A children’s literature professor at Texas A&M was fired on Tuesday after a video showing a student objecting to course material about gender identity and sexuality went viral.
Both the dean of the school’s college of arts and science and the head of department were also removed from their roles, the university president, Mark Welsh III, said in a statement.
The undated video does not show the professor or the student involved.
“I’m not sure this is legal to be teaching,” the student says. “According to our president, there’s only two genders and he said he would be freezing agencies’ funding programs that promote gender ideology. And this also very much goes against, not only myself but a lot of people’s religious beliefs.”
Welsh said he had first learned of potential issues with the course over the summer and “made changes to ensure this course content does not continue in future semesters”.
“I made it clear to our academic leadership that course content must match catalog descriptions for each and every one of our course sections,” he wrote in a letter to faculty and students on Tuesday. “I learned late yesterday that despite that directive, the college continued to teach content that was inconsistent with the published course description for another course this fall.”
The firing of the professor, whom university officials have identified as Melissa McCoul, comes shortly after Welsh appeared in another video in which he told the student that firing the professor was “not happening”, according to the Texas Tribune.
“It is unacceptable for A&M system faculty to push a political agenda,” Glenn Hegar, the school’s chancellor, said in a statement. “Early investigations appear to indicate this course failed to comply with clear instructions to align course descriptions with course materials.”
Texas A&M passed an audit earlier this year to ensure that the school complies with a new state law banning DEI in public universities, according to the Battalion, the student newspaper.
The videos prompted enormous pressure on the school from Republican politicians and officials. Brian Harrison, a Republican state lawmaker, posted the clips as well as what he said was material from the class and asked Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, to intervene to get the professor fired. He also asked the Trump administration to intervene. The post was amplified by Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the justice department’s civil rights division.
Abbott called for McCourt’s firing and cheered the removals on X. “The professor has now been fired,” he posted on Tuesday.
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