One year after the Trump administration issued executive orders targeting race, gender and sexuality, Simmons University faculty are reflecting on their effects on the university’s academic landscape.
The Trump administration promised upon inauguration that it would eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, promote a binary definition of sex and overhaul racial education in institutions that receive federal funding.
Months after the orders were released, several universities across the country have punished instructors over discussions of race, gender and sexuality in the classroom. Faculty have expressed concern about surveillance, like at Georgetown University, where professors pushed for greater restrictions on class recordings.
In September 2025, Texas A&M professor Melissa McCoul was fired after a secretly recorded video of her discussing gender in a children’s literature course went viral. A student claimed the discussion violated one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders.
Amy Pattee, a professor in the children’s literature department and the School of Library and Information Science, said it was “not surprising that this happened,” given how state politics can influence colleges and universities.
Pattee initially viewed the increasing trend of classroom protests as “isolated incidents” typically confined to specific environments, “like a religion class in the Bible belt.” She expressed surprise that such an event would occur in a children’s literature course.
“What they ‘got her’ on was that she didn’t explicitly say they would be talking about race, gender and sexuality – and yet it’s a children’s literature course,” said Briana Martino, associate professor and chair of the communications department.
Martino said, “How do you avoid that?”
Suzanne Leonard, a professor in the Department of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, finds situations like McCoul’s “question the very foundations of what academia is, which is about interrogated, legitimized, peer-reviewed research.”
“I think it’s really important that people understand and appreciate that we spent our whole lives working with and amongst scholarly sources,” Leonard said.
Martino highlighted that many of the targeted educators in this period are people from minority groups, and that the causes are not limited to the executive orders. They highlighted Rumeysa Ozturk’s arrest.
“She’s also working in child development, so I have concerns about who is bearing the brunt of the targeting – it is international students, it’s women, it’s trans women, it’s queer folks, and it’s folks working in fields like child development and children’s lit,” Martino said.
Pattee worries for the professors with less institutional security.
“My employment is, to a great degree, secure, and I think that makes it a lot easier for me to discuss more topics that some people might consider controversial,” she said. “Folks who are not tenured or whose employment is on a semester-by-semester basis are much more vulnerable.”
“Conversation is something that is always very important, but people can’t have those conversations unless they feel safe,” Pattee said. “The people who lead the conversations have to feel safe too, and that’s a privilege that not everybody has.”
Leonard said she feels scared on two levels. “One is for the individuals that this is affecting, but also for what it says about an attempt to erode the entire integrity of a system of higher education.”
“I think [the orders] are an assault on academic freedom. If you don’t have academic freedom, then you don’t have a system of higher education,” Leonard said.
Martino expressed their worry about students sharing personal information and it being weaponized. “They or their families might be going through something that they share that could be taken up by another student,” Martino said.
Regarding student engagement, Pattee said she has noticed “more anxiety about publicly falling on the right or the wrong side” among her graduate students.
Conversely, Leonard said Simmons undergraduates are “hungrier to talk about it” and “really needed a place to feel safe” in her Introduction to LGBTQ Studies class, which launched the same month as the orders.
Pattee, Martino, and Leonard all emphasized the heightened necessity of continuing discussions on race, gender, and sexuality in higher education.
“[The orders] underscore the necessity of talking about queer people and people of color,” Pattee said. “They add a new urgency to something that librarians and children’s literature scholars have been working to promote for a long time.”
Martino maintains cautious optimism, not in hierarchical institutions like universities, but in the people who navigate them. They believe that “the reasons people find themselves at Simmons signal a certain commitment to thinking about the structures of domination.”
Martino said that belief is reinforced by what they see in the classroom.
“Watching the way students practice sensitivity, care and investment in the learning process of others – even as all the other fights are happening – gives me hope.”
