What a disaster:

About half of Texas Tech University faculty members who responded to a recent survey said they’ve changed their course content — without being asked — to comply with policies restricting how they can teach about race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Another quarter reported they’d done so at administrators’ request, and more than half said the policies had prompted them to look for another job.

Professors say the results, from a survey distributed by the Faculty Senate last month, are proof of the chilling effect policies enacted by the Texas Tech system have had on the Lubbock campus. In April, the system’s chancellor, Brandon Creighton, released a sweeping memo phasing out academic programs “centered on” sexual orientation and gender identity, largely prohibiting faculty members from assigning material and graduate students from writing theses and dissertations on those topics. That guidance followed a December memo that banned teaching, among other things, that one race is “inherently superior” to another or that individuals should “bear responsibility or guilt for actions of others of the same race or sex”; it also created a course-content review process for material related to sexual orientation. The Faculty Senate survey focused on the December memo and a September one that preceded it….

All told, at least 277 courses on the Lubbock campus had content altered, according to the survey, which 367 faculty members completed and whose findings were first reported by The Texas Tribune. A system spokesperson, though, said a course-content review process, the results of which were released in April, offered a more reliable accounting than the survey’s “self-selected samples.” Across more than 14,000 courses in the Texas Tech system that were reviewed this spring, fewer than 60 required changes to comply with Creighton’s April memo, Erin Daly Wilson said in an email to The Chronicle. “The facts simply do not support the notion that academic freedom and accountability cannot coexist. At Texas Tech, they do.” The review process was systemwide, while the survey results reflect only the Lubbock campus; the Faculty Senate survey also factors in changes professors said they made without being asked.

Since Gauleiter Creighton’s memos transparently violated the constitutional rights of faculty to academic freedom, it’s good to know that even the Texas Tech hacks admit that the violation had effects in sixty different courses. The funny thing about the violation of constitutional rights, at least in pre-Trump America, is that if it’s 60 or 277, it’s still unlawful. I am surprised this hasn’t landed in court yet, but I hope it will.