University of Texas Uses Artificial Intelligence to Cut Progressive Content From Curriculum
Texas Tech University, located in Lubbock, in the heart of one of the most conservative regions of Texas, has become ground zero for a debate nobody expected to see unfold this soon: the use of artificial intelligence to review and cut curriculum content deemed progressive by the institution’s new conservative leadership.
The scene that kicked off this story says a lot about what’s going on over there.
At a faculty meeting held this spring, which started off friendly enough with snacks and refreshments, administrators handed out reports partially generated by AI listing the courses and content that professors would need to stop teaching.
The reactions were immediate and telling.
What do you mean? I don’t even teach this stuff, said one professor.
There are factual errors in here, added another.
This is AI garbage, fired back a third.
The episode wasn’t an isolated incident. It was a symptom of something much bigger happening inside a university system that encompasses five institutions in Texas, with ripple effects that have already crossed state lines and are being watched closely nationwide 👀
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Between widespread self-censorship, professors leaving their positions, Holocaust courses being downgraded to electives, and a lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors, Texas Tech has become the living laboratory for a conservative transformation of American higher education that uses cutting-edge technology as a tool for ideological control.
And at the center of all this sits a question with no easy answer: who should decide what gets taught inside a university?
Who’s behind this shift
The name that shows up at every stage of this story is Brandon Creighton, a former state legislator who took over as chancellor of the Texas Tech university system in November. Creighton is hardly a newcomer when it comes to reshaping higher education with a conservative slant. He authored some of the most impactful legislation in Texas on that front, including a law passed last year that drastically reduced the role of faculty in university governance and tightened state control over the curriculum. He also wrote the 2024 law that abolished diversity, equity, and inclusion offices at the state’s public universities.
For Creighton, all of this is about fixing real problems. He stated there was a lot of garbage in the curriculum at universities and argues that his course review plan will, in his words, produce the best curriculum in America and become a national model. A government major from the University of Texas at Austin with a law degree from Oklahoma City University, he says his views on higher education were shaped in part by his own struggles paying for college.
Creighton represents a growing trend in Republican-led states like Texas and Florida: former conservative politicians being appointed to lead higher education institutions. In Florida, at least seven university presidents are former Republican politicians, as are the heads of the Texas A&M and University of Texas systems. Even in that landscape, Creighton stands out for the depth of the changes he’s implementing.
How AI ended up in the middle of a curriculum debate
What really catches your eye about this whole story isn’t just the fact that a university curriculum is being revised under political pressure — that, unfortunately, isn’t new anywhere in the world. What’s genuinely surprising is the method chosen to do it. The Texas Tech University administration decided to use artificial intelligence tools to map, classify, and flag content that, according to the new leadership, didn’t align with the conservative values the current administration wants to embed in the institution. That means a language model was given an active role in defining what can and can’t be taught at an American public university.
The technical problem here is serious and needs to be spelled out. Large-scale language models, known as large language models, are powerful tools, but they don’t have the ability to evaluate pedagogical nuance, historical context, or the academic relevance of curricular content. They work with statistical language patterns, which means that if a text uses certain words or expressions associated with a particular political spectrum, the model might flag it as problematic regardless of the academic merit of that material. That’s exactly what happened at Texas Tech, and the professors at that meeting noticed it immediately: the reports contained glaring factual errors and even hallucinated information about courses the professors didn’t even teach.
It’s worth noting that the administration itself tries to downplay AI’s role in the process. Creighton stated that only about 60 courses out of more than 14,000 offered across the university system were recommended for modification, and that another 300 courses were proactively adjusted by the professors themselves before the review. He also maintains that AI was just one step in making the process more efficient, and that most of the work was done by humans, including a Board of Regents commission. Interestingly, Ronald Hendrick, the university’s chief academic officer, said at one point that he didn’t even know the system would be using AI in this effort.
This raises a question that’s both technical and ethical at the same time. When you put an AI in charge of helping with decisions that should be made by human experts with years of training in their respective fields, you risk using the appearance of technological objectivity to legitimize a decision that is, in practice, purely political. The AI becomes a shield — a way of saying the machine identified the problem, when in reality the criteria feeding that analysis were defined by people with a very clear agenda.
The real impact on the academic community
Talking about academic freedom in the abstract is easy. What’s happening at Texas Tech University shows how the restriction of that freedom operates in practice — silently, gradually, and deeply effectively. Professors who once developed their courses with intellectual autonomy started self-censoring before any formal guidance even came down. A faculty senate survey conducted in May revealed that about 50% of respondents had changed their course content without even being asked to comply with the new guidelines. The simple knowledge that a system exists to monitor and classify content is enough to change behavior.
The guidelines issued in December and April memos ordered the closure of programs centered on sexual orientation or gender identity, required the recognition of only two sexes, and prohibited student dissertations on gender identity. The strictest restriction falls on the common core curriculum — those foundational courses that students are required to take to graduate. Creighton banned from the common core any course that includes material related to sexual orientation or gender identity.
The specific cases are striking. Sonja Stojanovic, a professor of French studies, grew worried about her course called Holocaust in Literature. Because the course mentions that gay and bisexual men were also targeted by the Nazis, the leadership suggested the course be converted into an upper-level elective. Now the Holocaust becomes an elective, she lamented.
Jacob Bell, a medieval historian, found himself unsure about how to approach Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake in part for wearing men’s clothing. He ended up removing two weeks of study on Viking men and women, since Norse mythology frequently features gods who changed gender, like Loki and Odin. Bell no longer felt comfortable teaching that material and accepted a new job at a public university on the East Coast. According to him, future Texas Tech students will be unprepared to deal with the normal people in the world they’re going to interact with.
Self-censorship and the talent drain
One of the most concerning aspects is the panoptic effect that has settled over the faculty — that feeling of being watched that changes behavior even when nobody is actually looking. Lucy Schiller, a creative writing professor, described a level of stress that’s really hard to put into words. She said she cried when she realized the full scope of Creighton’s plans.
Schiller pointed out that the guidelines restrict teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity but don’t define what those terms mean. They’re forcing us to read between the obvious lines and to over-comply out of fear of being reported, removed from our jobs, or disciplined, she explained. Her report even hallucinated information about a course she didn’t teach. Still, the document did correctly flag a book she taught, Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn, which had to be replaced. Schiller didn’t make the changes. She chose to leave the university and started teaching at another institution this month. I loved my job here until this year, she said.
One of the respondents in the internal survey compared Creighton’s guidelines to using a chainsaw to remove a splinter. Many expressed concern about irreparable damage to the institution’s reputation and the quality of education offered to students.
Both sides of the argument
It’s important to note that Creighton isn’t without support. Some conservative students back the chancellor, and Preston Parsons, president of the local Turning Point USA chapter, argues that he’s bringing ideological balance to a predominantly liberal sector. Is it necessarily a bad thing to have universities that position themselves a little differently on various issues? Parsons asked.
Sherry Sylvester, a researcher at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, called Creighton’s effort fearless and meticulous, stating that Texas is the model for the nation in returning universities to places of open debate and free inquiry. She also reminded faculty that they need to remember they are state employees.
On the other side, Jonathan Friedman of PEN America, a free expression advocacy group, stated that while other Texas universities are reviewing curricula, Texas Tech has gone the furthest toward increasing ideological control. The American Association of University Professors filed a lawsuit against the university, arguing that the course review effort constitutes viewpoint discrimination and violates the First Amendment. A group of students even created a petition to remove Creighton from his position.
Political content and the limits of what can be taught
One of the most sensitive parts of this entire discussion is understanding what exactly is being called political content in this context. Texas Tech’s conservative leadership has used that term very broadly. A course on the Holocaust, which should be considered of undeniable historical relevance by any serious educational institution, was downgraded from a required course to an elective — which in practice drastically reduces the number of students who will have access to that content.
What’s at stake here is the definition of neutrality in the academic setting. There’s a very popular but academically questionable idea that a neutral university would be one that avoids any content that could be perceived as politically charged. The problem is that this logic ignores the fact that the very choice of what to teach and what not to teach is, in itself, a political decision. Removing references to certain topics doesn’t make the curriculum neutral — it just shifts it to a different position on the spectrum. And when that decision is made based on AI reports full of inaccuracies, the problem multiplies.
What this case tells us about the future of AI in education
If there’s one clear lesson that the Texas Tech University case offers anyone working in technology and artificial intelligence, it’s that how a tool is used matters just as much as the tool itself. AI has enormous potential to support educational processes, from personalized learning to identifying pedagogical gaps at scale. It’s worth noting that Creighton also highlights a partnership with Nvidia to invest in AI infrastructure and says he wants to position the university to capitalize on the technological paradigm shift he believes will reshape higher education. But when AI is deployed to validate curricular censorship decisions, with opaque criteria and results riddled with inaccuracies, it becomes an instrument for legitimizing power — not improving education.
Transparency in the criteria used to guide a language model in this kind of task is absolutely essential. If an institution is going to use AI to review curricula, it needs to be able to publicly explain what parameters are being used, who defined them, based on what, and with what kind of specialized human oversight. The reports arrived ready-made for professors, often without clear methodological explanation, and in several cases with errors that the faculty themselves called egregious. This is exactly the kind of use that fuels legitimate distrust and resistance to AI adoption in sensitive contexts.
The debate that Texas Tech has opened is going to continue for a long time. And it has a lot to teach any institution, company, or government thinking about using artificial intelligence to make decisions that affect real people, with real careers, teaching content that shapes how entire generations will understand the world. Technology can and should be part of that process, but never in a way that’s unilateral, opaque, and unaccountable. When that happens, the result isn’t efficiency. It’s exactly what Texas Tech is living through right now: confusion, distrust, resistance, and a lawsuit that will follow the institution’s reputation for years. 🎓
