from the triggered-much? dept
For the better part of a decade, conservative politicians—and Texas politicians in particular—have been absolutely apoplectic about the state of free speech on college campuses. You’ve heard the greatest hits: students are coddled snowflakes who can’t handle the real world, trigger warnings are destroying intellectual rigor, safe spaces are turning universities into daycare centers, and the real threat to America is that professors might have opinions that lean left.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott was so concerned about this supposed crisis that he signed a campus free speech bill in 2019. The whole thing was framed as a brave stand for open inquiry and the marketplace of ideas. As state Senator Joan Huffman said at the time:
“Our college students, our future leaders, they should be exposed to all ideas, I don’t care how liberal they are or how conservative they are.”
What a beautiful sentiment. Truly inspiring stuff.
So naturally, the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents just voted unanimously to ensure students can graduate without being exposed to ideas that might make someone uncomfortable.
The University of Texas System’s Board of Regents unanimously approved Thursday a rule requiring its universities to ensure students can graduate without studying “unnecessary controversial subjects,” despite warnings it could leave them less prepared for the real world.
The rule also requires faculty to disclose in their syllabi the topics they plan to cover and adhere to the plan, and says that when courses include controversial issues, instructors must ensure a “broad and balanced approach” to the discussion.
If you had described this policy to any Texas Republican in 2018 and told them a bunch of liberal professors had come up with it, they would have been on Fox News within the hour screaming about the death of Western civilization. The words “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and “cancel culture” would have been deployed at machine-gun pace all surrounded with high-minded claims about “free speech” and “academic freedom.”
But when it’s governor-appointed regents doing it? When the people being “protected” from uncomfortable ideas are conservative students and donors rather than marginalized communities? Well, then it’s just good governance.
The truly revealing moment came from Board Chair Kevin Eltife, who was asked about the fact that the policy doesn’t bother to define what “controversial” means or what a “broad and balanced approach” actually looks like. His response should be printed on a plaque and hung in the Museum of Political Cowardice:
“We are in difficult times,” he said. “Vagueness can be our friend.”
Ah yes. Vagueness. The chairman of a board governing one of the nation’s largest public university systems—more than 260,000 students across nine campuses—is openly admitting that the entire point of the policy is that nobody knows what it means. He’s saying the quiet part loud: the vagueness is a feature, not a bug.
And of course it is. Because when you leave “controversial” undefined, you don’t need to go through the messy business of actually banning specific topics, which might allow everyone to call you out on your hypocrisy and highlight the subjects you hope to censor.
You just create a system where every professor has to wonder, before every lecture, whether today’s lesson is the one that gets them hauled before an administrator. The chilling effect does all the work for you.
As UT-Austin physics professor Peter Onyisi pointed out during public testimony:
“Will they (administrators) be experts in the relevant disciplines or will they just seek to avoid unpleasant publicity?”
We all know the answer to that question. When a policy gives administrators the power to decide what counts as “unnecessarily controversial” without any definition whatsoever, administrators are going to do what administrators always do: minimize risk. That means the most easily-offended person in the room—or more precisely, the most politically connected complainant—effectively gets a veto over what gets taught. It’s a heckler’s veto laundered through bureaucratic process.
There are legitimate debates about how universities should approach controversial material in the classroom. But any time anyone has brought any of those up for serious debate over the last few decades, they were mocked as “woke snowflakes” who need their “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”
This is the exact dynamic that conservatives spent years claiming to oppose. The whole argument against “political correctness” and “cancel culture” was supposedly that small groups of oversensitive people shouldn’t be able to dictate what ideas are permissible in public discourse. The argument against trigger warnings was that adults should be able to encounter difficult material without having their hands held. The argument against safe spaces was that the university should be a place of intellectual challenge, not comfort.
Now Texas has built a taxpayer-funded safe space spanning nine campuses and four medical centers, complete with government-mandated trigger warnings (the syllabus disclosure requirement) and an institutionalized process for anyone who finds course material too upsetting to lodge a complaint. How very snowflake of Texas. The only difference here is who gets to be upset.
And then there’s the “broad and balanced approach” requirement, which sounds perfectly reasonable until you think about it for more than three seconds. What does “balance” look like when you’re teaching about the Holocaust? About slavery? The “germ theory” of disease? If a history professor is covering Jim Crow, are they now required to present the segregationist perspective with equal weight in the name of “balance”?
That sounds absurd, and it is. When you refuse to define “controversial” and then mandate “balance” for anything that falls under that undefined umbrella, you’ve created a system where any topic with a political dimension—which is basically every topic in the humanities, social sciences, and increasingly the natural sciences—becomes a minefield.
Allen Liu, policy counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said it could lead to “viewpoint discrimination” and disproportionately affect Black students and faculty by discouraging teaching about slavery, segregation and other subjects central to Black history.
To which, I would imagine, many of the UT Board of Regents would quietly admit among friends “well, yeah, that’s the fucking point.”
It’s also worth noting the broader context in which this is happening:
The vote comes a week after UT-Austin announced it will consolidate its African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments into a new Social and Cultural Analysis department. More than 800 students are pursuing majors, minors and graduate degrees in the affected programs.
Ah yes. Basically anything that is not white European heterosexual male focused, all gets shoved into one “those other people over there” department.
Meanwhile, the school is absolutely expanding programs that align with a very particular set of priorities. See if you can figure out which ones:
Last year, UT-Austin was also one of nine universities offered preferential access to federal funding in exchange for agreeing to ensure departments reflect a mix of perspectives and promote civic values and Western civilization, among other requirements.
Some students argue that even without formally signing the agreement, UT-Austin is already moving in that direction. Alfonso Ayala III, a doctoral student in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at UT-Austin, pointed to the university expanding the conservative-backed School of Civic Leadership as his department loses autonomy.
“It’s hard to understand this as anything other than ideological and political,” Ayala said.
No shit.
And this is just the latest chapter in what has become a remarkable saga of Texas Republicans dismantling the very speech protections they once championed. As we wrote about last year, that 2019 campus free speech law—the one that was supposed to ensure all viewpoints could be heard—suddenly became a problem when pro-Palestinian protesters started using it.
Texas Republicans couldn’t have that.
The original 2019 law was passed specifically because Texas A&M had canceled a white nationalist rally and Texas Southern University had scrapped a conservative speaker’s appearance. The legislature was furious. Free speech must be protected!
But when the same protections enabled pro-Palestinian encampments, suddenly the legislature couldn’t pass restrictions fast enough. New rules on where you can protest, bans on amplification devices during class hours, prohibitions on overnight encampments, restrictions on wearing masks. All the things that were never a problem in the five years between the law’s passage and the moment students started saying things Texas Republicans didn’t want to hear.
So let’s trace the arc here. In 2019, the Texas legislature mandated that universities must allow protests and controversial speakers because free speech is sacred. In 2025, the Texas legislature rolled that back because the wrong people were speaking. And now in 2026, the UT Board of Regents is mandating that professors can’t even teach “unnecessarily controversial” material in their own classrooms—a phrase so deliberately vague that the board chair openly celebrates its ambiguity.
Senator Huffman, who authored the 2019 free speech law and proclaimed that students “should be exposed to all ideas,” voted in favor of restricting protest rights last year and appears to have raised no objection to the new UT policy. Let’s go out on a limb here and say it: the 2019 law was never about ensuring exposure to all ideas. It was about ensuring that a specific set of speakers (white nationalists) saying a specific set of things (racist shit) would have access to university campuses. Once the same mechanism started working for the “wrong” people, it became disposable.
The UT regents will tell you this policy is about “balance.” That it’s about making sure professors stick to their areas of expertise and don’t wander off into political editorializing. But if that were the actual concern, you’d write a clear, specific policy. You’d define your terms. You’d create transparent standards that professors could understand and follow. You would absolutely not describe your own vagueness as a strategic asset.
“Vagueness can be our friend” is what you say when the goal is discretionary power—the ability to punish the speech you don’t like while leaving the speech you do like untouched.
For all the years of rhetoric about snowflakes and safe spaces and the coddled minds of American youth, the actual policy goal was never intellectual rigor. It was control. Control over which ideas get aired, which histories get taught, which perspectives get treated as legitimate, and which get quietly filed under “unnecessarily controversial” and removed from the curriculum.
The people who spent a decade mocking trigger warnings just voted unanimously to impose the biggest trigger warning in the history of American higher education: Warning: This university has been certified free of unnecessary controversy by the State of Texas.
I guess everything really is bigger in Texas. Including the censorship.
Filed Under: academic freedom, cancel culture, controversial topics, free speech, greg abbott, joan hoffman, kevin eltife, safe spaces, texas, vagueness
Companies: university of texas
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