Implicit Bias is Real
Oil men, real estate developers and other assorted political appointees are not the best experts in developing college curricula on race and gender
A good education is more than training technicians to build our bridges or fly our planes or heal us when we are sick.
Even the best training cannot be effective if we are not training doctors, business leaders, engineers, and scientists to understand the importance of culture and the societal forces that affect the people they serve. And sometimes those lessons contain some hard truths. Whether it is learning to recognize implicit racial biases or understanding gender diversity in the children they are treating, without learning about social conditions, past history and culture, professionals will have one hand tied behind their backs when it comes to serving actual Americans.
Our leaders are asking us to ignore this elephant in the room in our academic classrooms and in our academic research. In his letter to the faculty, Texas Tech Chancellor Creighton states that “a faculty member may not promote or otherwise inculcate beliefs” that individuals are “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, consciously, or unconsciously.”
Harvard University has been measuring implicit bias or as the Chancellor calls it “unconscious bias” for years. Their Implicit Bias Test measures unacknowledged or even unconscious preferences based on race, gender, sexuality, and other social categories. Harvard researchers have found that 2/3 of Americans make choices that favor whites over blacks, even when the person consciously believes that she is unbiased. This holds true for other statuses such as sexuality, weight, gender and able-bodied. The research is also clear that the best way to remedy unconscious bias is to recognize bias and challenge it head on. Not only between each other but in our own hearts.
It is easy to make the case that our culture has promoted racial biases for decades, if not centuries, either through overt racism or subtle unrecognized messages about each other that affect how a doctor may respond to a patient or a banker respond to a customer.
I want a doctor who recognizes the culturally ingrained but archaic assumptions about me as a woman when I go in for a problem pregnancy. I want a banker that provides a loan for an African American business owner who is serving the best brisket in town. I want an engineer that is sensitive to the impact of the bridge he builds on the community it serves. A good education helps the banker, the doctor, and the engineer to have clarity when making decisions rather than being influenced by unfair and hidden assumptions.
This matters to us because we end up with better health care, stronger businesses, and stronger communities when people learn to recognize their biases.
Professors who want to teach about race in the state of Texas or teach about gender in a way that is not the official party line must now have their course material approved by the Board of Regents. The Board of Regents are not educators or scholars. They are political appointees most of whom have gotten their wealth in the oil business, agriculture, banking, and real estate. Yet, they are empowered by the legislature to be the thought police to censor any material that does not fit their political agenda, even if this means undermining the education of students they have been empowered to serve. And faculty are threatened with sanctions for not complying.
This ill-advised policy is leading to a brain drain in Texas. A recent survey of Texas faculty showed more than a quarter of those surveyed (26.3%) plan to interview for a job elsewhere or have interviewed elsewhere in 2022 (28.3%). Almost 2/3 would not recommend taking a position in Texas for those who are on the job market.
What Texas is doing is not new. The repression of universities is always one of the first things that authoritarian governments do when they come into power. Just ask academics in Turkey, Hungary, and Iran.
This current crisis reminds me of a book entitled “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi. It is a memoir of a female faculty who resigned from her position teaching English literature at Tehran University after radical Islamic students took over the university. She said that “teaching in the Islamic Republic, like any other vocation, was subservient to politics and subject to arbitrary rules.” How could she do her job when she was constantly being bombarded with demands to make her courses conform to the demands of the new regime? Teaching is impossible when being told to “remove the word “wine” from a Hemingway story” or not be allowed to “teach Bronte because she appeared to condone adultery.”
Impossible to do her job, Nafisi resigned from the university. And she convened a handpicked group of students in her home, reading and studying the literature that politicians had made it too difficult to teach. Instead, she endeavored to “create their own little pocket of freedom.”
Is this what we want America to be?
The truth is tough as the Bermuda grass that grows through the cracks in our sidewalks and over the edges of our flower beds. You can keep digging at it, but the roots are still there, and the grass will come back again. Politicians can threaten and cajole and censor and fill the air will empty promises, but ideas will not go away. The roots of freedom will grow again.
Just like the women in “reading Lolita” in a small apartment Tehran.
This piece was published in the Lubbock Avalanche Journal, December 11, 2025