The AHA has released a statement strongly opposing the new Texas Tech University Course Content Guidelines. The guidelines impose a “strict prohibition” on content related to “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity” in core and undergraduate-level classes, while failing to define these terms.
“Historians understand that the history of sexual orientation and gender identity is inseparable from the broader human past; efforts to exclude it fundamentally distort the historical record,” the statement reads. “Students deserve to learn full and accurate histories of the United States and the world, and for university students at every level these histories necessarily include histories of gender and sexuality, and of LGBTQ+ people. Simple respect for the past in all its complex humanity demands that we give attention to these experiences.”
The full statement can be found below.
To date, 8 organizations have signed on to the statement.
AHA Statement Opposing Restrictions on Teaching and Learning at Texas Tech University
Approved by AHA Council, April 24, 2026
The American Historical Association strongly opposes the Texas Tech University Course Content Guidelines issued on April 9, 2026. These guidelines impose sweeping restrictions on teaching and learning related to “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity,” standing in opposition to the core principles of professional historical practice. Indeed, they betray the very idea of the university as a bastion of free inquiry in pursuit of knowledge.
The policy is troublingly both expansive and vague. It fails to define what constitutes sexual orientation and gender identity—reduced to “SOGI”—while simultaneously mandating a “strict prohibition” on such content in all core and lower-level undergraduate courses. This prohibition would prevent students from learning entire swaths of human history. The requirement to provide “alternate materials” when primary sources “center on or include these topics” will further limit students’ access to historical evidence. The policy even applies to student research, barring graduate theses and dissertations on gender and sexuality. To enforce compliance, the memo directs provosts to develop “standardized syllabus templates” designed for instructional surveillance.
The policy’s logic is unmistakably Orwellian, policing not only what can be taught but how knowledge itself is named and understood. By prohibiting sustained engagement with “sexual orientation and gender identity” while permitting only “purely incidental” references, it imposes a form of intellectual doublethink: subjects central to human experience must be simultaneously acknowledged and then ignored. Taken literally, such restrictions would preclude even meaningful discussion of George Orwell’s own engagement with questions of gender and sexuality. In this way, the policy does not merely limit content; it reshapes the conditions of thought, rendering certain lines of inquiry effectively unmentionable.
Historians understand that the history of sexual orientation and gender identity is inseparable from the broader human past; efforts to exclude it fundamentally distort the historical record. The policy’s list of examples where gender identity is “historically intrinsic” focuses strictly on sexual orientation without any understanding that women and femininity, men and masculinity, heterosexuality and marriage are all themselves historical subjects that exist not in a timeless vacuum, but in context. Historians have for decades shown that individuals have been transgressing imposed boundaries of gender since antiquity. Course materials cannot adequately cover many historical events—the abolition, suffrage, and temperance movements, for example—without discussing how women leaders and participants used historically specific ideas about gender to frame their actions and arguments.
And neither law nor policy can change the fact that LGBTQ+ people have always existed. This erasure flattens the story of America’s long Civil Rights Movement by ignoring or marginalizing the 1969 Stonewall Riots and the pathbreaking 2015 Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges. It bars students from examining cultures, religions, and societies—including Indigenous nations within Texas—that have embraced traditions of gender fluidity and homosexuality as meaningful categories of social identity and organization. Its effort to silence and segregate LGBTQ+ voices will restrict students’ understanding of the richness and diversity of the human experience. As the AHA explained in its 2021 Statement on LGBTQ+ History Curriculum, “Students who attend schools that include LGBTQ+ history will therefore not only be better informed citizens but will also be better prepared to engage with the complexities of everyday life.”
We strongly encourage the Texas Tech University System to reconsider this policy, which extends far beyond any requirement in state or federal law and is damaging to both faculty and students. Historians are obligated by the standards of our profession to pursue histories that are not distorted, to include evidence no matter where it leads, and to be attentive to the full scope of scholarship in our fields. This policy would require scholars to ignore these standards to work within the Texas Tech system. In advising graduate students to conform to this policy, for example, faculty could be severely distorting the historical record and committing professional malpractice.
Students deserve to learn full and accurate histories of the United States and the world, and for university students at every level these histories necessarily include histories of gender and sexuality, and of LGBTQ+ people. Simple respect for the past in all its complex humanity demands that we give attention to these experiences. All people have the right to write, read, and be represented in a full and accurate account of history. All students have the right to learn about the past that has shaped the world they live in.
The following organizations have signed on to this statement:
Alliance for Higher Education
American Philosophical Association
American Society for Theatre Research
Coordinating Council of Women in History
National Council on Public History
Organization of American Historians
Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
World History Association