A Year In, Texas Tech Chancellor Brandon Creighton Says Other Universities Are Following His Lead

Nearly a year after he left the Texas Senate to run the Texas Tech University System, Chancellor Brandon Creighton is making the case that Lubbock now leads the country on what a public university should teach.

"We're not going to wait on others to do it for us," Creighton told a recent Lubbock Chamber of Commerce luncheon, according to a lengthy profile by The Texas Tribune. "We're going to lead. Some of it will be uncomfortable."

This story is based on that single Tribune report, which drew on interviews with Creighton, regents, lawmakers, faculty and students.

From the Senate to the chancellor's office

Creighton grew up on a ranch outside Conroe, worked as a pipe fitter and electrician's helper at a chemical plant, and paid for the University of Texas with a $50,000 loan from a family friend, student loans and full-time work. He said he repaid the friend after law school. "I wanted to make some kind of difference in their lives, paying it forward," he told the Tribune about students facing the same pressures.

As chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee and later the Education Committee, he carried the laws that closed diversity, equity and inclusion offices at public colleges, broadened the grounds for firing tenured professors and gave governor-appointed regents more control. Senate Bill 37 reshaped faculty senates and requires regents to review the courses every undergraduate must take.

Texas Tech regents hired him in 2025 after Chancellor Tedd Mitchell announced his retirement. "We didn't hire Brandon simply to manage our system," Regent Clay Cash said. "We hired him to help define what it will become."

What changed at Tech

Within two weeks of taking over, Creighton ordered faculty across the system's five universities to seek approval before teaching material involving gender identity, sexual orientation or certain ideas about race and sex. In April, he and the regents barred sexual orientation and gender identity content from core and lower-level undergraduate courses and said programs centered on those subjects would be phased out.

Creighton said such courses were not the best use of students' tuition. "Some of that is misunderstood to be very political in nature, and I just see it as common sense tied to the data and the metrics that we're reviewing," he said. "We don't have to use state statute as a ceiling."

He has also pushed Tech into a partnership with chipmaker Nvidia. The university says it is investing $25 million in Nvidia computing for artificial intelligence research and training, in a project that could cost up to $40 million. The agreement itself has not been released; Tech asked the attorney general what can be withheld. Creighton and two regents reported owning Nvidia stock, and the system said all complied with disclosure law.

Enrollment at the Lubbock campus hit a record 46,296 students this fall.

The pushback

Faculty groups are suing Creighton and the regents, alleging unconstitutional censorship. Tech's lawyers argue classroom instruction is the university's own speech. "Coursework that indoctrinates students with left-wing theories and gender ideology rather than educates them with useful knowledge is not in the public interest," they wrote.

Tech records show 78 faculty separations from the Lubbock campus between November and mid-August, compared with 65 in the same stretch a year earlier, counting retirements and completed contracts. More than half of faculty who answered a survey said they were looking elsewhere. Teresa Klein, president of the Texas conference of the American Association of University Professors, said she fears the effects "will be a long lasting one."

Creighton said the mission does not change: "to make sure that our students ultimately get what they're paying for."

Supporters see a model. Sherry Sylvester of the Texas Public Policy Foundation said about a dozen states have asked about the Texas laws. "Everybody is looking to Texas," she said. When Auburn University trustees in Alabama gave themselves final authority over curriculum, Creighton wrote, "It is great to see other states following Texas' lead."

A fair word

Texas taxpayers and families have every right to expect that a public university spends their money teaching useful knowledge and not pushing one ideology. Many parents who send children to Lubbock will welcome that. But reform holds up best when it is done in the open. Releasing the Nvidia agreement and giving professors clear, consistent rules would help Texans judge the results for themselves.

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