Earlier this week, State Rep. Brian Harrison uploaded a video to X showing a student at Texas A&M University arguing with one of their professors.
The disagreement was about course curriculum on the topic of gender and sexuality and almost immediately after the video was posted, it went viral.
Soon, Texas A&M President Mark A. Welsh III directed his provost to remove a dean and department head from their administrative positions and now the entire Texas A&M System is undergoing an audit of its courses.
Megan Menchaca covers education for the Houston Chronicle and she’s been following the story. She joined Texas Standard to explain what happened.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: We talked a little bit about this incident yesterday in our broadcast, but tell us a little more about what sparked this response from the A&M administration. What happened?
Megan Menchaca: So in this video posted by Rep. Harrison, we hear just a few seconds of a professor showing a slideshow before a student interrupts to say that they’re not sure that the presentation on gender and sexuality is legal because there are only two genders, according to President Donald Trump. The student also says that they are not going to participate in the lesson because it goes against their religious beliefs.
The professor and the student kind of go back and forth about whether the presentation is legal to teach under Trump’s executive order before the professor ultimately asks the student to leave, and the student appears to agree to leave voluntarily before the video cuts off. We don’t see what the professor really was teaching, and we don’t see much of the exchange after that either.
Then Texas A&M president Mark Welch put out a statement saying he’s directed the professor to be fired. Is it clear who the professor was and what the grounds for termination were?
So the first part, yes, you know, in the initial video, both the student and the professor kept anonymous, although we’ve since learned the professor was a lecturer named Melissa McCoul teaching a summer English class called Literature for Children. The class is about what exactly counts as children’s literature and how those definitions have changed.
You know, the university has said that the professor is fired because her content did not align with the course description, although the professor’s lawyer says the instructor’s course content was consistent with the course description and she was never asked to change her content in any way, shape, or form by the administration.
There’s this new development that is that the Texas A&M Board of Regents has ordered an audit of all 12 schools within the system in the aftermath of this whole incident.
So, the system didn’t go into much detail, but at least at the university in College Station, that audit appears to be underway to ensure that the summary of what the course is about matches the actual content being taught in the course. The university hasn’t said how exactly they’re going to compare those two things or what criteria will be used to determine what does and doesn’t align with the description.
It’s important to note that under Texas A&M’s freedom policies and several other universities, faculty have broad freedom to discuss their subject of expertise, but they aren’t allowed to introduce controversial topics with no relationship to this classroom subject. So the issue kind of at stake here is was this professor’s presentation about gender identity within the bounds of the course that they were teaching on children’s literature.
But it’s your understanding that this audit has at least started already on the College Station campus, is that right?
Yes, it’s not really clear. The system and the College Station campus have been quite tight-lipped about their response to this.
The audit at the College Station campus appears to be ongoing, but the progress of the audit at other 11 campuses within the A&M system is unclear.
How much of an issue is this politically for Texas A&M University? I know that there have been some Texas Republican lawmakers calling for the president to be terminated.
Yeah, so on one side you have multiple free speech and faculty advocacy organizations raising significant alarm over a Texas professor being fired seemingly very quickly over what seems to be over a conservative politician’s objections. They’ve questioned how Texas professors can believe that they have the freedom to teach controversial subjects within their area of expertise if someone can get fired seemingly within a day due to a very short video.
While Republicans on the other end, many of them are unhappy with the university for the opposite reason, for not going far enough in taking action. They believe that the president should be fired for letting this happen under his watch and not firing the professor more quickly when this was initially brought to his attention over the summer.
