The panels were formed after reactions on campuses to the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk that some viewed as celebrating or mocking his murder.
AUSTIN, Texas — State lawmakers on a pair of new bipartisan committees held their first hearing at the Texas Capitol on Thursday to review speech on college campuses.
The House and Senate Select Committees on Civil Discourse & Freedom of Speech in Higher Education were formed in the days after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
“This committee exists because something fundamental has shifted on college campuses across the nation, and far too often, here in Texas, we have seen disorder, intimidation, and open hostility replace reason and dialogue in recent months,” State Rep. Terri Wilson (R-Georgetown) said. “Students have been intimidated or shamed, and administrators and educators are at an impasse on handling situations in a fair and balanced way. Let me be clear: This is unacceptable.”
Kirk, a 31-year-old popular conservative activist and media personality, was shot and killed while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University in September. He was the founder of Turning Point USA and frequently traveled to debate students at college campuses across the nation.
In particular, some of the reactions and public comments on college campuses were viewed by some as mocking or celebrating the killing, drew ire from Republicans.
“The people of Texas expect their public universities to uphold the rule of law, to safeguard free expression, and to protect every student’s right to learn in an environment free from fear,” Wilson said. “When those obligations are ignored, when intimidation takes the place of discourse, the integrity of higher education itself is at risk. Freedom of speech is not the freedom to threaten, harass or disrupt. Academic freedom is not the license to defy public accountability.”
Some Texas students and staff have faced expulsion, firing and backlash over comments they made after Kirk’s death. Legal experts say that, while offensive, those comments are protected by the First Amendment.
“For anyone to ever say it’s okay to try to hurt someone because you don’t agree with what they said, that doesn’t work,” State Rep. Richard Peña Raymond (D-Laredo) said. “It shouldn’t work and doesn’t work for me and shouldn’t work for anyone.”
Texas State University said a student is no longer enrolled following a video that surfaced where he appeared to imitate and mock Kirk’s death. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had called for the student’s expulsion.
A Texas Tech University student was arrested and is now “no longer enrolled” following a confrontation during an on-campus memorial for Kirk. Another student claimed she approached him during the memorial and began “out of nowhere screaming all things about Kirk.” The student claimed the argument escalated, and she eventually slapped the lid of his hat. In a video posted on social media, She can be heard saying, “F— your homie dead. He got shot in the neck.”
“We can only have civil discourse and freedom of speech when we welcome all sides of a debate to receive equal treatment and fully understand the intentions and beliefs of all participants,” State Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham) said.
The committees face the challenging task of defining the boundaries between protected speech and harmful rhetoric.
“We need to get back to civil discourse and make sure we don’t support hate speech,” State Sen. Donna Campbell (R-New Braunfels) said. “We can find that line between civil discourse and objectionable speech because you disagree and hate speech. There is no space for vitriolic spewing of any speech.”
Raymond said the line is pretty simple.
“You can’t get out there and just straight up preach hate or violence or overthrowing our government,” Raymond said. “To me, it’s kind of that basic.”
State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) called the committees and their work “well overdue.”
“I think it’s shameful that our higher education institutions have not done more to bring it into line to maintain civil discourse,” Hall said. “On our campuses, they have abdicated their responsibilities and abused their authorities in letting this happen. It is past time that we could get back to recognizing one of the core parts of our civilization here in America, and that is free speech, to be able to exchange ideas.”
Wilson vowed the committee will thoroughly examine what is happening on campuses, what is working and where the failures have been.
“We are here to evaluate conduct, identify failures, and hold people accountable,” Wilson said. “Texas will defend open expression, but we will also demand order. Those two principles are not in conflict. They are the twin pillars, twin pillars of a free society.”
Thursday’s hearing focused on campus safety measures related to public events, “encouragement of civil discourse and freedom of speech on and protection from undue administrative censorship by the state’s college campuses and the implementation of Senate Bill 37.“
SB 37 would limit faculty’s influence on academic decisions, giving the university systems’ regents, who are political appointees, greater power to decide what is taught in the curriculum and to control hiring decisions at the state’s public colleges and universities.
“We have addressed our hiring process. We’ve addressed the curriculum review. That is a work in progress. We have addressed how we organize ourselves through the idea of shared governance. We have built together a small group of 14 incredibly esteemed faculty members who have agreed to be advisors to the president, who have not ever participated before in the Faculty Senate,” University of Texas at Austin President Jim Davis said. “I feel like we have moved from a feeling of how do we implement to seeing the benefits of implementation done thoughtfully and positively, and the campus vibe is positive around those topics.”
Davis and UT Austin General Counsel Amanda Cochran-McCall were both questioned by state lawmakers about what type of hateful comments toward racial groups or distasteful remarks about someone’s death are allowed on campus.
“We do not want hateful, ugly ideas, but we also respect the First Amendment’s protection of ideas, and when they cross over into conduct or illegal or unprotected speech, we are very careful about that,” Davis said. “We also recognize that humans are fundamentally flawed and sometimes are in the moment of passion and say things. We don’t want to just deem people irredeemable all the time. It’s a very difficult balance of how to manage the expectations around that topic, because there’s not always agreement of what the definition means.”
A lot of discussion also centered around SB 2972, which the legislature passed earlier this year in response to last year’s pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses. It limits how people can protest on campus, prohibiting overnight expression and limiting speakers, amplified sounds and drums during certain times.
A federal judge has blocked key provisions of the law, after several students filed a lawsuit arguing that SB 2972 violates their First Amendment rights.
Texas Deputy Attorney General for Legal Strategy Ryan Walters said the state intends to appeal and vigorously defend SB 2972.
“We think that the trial court’s ruling is fundamentally flawed, finding that it was not a content-neutral time and place manner restriction that’s subject to strict scrutiny, which is almost always fatal to the law,” Walter said. “Instead, it should have been upheld as a reasonable restriction of time, place and manner of activity, and we will continue to defend this as far as we need to.”
Davis outlined his principles of civil discourse and free speech in the classroom and on campus. The first is that there is free speech on campus grounds and the right to speak your mind without fear of punishment for the content of your ideas.
“I believe that we do a very good job of supporting this type of free speech, while also thoughtfully addressing conduct that jeopardizes safety and fairly enforcing the time, place and manner rules that protect the orderly operations of a college campus,” Davis said.
He also talked about building a culture where students feel free to voice their questions and their beliefs, especially when their perspectives might conflict with those of the professor or other students.
“This includes the duty to present alternative views when discussing a disputed or potentially controversial topic. It’s a duty to equip our students to use reason to form their own conclusions, rather than dictate a conclusion to them. And on our campus, our faculty have come together to reaffirm those core values,” Davis said. “We honor the traditions of academic freedom and academic responsibility, and we hold ourselves accountable to those standards so that our students can freely explore ideas and freely express those ideas as they learn.”
In September, a viral video showed a Texas A&M University student confronting a professor over a discussion of gender identity during a children’s literature class, leading to the university firing the professor in the video, and former university President Mark A. Welsh III’s resignation.
The university said she was fired because the content of her course did not match its catalog description. Some panel members said the legislature should revisit existing laws requiring professors to post syllabi online to increase transparency.
Some Democrats on the panel questioned Davis about protecting professors when a student films them and then posts remarks or comments online that are out of context.
“Our faculty have come together to agree they will teach, and they and they and they have in the past that they will treat, teach in an honest way. They will have alternative perspectives in the classroom,” Davis said. “I think we can do, through our teaching of our students and our commitment to ourselves, of our principles, to help close that gap of that difference of opinion of someone who feels like I have been offended, therefore you are wrong in thinking.”
State Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa (D-McAllen) pressed Davis on the problematic situation universities face when students set up professors.
“We are committed to fairness and justice in our process, and we understand that sometimes people don’t recognize it or maybe want to have other opinions about that,” Davis said. “We are very thoughtful about making sure we have actual facts. Those facts are being fairly weighed against the issue, and we have rules in place to make sure that we are protecting people from allegations that are not true and we’re also taking appropriate action when things aren’t true.”
Cochran-McCall outlined how the university regulates free speech and campus activities.
While discussing those boundaries, Raymond asked her if they’d allow a Ku Klux Klan event on campus.
“Before Sept. 1, when we were a traditional public forum, we would have had to let them come, because we wouldn’t have had discretion to say ‘Outsiders, you can’t come onto our campus for your protest or your demonstration,’” Cochran-McCall said.
Raymond followed up and asked what if students or professors invite them.
“I’d be working very hard to find if there’s a legal way to prevent that, but if there were not, then as a government body, we have to honor what the First Amendment requires,” Cochran-McCall said.
“There’s a line, and that is not a group that should be allowed,” Raymond said. “I don’t care if it’s 20 professors that teach at the university or 20 students that go to school there. They should not be allowed to have an event, in my opinion.”
In addition to talking to Davis and Cochran-McCall, lawmakers also heard from Wynn Rosser, the Commissioner of Higher Education for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Ray Martinez of the Texas Association of Community Colleges, and several students who spoke about the current campus climate.
Dylan Seiter, the President of Turning Point USA Texas A&M Chapter, said they are facing unnecessary hurdles in holding events.
“We’ve had multiple instances where professors are either too afraid to come out and support a student who’s getting active in our chapter,” Seiter said. “That lack of support internally in the classroom can come in forms of not getting an excused absence for an organization meeting, something of the sort, or even going back to last semester when we did host Charlie Kirk on campus, there were some difficulties in getting some excused absences for that day.”
State lawmakers on the panel are trying to thread a needle between free speech, ensuring safe environments and respectful debate.
The committees plan to hold more hearings in the future, including ones where the public can testify next year.
Once they finish their work, the committees will issue reports on bias, discourse and freedom of speech, which they’ll use to write legislation in the 90th Legislative Session in 2027.