Texas A&M University President Mark A. Welsh III announced Tuesday the firing of Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer whose mention of “gender and sexuality” in a children’s literature course was videotaped by a student. The full details of the incident are not yet clear, but the reasons given for the swift decision to fire McCoul—and to remove English Department Head Emily Johansen and College of Arts and Sciences Dean Mark Zoran from their leadership roles—are preposterous and clearly manufactured in the hopes of satisfying the bad-faith MAGA zealots who have been demanding scalps.
The video shows no faces but records a brief classroom exchange, in which the student interjects to tell McCoul that according to President Trump, “there’s only two genders, and he said that he would be freezing agencies’ funding programs that promote gender ideology.” The student, who has not been identified, goes on to claim that discussing the topic of gender and sexuality goes against their religious beliefs and that they won’t participate further in the class session because “it’s not legal” to bring up gender. McCoul eventually asks her to leave.
The video went viral thanks to a Republican state representative who prefers social media stunts to actual legislating. Brian Harrison, whom Texas Monthly describes as a “cockroach” and the Texas Observer calls a “huckster,” shared it on social media on Monday, writing that he was “referring” the university to the Trump administration for investigation and asking Governor Greg Abbot to “fire the A&M officials involved and to instruct his Regents at all public universities to immediately end all DEI and LGBTQ indoctrination.” His post was picked up by the right-wing Libs of TikTok, which has 4.2 million followers on X: “WTF. Student at @TAMU KICKED OUT of class by a woke professor after she objected to a lesson on transgenderism.… Defund and investigate this institution IMMEDIATELY.”
They got their wish. The Department of Justice said it would “look into” this “deeply concerning” incident, and the chancellor of the A&M system said McCoul would be disciplined. Then President Welsh made it official, announcing in a statement that McCoul was fired because her course “contained content that did not align with any reasonable expectation of standard curriculum for the course” and “was inconsistent with the published course description.”
Whether it’s reasonable to discuss gender and sexuality in a literature course is context-dependent, and we don’t seem to have all the necessary context. However, the prospect of course material and discussion topics ranging beyond course descriptions is in general anodyne and inevitable. Texas A&M University course descriptions appear to range between 30 and 60 words, which is on the short end of typical. The purpose of a course description is not to set the outer bounds of what’s reasonable to teach in the course—if it were, they’d be a lot longer and more descriptive, like a syllabus—but to give students a rough idea of the course topic.
You could imagine a scenario in which a student is justifiably confused and maybe upset if they’ve been told to come to class prepared to talk about illustration techniques in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, only to show up for a surprise lecture on the evils of fascism and the scapegoating of minorities. At the same time, because Sendak’s iconic children’s book was unmistakably influenced by the fact that Sendak, who comes from a Polish-Jewish immigrant family, lost several family members to the Holocaust, such a lecture might reasonably fall within the scope of the course.
Such course material may or may not make it into a course description, though there may be both reasonable and unreasonable ways to introduce it. President Welsh portrays misalignment between course description and course content as a “break [of] trust with our students,” but the idea is ludicrous on its face. Every single one of Texas A&M University’s 16,000 courses will cover material not even obliquely referenced in their 50-word course descriptions. On such grounds, if an advanced math course goes a little further than advertised because the group of students is especially good, one student’s complaint could get the math professor fired.
We could rebut the argument, such as it is, of the student who recorded the video. For instance, an executive order stating that there are two genders does not make it so; biologists believe there are broadly “two sex forms” but “multiple gender variants.” (The student recorder themselves stumbles over “gender” versus “sex.”) We could call out the hypocrisy of the right spending years attacking professors for “trigger warnings” because “snowflake” students can’t handle material they disagree with, only to rally around a student who explicitly states on video that Trump’s dictates on “gender ideology” permit them to withdraw rather than to engage with opposing viewpoints in the classroom. We could argue about academic freedom and viewpoint diversity. But this is all beside the point.
If it’s not clear enough by now, the MAGA right is only doing to left-leaning academia what they perceived left-leaning academia was doing to people like them, with students taking cues as they always have. There are only two operative principles behind the surveillance and attacks on higher education, neither of which have anything to do with free speech, academic freedom, or viewpoint diversity: retribution and dominance.
It’s tempting to resort to liberal pluralist principles to explain this—as a kind of hypocrisy with respect to the right’s past positions on viewpoint diversity, or as an attack on academic freedom—but the truth is we’re no longer living and working within that framework. The problem is that the American college and university system—like the American Constitution—is a fundamentally liberal pluralist system butting up against the aggressively monist system the Trump administration is quickly institutionalizing.
“Monism” is in this sense the simple opposite of pluralism, the idea that there’s only one way to think and believe. For example, in a recent Jubilee debate with journalist Medhi Hasan, a young man named Connor, who identified himself as a fascist and Trump supporter, forthrightly articulated that his support for freedom of speech was only a means to an end—to obtain power—after which point he would take it away from everyone else. A liberal pluralist—someone who believes in the rights-based accommodation and coexistence of multiple viewpoints and cultures—would be tempted to call this hypocrisy. How could you be in favor of free speech for yourself, as an instrument to gain power, but against it for others? But hypocrisy doesn’t matter here, because the operative principle is dominance, not liberal pluralism: The only correct way is to force everyone to believe as the monist does.
Likewise, when the monist right—and sympathetic students understandably taking their cues—pressures higher education leadership to capriciously fire professors, censor their curricula, or purge their libraries of books that promote Thoughtcrime, the perpetrators don’t care if this is hypocritical or unprincipled or illiberal. Long ago the right settled on a belief that the campus left won the culture war by not playing fair. That view is debatable, but all that matters now for right-wing monists is winning it back, by any means necessary.
I consider myself something of a veteran of the campus free speech culture wars, having already made virtually every principled case for liberal pluralist approaches to these issues. But those of us who still believe in liberal pluralism have to be clearsighted about just how much the battleground has shifted. Instead of getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of American Association of University Professors statements on academic freedom or First Amendment jurisprudence, we should be fighting for liberal pluralism at large, hand in hand with those who otherwise wouldn’t give academia a second thought.
The right isn’t committed to exposing you to different viewpoints on gender, religion, or economics, even conservative ones. That’s entirely the wrong framework. The right perceives higher education as a left-leaning institution that has to be destroyed for the monist vision of right-wing politics to be realized. They can’t accomplish this destruction through liberal pluralist beliefs and tactics. They can only accomplish it by violating individual liberties, intimidating people with brute physical force and the full power of the Department of Justice and the military, forcing people to think and read only what they want them to, and mobilizing sympathetic civilians to surveil and report Thoughtcrime.
Accordingly, the messaging from liberal pluralists in the academy and beyond needs to make clear that the right doesn’t believe in American freedom anymore. They don’t believe in individual rights and liberties. They don’t believe in the Constitution or the broader pluralist cultures in higher education that extend from it. If you find yourself on the wrong side of right-wing monism, it won’t matter who you are, what your job is, or how you do it. All you are to them is a 50-word description they can interpret any way they want as a justification to terminate you as long as they have the power to do so.
