance. This is to point out that this goes beyond just a given job. Threatening people’s livelihoods is bad enough, and leads often to compliance, but we are talking here about taking away, potentially, a person’s hard-earned identities. Threatening that will definitely result in compliance.
I realize that generating sympathy for academics is hard to do. I am frequently reminded that while a lot of people do look back with fondness on their college experiences, there is also a subset of people who hold deep resentment of their professors. After all, who are they to stand up in front of a room and tell a bunch a people what the right answers are? Well, experts in their field, that’s who. But we are in a moment in which respect for expertise is ebbing.
Of course, not all professors are good at their jobs (shocking, I know!), and some can be arrogant assholes (I am sure I fit that description on occasion), but none of that means that we should applaud when authoritarian politics leads to the firing of one of them, with the implicit threat to fire anyone who crosses the line.
Whether one likes it or not, and despite whatever Executive Orders Trump has issued, not everyone neatly falls into straight boy/straight girl. Literature exists on such topics as a result. It is not unreasonable for college students to study such literature.
The idea that the government can dictate, in ironclad ways, the intellectual discussion of what is “normal” based on the preferences of those in power is fascistic. It is not in keeping with either the letter or the spirit of the First Amendment. It also directly violates the foundational notions of a university.
Down the list is that this is an illustration of why tenure matters and exists.* Again, I don’t know the internal workings of TAMU, but typically, the rank of Lecturer, Senior or not, does not include tenure protection. Therefore, it is easier to fire someone, especially in a state like Texas that has weak employee protection laws. Tenure exists to protect faculty from the political trends and fads of the day. As such, Welsh is incorrect when he states in his letter,
This isn’t about academic freedom; it’s about academic responsibility. Our degree programs and courses go through extensive approval processes, and we must ensure that what we ultimately deliver to students is consistent with what was approved.
This is rank and utter nonsense that sounds good to a general audience, especially those looking for any thin reed of justification for all this, i.e., for people who want a way to ignore how this is authoritarianism at work.
Again, there may be some special Aggie sauce, of which I am unaware, as to how they do things, but my experience, and my general understanding of how these things work, is that there is simply no ground to stand on here for Welsh. Academic programs are not designed in such a way as to dictate individual lessons/lectures, especially not in the humanities. There may be examples in specific programs, like nursing, wherein there are more detailed requirements per course due to technical and/or accreditation elements that dictate curriculum. But even then, the notion that the content of one lecture, or even lectures, is likely to have violated the “approval process” for courses is absurd.
Even courses that have standardized syllabi and student learning outcomes will not be identical in every way. Going back to my experience as an undergraduate, it was pretty damn obvious that if you took the exact same course from two different faculty members, even if they had a common syllabus, the courses were not going to be identical. Anyone who went to college knows that Dr. Jones’ Western Civ class is not identical in every way to Dr. Smith’s. James Joyner and I both taught American National Government at Troy University for several years concurrently, and while the courses were congruent, they were hardly identical.
Let’s talk about catalog descriptions. My best guess, based on the reporting and looking at the TAMU catalog, is that this is the course in question.
ENGL 360 Literature for Children
Credits 3. 3 Lecture Hours. Representative writers, genres, texts and movements. Prerequisite: Junior or senior classification.
I defy anyone to tell me that that catalog description precludes a discussion of children’s literature that addresses gender issues. That it was a fireable offense for violating that extremely (and purposefully) vague course description to discuss the role of gender in children’s literature is laughable (to put it kindly).
By the way, in my experience, most students don’t even read the course descriptions in the catalog; instead, they go solely by a combination of: What do I need for my degree, when is the class, and maybe the title sounds interesting?
There are likely additional details to this story, but I suspect that all that they will show is that this is about enforcing the orthodoxy that the Trump and Abbott administrations want, and none of it is about following the catalog.
A conclusory note: it never ceases to amaze me how so many people whose positions in life are directly related to the degrees they earned (often at elite institutions) are so resentful of higher ed.
*I would note that the Dean and Department Head lost their admin duties, not their jobs. I am sure they both have tenured faculty positions. Still, losing those positions will mean losing income, and again, the goal here is to use fear to generate compliance.
