The Texas A&M Scandal

Facing growing political pressure, Texas A&M University President Mark A. Welsh III announced Monday evening that the dean and department head overseeing a children’s literature course at the center of a viral recording were going to be removed, saying they approved plans to teach material inconsistent with the published course description.

https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/08/texas-am-video-professor-student-gender-identity-content/

The material that this person was teaching was absolutely inappropriate and wrong but what do the department head and the dean have to do with it? I have absolutely no idea what my faculty members are teaching. Neither does our dean. We aren’t a high school. There are no “approved materials.” I can’t imagine the Dean I currently have approving much of what I say about socialism, US foreign policy, mass migration, etc. But so what? It’s my academic freedom. He wouldn’t dare make a peep about my materials and assigned readings. And that’s good.

The problem here is not with course materials.

From the videos of the incident, it’s clear that the faculty member who taught the course is a crap teacher outside of any ideological considerations. She has no understanding of basic pedagogy and doesn’t know how to engage productively with a student who challenges her politely. We all have students who challenge what we say in class. Knowing how to respond in a way that advances our teaching goals is Pedagogy 101. If you can’t even do that, what can you do?

I love students who contradict me in class. It shows that they are engaged. They care. They want to participate. And I’m not always right. I have apologized on various occasions, saying, “you are absolutely right, my mistake. Thank you for pointing it out.” I love such moments because they are wonderful for establishing trust and rapport with students.

I have had students challenge me aggressively, especially when I was a much younger, early-career academic. Every time, I handled it with dignity, understanding, and kindness. It never occurred to me to throw a student out. In the end, every such student apologized and shared the reasons that drove them to this behavior. I once had a student, strung out on meth, curse me out and threaten me in the classroom. The week after that, she was weeping in my office, telling me how much she appreciated that I didn’t “fuck me up like I fucking deserved for being such a stupid fuck.” I was 24, and this was my first year teaching college. And still, I handled it professionally.

The A&M student who started the hullabaloo is a dream student. She’s polite, articulate, well-spoken. If the Dean and the department head deserve removal, it’s not because of the materials, for which they bear no responsibility, but because they aren’t doing faculty development. Every semester you should be doing something to improve everybody’s pedagogical skills. Including your own. Or you end up with faculty who can’t handle the most basic situations in the classroom.

In one of the videos of the incident, the faculty member (I’m very unconvinced she’s a professor) says “I’m the authority in this classroom.” Dude, only people with zero authority have to say they are the authority. You can’t demand respect. You must generate it. You gain authority by behaving like one.

It’s embarrassing to watch this faculty member flail pathetically like teaching was invented 15 minutes ago and she’s trying to figure it out on the spot. That’s why I don’t think she has tenure. If she does, the university must revise its entire tenure-granting process.

P.S. I googled this “professor”, and I was right. She’s a senior lecturer. Not even an instructor. This is why you want professors, and not a troop of contingent laborers with zero interest in teaching, to work in higher education. Again, none of this is about ideology for me. This is simply an issue of being unqualified for the job.