Texas Civil Rights Review

Category: Higher Education

  • Jan. 2004 Site Announcement Archive

    Jan. 2004

    On De-Segregation and Civil

    Rights at A&M

    Welcome. This site has a working thesis:

    the Texas A&M University Board of Regents, as party to an on-going de-segregation plan, should respect

    its own civil rights responsibilities and restore affirmative action in admissions to the Texas A&M

    campus.
    With respect to this thesis, it is widely doubted that Texas A&M has any civil rights

    responsibilties when it comes to affirmative action in the admissions process. But if this is true for

    Texas A&M, while it is party to a de-segregation plan, then what role does affirmative action play?

    David Skrentny’s work shows that affirmative action was devised by civil rights

    enforcement agencies who otherwise would have been left with only the tool of case complaints–a

    procedure that will leave with you a higher stack of complaints each day. Without a tool for adjusting

    “institutional” behavior, civil rights cannot be adequately enforced. Without affirmative action,

    then, how else are civil rights to be em nforced?

    Everyone forgets that Texas

    A&M was the first campus in Texas to adopt affirmative action as a show of “good faith” that was

    supposed to signify a commitment to self-responsibility for de-segregation. As a result, Texas was

    allowed to negotiate its own de-segregation plan.

    If, 22 years later, the state

    higher education system is still not de-segregated, then what does the unilateral revocation of

    affirmative action signify?

    The suspension of numerical goals cannot signify that

    Texas A&M needs to abolish affirmative action in order to free the admissions process to consider each

    applicant “for who they are rather than what they are,” because if it were necessary to abolish

    affirmative action in order to achieve “individual consideration,” then affirmative action would not

    have survived its fierce and persistent cons :So what is Texas A&M saying about any of its students

    who have been admitted under affirmative action? That they were never invited as individuals, but only

    as “whats”?

    In short, the decision by Texas A&M violates its own “good faith” sign

    of self-responsibility, ignores constitutional law, and demeans the very process of affirmative action

    as a responsible civil rights policy wherever de-segregation persists.

    With miraculous

    pitching, the abolition of numerical goals was spun as a “diversity initiative.” But how can this

    be?

    If what Texas A&M did last year is not illegal, it should be. It presents an

    intolerable civil rights environment when state agencies (in Texas or any other state), while operating

    under a de-segregation plan, can allow site administrators to suspend their commitments to numerical

    goals.

    True, no one expects excellence in civil rights from Texas A&M. But these low

    expectations of the College Station campus in Texas may fool us into agreeing to something more than

    letting A&M be A&M. Without numerical goals, how are the civil rights of de-segregation to be

    pursued?

    If desegregation requires no numerical goals, then what does?

    Greg Moses
    Site Editor
    gmosesx@prodigy.net

    Below

    are the latest clips and comments. See the “Stories Archive”; “Sections”; “Topics”; “Web

    Links”; and “Forums” for more news, background, and opinion. Please add your comments to articles.

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    contributions.

  • Texas Aggie: High Schools not Equal

    [Quote about Princeton Study] What the survey suffers from is the same problem that the top

    10 percent law does: It treats all high schools the same. The automatic admissions program means that a

    student with a 4.0 grade point average who does not place in the top 20 percent of his class at a

    competitive school must fight for admissions while the valedictorian at a mediocre high school with a

    3.5 grade point average is automatically admitted to the school of his choice. [endquote from Texas A&M

    Battalion, “Unruly Behavior,” Matt Maddox Jan. 29,

    2004.]

  • We asked the A&M Regents for all their supporting materials and all we got..

    …were these four lousy sheets of paper. Go to

    our Open Records pages to see what complete supporting materials look like when you’re about to make

    civil rights history in Texas.

    And yes, we double-

    checked…

  • A&M Committe Reports ''Growing Inability'' in 2002

    [Quote:] Despite the small percentage gains over the twenty-year period,

    the number of minority
    students and faculty, when viewed as a percentage of the total, remains

    small. This is
    particularly true of African Americans and Hispanics students. TAMU is basically an

    enclave
    for the education of white students by white faculty. In addition, although our

    undergraduate
    students are primarily white U.S. citizens, over half of our graduate students are

    from foreign
    countries or hold nonresident status. Overall, this is an indication of TAMU’s growing

    inability
    at both the undergraduate and graduate levels to effectively attract, retain, and educate

    diverse
    Texan and American citizens despite the need to do so as reflected in the increasing

    diversity of
    Texas’ college age population. In fact, over the last twenty years there has been a

    12.9 percent
    growth in our state’s minority population but TAMU still serves the same population

    that it did
    in 1981. We do note, however, that the sizeable increase in the proportion of women

    students
    and the increase in the percent of women faculty at TAMU is a major achievement over the

    past
    two decades.[end quote, Student and Faculty Minority Conditions at Texas A&M University: A

    Longitudinal Comparison of the Years 1981, 1991, and 2001. June, August 2002. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY, pdf

    p. 4, see links for complete pdf.]

  • Feedback from Tyrone Smith: Revoke the Funding

    Civil Rights does not mean equal opportunity, it means
    equal results. We do not

    even have equal opportunity in many situations
    (education, job income, etc.) and even if we did, IT

    WOULD NOT BE
    ENOUGH. It is time to take back from the white man what he has taken from us
    for

    so long. Affirmative action is a first step, but we must go
    further. We MUST require quotas for

    corporate America and educational
    institutions to ensure we get what we deserve and are entitled

    to. Texas A&M
    should be stripped of all state funds until it establishes an
    affirmative action

    policy, and if black students don’t exceed the percentage of
    the general populace within 4 years,

    funds should be revoked
    PERMANENTLY. First steps to freedom! [tsmith5001@yahoo.com 1/9/2004]