The Texas Tech faculty meeting began amicably this spring, with offers of refreshments. Then administrators handed out reports, created partly by artificial intelligence, listing the lessons professors needed to stop teaching.

“What?” one professor asked. “I don’t even teach those things.”

“There are factual errors,” added another.

“It’s A.I. slop,” a third said.

Texas Tech is using A.I. to ferret out books and other materials that touch on topics like sexual orientation and gender identity. Professors describe the effort as a dystopian academic nightmare, in which ideologues are wielding technology to sideline subject-matter experts.

That is not how the Texas Tech system’s leader, Brandon Creighton, sees things.

Mr. Creighton, a former state lawmaker who has been heading the five-university system since November, is the force behind the effort. He has said there was “quite a bit of garbage in curriculum” at universities.

His course-review plan, he said, “will produce the best curriculum in America. I also believe it will be a national model when we’re finished.”

Mr. Creighton is tackling two of higher education’s most pressing problems, at least in the eyes of its Republican critics and others who argue universities need to be reformed. Academia needs to rebuild lost public trust as campuses have moved left and to make itself more relevant in the era of artificial intelligence, they say.

In an interview, Mr. Creighton fired off a litany of concerns about higher education shared by Republican politicians across the country. He said that diversity, equity and inclusion offices discriminated against Asian students, campus protests often turned antisemitic, and diversity statements — which he has called “leftist loyalty oaths” — sidelined conservatives in faculty hiring.

Politics aside, Mr. Creighton has said an A.I.-fueled wave will forever reshape higher education in the years ahead. He said he wanted the campus to be well positioned to take advantage of that paradigm shift by focusing on degrees that employers want and eliminating low-enrollment programs. He touts a partnership with Nvidia to invest in A.I. infrastructure.

But Mr. Creighton’s moves have tapped into existential anxieties haunting professors. Many worry that limits on their academic freedom are strangling their work even as technology moves faster to upend education than they can keep up.

“There’s a level of stress that’s very hard to explain,” said Lucy Schiller, a creative-writing professor who was asked to switch out a book she wanted to assign. She said she broke down in tears when she realized the scope of Mr. Creighton’s plans.

Academia’s Republican Wave

Mr. Creighton represents something of a trend in red states like Florida and Texas: a former Republican lawmaker tapped as higher education leader. In Florida, at least seven college presidents are former Republican politicians, as are the heads of both the Texas A&M and University of Texas systems.

Even so, Mr. Creighton sticks out. He was behind some of the state’s most consequential legislation targeting higher education. He wrote a bill enacted last year that sidelined the role faculty play in governing universities and tightened the state’s grip on curriculum. He also wrote a bill enacted in 2024 that abolished D.E.I. offices in the state’s public universities.

Mr. Creighton, who is from Conroe, Texas, north of Houston, earned a bachelor’s degree in government from the University of Texas at Austin and a law degree from Oklahoma City University. He said his views on higher education were shaped, in part, by his own difficulties paying for college.

Texas Tech’s main campus, in Lubbock, part of one of the state’s reddest districts, includes an agricultural and engineering college, along with a center dedicated to free-market economics. The university has a politically diverse faculty and student body.

But Mr. Creighton has argued that conservatives have been treated unfairly on campus, and some faculty members have become rattled after his administration issued a series of escalating directives.

Memos in December and April outlined the closures of programs centered on sexual orientation or gender identity, required the recognition of only two sexes and outlawed student dissertations on gender identity. The administration also created a portal in which professors must submit their course materials for review.

The strictest prohibition at Texas Tech is on classes in the core curriculum, which are a menu of lower-level courses that students must select from in order to graduate. Mr. Creighton has banned any course in the core that includes material related to sexual orientation and gender identity.

Sonja Stojanovic, a French studies professor, worried about her core course, called Holocaust in Literature. Because it mentions that gay and bisexual men were also targets of the Nazis, university leadership suggested that the course become an upper-level course.

“Now the Holocaust becomes an elective,” she said.

Texas Tech is also making changes beyond the core. Jonathan Friedman, with PEN America, a free-expression group, said that while other universities across Texas are reviewing curriculums, Texas Tech has gone the furthest. The university is “edging forward towards greater and greater ideological control,” he said.

Last month, the American Association of University Professors sued the university, saying the course-review effort is viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.

Some students have voiced concerns. One student group started a petition to remove Mr. Creighton from office, saying he was unfit to serve. But some conservative students support the chancellor.

Mr. Creighton is bringing ideological balance to a sector that is overwhelmingly liberal, said Preston Parsons, the local chapter president of Turning Point USA, a conservative group.

“Is it necessarily a bad thing that we have universities that sit a little different on different issues?” Mr. Parsons asked.

In the interview, Mr. Creighton said that only 60 or so courses of more than 14,000 taught in the university system were recommended for modification, and system officials have said that another 300 courses were “proactively” modified by faculty members before review.

He also said that the course-review effort has been deliberative, with many layers, including a Board of Regents committee, and that A.I. was just one step to make it more efficient. Most of the work was done by humans, he added.

Self-Censoring Courses

Some professors are self-censoring to avoid running afoul of the new guidance.

Ms. Schiller, the creative-writing professor, said the new directives restrict teaching about “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” but do not define those terms. “They’re making us do the work of reading between the very obvious lines,” she said, “and overcomplying out of fear that we might be reported or separated from our work or disciplined.”

Jacob Bell, a Medieval historian, said he worried about how to discuss Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake for, among other reasons, cross-dressing. Mr. Creighton’s memo about gender exempts biographical details of historically significant figures. Still, any references must be “purely incidental,” according to the April memo.

Dr. Bell removed two weeks of study about Viking men and women. He said Viking mythological poems often featured gender-changing gods like Loki and Odin, material he no longer felt comfortable teaching.

When asked about Dr. Bell’s case, Mr. Creighton suggested that professors not make pre-emptive decisions and rather submit materials to the university system for review.

Dr. Bell went a different route. He believes that future Texas Tech students will be “unprepared to deal with normal people in the world that they’re going to interact with.” He recently accepted a new job, at a public university on the East Coast.

A faculty senate survey from May found that about 50 percent of respondents changed their course content without being asked to comply with the new directives.

Survey respondents also said they worried about irreparable reputational damage. One said Mr. Creighton’s directives amounted to “using a chain saw to remove a splinter.”

Mr. Creighton shrugged off the concerns. He said many professors are supportive of the changes, though they are less vocal, and noted other university systems are implementing their own course-content reviews.

“Ours is absolutely the most deliberative and respectful of academic freedom,” he said, adding, “It has never been more exciting to have an opportunity to be a faculty member at the Texas Tech University System.”

Sherry Sylvester, a fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, called Mr. Creighton’s effort “fearless and meticulous” and said legislation authored by Mr. Creighton has been critical in wresting control of universities from faculty members.

“Texas is the model for the nation in returning our universities again to places of open debate, free inquiry, getting rid of ideological indoctrination and creating degrees of value for students,” Ms. Sylvester said, adding, “Faculty members need to remember that they are state employees.”

At the faculty meeting this spring, a couple dozen professors questioned administrators, including Ronald Hendrick, Texas Tech University’s top academic officer.

Dr. Hendrick, caught between his enraged faculty and Mr. Creighton’s plan, said he did not know the Texas Tech system would be using A.I. in the effort.

In an interview, Professor Schiller said her report hallucinated information about a course she was not teaching.

It did refer to one book she teaches, however: “Voice of the Fish” by Lars Horn, who says he is transmasculine. The book, which is described by the publisher as exploring “the trans experience through themes of water, fish and mythology,” must be switched out.

Ms. Schiller did not make the changes. Rather, she left the university and started at Grinnell College this month.

“I loved my job here until this year,” she said.