Onderwijs
How Deeply Gender Ideology Was Embedded in the Core Curriculum: Houston Had to Cut 100 Courses to Get It Out Again
This week, the University of Houston’s board eliminated around 100 courses at once—40% of the core curriculum—to comply with a Texas law requiring mandatory courses to impart genuinely fundamental knowledge. Among the courses cut: Introduction to LGBT Studies. The episode shows how thoroughly such courses had become embedded in the required curriculum.
On Thursday, August 21, 2026, the University of Houston’s board unanimously approved a sweeping overhaul of the core curriculum: approximately one hundred courses — around 40% of the existing offerings — will be removed from the list of required core courses. At its affiliate institution, the University of Houston-Downtown, the number of core courses will fall from 98 to 87. Among the titles cut: Introduction to LGBT Studies, Women and Gender in Arabic Literature, and — less obviously — Intro to Global Climate Change.
A Law That Asks What “Fundamental” Actually Means
The reason is Senate Bill 37, a 2025 Texas law requiring public universities to review their core curriculum once every five years. Each course must demonstrably impart “fundamental” knowledge, contribute to civic education, and prepare students for the workforce. The law also stripped faculty senates of their formal influence over such decisions — Houston’s senate had already been dissolved last year and replaced by a faculty council without binding authority.
What Survived — and What Did Not
The outcome of the review is far from consistent. Classics lost five of its six core courses, with only one popular course on heroes from Greek and Roman mythology surviving. Classics professor Richard Armstrong captured the confusion aptly: “I have no idea why that one course remained and the others did not.” At the same time, several courses on Chicano history and American history remained in the core curriculum. Dona Cornell, general counsel for the university system, said that courses were primarily eliminated because of low enrollment or because they were no longer being offered — and pointed out that departments can have a course added back to the core curriculum through a formal procedure.
The Question That Remains
The sting of this episode lies not in whether Introduction to LGBT Studies was a good course. It lies in what its removal reveals: until recently, such a course was a required part of the broad, fundamental knowledge that every student at a public university was expected to acquire — on an equal footing with mathematics, history, or the natural sciences. The fact that a law was needed to expose and challenge that assumption again says something about how thoroughly gender ideology had permeated the regular, required university curriculum — not as an elective for those interested in it, but as part of what every student had to complete regardless.
Not an Isolated Case
Houston is not alone. Earlier this year, Texas A&M University eliminated its entire bachelor’s program in women’s and gender studies, following a viral video of a lecture in which a professor claimed that more than two genders exist. The University of Texas announced that it would merge gender and ethnic studies into a single new department that would first undergo a thorough review. What happened in Houston is therefore not an isolated incident but a pattern: Texas universities are being forced, one by one, to examine how a particular ideological perspective secured a permanent, mandatory place in the education that applied to every student.
Source: Houston Public Media, August 21, 2026.
Edward Jansen