Hailey Nguyen / The Cougar
UH is the first university system in Texas to complete the curriculum review required by Senate Bill 37, but the months-long effort to reach this target has sparked dissent from faculty and students.
Last November, President and Chancellor Renu Khator asked faculty to align with the University’s academic commitment to teach, not indoctrinate students.
In February, deans of several colleges, including the Honors College and the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, sent out a memorandum with similar wording, which faculty were asked to sign.
Professor Robert Zaretsky, who has a dual appointment in the Honors College and in the CLASS Department of Modern and Classical Languages, did not sign either memo.
“The very notion that I have spent the last 36 years of my life as a professor here at UH indoctrinating my students, I was indignant,” Zaretsky said. “It outraged me.”
Zaretsky authored an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle and spoke on Houston Public Media’s Houston Matters show shortly after receiving the memos.
SB 37, which went into effect in January, establishes comprehensive reviews of university core curriculum to ensure “breadth of knowledge” but does not mention indoctrination by name.
Although SB 37 only applies to the core curriculum, UH extended the standards of the bill to all other University curricula in a separate, parallel review process.
“Our students deserve confidence that their tuition dollars and the public investment in the University are directed toward courses that meet the highest standards of academic quality and prepare them for the workforce and life after college,” said a University spokesperson. “By rigorously evaluating all courses, the University is ensuring that every hour spent in a UH classroom represents a meaningful investment in students’ future success – one grounded in critical thinking, disciplinary rigor and intellectual openness.”
UH has stated that faculty remain free to teach contested topics so long as students are free to question and are not graded on agreement.
According to Zaretsky, the CLASS memo referencing indoctrination has since been subject to revision. Faculty have not yet received the revised document.
“This is an occasion for faculty to grasp how fragile all that we’ve accomplished over the years is, this quest for a more equal, more just society,” Zaretsky said. “More specifically, our quest to make UH truly a Tier One university. Not just in the number of colleges we have, the number of students we have, or the graduation rate or the grants that we bring in. To be a true research university, just the very idea of university entails the willingness to think for oneself.”
Zaretsky, who called indoctrination the antithesis of critical thinking, said that his teaching approach is Socratic.
“I have never, to the best of my knowledge, sought to indoctrinate,” Zaretsky said. “In other words, simply impose upon my students that these things are true, these things are false. Don’t ask me why that first category of things is true, just accept my word for it. That’s indoctrination. And my guess is that all of my colleagues at UH, rather than doing what I’ve just described, their approach is socratic.”
Resistance to the memo at UH coincides with similar pushback from students and faculty at Texas A&M University, where earlier this year, 200 courses in the College of Arts and Sciences were set to be affected by a recent ban on race and gender ideology topics, as well as topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity.
English professor Maria C. Gonzalez, who also openly refused to sign the indoctrination memo, cited controversies over the curriculum at A&M as part of her decision to dissent.
“When A&M did their silly thing and banned Plato, what I told everyone was, you tell me to ban Plato, you have to show me the policy that tells me to ban Plato,” González said. “What I’m going to do is double down and teach more Plato and I’m going to sue you if you fire me.”
González, whose research interests include Chicana writers and feminist and queer theory, came to UH over 20 years ago. At that time, González remembers that the University was welcoming to her research and teaching.
Courses on Native American literature, Jewish literature and gay and lesbian literature were approved, as well as ones on feminist and queer theory.
These courses are now on the books and part of the curriculum as these are all intellectual fields, González said.
“My colleagues understand intellectual fields. What makes people uncomfortable is that administrators are vulnerable to the politics of the state of Texas,” González said. “I’ve never had a dean directly challenge my work, but the caution with which some of the administrators speak about the diverse fields I teach in has given me pause more than once.”
Students are not immune to these tensions. On March 24, the UH branch of Young Democratic Socialists of America, in collaboration with the Texas State Employees Union, hosted a discussion with Texas State University professor Tom Alter.
Alter was fired after videos of him speaking at an online socialism convention were published online and has since become a prominent figure in the debate over free speech in academia.
“Even before students can generate the curiosity in a topic, the material in and of itself is neutered in a way to make it apolitical, non-ideological, non-indoctrinating,” said political science senior Cody Szell, who was also present at the event. “It already limits the ability for students to gain the material. Overall, it just completely limits discussion.”
Szell found the indoctrination memo to be insulting to the faculty and detrimental to learning.
For the most part, faculty are being more careful in what they say in class. But writing on feminism, Marxism, Chicana theory and queer theory still have a place in the course on American literature, González said.
“I don’t know any other way to teach it,” González said. “I do all this stuff that the legislature is trying to dismantle, but it’s too late. They’ve already lost. The battles may still be going on, but they have lost. They are trying to wipe out the last 50 years, and they can’t. It’s done.”
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