In today’s crisis of higher education, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents doesn’t desire to simply maintain the marketplace of ideas, as it’d like to claim. Instead, it desires to whitewash education in order to limit the intellectual expression of all Aggies, regardless of what educators think. 

So, why are they doing it?

Two internal investigations have already concluded that former senior lecturer Melissa McCoul did not actually violate university rules. Earlier in the semester, the lecturer was fired after teaching students about gender identity in an upper-level children’s literature course. Chair of the Board of Regents Robert Albritton — like the student who recorded McCoul — even publicly accused her of violating a law that does not exist. This is rather suspicious, since McCoul was fired only after the classroom video was leaked to the public.

The Regents’ political imagination is so formidable that they’ve even imagined violations of rules ex post facto regarding catalog descriptions in an attempt to retroactively justify McCoul’s firing. They’ve since passed real rules that serve the same purpose — control for control’s sake.

Since Nov. 13 — the date on which a unanimous vote was held by the Board of Regents to prohibit instruction of “gender ideology” and “race ideology” in the classroom — we have sunk further into the kind of blistering ignorance that the Regents and their political appointer, Gov. Greg Abbott, now properly esteem as an “education.” As a result of decisions made in a single semester, our education will now be capriciously gatekept.

They aren’t protecting students from indoctrination; instead, it’s all political theater at the university’s expense.

The revisions of “gender ideology” and “race ideology” are so vague and unsupported that several crucial topics can be taken off of course syllabi altogether.

According to the Board of Regents, “gender ideology” is defined as the “concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex.” 

This one-sentence definition of “gender ideology” completely erases entire areas of research. This revision overlooks psychological research on the mental health of transgender and nonbinary individuals, developing biological studies on gender orientation and ongoing debates on whether we can assume gender or sex are essential categories altogether.

Issues of gender are in constant contention in healthcare, the legal system and a plethora of other overlapping industries. Young professionals should be prepared for the workforce with a well-rounded, uncensored education. However, since this revision is so vague, many important lessons could be subject to complete erasure.

The Board of Regents also defines “race ideology” as a “concept that attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity, accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy or conspiracy, ascribe to them less value as contributors to society and public discourse because of their race or ethnicity, or assign them intrinsic guilt based on the actions of their presumed ancestors or relatives in other areas of the world.”

This extremely long revision suffers from its own lack of historical context that the length cannot compensate for. If there were any incidents where a professor taught students about slavery in order to “shame” white students for their supposed ancestors, why wasn’t this case mentioned or cited?

In reality, “race ideology” remains a specter and no student at A&M has recently reported a class lesson containing “race ideology” that justifies this conveniently shoehorned addition. “Race ideology” is yet another fantasy for the Regents who desire to enact revisions that are not grounded in fact.

Even if a professor were to teach about race, the mere fact that this definition may downplay major historical events has the potential to exacerbate the denials of the horrors of slavery, colonization and war. 

For instance, this revision may trigger an exclusion of the Holocaust. During the open session of the Regents’ meeting, assistant professor Miranda Sachs, Ph.D., claimed that the history of the Holocaust fell under the restrictions outlined in the amended policies. 

“The new revised policy would, in fact, make it impossible for me in a classroom at A&M to teach this history,” Sachs said.

The project of education challenges misinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories, yet that becomes impossible when institutions decide to power trip. By the Regents’ own definition, a professor should not label anyone as being “oppressors in a racial hierarchy.”

If these revisions were created in 1930s German academies, then the Nazis couldn’t have been accused and therefore held accountable for the oppression and mass extermination of Jews, queer and disabled Germans, Romani nomads and other groups that were considered “non-aryans.”

In fact, the Nazis wrote eerily similar rules called the Nuremberg Race Laws, which were intended to “Aryanize” German universities and protect German honor. Today, whose reputation actually needs this level of feverous protection? The “race ideology” revision reads like defensive self-victimization rather than real policy.

What’s so troubling about these revisions is that the Board of Regents — after listening to rounds of professor testimony — did not seem open to changing the definitions or negotiating concessions. The Regents were instead asking themselves who they had to terminate in order to satisfy the politicians responsible for their careers.

At the end of the day, it’s unsettling to acknowledge the sheer banality. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare and another iteration of “just following orders.” 

Overall, these didactic revisions enforce the disavowal of education on the grounds of something like “you’re being insensitive to my worldview” rather than championing any real arguments. Yet, we are not children to infantilize, and a university is not a sandbox.

Even though our political leadership fully expects us to acquiesce in ill-decisions, we did not come to this university to be delivered to bad actors. Before the university experiences an impending brain drain, we ask that they stop selling students to politicians. Let students have an education the university is ready to offer. Let us have a future.

Sidney Uy is a philosophy junior and opinion writer for The Battalion.