Earlier in the year, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University and Texas Tech University's governing boards made similar changes to their core curriculum.
Now, the University of Houston, or U of H, has removed some courses.
Houston Public Media reports some of the classes removed from the school's core curriculum include those discussing race and gender, such as Introduction to LGBT Studies, Women and Gender in Arabic Literature and Intro to Global Climate Change. More than 45% of the courses were removed.
State universities have scrambled to comply with Senate Bill 37 before a January 1 certification deadline. Among other things, the bill, authored by State Sen. Randon Creighton (R-Conroe), requires that governing boards look over the general education curriculum and determine if its foundational.
Sherry Sylvester, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, says the core courses shouldn't include those with a bias.
“The important thing to realize is that because they were in the core curriculum, you could take them as science classes or humanities classes to account for credit towards your degree, and that's why Chairman Creighton wrote the law to target reform of the core curriculum,” Sylvester says. “So that you have to have, what the curriculum calls for, basic understanding of science, basic understanding of mathematics and basic understanding of language.”
Critics of the law say this is creating a “climate of censorship” and discouraging teachers from teaching about controversial subjects.
Maria Gonzalez, associate professor of English at U of H said that leadership bended to the winds of politics in this situation. She is disappointed by the decision, claiming that a narrow interpretation of SB 37 guaranteed a narrow decision.
Sylvester is of the opposite mindset.
“The first thing they (faculty) need to understand is that they are state employees and those universities are paid for by taxpayers. This isn't the winds of politics,” Sylvester counters. “The people who made those changes were elected by the people of Texas to do a number of things, and one of the things that they were elected to do was oversee all the money, the $60-$70 billion that we put in every two years into these universities.”
Before the board's vote, the school's general counsel said that some of the removed courses were still part of the elective curriculum.
