Author: mopress

GSC supports FCIC March for Diversity
By James Twine
Published:

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

The Texas A&M Graduate Student Council (GSC) said at its

meeting Tuesday that it would support Wednesday’s diversity

march.

‘Defeat ignorance, support diversity’
Hundreds of students, faculty and

staff
attend rally to promote diversity
By Anthony Woolstrum
Published: Thursday,

February 19, 2004
—–Caption—–
Michael Jackson (left), class of 1988, and Thomas

Spellman, class of 1986, hold hands in front of the Academic Building in support of the march Wednesday

afternoon. The march through campus was organized by the members of the Faculty Committed to an

Inclusive Campus and included a rally at Rudder Fountain. (Photo by John C. Livas / The

Battalion) “Aggies are diverse; we are diverse.”

This statement and others were

chanted Wednesday afternoon as hundreds of Texas A&M faculty, staff, students and members of the Bryan

-College Station community gathered for a rally sponsored by the Faculty Committed to an Inclusive

Campus (FCIC) to promote diversity on campus.

“We have to make sure that we represent

Texas A&M to the outside community the way we want to be represented,” said James Anderson, vice

president for diversity.

Feb. 2004

“We Don’t Want to Integrate!”

That was the outcry

made by 4,000 students in 1963 when Texas A&M President, General Earl Rudder, convened a campus forum

to discuss plans to admit women. According to the Brazos Genealogical Society online, “Rudder’s

concluding remarks are drowned out by a chorus of boos.”
Even today at the College Station

campus, if 4,000 people are shouting together about something, it will not be a good day for

diversity.

How do we approach these persistent and discouraging dynamics? During Black

History Month, we are going to try to keep our scholarly wits. There are crucial questions to

answer.

For instance, we have yet to locate a document that supports the Texas A&M

announcement to extend the vestiges of Hopwood. We tried looking in the Regents’ agenda packet, but

there was absolutely no mention of race or affirmative action there.

Where is the

documentary trail that leads to the decision to uphold the vestiges of Hopwood and why was it made? It

is remarkable that the Regents didn’t put a single word in writing.

Professor Marco

Portales reports that A&M President Robert Gates met with “minority” faculty on Dec. 18, two weeks

after the announcement was made. So who did he meet with before?

As we continue to

collect materials and to think about the possibilities of winning a civil rights victory, we cannot

forget that we live in a state rich with civil rights intelligence. James Farmer, Sr., taught at Sam

Huston College in Austin (now Huston-Tillotson) and Wiley College in Marshall. He raised up a son,

alright, who was not a Young Conservative.

And speaking of Wiley College, we marvel at

the golden age of scholars who would today still be considered heroic for their intellectual

courage.

Oliver Cromwell Cox, for instance, who taught at Wiley College, wrote a durable

analysis of Caste, Class, and Race. For him, the anti-integration fervor of young people was not to be

explained by any innate tendencies to wickedness. These attitudes have to be cultivated. And behind

that cultivation, Cox looked for interests served.

So how do we understand the

conditions that cultivate such dreadful images as jungle parties, affirmative action bake sales, and

open protests against the arrival of a Vice President for Diversity?

As we continue to

sift for documentary evidence, we will also continue to read our Black History and reflect on the Texas

struggles that have brought us this far.

And we will not apologize for following quite a

different path of scholarship than what is being pursued by Young Conservatives these days, who are the

intellectual heirs of a staunch tradition to be sure. In the end, will the elite leaders of the state

do what Cox predicted they would do–cultivate neo-fascist youth–or will they stand up to the boos?

Mark your calendars for March 11, when the Univ. of Texas Regents have scheduled a

special meeting during Spring Break whose agenda has yet to be announced.

Greg

Moses
Site Editor

via email from Asst. Prof. of English at Texas A&M, Elias Dominguez-

Barajas.

The recent Harvard study describing the resegration of U.S. schools has been

mentioned in several different contexts, and I’m sure that many … have not only heard of it but have

actually perused the full report. Despite the latter, I considered it pertinent to pass the information

along in case somebody who hasn’t heard of it wants the actual source for research purposes or

personal information.

[More summary below. Get the link at “Web Links” Module (the

menu at the upper left) under “National Resources.]

Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee began to

circulate their preliminary findings several years ago (starting circa 1997). Those findings have been

confirmed
in their final report, which includes the following points among

others:

There has been a substantial slippage toward segregation in most of the states

that were highly desegregated in 1991. The most integrated state
for African Americans in 2001 is

Kentucky. The most desegregated states for Latinos are in the Northwest.

However, in

some states with very low black
populations, school segregation is soaring as desegregation efforts

are abandoned.

American public schools are now only 60 percent white nationwide and

nearly one fourth of U.S. students are in states with a majority of nonwhite
students. However,

except in the South and Southwest, most white students have little contact with minority

students.

Asians, in contrast, are the most integrated and by far the most likely to

attend multiracial schools with a significant presence of three or more racial groups. Asian students

are in schools with the smallest
concentration of their own racial group.

The vast

majority of intensely segregated minority schools face conditions of concentrated poverty, which are

powerfully related to unequal educational
opportunity. Students in segregated minority schools face

conditions that students in segregated white schools seldom experience.

Latinos confront

very serious levels of segregation by race and poverty, and non-English speaking Latinos tend to be

segregated in schools with each other. The data show no substantial gains in segregated education for

Latinos even during the civil rights era. The increase in Latino segregation is particularly notable in

the West.