Late Tuesday, Texas A&M University President Mark A. Welsh III posted a letter he shared on X saying that, “following full consideration of the facts related to this situation,” he had directed the university’s provost to fire the instructor involved, “effective immediately.”

Welsh wrote that, after a children’s literature course this summer “contained content that did not align with any reasonable expectation of standard curriculum,” he “made it clear to our academic leadership that course content must match catalog descriptions.”

But, on Monday, Welsh learned that “the college continued to teach content that was inconsistent with the published course description for another course.” So he removed the dean and department head from their administrative positions and ultimately fired the instructor, he wrote.

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The letter didn’t satisfy Harrison.

“President Welsh must be fired!” Harrison posted on X in response to the letter.

Well, the big head just rolled on Thursday, as Welsh stepped down amid pressure regarding this situation. Not sure who else could be on the block, as I think the A&M’s paid workforce might be down to three custodians and a squirrel wrangler at this point.

BACKGROUND:  According to multiple sources, Melissa McCoul is the instructor in question who was using the “Gender Unicorn” as a teaching tool in the course on children’s literature.

In a statement emailed to The Washington Post by her attorney this week, McCoul said the class was on the second of three days reading a middle-grade contemporary fiction novel called “Jude Saves the World” that she had taught in “several previous iterations” of the class.

“The main character, Jude, is nonbinary. The plot largely deals with Jude’s difficulties with ADHD in school, their relationship with their friends, mother, and grandparents, and their friend group’s attempt to build an LGBTQ-accepting social club in their town,” she said.

McCoul’s A&M faculty page was gone as of Wednesday afternoon and what I could find on the Wayback Machine wasn’t much more insightful. Her “Rate My Professors” page was the perfect mix of glowing praise and angry condemnation, with a few of her detractors noting that was “pushing her liberal agenda” or bringing “transgender ideology” into the classroom.

According to Welsh’s public statement, this wasn’t a one-shot deal. The summer version of the course, which the student recorded, led to discussions with the department and college about how to restructure the class. The argument, Welsh noted, was that the curriculum as it was taught wasn’t lining up with what was expected in the class. Once this situation was dealt with at that level, everyone was cool until it turned out the class hadn’t changed at all for the fall.

Thus the firing began.

The problem is that the student is anonymous, which I get in some ways, but it also leads to more questions about motive and outcome.

Students deserve to get what they paid for, so I know that, in some cases, McCoul’s approach to this kind of topic might be on point, while in others, it’s like me deciding to turn an entire reporting class into a discussion of the Miracle on Ice. In some cases, students take courses that they need and find they’ve been led down a primrose path toward a problematic situation, while in others it’s basically a “gotcha” thing where they know what they’re getting and want to go viral for it.

We don’t know what it is that led to this video or the reasons it suddenly became the hill upon so many folks had to die. A fantastic deep dive into this by the Texas Tribune adds a ton of detail, but not much clarity neither side agrees with the statements the other made.

DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: I’ve spent my entire adult life dealing with academics, and I have to say that there are plenty of times where some of these folks really should be run out of town on a rail.

The ego, the myopic sense of the world, the complete detachment from reality and more have occasionally had me hoping that my neighbors thought I was a custodian instead of a professor at the U. It’s not clear where McCoul fits, but I want to make it clear I’m not just “Team Professor,” regardless of circumstance.

That said, the impact this kind of thing has on anyone else involved in education is massive. I almost took a job in Texas when I finished my doctorate and several others have tempted me along the way. Even recently, a friend asked if I’d be interested in applying at Texas A&M, as a position seemed to be like a briar rabbit in the briar patch situation. It was always a “thanks, but no thanks” kind of situation. Now, it would be much more of a firm “Oh HELL NO.”

If you think the phrase “a chilling effect” is a lot of BS, well, then you’ve never been left out in the cold before.

I’m always worried about my friends who have taken on the yoke of scholarship and education in areas involving race, class, gender, religion, LGBTQ issues and more. There are significant and valuable reasons to have discussions in a wide array of classes about any and all of these issues. When people get in power want to whip up a frenzy, these professors are almost always in the crosshairs, regardless of who is in charge.

What the folks demanding McCoul’s head on a spike call “indoctrination” usually consists of merely putting forth a topic that upsets them. Their “hang ’em high” approach to faculty who breathe near anything that isn’t sanctioned in their preferred reality of “Leave it to Beaver” makes a lot of us nervous, not just people teaching in those areas I previously mentioned.

For example, we just had a media-writing class in which I had to explain that the AP style guide has loosened up some rules on pronouns because the English language, in its infinite set of rules and exceptions to those rules, never managed to invent a singular gender-neutral pronoun.

In features, we use a series called “Legacy of a Lynching” to demonstrate an incredible job of reporting a long-dormant topic nearly 100 years later through documents.

In reporting, we go over issues of bias and how it comes out in what we say or don’t say about people and I think the students really value those discussions.

(A few examples: Why is it that standard profiles note that woman is a “mother of three” but less often note that a man is a “father of three?” Why were we, up until fairly recently, referring to the “black quarterback” on a team when no one would ever say, “Bill Smith, the white quarterback of the Cougars, said he wants to win this week?” When I asked which person had the most Wimbledon singles championships in the open era, the answer almost university came back as “Roger Federer with eight” when it’s actually Martina Navratilova with nine, but nobody thinks to look on the women’s side of the list.)

A lot of folks reading this might say, “Geez, Vince, those are totally reasonable things to do and you shouldn’t get in trouble for that.” OK, but what about the people who DON’T feel that way and now feel emboldened to make any or all of those things a big deal? Also, when it feels a lot less safe to talk about something, a lot fewer people will talk about anything relatively close to it. That leads to silence, which is mistaken for agreement.

It also leads to the unfortunate and misguided view that being the loudest idiot on Twitter should be rewarded. I’d never heard of State Rep Brian Harrison, the legislator who posted the video and demanded that people get fired for it before this moment. The board of regents chair said the board wouldn’t fire anybody over this, making it pretty clear what he thought of the situation:

“We have one individual who, who I would call a moron, who is an absolute classified megalomaniac, who is insatiable with his desire to feed his ego,” Albritton told reporters Thursday. “And do people like that solve problems? They don’t give you solutions other than: fire this, do this, do that…And I will say one wonderful thing about the Board is that we don’t listen to that.”

However, Harrison’s yammering helped lead to Welsh resigning and he seems pretty happy about it:

We have essentially given the screaming child in the grocery store all the candy he wants instead of realizing there might be a better way to deal with the situation. 

Not everyone agrees with Harrison and I’m sure a lot of folks don’t agree with me, which is fine in a country that purports to have free speech that facilitates fair and open dialogue on important issues. However, when certain people get their way through all caps tweets and threats, all it does is present the view that being loud, threatening and angry is the trump card against any other play.