In 2025, Texas Tech rolled out TTU Online+, a new online “campus” into which all distance students would be transferred over the course of several semesters. Built without meaningful faculty input or shared-governance oversight, the rushed rollout created confusion for both students and faculty—and signaled a shift toward platform-style instruction that separates course design from teaching.
This shift is both a teaching-and-learning issue and an academic freedom issue.
Academic freedom depends on faculty members’ professional control over what and how they teach: developing learning outcomes, selecting materials, framing problems, revising a course as scholarship evolves, and responding to students in real time. When “quality” is defined as uniformity and compliance, instructors are recast as script readers and “graders” rather than experts—and the conditions for open inquiry shrink even without an explicit ban on specific ideas.
In a moment when TTU is expanding content oversight and explicitly banning all ideas related to sexual orientation and gender identity, the platformization of instruction makes censorship easier to implement and harder to contest.
Read more below: how this connects to academic freedom, deskilling, platformization, educational quality, and censorship-by-process.
Course content related to sexual orientation and gender identity are censored at TTU Online+, just as they are elsewhere in the system. However, academic freedom isn’t only about whether faculty can mention certain topics. It also depends on whether faculty retain control over the structure of their teaching: what learning outcomes students should demonstrate, which assignments will help them to demonstrate those outcomes, what materials to assign, what examples to use, how to frame problems, and how to revise a course in response to disciplinary developments and student needs. When those decisions are centralized and standardized, academic freedom is narrowed through process and compliance rather than explicit prohibitions.
Deskilling happens when work that depends on professional judgment is reorganized so that judgment is minimized, extracted, or transferred elsewhere. In a standardized course-shell model, expertise is treated as something produced once and then distributed—rather than something exercised continuously by instructors. Over time, the instructor’s role shifts from scholar-teacher to compliant delivery mechanism, and the institution begins to treat the pre-designed shell as the source of authority.
A platformized educational model values scalability, consistency, and managerial oversight. It treats courses as modular products that can be distributed across sections and personnel. Its ideal is not the distinctiveness of faculty judgment but the reproduction of a pre-approved experience. That logic may be attractive to administrators because it promises efficiency, predictability, and brand control. But those values come at a very high cost. The more instruction is platformized, the less room remains for faculty to exercise the forms of judgment that academic freedom is meant to protect. Even without explicit censorship, the structure trends toward risk management and away from open inquiry and exposure to a diversity of ideas. The end point of this model is higher education reduced to a product, such as those featured on platforms like Coursera or Udemy.
In a genuinely academic model, quality depends on knowledgeable instructors exercising professional judgment in relation to students, texts, methods, and disciplinary developments. In a managerial model, like the one now in place at TTU Online+, quality is redefined as uniformity, compliance, and reproducibility. The former treats faculty as intellectual professionals. The latter treats them as, at best, content-delivery mechanisms.
For students, the stakes are profound. They are promised consistency, but what they may actually receive is a degraded educational experience: one less responsive to context, less open to emergent discussion, less grounded in the live exercise of expertise, and less capable of cultivating the critical habits that higher education claims to value. If faculty are denied the freedom to teach as experts, students are denied the benefits of being taught by experts.
Moreover, the purpose of this new online "campus" is not workforce readiness or education delivered with busy students in mind. It is to increase the rate of matriculation: when students can begin coursework immediately, rather than at the start of a new semester, they are more likely to register for classes. Students may be able to complete their degree requirements, but the choices they have about how to do that—which classes to take and with which faculty members—are severely diminshed.
It is clear that this model of instruction does not value students or their education. It values only the dollars that students are willing to exchange for a transcript.
The issue with TTU Online+ and similar initiatives at other institutions is not simply whether faculty are allowed to say certain words or assign certain texts. It is whether universities will preserve teaching as a site of professional judgment and public, political, and intellectual expression, or whether they will continue to convert it into a managed platform in which faculty design content once, relinquish control over its use, and become increasingly interchangeable in its delivery. If they choose the latter, this is a redefinition of teaching itself—and a profound contraction of academic freedom.
Any serious defense of academic freedom must therefore include a defense of faculty control over course design, delivery, revision, and interpretation. Without that control, “academic freedom” is little more than an empty slogan attached to a system that no longer treats teaching as expert intellectual work.