Category: Higher Education

Jan. 8, 2004
End `legacy’ program, A&M urged
Minorities say policy

favors white applicants
By Todd Ackerman
Copyright 2004 Houston

Chronicle

Minority politicians and activists around the state Wednesday urged Texas A&M

University to bring consistency to an admissions policy that doesn’t consider race or ethnicity but

includes a “legacy” program that favors whites. The legacy program, which gives points to

applicants whose parents, siblings or grandparents went to A&M, is the deciding factor in the admission

of more than 300 white freshmen annually. Only a handful of blacks and about 25 Hispanics are admitted

each year because of the program.

“This legacy program thing is nothing more than

conservative affirmative action,” said state Rep. Paul Moreno, D-El Paso. “It’s admission by

invitation only.”

Jim Harrington, a veteran civil rights lawyer who heads the Texas

Civil Rights Project, said A&M needs to change its policy or “it’s going to be Brown vs. the board of

regents of Texas A&M,” an allusion to the landmark desegregation case of the

1950s.

Moreno, Harrington and Bledsoe were among a number of officials who attacked

A&M’s admissions policy at a news conference at the state Capitol. News conferences were also

conducted on the front steps of City Hall in Houston and in San Antonio.

A&M’s legacy

program is drawing particular fire because the university recently announced it will not consider race

in admissions. The announcement followed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that universities can give

minorities a boost in admissions, in effect overturning the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ Hopwood

decision, which had banned racial preferences in higher education in Texas since

1996.

Spurning the new opportunity, A&M President Robert Gates said attracting

minorities is a top priority but stressed that “students should be admitted on merit — and no other

basis.”

He had no response to the criticism of the legacy program Wednesday, releasing

a statement that said A&M’s admissions process has been “under review and will continue to be

evaluated to ensure it achieves one of the university’s primary objectives — that of having a student

body that is more representative of the state of Texas.”

A&M’s undergraduate

population is 82 percent white, 9 percent Hispanic, 2 percent black and 3 percent Asian-

American.

Typically, anywhere from 1,650 to more than 2,000 A&M applicants a year

receive legacy credit, four points on a 100-point scale that also takes into account such factors as

class rank and test scores.

While most applicants don’t need legacy points to get in,

in 2003, 312 whites were admitted because of them. In 2002, that figure was 321.

The

program was the difference for six blacks and 27 Hispanics in 2003, and three blacks and 25 Hispanics

in 2002.

State Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, who has twice filed bills in the

Legislature to end A&M’s legacy program, said last week he plans to sponsor such legislation again, as

early as spring if a special session is called.

But state Rep. Garnet Coleman, D-

Houston, who said at the Houston news conference that he will support any such bill, added that he’d

prefer A&M acquiesce on its own and change its policy, either to end legacies or consider race. He said

he plans to ask Gov. Rick Perry to have his appointees on the A&M board of regents vote to make the

school’s admissions policy “consistent.”

Sens. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, and Gonzalo

Barrientos, D-Austin, added that they plan to take a closer look before voting to confirm future

gubernatorial appointees to university governing boards.

Other officials at the three

news conferences included U.S. Congress members Chris Bell and Sheila Jackson Lee; state

representatives Mike Villarreal, Joaquin Castro, Jose Menendez, Dawnna Dukes, Jessica Farrar and Dora

Olivo; and representatives from the Urban League, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational

Fund, and the League of United Latin American Citizens.

A&M’s legacy program was even

criticized by an official of an anti-affirmative action group that Tuesday praised A&M’s decision not

to consider race while announcing that a loose coalition of conservative leaders recently wrote to

Perry, other elected state officials and the University of Texas System board of regents, calling on

them to stop UT from reintroducing racial preferences in admissions.

The official,

Center for Equal Opportunity senior fellow Edward Blum, said he thinks legacy admissions are “a stupid

idea.” He said A&M should revisit them.

The letter about UT was signed by former U.S.

Attorney General Edwin Meese, California anti-affirmative action leader Ward Connerly, and eight other

political or legal activists.

“We are all, frankly, baffled why (UT President Larry)

Faulkner would insist on treating students differently because of their skin color and their

ancestors’ national origin when there is demonstrably no reason to engage in such unfair and divisive

activity,” said the letter, sent in mid-December.

Wednesday, there seemed to be no

confusion among officials at the news conferences.

Villarreal, D-San Antonio, noted the

inconsistency of A&M passing up an opportunity to increase minority enrollment because that would

“amount to special treatment of a specific set of the student population, then in the next breath

continuing a program that does exactly that for a segment of the student population already

disproportionately represented.”

“A public university can’t have it both ways and

maintain any semblance of fairness, consistency and equity,” he said.

Clay Robison

contributed to this story from Austin.

“We have a well-established program to encourage students of our graduates to apply to Penn

and have had this program in place for years,” [Admissions Dean Lee] Stetson said. “Basically we say

we will give a measure of preference to students with an alumni affiliation who apply during the early

decision program.”

“I would find it difficult to believe we would change the

admissions program drastically to eliminate a program that has worked so well for us over the years,”

Stetson said. [From the Daily Pennsylvanian, “Texas A&M Abandons Legacy Admissions,” Brooke Daley

Jan. 28, 2004.]

[Quote:] Statistics for the University of Texas last year showed 75

percent of the freshmen admitted were in the top 10 percent of their high school

class.

Texas A&M hopes not to be in the same boat, said Frank Ashley, associate provost

for enrollment….
Ashley said he believes the top 10 percent rule is a good rule, but it needs

some changes. He said he believes every student should take a college preparatory course, because some

students may not take more rigorous courses in high school. [end quote TheBatt.Com, Texas A&M, “Top

Ten Percent Rule Criticized,” by By Pammy Ramji, Jan. 30,

2004.]

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]