It’s been a summer of bad news for anybody with favorable feelings (me!) about Texas Tech. The New York Times joined the pigpile this week with a feature story whose subhead said the school had become a “a dystopian academic nightmare.” As if this year’s athletics debacles weren’t nausea-inducing enough. How can a guy (me!) root for a place like this?
The Times piece mulled the aggressive missteps taken by Brandon Creighton, the low-aiming and cartoonishly evil chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, while altering the curriculum to suit his radically conservative agenda. Like generating fear among the faculty by sending sloppy AI-generated reports and scary memos that told professors which specific lessons they’re going to have to stop teaching for being too left-leaning, some of which included lessons that weren’t even being taught. One instructor, described as a medieval historian, said he dropped classroom discussion of Viking mythology because there were references to “gender-changing gods like Loki and Odin,” and felt Joan of Arc was also off-limits because that topic could lead to references of her “cross-dressing.” A creative writing teacher told of quitting her job after being warned by the administration about using a book titled Voice of the Fish, because a character describes himself as “transmasculine.”
This is, of course, the exact stuff Creighton was brought to Lubbock to do. He had no strong ties to Tech or past as an academic when he got the job. He’d been a politician, holding office in the Texas House and Senate since 2007, and was a leading proponent of many of the state’s shittiest statutes. His record shows he loves racist monuments, hates anything LGBTQ, fears Plato, led the fight to ban abortion in his state, and can be trusted to treat concepts like diversity, equity, inclusion, compassion, fairness, and decency with contempt. He showed he had all the wrong stuff to take over a college by authoring Senate Bill 37, the legislation signed into law last year by yucky Governor Greg Abbott that sentenced academic freedom to death at all the schools in the state university system.
Students at Tech held a mock funeral for academic freedom on campus once Creighton got rolling, at which a grad student from Iceland listed things that were now off-limits in the classroom, including “Elsa from Frozen, Romeo and Juliet, Moby-Dick … and David Bowie.” A consortium of teachers groups sued Creighton last month in hopes of getting the courts to curtail the chancellor’s reign of censorship.
Word that nobody should work or enroll at Tech came after the school had already made it hard for anybody to cheer for the Red Raiders. In no time flat, Tech athletics went from humble underdog to Exhibit A of everything wrong with college sports. One need look no further than the Brandon Sorsby fiasco. It started when Tech outbid every other football school to land the prized transfer quarterback from the University of Cincinnati with a reported $5 million deal. That seems like a lot of money for other schools, but with a benefactor like Tech alum and oil billionaire Cody Campbell doling out NIL dollars, Lubbock had already become known as the place where athletes get paid most.
After a starmaking performance in the spring game, Sorsby left Tech's football program to check into rehab for a gambling addiction. His departure came amid reports he’d been betting on Indiana while on that school’s roster, as well as placing wagers on balls and strikes at MLB games he attended. The NCAA launched an investigation and suspended Sorsby for his wagering.
While the rest of the country looked on with some combination of horror, disbelief, and giggles, Tech mounted an insane campaign to get some return on the school’s investment. Coaches and administrators backed Sorsby’s lawsuit to get reinstated, arguing the NCAA wasn’t actually policing gambling by kicking him out, it was actually just picking on a sick kid. If there’s a more embarrassing chapter in the recent history of college sports than the clusterfuck video that Tech’s athletic department put out to justify all the effort the school was putting into saving Sorsby’s Red Raiders run, I’m not aware of it.
“[Sorsby] looked me in my eye this morning, again, and reassured me that he has done nothing to jeopardize the integrity of a game that he's competed in," Tech athletic director Kirby Hocutt said in the 21-minute production, which was released on social media.
Sorsby’s Hail Mary kind of worked for a time. First, a Lubbock judge granted an injunction preventing the NCAA from permanently banning Sorsby; instead, the judge handed down his own two-game penalty. Then Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney general and a guy who deserves a place in any conversation of the worst human beings alive, threatened to sue the Big 12 Conference and make life miserable for anybody who got in Tech’s way. Paxton’s bizarre intervention in a sports matter, especially given the facts at hand, made no sense until news broke that just one day before he’d acted on Tech’s behalf, the AG had been given a $275,000 donation from Campbell.
Tech’s football folly ended when the Big 12 and NCAA ignored Paxton and asked the courts to restore their ability to suspend him. Somebody in the school's administration clearly convinced the player to get the hell out of town. Sorsby tried to get the NFL and CFL to take him, but failed. By then the school was a despised laughingstock. According to recent news reports, nobody even wants to schedule Tech anymore.
Talk about a heel turn! I remember and miss the days when Tech was a desired homecoming date. I’m not a big philosophy guy, but I do know that Creighton’s least favorite big thinker gets credit for saying, “Love is a serious mental disease.” I’ll be proving the canceled Greek's point while cheering on the Red Raiders come Sept. 5, when Tech opens the season against Abilene Christian.
Disclosure: I went to Texas Tech in the 1980s, and after not giving a rip about the place for decades, I now root real hard for all its sports teams.
