An Aggie donor criticizes the Texas A&M University System's board of regents, accusing them of succumbing to political pressure and compromising academic freedom. The donor cites examples of curricular censorship and program cancellations, highlighting concerns over the regents' actions.
The primary election is one month away. Check out our voter guide to see candidate profiles, recommendations and build your sample ballotAggie donor Jon Hagler writes that the school’s regents are failing it, threatening academic freedom and kowtowing to politicians.
A time comes when silence starts to feel like betrayal. That time for me is now, as I watch the board of regents of the Texas A&M University System bow to political pressure and shirk its obligations to preserve academic freedom and institutional independence. Independence is a cornerstone of institutional excellence. I think this is especially true for educational institutions. That is why a mandate for independence is embedded into existing Texas law and into current Texas A&M System policy. But a Dec. 10, 2025 investigative news article in theMore recent reports chronicle how political influence has reached directly into classrooms. Late last year, regents imposed restrictions on how faculty can talk to students about race or gender. Texas A&M then killed an entire set of programs — women and gender studies in the College of Arts and Sciences — and canceled six classes, including a graduate course on ethics, of all things. In an untold number of other classes, faculty and administrators are censoring curricula. One example involves limiting the philosophies of Plato. I watch these alarming matters closely because I am a proud former student, Aggie class of 1958, who has actively supported decades of efforts — beginning with those of former Texas A&M President Earl Rudder — to transform my beloved alma mater from the small, all-male military college I attended to one of America’s genuinely great public universities.Regents are flouting two provisions of Texas statute. Sec. 51.352 of the Education Code says it is the responsibility of each governing board to “preserve institutional independence and to defend its right to manage its own affairs through its chosen administrators and employees.” Texas A&M System Policy ) mirrors that provision. The state’s Education Code goes on to say that each university must “protect intellectual exploration and academic freedom” and “strive for intellectual excellence.”In the Tribune article, Board Chairman Robert Albritton acknowledged that regents have made key decisions in compliance with the wishes of Gov. Greg Abbott or to alleviate other political pressure coming from Austin. For example, Abbott directed then-Chancellor John Sharp to close the university’s thriving campus in Qatar. For reasons still unexplained, Abbott directed the action after visiting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Tribune reported. When the A&M System Board of Regents voted in February 2024 to begin a shutdown, there was no mention of Abbott or Netanyahu, no public discussion and no explanation offered for the decision beyond general concern about political instability in the region.Also in the Tribune article, Albritton admitted the governor was involved in evaluating the performance of retired Gen. Mark A Welsh III, former chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, who was forced in September to resign as A&M president. Welsh had been deemed too “woke” in his handling of several culture war skirmishes. In my opinion, the loss of Welsh is a colossal governance mistake likely to have a lasting negative impact on the university., the executive committee of A&M’s distinguished professors said that Welsh’s removal “would not only deprive Texas A&M of an exceptional president, but also risk worsening the university’s reputation for instability in leadership, an issue that has already drawn national attention.” Eight of the nine regents who presided over his ouster had hired Welsh only two years earlier. He became president at a time of high institutional uncertainty. His predecessor had departed after her perceived mishandling of a separate culture war skirmish. She had lasted just two years, which is about the average tenure these days. There have been five presidents and three interim presidents at Texas A&M since Robert Gates left in December 2006.All who care about Texas A&M’s future should be on alert about the search for our university’s next president. He or she must be free of political loyalty or influence and must be independent enough to lead a still aspiring university toward excellence. Texas A&M’s decisions, policies and actions should be guided by its own rules, professional standards and legal frameworks. The current board also is ignoring best practices endorsed by a previous board of regents in 1999 through a project called Vision 2020. More than 25 years ago, I was honored to be co-chairman of Vision 2020 alongside then-President Ray Bowen. Bowen called together more than 250 people associated with Texas A&M for thousands of hours of deliberation spanning three years. The aim was to raise the stature of Texas A&M to place it among the best public universities in the nation. The Vision 2020 report said that “strong, enlightened, stable, and forward-thinking leadership focused on academic quality is essential.” It called for regents to take the policy high ground and make decisions through a process characterized by openness and appropriate faculty and staff participation. It also said that “academic progress is fragile. Enlightened, shared governance and leadership are elemental to its achievement.”The regents of 1999 resolved that the principles of Vision 2020 guide the future direction of Texas A&M University. They encouraged future regents, chancellors, presidents, administrators, faculty, staff and students to honor those principles. Vision 2020 is in sync with the state statutes demanding institutional independence and academic freedom. They dovetail nicely with U.S. Supreme Court precedents, including a 1967 ruling which stated, “Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”I have empathy for the regents of 2026. All nine are Aggies. I suspect they love Texas A&M and see themselves as protecting its interests, given that state politicians threaten to slash funding if the system fails to heed their complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion and LGBTQ+ policies or claims of liberal indoctrination, as the Texas Tribune reported. I imagine regents also feel pressure when the sitting U.S. president accuses universities of turning college students into socialists and terrorist sympathizers. But these hyperbolic claims do not stand up to scrutiny, especially at a place such as Texas A&M. The claims give our students — who are young adults, not young children — zero credit for independent thinking, and they grant faculty persuasive powers that they simply do not have.The willingness of state officials to intervene in managing Texas A&M comes despite a prolonged period of declining per-student state funding. Texas A&M has had to replace this public support with private dollars. Today, alumni-led fundraising through the Texas A&M Foundation provides roughly $200 million each year to the university — money that now sustains core academic functions once funded by the state. It’s ironic that state officials want to micromanage our university more than ever while our donors bear more of its financial burden than ever. During the 2025 session, the Legislature formally curtailed the faculty’s role in governance while spelling out an explicit role for governing boards in overseeing course curricula. The Legislature also created a higher education ombudsman’s office with the power to investigate allegations of violations, including complaints that universities still promote DEI. But recent changes in the law did not force Texas A&M to eliminate entire fields of study related to race, gender and sexuality. That was a choice made by our regents. They are overachievers in their subservience to powerful politicians.Meanwhile, Texas lawmakers have not rescinded the statute that defines the board of regents’ role as an independent one. The board still operates under the system policy intended to reinforce that independence. And the board has not rescinded its endorsement of Vision 2020. The dissonance is deafening. The last thing Texas A&M needs is political obedience. It needs courageous governance. It needs a board of regents that obeys the laws of Texas and the policies of the system, a board that recommits to the principles of institutional independence and academic freedom that have enabled Texas A&M’s decades of great progress toward excellence. I urge the Aggie family to seize upon this issue now, to speak out and protest and to decisively defeat the excessive politicization of this wonderful university — this sacred public trust. Jon Hagler, a 1958 graduate, received an honorary doctorate from Texas A&M in 2015. He was the lead donor for the Hagler Institute for Advanced Study, which annually brings renowned scholars to Texas A&M for a year to collaborate with faculty and students.
Texas A&M Regents Academic Freedom Political Interference Censorship
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