Texas Tech’s Administration Is Just As Embarrassing As Its Football Program

It’s been a summer of bad news for anybody with favorable feelings (me!) about Texas Tech. The New York Times joined the pig pile this week with a feature story whose subhead said the school had become a “a dystopian academic nightmare.” As if this year’s athletics debacles weren’t nausea-inducing enough. How can a guy (me!) root for a place like this? The Times piece mulled the aggressive missteps taken by Brandon Creighton, the low-aiming and cartoonishly evil chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, while altering the curriculum to suit his radically conservative agenda. Like generating fear among the faculty by sending sloppy AI-generated reports and scary memos that told professors which specific lessons they’re going to have to stop teaching for being too left-leaning, some of which included lessons that weren’t even being taught. One instructor, described as a medieval historian, said he dropped classroom discussion of Viking mythology because there were references to “gender-changing gods like Loki and Odin,” and felt Joan of Arc was also off-limits because that topic could lead to references of her “cross-dressing.” A creative writing teacher told of quitting her job after being warned by the administration about using a book titled Voice of the Fish, because a character describes himself as “transmasculine.” This is, of course, the exact stuff Creighton was brought to Lubbock to do. He had no strong ties to Tech or past as an academic when he got the job. He’d been a politician, holding office in the Texas House and Senate since 2007, and was a leading proponent of many of the state’s shittiest statutes. His record shows he loves racist monuments, hates anything LGBTQ, fears Plato, led the fight to ban abortion in his state, and can be trusted to treat concepts like diversity, equity, inclusion, compassion, fairness, and decency with contempt. He showed he had all the wrong stuff to take over a college by authoring Senate Bill 37, the legislation signed into law last year by yucky Governor Greg Abbott that sentenced academic freedom to death at all the schools in the state university system.

Read it at Defector ↗

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