Texas A&M committee rules professor’s firing over gender identity lesson was unjustified

A Texas A&M committee agreed that the university was wrong to fire a professor earlier this year after a controversy over a classroom video that showed a student objecting to a children’s literature lesson about gender identity.

The internal committee ruled that the university didn’t follow proper procedures and didn’t prove there was good cause to fire Melissa McCoul, who was a senior lecturer in the English department with over a decade of teaching experience. Republican lawmakers, including Gov. Greg Abbott, had called for her termination after seeing the video.

The committee unanimously voted earlier this week that “the summary dismissal of Dr. McCoul was not justified.” The university said in a statement that interim President Tommy Williams has received the committee’s nonbinding recommendation and will make a decision in the coming days or weeks after reviewing it.

McCoul’s lawyer, Amanda Reichek, said this dispute seems destined to wind up in court because the university appears to plan to continue fighting and the interim president is facing the same political pressure.

“Dr. McCoul asserts that the flimsy reasons proffered by A&M for her termination are a pretext for the University’s true motivation: capitulation to Governor Abbott’s demands,” Reichek said in a statement.

The video showing a student questioning whether the class discussion was legal under President Trump’s executive order on gender roiled the campus and led to sharp criticism of university president Mark Welsh, who later resigned, but he didn’t offer a reason and never mentioned the video in his resignation announcement.

The opening of the video posted by state Rep. Brian Harrison showed a slide titled “Gender Unicorn” that highlighted different gender identities and expressions. Students in the class told the Texas Tribune that they were discussing a book called “Jude Saves the World” about a middle schooler who is coming out as nonbinary. That was just one of several books included in the course that highlights LGBTQ+ issues.

After a brief back-and-forth discussion about the legality of teaching those lessons, McCoul asked the student to leave the class. Harrison posted other recordings of the student’s meeting with Welsh that show the university president defending McCoul’s teaching.

The Tribune reported that McCoul had taught the same course at A&M at least 12 times since 2018. University officials decided to end this particular summer class early after the confrontation, but McCoul returned to teach in the fall until after the videos were published online.

Welsh had said when McCoul was fired that he learned she had continued teaching content in a children’s literature course “that did not align with any reasonable expectation of standard curriculum for the course.” He also said that the course content was not matching its catalog descriptions. But her lawyer disputed that, and said McCoul was never instructed to change her course content in any way, shape or form.

Earlier this month, the Texas A&M Regents decided that professors now need to receive approval from the school president to discuss some race and gender topics. The new policy states that no academic course “will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” unless approved in advance by a campus president.

Various universities and their presidents around the country, including Harvard and Columbia have come under scrutiny from conservative critics and President Donald Trump administration over diversity, equity and inclusion practices and their responses to campus protests.