Category: Higher Education

Published by Counterpunch, Jan. 14,

2004
http://www.counterpunch.com/moses01142004.html
also distributed via

Portside

To Write Off the South
is to Surrender to Bigots

By Greg

Moses

It is the day before Martin Luther King’s birthday, 2004, and I am reading with

great sadness reports of a recent political analysis that says to Democratic candidates for president,

“forget the South, white voters will not be coming back to you.” From my home base in Texas, I

cannot disagree with the report. I have watched the new racism and the new Repulbicanism rise together

in close collaboration for the past twenty years. I have seen it up close.

I was there

in a small Texas town 20 years ago when a rising political star told a frail and elderly black woman to

get herself a new husband. And I was in that room when the room burst into laughter. The paradigm of

racist Republicanism was born that day, and it has been winning votes ever since.

For

me, the culmination of the process was exemplified by December’s announcement that Texas A&M

University would drop its 23-year-old commitment to affirmative action. The major players in the

decision have solid credentials in the Republican establishment, including the corporate leader of

Clear Channel who acts as chairman of the board of regents, the former director of the CIA who serves

as president of the university, and a Republican Governor who quietly sits and watches this experiment

in backlash, without saying anything at all.

Not to mention a president, whose

influence over federal civil rights policy can be palpably felt by the absolute silence from the Office

for Civil Rights. According to promises that George W. Bush himself made in writing, when he was

Governor of Texas in the Summer of 2000, the OCR is supposed to be an active partner in the civil

rights policies of Texas higher education, but OCR looks more like a silent partner these

days.

All this is sad enough for the South that produced the great Civil Rights

revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, but it is doubly sad during these days of national tribute to

King.

There are white voters who have not gone over to Republican racism. For this

reason, we do find some relatively progressive representatives such as Lloyd Doggett or Martin Frost.

But these progressive white voices have been deliberately targeted for removal by a redistricting

battle that proved the Republican Governor could speak quite a lot when he wanted to.

Where white, anti-racist voters are supposed to find a future in this mess is a

question as nasty as the recent political analysis indicates.

Yet, during this

commemoration of King’s birthday, we can review what he said in his chapter about “Racism and the

White Backlash” when he wrote his final book in 1967.

In Where Do We Go from Here:

Chaos or Community? King argued that, “we must turn to the white man’s problem.” That problem,

argued King, could be diagnosed in a contradictory personality that always takes something back for

everything it gives.

The Texas A&M decision would be a classic illustration of this

“strange indecisiveness and ambivalence”. The university president promises to add new resources for

marketing and recruitment. But since something has been given, something else must be taken away.

Gone now is affirmative action in admissions.

Backlash in America, King reminds us, is

the norm rather than the exception. The Civil Rights Movement was the exception in American history,

so far as white America is concerned.

Not all white America, of course. But white

America as a whole has a predictable pattern of behaving as if white America as a whole were the most

important people in history.

King’s frankness about white racism is eloquent. “Racism

is a philosophy based on a contempt for life…. Racism is total estrangement…. Inevitably it

descends to inflicting spiritual or physical homicide upon the out-group.”

Today, you

can hear the pain of Texas leaders who stand bewildered before the Texas A&M decision. Leaders who

were never consulted, advised, or warned about the surprising turn of policy, because why? Because

they were not enough respected. And in the aftermath of their well-organized and collective complaint,

they are greeted with an implacable silence. The voices that THEY represent need not be heard by the

rulers who now run Texas A&M.

In light of President Bush’s recent declarations that we

must return to outer space with gusto, we may note what King wrote in 1967, that the nation’s

enthusiasm for solving great problems was curiously selective. No problem is too great for NASA to

solve. Yet, “No such fervor or exhilaration attends the war on poverty.”

Or in light

of the billions that have been budgeted for global war, we might again attend to King’s observations,

“In the wasteland of war, the expenditure of resources knows no restraints; here our abundance is

fully recognized and enthusiastically squandered.” King was talking about war budget that amounted to

a mere $10 billion per year.

As we drift in the direction of Republican racism, outer

space enthusiasm, and big bucks for war, it would serve us well to consider what our great national

philosopher counseled us in 1967. American progress has always been in the hands of dedicated

minorities who resisted that drift.

“That creative minority of whites absolutely

committed to civil rights can make it clear to the larger society that vacillation and procrastination

on the question of racial justice can no longer be tolerated.” What we can do is never give up,

especially if we’re white and Southern.

Duke

University has affirmative action and legacy admissions. What prevents Texas A&M from the same?

Perhaps the public nature of the university is a consideration, but if Aggie alumni wanted to follow

the Duke plan by restoring legacy and affirmative action, who can doubt their political abilities in

Texas? State Senator Jeff Wentworth suggests that the Ten Percent Plan is raising enough complaints to

attract the legislature’s attention. But here’s the question, is Aggie hostility to affirmative

action greater than their political desire to continue a legacy program. And if hostility to

affirmative action exceeds alumni loyalty at Texas A&M, what does that say about the temperament of

Aggie Culture when it comes to race?

[Published at TheBatt, Jan. 27,

2004]

Racism 101 All Over Again

By Greg

Moses

The spectre of race in Texas higher education was raised inside and outside the

state as soon as the King holiday weekend was over. A campus task force at the University of Texas at

Austin found new reasons to take race seriously. And a long-term study from Princeton dismissed highly

racialized suspicions that have swirled around the Texas “ten percent plan.”

As

quoted by the Houston Chronicle’s Todd Ackerman, the task force at the Austin campus, found that,

“people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds don’t understand each other.”

Therefore, according to the chair of the committee, “Rather than just providing

stopgap measures when issues arise, we hope to integrate racial respect and fairness throughout the UT

community.”

[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2363406]

The bureaucratic neutrality of the findings, of course, fail to convey the fact that

one must understand white folk as a survival skill in American today (can you say Iowa caucus?), so if

different people are having trouble understanding each other, the problem is more likely to belong on

the side of white folks who still think they have so little to learn about people of color.

The Houston Chronicle report also neglects the stormy history of past attempts to

inaugurate “multiculturalism across the board” at the Austin campus. The English Department, once

upon a time, tried to require a textbook for freshman writing that included critical theory in race and

gender.

Hunter Thompson invented the term shithammer for the kind of politics that

came down during the “Texas Comp. Controversy” of 1990. It is shamefully amusing today to re-read

the complaints of stolid scholars complaining fourteen years ago about that, “highly politicized

faction of radical literary theorists” who dared to make race everybody’s business.

[http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v04/0372.html]

And yet, some of the consequences of ongoing white ignorance about race could be read

between the lines of this week’s Princeton report, which found that careful scientific analysis did

not support popular prejudices, fed by media reports, that the state’s admissions laws were driving

better qualified, white students, out of state.

The prejudicial suspicions were never

quite uttered publicly as racist, but the demographics leave little question about the racialized

nature of the allegations.

The “popular complaint” goes like this: since the

state’s best universities have to admit the top ten percent of high school graduates under the “top

ten plan”, students from the worst high schools are taking places that ought to go to more students

from “better” high schools.

As the complaint continues, many students from the high

quality high schools, or so-called “feeder schools,” are therefore having to leave the state,

contributing to a Texas brain drain.

The racialized nature of the complaint may be found

in the history of the top ten plan, which was explicitly devised to substitute for affirmative action

during the Hopwood period in Texas history. In fact, to illustrate just how racialized the “ten

percent plan” was, professors Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres argued at the time that the ten percent

plan illustrated a brand new theory of race.

As the Princeton report points out, if

the ten percent plan works as a sort of semi-substitute for affirmative action, it is because Texas

high schools are still segregated.

In the words of Princeton authors Marta Tienda

and Sunny Niu:

“The Texas school segregation patterns that enabled H.B.588 [the ten

percent law] to restore some diversity at college campuses after 1996 imply disproportionate

representation of blacks and Hispanics at high schools where large shares of students are economically

disadvantaged. In fact, over 30 percent of black seniors and nearly half of Hispanic seniors graduated

from a high school designated as poor, but only 2.5 and 3.9 percent, respectively, attended one of the

“feeder” high schools. By contrast nearly 13 percent of non-Hispanic white students graduated from

feeder high schools, as did 18 percent of Asian-origin students.”

[http://www.texastop10.princeton.edu/publications/tienda011504.pdf]

Between schools that

are “feeders” and schools that are “starved” is a demographic of class and race, where vestiges of

separate and unequal remain.

But as Dallas Morning News reporter Kent Fischer tells us

in his Tuesday report, the results of the ten percent plan have not yielded much in the way of

diversity as far as Texas A&M University is concerned.

Fischer introduced Texas A&M near

the end of his story about the Princeton report, only to forget it precipitously as we shall soon see.

By interviewing thousands of students, the Princeton report is able to show us that

more Texas youth would prefer to leave the state. It’s not the ten percent plan that’s “forcing”

students out, rather it’s the rest of the country that’s attracting students away from the Lone Star

State. If truth be told, more students would have gone out of state for higher education had they been

more successful in meeting their goals.

As for the suspicion that the “poor” high

schools were producing poorly qualified candidates, the Princeton report notes that many of these

students landed some of the most competitive out-of-state offers.

And considering the

number of “feeder” school students who eventually won admission to college, the Princeton report

tells us that they do better than most students in the nation in terms of landing the schools they

want.

Not surprisingly, the Princeton report suggests that black students from Texas

tend to be more likely to set their sights out of state in the first place, and secondly are less

likely to want to go to Texas A&M at all. These are problems well known in College Station, even if

the Aggie solutions look more often like bad jokes.

Tienda and Niu raise questions about

the purpose of public higher education, which still has a sort of populist legacy in Texas. The

question of allocating seats is a serious public question, and they contribute to a tone of seriousness

about it.

And so the Princeton researchers conclude that, “a modified percent plan

combined with a narrowly tailored consideration of race would yield the optimal solution for

Texas.”

“That, in fact, has happened,” reports the Dallas Morning News. Say that

again? What has in fact happened. The Morning News, which had reminded us a few paragraphs back about

the predicament of Texas A&M admissions, now completely moves on.

[http://www.dallasnews.com/latestnews/stories/012004dntextop10percent.5e2c9.html]

Ignoring its own recently published reports about Texas A&M’s decision last month to

abolish its narrowly tailored considerations of race, the Morning News closes only with the example of

the University of Texas at Austin, which will employ a constitutionally refurbished affirmative action

plan. And never mind that the Austin campus still needs a fifteen member committee of presumably non-

radical literary theorists to soberly recommend systematic racial understanding.

In

their consideration of the Texas ten percent plan, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres argued that a new

theory of race was in the making, one that superseded old paradigms of affirmative action. Yet, the

Princeton report and the outcry during the last month from Texas civil rights community indicates that

old lessons may still have legs. Affirmative action by any other name, is, after everything has
been

carefully considered, “the optimal solution.”

In light of these fresh reports, The

Texas Civil Rights Review is especially ea
ger to share with you the documentary evidence that Texas A&M

used to adopt its anti-affirmative action policy… as soon as the Texas Open Records Law is obeyed.

Please stay tuned.

“The need for change is the expansion of the faculty; more minority

recruitment in terms of our obligation to the state of Texas; expanding our research effort and taking

it to a new, national level; having A&M play on a national stage in important arenas; and more national

recognition for the achievements of our faculty.”

Texas A&M President Robert Gates

interview with Houston Chronicle reporter Todd Ackerman, Jan. 24, 2003. I read this (Jan. 26) within

an hour after talking to a state regulator who says there’s really not much the state is empowered to

do when it comes to directing A&M’s “obligations” to diversity. Placing “minority recruitment” in

the category of “obligations to the state of Texas” is an interesting construction. There were no

follow up questions published in the interview.

January 11, 2004
Bowen believes Gates made right decision
By JOHN

LeBAS
Eagle Staff Writer

Former Texas A&M University President Ray Bowen said his

administration considered dropping the school’s legacy program after the 1996 Hopwood court decision

took race out of admissions decisions. But officials eventually concluded that doing so could

actually harm the university’s efforts to increase the ethnic diversity of its students, he

said.

The current president, Robert Gates, on Friday ended a 14-year-old practice that

gave an edge to freshman applicants with relatives who attended the once all-white university. The

legacy program had been blasted recently by minority lawmakers and civil rights groups who argued it

discriminated against applicants of color.

“We studied it after Hopwood and determined

legacy was helping minorities in a small way,” said Bowen, who was president from 1994 to 2002. “But

nobody believes that.”

Still, he said Gates made the right decision in light of the

recent uproar.

Legacy critics have said the program’s end is a small step toward a more

diverse student body, which is 82 percent white. While Hispanics have been at the 127-year-old

university throughout its history, blacks were not allowed until 1963.

A&M officials

have blamed a slide on minority enrollment over the past seven years on the Hopwood decision. But Bowen

said his administration calculated that dropping legacy probably would have decreased the number of

minorities who enrolled by three or four a year.

While figures from the late 1990s

weren’t available late last week, legacy statistics from the current freshman class seem to support

that assertion.

For fall 2003, 878 applicants who weren’t eligible for automatic

acceptance but met academic standards earned legacy points during A&M’s review process. Seven were

African-American and six of those were admitted (85.7 percent).

Of 800 whites with

legacy, 312 got in (39 percent). Twenty-seven of 52 Hispanics were admitted (51.9 percent), as were

eight of 19 others (42.1 percent).

In all, 353 of the 878 legacy candidates (40.2

percent) won admission.

Bowen joined current A&M officials in arguing that legacy —

which counted for up to four of 100 points in the review process — was not the deciding factor for most

applicants. More points could be earned in other areas, such as leadership, extracurricular activities,

class rank and SAT or ACT score.

“It’s the danger, I think, of playing the statistics

too close,” he said. “You need to look at the big issues. I think the big issue here is perception, and

I think Dr. Gates addressed that through his decision. … If the public perceives this is unfair,

you’re wasting your time going through an exercise trying to convince people it’s not unfair.”

Many critics said the practice was especially unfair in light of a U.S. Supreme Court

decision last year that overturned Hopwood and allowed limited consideration of race in admissions.

Despite that, Gates said in December that A&M would stay away from using race and move to a totally

“merit-based” policy.

While lawmakers and activists still called for Gates to go beyond

ending legacy and reinstate affirmative action, one Texas-based group applauded his decision

Saturday.

“This is another step forward towards a truly merit-based system with equal

opportunity for all Texans,” Texas Civil Rights Initiative spokesman Austin Kinghorn said in a

statement. The group’s chairman is former Hopwood plaintiff David Rogers.

A&M’s legacy

program started in 1989 as part of an enrollment management effort at the burgeoning university. It was

the only formal legacy practice among the state’s public universities.

But legacy hadn’t

been heavily scrutinized until recent weeks, when minority activists threatened legal action to end the

program. Had such pressure been applied in the late 1990s, A&M would have stopped using legacy in

admissions, Bowen said.

“It’s a perception issue,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to

have any effect on minority enrollment at all.”