On (not) teaching in Texas

I'm probably not the only professor right now who's frantically finishing up spring semester syllabi while breathing a silent prayer of gratitude: I'm glad I'm not teaching in Texas. 

Let Texas stand for any state or system where legislators or governing boards are trying to force professors to comply with ideological constraints on curricula. Today everyone's talking about an article in Inside Higher Ed about Texas A&M University, where a philosophy professor has been told to remove Plato from his syllabus (?) and a History of Film class was deemed inappropriate for the core curriculum because it includes material on feminism and queer cinema. When students were informed that the course no longer counts toward their core requirements, enrollment started dropping--which may have been the point.

I'm most interested, of course, in how these strictures affect English professors. Here's the relevant portion of the article: 

English faculty members received an email Tuesday from senior executive associate dean of the college Cynthia Werner telling them that literature with major plot lines that concern gay, lesbian or transgender identities should not be taught in core-curriculum classes.

In a follow-up email Wednesday, Werner said, "If a course includes eight books and only one has a main character who has an LGBTQ identity and the plot lines are not overly focused on sexual orientation (i.e. that is THE main plot line), I personally think it would be OK to keep the book in the course." She also clarified that faculty may assign textbooks with chapters that cover transgender identity, so long as they do not talk about the material or include it on assignments or exam questions.

I'm trying to imagine the mental gymnastics an English professor would have to perform in order to comply with this, um, guidance. Okay, what if my course has seven books but two of them have minor characters or plot lines dealing with sexual orientation? What if none of the readings directly address sexuality but there's a whole lot of ambiguous subtext? How much ambiguous subtext is equal to one main plot? It's a word problem with too many variables and undefined terms, and even if my answer might satisfy the personal feelings of this one associate dean, who's to say that someone higher up might have a different interpretation of the rules?

And then what about literature that's not plot-driven? How many Walt Whitman poems vaguely referencing sexuality (wink-wink, nudge-nudge) would correspond to one book with a major plot dealing with sexual identity? Let's all play "Tiptoe Past the Subtext"! Would it even be possible to teach Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," or is some clever textbook publisher even now creating a bowdlerized version to remove anything that could be remotely perceived as offensive? (It would be a much shorter poem, which would certainly make some students very happy.)

I don't know how to teach Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Kate Chopin without directly addressing gender roles--or Susan Glaspell's Trifles, for that matter. Or Zora Neale Hurston's "Sweat." Or Ernest Hemingway's "Soldier's Home." Or Elizabeth Bishop or Jhumpa Lahiri or Toni Morrison or Alice Walker or Maxine Hong Kingston. Even when the "main plot" of a work of literature is not "overly focused" on gender or sexuality, those topics may still be relevant to class discussion and analysis. 

And as to the further guidance that it's acceptable to assign texts including the forbidden topics as long as we pretend those parts of the text don't exist--well good luck with that. Such a stricture is bound to backfire. The best way to get a group of students to read a text is to tell them that it's forbidden. So while I'm glad I'm not teaching in Texas, if I were, I'd be tempted to issue an anti-syllabus--a list of texts we're not permitted to read or talk about. That would be a fun couple weeks of teaching before I got fired.

Good thing I'm retiring at the end of the year, though, because someday we may all be teaching in the equivalent of Texas, and then what would I do?