Texas A&M committee says firing of professor over gender lesson was unjustified

A Texas A&M committee ruled that the university’s decision to fire a professor after a student was removed from class for objecting to a children’s literature lesson on gender identity was unjustified.

A video recorded earlier this year by a female student showed her asking Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer in the English department, if teaching gender ideology is legal, pointing to President Donald Trump’s executive orders aimed at removing the subject from higher education.

The internal committee ruled that the university failed to follow proper procedures and did not prove there was good cause to terminate McCoul. The committee unanimously voted 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 after reviewing it.

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McCoul’s lawyer, Amanda Reichek, said the dispute is likely to end up in court because the university appears to want to continue fighting, and the interim president is facing similar 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.

Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republicans had called for her firing after watching the video.

“Fire the professor who acted contrary to Texas law,” the governor wrote on X in September.

The video led to public criticism of university president Mark Welsh, who later resigned, although he did not offer a reason and never mentioned the video in his resignation announcement.

State Rep. Brian Harrison said in a statement to Fox News Digital at the time that the “liberal president of Texas A&M must be fired and all DEI and LGBTQ indoctrination defunded.”

The opening of the video posted by Harrison on social media showed a slide titled “Gender Unicorn” that noted different gender identities and expressions. 

Students in the class told The Texas Tribune that they were discussing a book called “Jude Saves the World,” which is about a middle school student who comes out as nonbinary. Several other books included in the course also touched on LGBTQ+ issues.

After a back-and-forth dispute about the legality of teaching the lessons on gender identity, McCoul asked the student to leave the class. Harrison also posted other recordings of the student’s meeting with Welsh that showed the then-university president defending McCoul’s instruction.

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Welsh 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 the course content did not match its catalog descriptions.

“If we allow different course content to be taught from what is advertised, we let our students down. When it comes to our academic offerings, we must keep our word to our students and to the state of Texas,” he said in September, noting that leaders in the College of Arts and Sciences were found to have approved plans to continue teaching course content that was not consistent with the course’s published description.

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Earlier this month, the Texas A&M Regents issued a new policy stating 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.

Fox News Digital reached out to Texas A&M for comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.