Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on July 02, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
When I signed up for Professor Michael Whitehawk’s sociology class at Texas State University (TXST), I hoped it would challenge me to look at society in new ways and think critically.
But after hearing his lectures and seeing his slides, it was obvious that we were there to accept his one-sided political view, not explore ideas or facts.
That’s especially concerning at a public university. For the 2024-25 school year alone, lawmakers approved $275 million in public funding for the Texas State University System.
And for next year, the legislature approved a $70 million increase, making it all the more fair to ask whether that money is going toward real education or just reinforcing political agendas in the classroom.
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In class, Whitehawk told us flat-out that biological sex itself is a social construct.
“First, we assign the sex category?” he told us. “The sex, male or female, is also assigned at birth. I think that’s a little bit of a hump for some of us to get over, to see that we’re not born with a sex. Sex is also socially constructed.”
One girl raised her hand and asked him, “So you’re saying biological sex and gender are separate?”
Whitehawk replied: “Yeah, and the simple explanation is that sex is biological and gender is social. And I’m sort of suggesting they’re both social. Even the concept of sex is social and a human convention. Because we understand that that binary isn’t even how biology works, it’s more of a continuum.”
That was only the beginning.
Later in the semester, when I thought maybe his ideas had simmered down a bit, Whitehawk showed us slides claiming that men “only do housework when they feel like it or when nagged into it,” and that a wife earning more than her husband “threatens his masculinity.”
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Another slide showed a toy broom marketed to girls as evidence that we “indoctrinate children into a male-led society.”
None of this was presented as one of many viewpoints—they were taught as settled facts. Even one of our exams asked which minorities face the most scrutiny, and the only correct answers were the ones Whitehawk had spent the semester pushing.
All of this was so conflicting. As much as I wanted to test well in that class, I cringed at the thought that what was being taught to me in a college setting could be so fallacious and blatantly incorrect.
As someone who hoped for honest discussion, I left Whitehawk’s class disappointed. What was supposed to be a college course that welcomed diverse ideas felt more like a test of whether we would repeat one professor’s politics back to him.
The harsh truth is knowing Whitehawk isn’t the only one at TXST and other colleges teaching this way. In 2019, an English professor at Texas State was accused of bashing President Donald Trump in a film course. And in 2023, a sociology professor at Texas A&M University threatened to quit if she was no longer allowed to teach critical race theory.
These are just a few of many examples of professors’ politics dominating academics in universities across the country. But unless students speak up, that’s unlikely to change.
Image: “Texas State University at San Marcos sign” by Billy Hathorn on Wikimedia Commons
The author is lucky that she didn’t speak out because the professor likely would have referred her to the psych goon squad if she had. Forget merely failing a course, these secretive star chambers (and just about every college or university has one now) would try (and likely convict) her in absentia and while they probably wouldn’t expel her for this, she’d start having all kinds of “problems” — inexplicable administrative glitches that couldn’t be fixed, difficulty getting internships, noticing administrators unwilling to talk to her.
The other thing worthy of note is where do students taking sociology go? They become the child protective social workers who take away people’s children, etc. The uber-left bias in the psych professions is a real threat to our liberty.
But being the troublemaker I am, I would have followed up his assignment statement with ‘isn’t that true of race as well?”