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+ topics

The 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 border communities in El Paso. At Texas Tech University School of Law, faculty were restricted from presenting race-related information about Dred Scott v. Sandford in a first-year constitutional law course, the complaint says.

Related: Texas Tech faculty say Republican anti-LGBTQ+ curriculum rules are driving professors away

At a Wednesday press conference, Nicholas Hite, senior attorney and McDonald/Wright Distinguished Counsel at Lambda Legal, said the policy allows professors to teach the government’s position “that there are only two sexes,” while barring 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 said medical students were barred from interacting with transgender patients “for any reason,” not only in the context of gender-affirming care.

Antonio L. Ingram II, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, said Creighton had failed to enact similar restrictions as a lawmaker. “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 the court to declare the memoranda unconstitutional and block the system from enforcing them.

Texas Tech representatives did not immediately respond to The Advocate’s request for comment.