Texas Tech sued for erasing LGBTQ+ people and Black history from university classrooms

A coalition of legal and academic freedom groups sued the Texas Tech University System on Wednesday, accusing Chancellor Brandon Creighton and the system’s Board of Regents of turning a conservative political project into campus policy by restricting what professors can teach about race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.The federal lawsuit, filed in El Paso, challenges two memoranda Creighton issued in December 2025 and April 2026. It was brought by the American Association of University Professors and its Texas affiliate, Texas AAUP-AFT, with representation from Lambda Legal, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and Davis Wright Tremaine LLP.The complaint argues that the directives, known as the Creighton Memoranda, violate the First Amendment by discriminating against disfavored viewpoints, violate the Fourteenth Amendment because faculty cannot reasonably tell what is prohibited, and were created and enforced, at least in part, to target Black faculty and suppress instruction about Black history and racial inequality.Related: Texas Tech University bans teaching, researching LGBTQ+ topicsThe lawsuit says Creighton, a former Republican state senator who became chancellor last fall, had previously tried to pass similar restrictions through the Legislature. Legal advocates said that after those efforts failed or were narrowed, he imposed them administratively inside the Texas Tech system.Faculty across the system were required to submit course materials for review and disclose whether their classes included content addressing race, sexual orientation, or gender identity. If a course was flagged, professors were told to omit or delay the material until the Board of Regents reviewed it, according to the complaint.The lawsuit says professors have been blocked from teaching Plato’s Republic, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, the persecution of gay and bisexual men in Nazi Germany, and health disparities in rural Lubbock and bor