Texas Tech faculty sue over classroom limits on LGBTQ+ topics and Black history

A coalition of academic freedom and civil rights groups has filed a federal lawsuit against the Texas Tech University System, accusing its leadership of imposing restrictions that limit what professors can teach about race, sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

The complaint, filed Wednesday in El Paso, names Chancellor Brandon Creighton and the system’s Board of Regents. It challenges two memoranda issued by Creighton in December 2025 and April 2026, which the plaintiffs say were turned into campus policy and used to censor course content.

The suit was brought by the American Association of University Professors and its Texas affiliate, Texas AAUP-AFT. Lambda Legal, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Davis Wright Tremaine LLP are representing the groups.

According to the complaint, the directives violate the First Amendment by discriminating against viewpoints the system disfavors. The lawsuit also says they run afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment because faculty members cannot reasonably know what material is barred. In addition, the plaintiffs argue the rules were created and enforced, at least in part, to target Black faculty and suppress teaching about Black history and racial inequality.

Creighton, a former Republican state senator who became chancellor last fall, previously sought similar limits through the Legislature, the suit says. After those efforts were rejected or narrowed, legal advocates contend, he imposed the restrictions administratively within the Texas Tech system.

Faculty members across the system were required to submit course materials for review and say whether their classes included discussion of race, sexual orientation or gender identity. If a course was flagged, professors were instructed to remove or postpone the material until the Board of Regents reviewed it, the complaint says.

The lawsuit says the policy has already affected teaching in multiple areas. Professors have been blocked from presenting Plato’s Republic, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, material on the persecution of gay and bisexual men in Nazi Germany, and health disparities in rural Lubbock and border communities in El Paso. At Texas Tech University School of Law, faculty were also restricted from teaching race-related information about Dred Scott v. Sandford in a first-year constitutional law course.

At a Wednesday news conference, Nicholas Hite, senior attorney and McDonald/Wright Distinguished Counsel at Lambda Legal, said the rules permit professors to teach the government’s view “that there are only two sexes,” while preventing them from acknowledging transgender and gender-nonconforming people.

“That’s viewpoint discrimination and a First Amendment violation in practice at its most basic,” Hite said.

Hite also said medical students were barred from interacting with transgender patients “for any reason,” not just in the context of gender-affirming care.

Antonio L. Ingram II, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, linked the dispute to Creighton’s earlier legislative work. “What he failed to do to hurt Black communities in the Texas Senate, he is now doing in the Texas Tech system,” Ingram said.

The lawsuit asks a court to declare the memoranda unconstitutional and bar the university system from enforcing them. Texas Tech representatives did not immediately respond to The Advocate’s request for comment.

The case adds to the broader national fight over academic freedom, classroom censorship and LGBTQ+ inclusion in higher education. For LGBTQ+ students, faculty and patients, the suit argues, the restrictions can narrow what is discussed in classrooms and training settings where identity and health are directly relevant.