From the Texas Tribune: Texas A&M University will not reinstate a lecturer who was fired in the fall after a video of her teaching about gender identity in a children’s literature class went viral, despite a faculty appeals panel unanimously concluding that her dismissal was not justified. The New York Times first reported Wednesday that interim Texas A&M president Tommy Williams deferred the decision to the university system, and that James Hallmark, the system’s vice chancellor for academic affairs, wrote in a Dec. 19 memo that Melissa McCoul’s termination in September was supported by “good cause.” He did not explain his reasoning. McCoul’s attorney, Amanda Reichek, confirmed to The Texas Tribune that this sequence of events occurred.
...McCoul was fired in September after a student over the summer secretly recorded a classroom exchange in which the student disagreed with McCoul about whether it was legal to teach that there are more than two genders. The student then met with — and also secretly recorded — then-university president Mark Welsh III, who initially refused to fire McCoul. State Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, posted the videos on X weeks after they were made.
...The controversy at Texas A&M, along with new laws expanding the power of governor-appointed regents over curriculum, hiring and discipline and expression on campuses, sparked changes across Texas higher education, with university systems launching course audits and adopting new restrictions on how race, gender and sexuality are taught.
Full story at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/12/24/texas-am-system-fired-lecturer/.
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From Inside Higher Ed: With just over two weeks left in office, Republican Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares agreed with the federal Justice Department that a 2020 law granting in-state tuition to undocumented students is unconstitutional. In a joint court filing, Miyares and lawyers for the Justice Department asked a federal judge to declare the Virginia Dream Act invalid and bar state authorities from enforcing it. If approved, the joint consent decree order would make Virginia the fourth state to scrap its policies that allow eligible undocumented students to pay the lower in-state tuition rate. The joint agreement came just one day after the Trump administration sued Virginia over its in-state tuition policies—the seventh such lawsuit...
Miyares, who lost his re-election bid to Democrat Jay Jones in November, wrote on social media that it’s clear that the 2020 statute “is preempted by federal law.” ...
Trump lawyers argued in the Virginia lawsuit and elsewhere that such policies discriminate against U.S. citizens because out-of-state students aren’t eligible for in-state tuition. In Virginia, undocumented students can qualify for the reduced rate if they graduated from a state high school and if they or their parents filed Virginia income tax returns for at least two years before they enroll at a postsecondary institution. Jones, the incoming Democratic attorney general, criticized the administration’s lawsuit as “an attack on our students and a deliberate attempt to beat the clock to prevent a new administration from defending them.” He added that his team is reviewing their legal options...
Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/state-policy/2026/01/02/virginia-agrees-scrap-state-tuition-undocumented-students.
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