In front of a few dozen faculty members at a town hall–style meeting on Oct. 10, Angelo State University president Ronnie Hawkins said, repeatedly, that new university policies prohibiting discussion of transgender identity in class would not be written down.

“We have not put out any written guidance on that, but it’s tied to that executive order that the president put out, and then also the directive of the governor, and so that’s what makes it law for us to have to follow here at Angelo State University,” Hawkins said, referencing orders by President Donald Trump and Gov. Greg Abbott that recognize only two genders—male and female. “But there’s no other written types of documentation that we plan to be putting out that’s tied to that.”

Angelo State, one of five institutions in the Texas Tech University system, has been in the news for weeks over murky new directives, passed down telephone-style from university leaders to deans to faculty members, that prohibit faculty from acknowledging more than two gender identities. The rules have confusing and widespread implications; for example, faculty are unsure whether they can display a pride flag in their own office, field student questions about transgender identity or teach health-care students how to care for someone who has had gender-confirmation surgery. The Oct. 10 town hall didn’t clear anything up.

“Our general counsel has told us that at the system level, there’s no gray area” in the law, Hawkins said at the town hall, according to a recording Inside Higher Ed obtained. But none of the laws or orders Hawkins referenced limit what faculty can legally teach about gender. Texas House Bill 229, which Hawkins also cited during the town hall, directs state institutions to use only male and female gender options in state data collection, but it does not apply to academic instruction. The president’s and governor’s executive orders are not law. When asked by a faculty member whether the spoken directive violates the university’s core values of “diversity and inclusion,” Hawkins said it does not, because designing the core values “had nothing to do with race. It had nothing to do with gender. It had everything to do with us being a diverse university.” Regarding whether or not to follow the directive, Hawkins told faculty members, “If you don’t agree with that, you have a choice to make yourself.”

Hawkins and a spokesperson for Angelo State did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about his town hall comments.

Other universities are taking a page out of the Angelo State playbook and using unwritten, spoken policies to censor course content and scare faculty members into compliance with legally ambiguous rules. Within the Texas Tech system, other institutions have issued similar spoken rules. So has the University of North Florida, where university leaders verbally instructed the College of Education dean to remove the words “diversity, equity and inclusion” and “culture” from course descriptions and learning objectives, and to bypass typical institutional processes for changing course content.

That directive came from the statewide Board of Governors and was conveyed this summer to all College of Education deans at public institutions in Florida, said James Beasley, an associate professor of English and president of the faculty association at North Florida.

“All the [education] college deans are just scratching their heads about this. It is not written anywhere, and it’s very clear in Florida statute … that all laws and administrative rules be written and published in order to be valid and enforceable,” Beasley said.

The new rule is likely a response to two Florida laws, faculty say. The first, Florida House Bill 7, is currently blocked by a court order, but if enforced it would significantly curtail how faculty members can teach and speak about sex and gender. The law prohibits any instruction or training that “espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels a student or employee to believe” certain “concepts” relating to race, color, national origin or sex. For example, a lesson about structural sexism or racism would be prohibited under the law. The second law, Florida House Bill 875, which took effect in May, says that teacher-preparation courses “may not distort significant historical events or include curriculum or instruction that teaches identity politics, violates or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

Neither law specifically bans the terms “diversity, equity and inclusion” or “culture” from course content, descriptions or syllabi. Spokespeople for the Florida Board of Governors did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment.

Faculty in the College of Education at Florida Atlantic University have received the same spoken directive, said William Trapani, a communications and multimedia studies professor at Florida Atlantic. Despite repeated requests from faculty and other officials, the Board of Governors will not put the directive in writing “so they can maintain their strategic ambiguity,” according to Trapani. The new rule is just a part of the worsening climate for academic freedom in Florida, he said.

“Faculty are losing control over the curriculum,” Trapani said. “Textbooks are just disappearing in the night. Assignments are being changed, words are being changed, and we have no idea what’s happening at any of our sister institutions. As we speak, there could be some intransigence happening at University of Florida, and I have no idea about what’s going on there, nor, probably, do the faculty at large, because it happens in such small corridors with so few officials involved.”

John White, an English professor at the University of North Florida’s College of Education and Human Services, is pushing back hard on the new directive. He filed a grievance with the faculty union, arguing that “my academic freedom has been infringed by the university making me change course materials via some kind of mandate from above that no one can show me,” White said. Administrators changed course descriptions and learning objectives over the summer without faculty input, according to White. When faculty returned in the fall, they were told to remove the terms from their syllabi as well, he added, or else their course might not be approved by the department.

“I told the dean I would not change my syllabus, because I said, ‘I want to actually read the administrative rule or the law that mandates this … otherwise, we’re just going on hearsay, and I refuse to give up my rights based upon hearsay,’” White said. “And they insisted that I would be in trouble if I didn’t change it.”

White has not yet received a response to his grievance. Spokespeople for the University of North Florida and Florida Atlantic University did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment.

Legal experts are uncertain whether enforcing unwritten policies could violate employment contracts. In recent weeks, several universities have fired faculty members for speech or instruction that has historically been protected. Some of those professors sued, and in some cases courts have reinstated them. But the idea that a lawsuit is required to fight an institutional policy already has a chilling effect on faculty that accomplishes that university’s goal, explained Michael Hayes, an associate professor of law at the University of Baltimore. He hasn’t encountered universities enforcing unwritten policies in “a very long time,” he said.

It’s possible that universities’ faculty handbooks include a provision that requires faculty members to follow spoken directives from their supervisors, which officials could use to justify these policies, said Audrey Anderson, a higher education attorney at Bass, Berry and Sims and former general counsel at Dartmouth College and Vanderbilt University. But faculty handbooks also have provisions protecting academic freedom, she noted.

“They have to be disciplined first before there’s a formal way that they can dispute [the rule]. Otherwise they complain about it in a department meeting, or write an open letter to the president of the university saying, ‘This is wrong. It goes against academic freedom,’” she said. “But in terms of being able to formally dispute it, they have to wait until they get disciplined.”

An Angelo State faculty member told Inside Higher Ed that they are not aware of anyone who has been punished for teaching about gender identity at the university, and that some faculty members are proceeding with “business as usual” in the absence of clear written guidance from administrators.