When LGBTQ Courses Leave the Core, Campus Life Changes

The fight over what a university will “allow” is the version that makes headlines. The quieter change, the one that rearranges an actual semester, is about what still counts.

Jessica Priest reported for the Texas Tribune on September 3 that the Texas A&M University System is looking at taking more than 200 classes off the general-education lists at 11 of its campuses. LGBTQ literatures is on the flagship removal list. So are introduction to women’s and gender studies, gender and health, and a stack of courses on race, ethnicity, and climate. System spokesman Chris Bryan was careful to say the review is not a verdict on whether those subjects may be taught. The classes can remain in the catalog as electives.

That distinction is the whole campus-life story. A course that does not count toward the 42 core credit hours Texas requires of every undergraduate is a course most students will never take. You do not need a ban if the registrar can do the same work with a checkbox.

This is not a recap of how state laws are reshaping campus life. That piece is about the legal weather. This one is about your degree audit.

What the core-course proposal moves

The agenda packet, as the Tribune counted it, has 360 lines marked “remove.” Some courses appear more than once because they sit under two departments or two core categories, which is why “more than 200” and “360 entries” are both true. Texas A&M in College Station has the most: 103. Texas A&M-San Antonio has 76. Tarleton State has 48. West Texas A&M and Texas A&M-Texarkana have 21 each. The other six campuses sit between 13 and 18. Texas A&M-Central Texas has none, because it is a transfer campus and does not teach the lower-level core in the first place.

The Houston Chronicle’s Samantha Ketterer got the flagship math in an email from interim provost Jerry Strawser: the suggested cuts would take the core from 260 courses to 182, about 30 percent. A committee of 20 faculty, administrators, community leaders, and industry people made the recommendations. Strawser wrote that the courses “may be relevant within specific areas of study” and still failed the committee’s bar for remaining in the core.

The legal hook is Senate Bill 37. It tells public university boards to review core lists at least every five years, keep what is “foundational and fundamental,” and think about civic life, the workforce, and the tuition and time cost of those requirements. The system’s deadline is January 1. The bill does not name LGBTQ literature. It also does not stop a board from deciding that LGBTQ literature is not foundational.

Regents were scheduled to vote Thursday. If they approve the lists, Ketterer reported, the new cores would apply to new students starting fall 2027. Current students are not automatically dumped out of a class they already have on a degree plan. Incoming first-years two cycles from now are the ones who lose the checkbox.

The classes that stop counting

At College Station, the Tribune’s named removals include LGBTQ literatures, introduction to women’s and gender studies, introduction to Latinx literature studies, women writers, introduction to race and ethnicity, gender and health, Blacks in the United States, Bible as literature, and climate change.

The Chronicle’s longer list is messier, which is useful. Cross-listed women’s and gender studies courses on the chopping block include Gender and Health, Feminist Science, Tech, and Medicine, and LGBTQ Literatures. Gender studies as a program is already being phased out. Other proposed drops: Dance in World Cultures, Popular Musics in the African Diaspora, Aesthetics of Activism, Intro to Health Disparities and Diversity, Southwest Borderlands, and both halves of Blacks in the U.S. Native American history would stay as a history option. Finite Mathematics and Geography of Texas are also on the removal list, which is a reminder that not every line is a culture-war trophy. The English department would lose 21st Century Literature and Culture, Arthurian Literature, Sci-fi Present and Past, and Bible as Literature from the language-philosophy-culture slot. Every student has to fill that slot with something. If the something can no longer be LGBTQ literatures, it becomes Arthurian-adjacent only if Arthurian survives, or it becomes whatever is left.

Prairie View A&M, a historically Black university, has Sociology of Minorities, Blacks and the American Political System, Social Problems, and Mexican-American Culture on its list. Some race-related courses would remain. Texas A&M-Victoria’s list includes Women in the U.S., Mexican-American History, Immigration in the U.S., and African American History. Tarleton’s science requirement could lose Intro to Environmental Science and Natural Disasters.

The pattern is not “every course with a identity word dies.” It is “the survey that a chemistry major might have taken to fill a requirement is no longer a survey that fills a requirement.”

Why electives are not the same class

Bryan’s statement is accurate as far as it goes. A department can still staff LGBTQ literatures. A student can still enroll. The course still exists.

Campus life is downstream of incentives. Core seats fill because every major has to sit in them. Elective seats fill if a student has leftover credits, a flexible major, a faculty mentor who mentions the class, and a schedule that does not collide with a lab. When enrollment drops, the next budget cycle asks why the section exists. The Advocate’s Jacob Ogles quoted University of Houston student Valentina Rivas Labarca, with Students Engaged in Advancing Texas: “Censorship doesn’t always begin by banning ideas. Sometimes it begins by making those ideas impossible to study.”

UH already did a version of this. The Chronicle reported that Houston’s flagship core went from 241 courses to 144, including introduction courses on global climate change and LGBT studies. That is the near-term preview, not a hypothetical.

There is a second layer at A&M that is easy to mash together with SB 37 and should not be. Last fall the regents adopted a separate policy that bars any academic course from advocating “race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity,” with narrow exceptions for specific non-core or graduate courses that get written approval from the campus CEO. The American Association of University Professors and four system professors sued on August 3. A judge has not ruled. Leonard Bright, who leads the AAUP chapter at College Station, called the latest core review a political decision. Bryan said each campus ran its own review against the same state-law and system-policy requirements. Both things can be in the same paragraph. Neither one tells you whether the Tuesday/Thursday 2 p.m. section will still have a room in 2027.

The Board already removed an LGBTQ studies minor in 2024. Core-list edits are how a minor’s feeder courses starve after the minor is gone.

What this does to a week on campus

If you are a queer student at a large public university, the core is often the only place you share a room with people who did not self-select into a GSA meeting. A required literature survey that includes queer writers is not a student org. It is a room of majors who would not have chosen the elective. When that survey leaves the core, two things move at once.

The classroom gets quieter for you. You can still find a queer study group or show up at a resource center, and you should. Those rooms are full of people who already agree you exist. The gen-ed classroom was the one that did not.

The faculty map changes too. A professor who used to teach two core sections of LGBTQ literatures may be down to one elective that needs a minimum enrollment. That is fewer office hours attached to that subject, fewer TAs, fewer reasons for a department to hire the next person. Students looking for someone to write a recommendation that understands their research interests start emailing the same two people.

It also changes what “the first day of class” sounds like in every other course. We have a separate piece on how LGBTQ students wish professors would introduce themselves. Syllabus language still matters. It cannot replace a core catalog that used to treat queer literature as one legitimate way to satisfy a university-wide requirement.

For first-years who just got here, this is colliding with the usual September scramble to find people in the first weeks of fall. Community is not a substitute for curriculum. It is what you build when the curriculum stops doing part of the work.

How to read your own core list this month

You do not have to attend A&M for this to be relevant. SB 37 applies to public universities in Texas. UH already cut. UT-Austin’s president has floated replacing a choose-from-a-menu core with 12 specified subject areas, including Western civilization and “Great Questions of Human Life.” Other states will copy the “foundational” language because it sounds unarguable in a hearing.

Practical steps, in order:

Pull your undergraduate catalog and the current core list, not last year’s PDF. Search for the exact course numbers you care about. “Women’s studies still exists” is not the same as “WGST 2000 still satisfies Language, Philosophy, and Culture.”

If a class you planned to take as core is on a removal list, ask the registrar two questions in writing: Does this apply to my catalog year, or only to students admitted in 2027? If I already have the course on an approved degree plan, is it grandfathered? Get the answer in email. Advisors are trying to be helpful and still get the catalog year wrong.

If you want the subject and it becomes an elective, treat it like a scarce section. Register on opening morning. Ask the instructor whether they expect the course to run every year or every other year. An elective that runs every other spring is a four-year planning problem, not a vibes problem.

If you are a transfer student, core lists are how credits die. A community-college LGBT studies intro that used to satisfy a component area may land as “elective credit” after the receiving university shrinks its list. That is extra tuition for a replacement course you did not choose. Ask the transfer office for a course-equivalency ruling before you enroll, not after add/drop.

If you are applying, the usual LGBTQ-friendly college checklist still holds: housing, health coverage, a staffed center, a functioning org. Add one ugly question. Ask admissions for the current core list and the last time it was revised. Ask whether LGBTQ literature, gender studies, or LGBT studies still satisfy a university requirement. If the person in the matching polo cannot answer, that is an answer.

Watch who is left to teach. A campus can keep a course number and starve the hiring line. Look at the faculty page, not the rainbow icon on the campus tour slide.

The staff layer you only notice when it is gone

Curriculum is one pressure. Personnel is the other, and it showed up in the same news cycle in a different state. WTOC reported on August 27 that Georgia’s Department of Administrative Services will pay $250,000 to settle a lawsuit by Gemma Skuraton, former director of student wellness and health promotion at Georgia Southern University. The split is $144,365.36 to her and $105,634.36 to her lawyers. She alleged she was fired after objecting to the university’s rejection of a proposal to provide free chest binders to students, and that a vice president accused her of encouraging protests and media attention. The settlement is not a court finding. Both sides deny wrongdoing.

Put that next to a core-list fight and you get the campus-life sandwich: fewer required classrooms where queer content is normal, and more risk for the staff who try to fill the gap with programming. Students then do what they always do. They build unofficial lists of “safe” professors, they trade syllabi, they run reading groups in dorm lounges. That work is real. It is also unpaid, and it does not show up on a degree audit.

What to do this week if you are in one of those classrooms

If you are currently in a core section that might lose that status later, stay enrolled. Your catalog year is the asset. Finish the course. Keep the syllabus and the transcript line.

If you work on a student paper or org, request the agenda packet and the full remove/add lists. The Tribune noted 27 “add” entries at seven universities, including human nutrition at College Station and Mexican American literature at Texas A&M International. Adds matter. They tell you what the institution now considers foundational. You cannot argue with a list you have not read.

If you have a faculty member you trust, ask them whether they expect to keep a section as an elective and what enrollment number keeps it alive. Then tell two other students. Electives die in silence.

If you are exhausted, that is allowed. You do not have to become a one-person curriculum committee. You do have to stop assuming the course will still “count” because it still has a description in the catalog. The catalog is about to have two columns: what exists, and what the university will treat as everybody’s education.

The second column is the one that changes campus life.