Texas A&M University has declined to reinstate a faculty member who was fired after she was accused of teaching a course that recognized more than two genders, even after an appeals panel found that the dismissal was not justified.
The decision to not reinstate the instructor, Melissa McCoul, is expected to set off a court battle touching on academic freedom as President Trump is pressuring universities to embrace his vision for the nation’s campuses.
Few places have gone as far as Texas, the most populous Republican-led state, to align its public universities with Mr. Trump’s ideology. And few episodes have crystallized the tensions over academia as much as the one that led to Texas A&M’s firing of Dr. McCoul in September. She had displayed a “gender unicorn,” which is used to explain the differences between gender expression and gender identity, during a class on children’s literature.
A student challenged Dr. McCoul, saying, “I’m not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching because, according to our president, there’s only two genders.”
After listening to the student a bit more, according to a video of the exchange, Dr. McCoul responded, “You are under a misconception that what I’m saying is illegal.”
Plenty of Republican officials in Texas believed that it was and demanded discipline. Texas A&M quickly fired Dr. McCoul. The university’s president, Mark Welsh, who had already been buffeted by other contentious issues during his tenure, stepped down not long afterward.
Dr. McCoul appealed her dismissal, and a faculty panel ruled unanimously in November that the school was “not justified” when it ousted her.
The committee’s chairman wrote in the decision that the panel had been “especially concerned by the lack of a rigorous investigation into the circumstances, details, specific events and timeline leading to Dr. McCoul’s summary dismissal.” The report also cited other misgivings about the university’s handling of the episode and repeatedly said that A&M “did not meet the burden of proof that Dr. McCoul’s summary dismissal was based on good cause.”
The university system’s vice chancellor for academic affairs, James R. Hallmark, however, wrote in a Dec. 19 memo that he had “determined that Dr. McCoul’s dismissal was based upon good cause.”
In the memo, Dr. Hallmark did not elaborate on his rationale. Texas A&M did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the decision, which Dr. McCoul’s lawyer shared with The New York Times on Wednesday.
The lawyer, Amanda Reichek, said in a statement that Dr. McCoul was “disappointed by the university’s unexplained decision to uphold her termination but looks forward to pursuing her First Amendment, due process and breach of contract claims in court very soon.”
In November, university system regents imposed new restrictions on what may be discussed in Texas A&M classrooms. One new policy declared that courses may not “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” without a campus president’s approval of the course and related materials. A separate though related policy said that faculty members were not allowed to “teach material that is inconsistent with the approved syllabus for the course.”
Dr. McCoul’s case was not explicitly mentioned during the regents’ meeting, where officials approved the policies unanimously. But one regent said it had lately “become clear” that some faculty members were testing the rules of the system, which includes a dozen universities and a health sciences center and enrolls about 165,000 students in total.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
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