THEY BUILT AN A.I. CENSOR FOR THE CLASSROOM

When politicians use A.I. to control the classroom, academic freedom is in danger.

By Dr. John Petrone

I am a university professor.

I design courses. I write syllabi. I select readings. I develop assignments. I align instruction with professional standards. I revise curriculum based on research, student outcomes, accreditation requirements, developments in my field, and years of professional experience.

And I use artificial intelligence.

I know what it can do.

I also know what it cannot do.

An algorithm does not possess academic judgment. It does not understand disciplinary context the way a scholar does. It cannot replace years of research, teaching, peer review, professional experience, and subject-matter expertise.

Yet at Texas Tech University, artificial intelligence has reportedly been used as part of a sweeping effort to identify course materials touching on politically disfavored subjects—including gender identity and sexual orientation—and flag them for review.

Professors were reportedly handed AI-assisted reports telling them what they needed to stop teaching.

Some contained factual errors.

One professor reportedly discovered material attributed to a course she wasn’t even teaching.

Another faculty member described the result perfectly:

“A.I. slop.”

But this is not merely a story about unreliable artificial intelligence.

It is a story about who controls knowledge in an American university.

And that should concern every one of us.

The Pattern

Texas Tech Chancellor Brandon Creighton is not simply another university administrator tinkering with curriculum.

Before becoming chancellor, he was a Republican state senator and one of the principal architects of Texas’ sweeping effort to restructure public higher education.

The changes have weakened traditional faculty governance and expanded the authority of politically appointed governing boards over curriculum.

Now, at Texas Tech, that political philosophy has reached directly into the classroom.

Restrictions have been imposed on how certain subjects involving race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity may be taught.

Programs centered on sexual orientation or gender identity have been targeted.

Restrictions have extended into graduate research.

Faculty members have been required to submit materials for review.

And artificial intelligence has been incorporated into the machinery used to identify potentially objectionable material.

Creighton argues that universities have drifted politically left, that students need degrees more closely connected to employment, and that greater oversight will restore public confidence in higher education.

Those are legitimate subjects for debate.

Universities should be accountable.

Programs should demonstrate value.

Professors should never use their classrooms to demand political conformity from students.

Conservative students deserve exactly the same intellectual freedom and respect as liberal students.

But there is an enormous difference between preventing indoctrination and having political officials decide which subjects may be discussed.

Replacing perceived ideological conformity on the left with government-enforced ideological conformity on the right is not academic freedom.

It is merely changing who holds the censor’s pen.

Why This Matters

Here is what people outside higher education sometimes misunderstand about censorship.

The greatest damage does not occur when someone formally announces:

“You are forbidden from teaching this.”

The greatest damage occurs when professors begin asking themselves:

Will this reading get me investigated?

Will this lecture trigger a review?

Will somebody misunderstand this discussion?

Could this assignment threaten my job?

Should I simply remove it rather than take the chance?

That is called a chilling effect.

And according to the reporting from Texas Tech, it is already happening.

Faculty members have altered course content even when they were not specifically ordered to do so.

Consider what that means in practice.

A professor teaching Holocaust literature worries about mentioning the persecution of gay and bisexual men by the Nazis.

A medieval historian wonders how safely he can discuss Joan of Arc.

That same historian reportedly removed material concerning Viking men and women because Norse mythology includes figures whose gender changes.

A creative-writing professor was told to replace a book because of its connection to transgender experience.

This is where ideological censorship inevitably leads.

History refuses to cooperate with political talking points.

Literature refuses to cooperate.

Science refuses to cooperate.

Human beings refuse to cooperate.

You cannot meaningfully study civilization while pretending portions of human experience never existed.

And you certainly cannot prepare university students for the real world by hiding the real world from them.

The Constitutional Stakes

This fight has now moved into federal court.

Faculty organizations have sued the Texas Tech University System, arguing that these restrictions constitute viewpoint discrimination and violate constitutional protections of speech and due process.

Texas Tech disputes those allegations and maintains that its policies protect academic integrity, comply with the law, and ensure rigorous and relevant education.

The courts will ultimately decide the legal questions.

But there is a larger democratic principle at stake that should not require a law degree to understand.

A public university cannot fulfill its purpose if political power determines acceptable knowledge.

Academic freedom does not mean professors may teach whatever they want without standards or accountability.

It means scholarly questions are resolved primarily through evidence, expertise, research, disciplinary standards, and intellectual debate—not partisan directives.

I teach future educational leaders.

One of the most important things we can teach students is how to confront complicated ideas, evaluate evidence, distinguish argument from fact, recognize bias, challenge assumptions, and reach defensible conclusions.

That requires exposure to ideas.

Sometimes uncomfortable ideas.

Sometimes ideas we reject.

Sometimes ideas we despise.

The answer to a bad argument is a better argument.

The answer to questionable scholarship is stronger scholarship.

The answer to ideological bias is intellectual diversity.

The answer is not censorship.

And it certainly is not feeding course materials into an algorithm designed to search for politically sensitive words and concepts.

When A.I. Becomes an Instrument of Power

There is another dimension to this story that should frighten anyone paying attention to artificial intelligence.

AI is neither inherently liberating nor inherently authoritarian.

It depends upon who controls it and what they ask it to do.

In one professor’s hands, AI might help students analyze data.

In a researcher’s hands, it might discover patterns humans missed.

In a physician’s hands, it might help identify disease.

In an authoritarian system, however, the same technology can become extraordinarily efficient at surveillance, classification, and ideological enforcement.

That is what makes Texas Tech’s experiment so troubling.

Imagine this model spreading.

Every syllabus uploaded.

Every reading scanned.

Every lecture title analyzed.

Every assignment searched.

Every professor flagged according to terms established by political appointees.

Today the forbidden subject might be gender identity.

Under a different government tomorrow it could be conservative political theory.

Or religion.

Or capitalism.

Or socialism.

Or abortion.

Or immigration.

Or climate change.

Or American military history.

Once Americans accept the principle that government may build an automated ideological screening system for university classrooms, the political identity of the people controlling the machine becomes almost beside the point.

The machine is the danger.

This Is Bigger Than Texas Tech

Anyone tempted to dismiss this as a dispute involving one university in Lubbock should look at what is happening across Texas.

Public universities throughout the state are reviewing and restructuring curricula under a new political framework that gives governing boards considerably greater authority.

Faculty governance has been weakened.

Programs are being consolidated or eliminated.

Core curricula are being reconsidered.

Restrictions involving race, gender, and sexuality have appeared at multiple institutions.

Texas is becoming a laboratory for a fundamentally different model of American public higher education.

And supporters are quite open about wanting that model replicated elsewhere.

That is why Americans outside Texas should pay attention.

Political movements test ideas where they have power.

If those ideas survive politically and legally, they spread.

We have seen that pattern repeatedly.

Texas Tech may be one campus.

The precedent will not remain there.

How We Fight Back

Universities absolutely need reform.

We should debate tuition.

We should debate administrative bloat.

We should debate ideological conformity.

We should debate whether programs adequately prepare students for careers.

We should debate whether universities have become disconnected from portions of the American public.

I am perfectly willing to have every one of those conversations.

But reform must strengthen intellectual freedom—not destroy it.

Faculty members must defend academic freedom even when the speech being protected comes from people with whom we profoundly disagree.

University leaders must resist political micromanagement of scholarship.

Students must demand the right to encounter competing ideas rather than politically sanitized curricula.

Alumni and donors must ask institutions whether academic decisions are being made by qualified scholars or political appointees.

Courts must scrutinize government policies that cross the line from legitimate oversight into viewpoint discrimination.

And universities using artificial intelligence to review faculty work should be required to disclose exactly how those systems operate:

What information is being scanned?

What terms trigger a flag?

Who programmed the criteria?

Who evaluates the results?

What error rate exists?

What human review occurs?

What appeals process exists?

And most importantly:

Who decides which ideas are suspicious?

Those questions belong at the center of this debate.

The Bottom Line

I have spent much of my professional life in education—as a teacher, school administrator, and now university professor.

I have watched educational fads come and go.

I have watched technologies transform classrooms.

I have watched politicians from both parties attempt to place their fingerprints on education.

But universities cannot become places where faculty members first consult a list of politically acceptable ideas before deciding what students are permitted to learn.

That is not higher education.

It is intellectual obedience.

And artificial intelligence makes the danger greater because censorship that once required armies of bureaucrats can increasingly be automated.

Search the syllabus.

Flag the words.

Generate the report.

Send it to administrators.

Make professors afraid.

And eventually, professors begin censoring themselves.

That last step is the most dangerous one because the government no longer needs to remove every book.

Fear does the work for them.

Universities should expose students to the enormous complexity of human knowledge and teach them how to evaluate it.

They should produce citizens capable of thinking for themselves.

They should be places where liberal ideas can be challenged by conservative ideas, conservative ideas can be challenged by liberal ideas, and both can be challenged by evidence.

Because the mission of a university is not to tell students what they are permitted to think.

It is to teach them how to think.

And the moment politicians begin programming machines to determine which ideas professors may teach, every American who values intellectual freedom should understand what is happening.

This isn’t educational reform.

It is censorship upgraded for the artificial-intelligence age.

And if we allow it to become normal in Texas, we should not be surprised when someone tries to make it normal everywhere else.

We the People cannot allow that to happen.

If you believe our universities should remain places of free inquiry rather than political obedience, please share this post, subscribe to We the People United!, and send it to someone who believes academic freedom is worth defending.

Democracy depends upon citizens who know how to think.

And free citizens cannot be educated in classrooms where everyone is afraid to speak.

P.S. Academic freedom does not belong to the political left or the political right. It belongs to all of us. The test is not whether we defend ideas we like. The test is whether we defend the freedom to examine ideas we don’t.