A recent Blaze News report revealed that an order from the Republican governor, a directive from the university system's chancellor, and the guarantee of a prohibitive law going into effect in January were not altogether enough to dissuade Texas A&M University from asking potential hires to signal their ideological conformity to and support of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The unwanted attention resulting from that same report appears to have had an impact, however, demonstrating the importance of vigilance and sustained pressure.
Last week, Dr. Scott Yenor, a political science professor at Boise State University, highlighted various apparent examples of departments hiring "based on ideological conformity and racial preferences" at Texas A&M.
While many ostensibly DEI-coded postings remain, following Yenor's report, one of the most brazen examples had been noticeably altered.
Gov. Greg Abbott notified Texas public institutions in February to stop using DEI hiring practices.
"The innocuous sounding notion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has been manipulated to push policies that expressly favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others," said the memo, reportedly penned by the governor's chief of staff, Gardner Pate.
Weeks later, the University of Texas System's Board of Regents indicated it had put a pause on all new DEI policies.
Chairman Kevin Eltife, an Abbott appointee, suggested that while the system seeks to promote diversity, "certain DEI efforts have strayed from the original intent to now imposing requirements and actions that, rightfully so, has raised the concerns of our policymakers around those efforts on campuses across our entire state."
On March 2, Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp directed university leaders to stop asking job applicants about their commitment to DEI in their applications, reported the Texas Tribune.
"No university or agency in the A&M System will admit any student, nor hire any employee based on any factor other than merit," wrote Sharp.
Texas lawmakers went a step farther to ensure there was no outstanding confusion concerning the Lone Star State's prohibition on race- and identity-based hiring practices.
Senate Bill 17, ratified by Gov. Greg Abbott and effective Jan. 1, 2024, prohibits Texas' public universities from establishing a diversity, equity, and inclusion office; using DEI criteria in their hiring practices; and requiring employees or prospective employees to attend DEI trainings.
The law further requires that governing boards ensure that each institutional unit does not, among other things, "compel, require, induce, or solicit any person to provide a diversity, equity, and inclusion statement or give preferential consideration to any person based on the provision of a diversity, equity, and inclusion statement."
Public higher-education institutions will be audited every four years to determine if taxpayer funder were squandered on DEI-related schemes. Offending institutions that fail to correct the issue inside 180 days can become inelgible for formula funding increases and institutional enhancements, reported the Austin American-Statesman.
Eltife, an Abbott appointee, said last week, "We really want to make something crystal clear, whether you like the policy or whether you like this law or any other law, the University of Texas System is going to respect the process, and we're going to respect the law.
"We're not going to look for loopholes. We're not going to look for workarounds. We're going to implement the law as passed," said Eltife.
Dr. Yenor noted in his initial report that the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M was hiring four tenure-track assistant professors, asking candidates in a posting — archived on Nov. 15 — to provide a cover letter "referencing research agenda, past or planned contributions to advancing diversity, and teaching interests."
The day after Yenor's report, the posting was changed such that it now omits the "past or planned contributions to advancing diversity" language.
Blaze News reached out to Texas A&M's political science department but did not hear back by deadline.
Yenor told Blaze News that the sudden about-face reveals that "there was a recognition that the job posting explicitly violated Gov. Abbott's order abolishing DEI statements in use for faculty hiring or university hiring or state hiring. It was a direct affront to Gov. Abbot's executive order."
The change "brought them into compliance with the executive order," at least in this instance, said Yenor.
Anna Katherine Miller, education policy director at the Center for American Education, told Blaze News, "Texas A&M's recent removal of diversity in their job posting after being called out for defying the governor's directive shows that policies banning DEI will not be easy to enforce on college campuses. Unwilling university presidents, aided and abetted by campus DEI bureaucracies, will do their best to evade these orders."
Yenor similarly suggested that prohibitions on DEI hiring practices "are pretty easy to evade. Many of the universities have already suggested that they're going to do it. My initial article tried to show some of the ways in which they were evading it, but the Bush School advertisement didn't even try to evade it. It just violated it."
Yenor noted that one ostensible loophole is that rather than having applicants sign a DEI pledge, "they're willing to make sure to evaluate that job application in light of the fact that they've done the work of diversity over the course of their lives."
"In other cases, the university says, 'This university stands for diversity and inclusion,' in one part of the ad, then it asks the potential job applicants whether or not they would like to respond to what the university stands for. That's another way of ... providing an opportunity to candidates to volunteer their adherence to the ideology," continued Yenor. "I think the letter of the law may be complied with, but the spirit of the law is being violated in most of these jobs."
Sherry Sylvester, distinguished senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told Blaze News that it's become clear since the passage of SB 17 that "many in the university are committed to find workaround loopholes and ways to not comply. They have said this directly and indirectly. They've talked about the possibility of changing DEI to some other name."
Despite a name change and possible facelift, Sylvester made clear what DEI amounts to: division and dehumanization
"The problem with DEI is that it is divisive. Its worldview is that America's bad, Texas is bad, and the world is made up of either oppressors or the oppressed," said Sylvester. "Your identity is based on immutable characteristics, gender and race, and not on your personal achievements; what you can do; what you've learned how to do; what you have overcome. We all don't start in the same place — nobody thinks that we do — but people achieve from wherever they start."
"[DEI] is anti-individual. ... That's one thing that's antithetical to our Texas identity. We believe every individual is unique, every individual finds their path, and our job is to make sure that there's nothing that stands in the way of any individual," continued Sylvester. "DEI does not think in terms of the integrity of the individual. It thinks in terms of group identity, and people need to understand that."
Extra to fostering an expectation among students and potential hires that they must be treated as individuals rather than on the basis of immutable characteristics and/or group membership, Sylvester suggested that there are other ways to hold the university accountable.
"The legislation has several components for accountability. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board is one group that is available to monitor ... and report lack of compliance. The state auditor will also be monitoring the universities. Every university will have to come in and testify before the higher education committees in the [state] House and the Senate affirming that they are in compliance," said Sylvester.
However, even with such checks and balances, Sylvester underscored that good leadership remains a critical part of the solution.
"Texas public universities should make sure that all the leadership they hire are fully committed to ridding the academic institution of DEI," said Sylvester. "No one should be hired for a leadership position in a Texas public university who supports DEI or has a wishy-washy position on DEI. Texans don't support DEI. The legislature has made it clear that we do not want DEI as part of the infrastructure in our institutions. So no leader should be hired unless they are fully committed to making sure that their academic institution is free of DEI."
Yenor emphasized that the "only way to really halt the DEI revolution on campus is through university leadership that is willing to halt it and to put the money and prestige of the office of the university behind the non-DEI vision of education."
The trouble, suggested the Boise professor, is that General Mark Welsh, Texas A&M's interim president, "has signaled that he is interested in continuing the diversity, equity, inclusion revolution at Texas A&M, furthering it and deepening it. ... He's going to do whatever it takes, it looks like, to comply whatever letter of of the law is out there but to violate its spirit."
Gen. Welsh has long been a supporter of DEI, at least rhetorically. He recently told the Washington Post he would not have supported SB 17, stating, "I don't believe it's beneficial to where we are trying to go long-range as a society."
Yenor indicated that the public has roughly 30 days to comment on whether Texas A&M's Board of Regents should officially appoint Welsh as university president, noting that "I think this is one of the only chances that there will be to reverse some of these nefarious actions at Texas A&M."
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DEI initiatives have gone viral across the country, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has clearly had enough.
On June 6th of this year, Abbott signed a bill that forbade DEI offices at public universities and colleges across the state.
Despite the executive order, however, many colleges and universities have decided to continue hiring “based on ideological conformity and racial preference,” says Chad Prather.
One of the universities leading the charge is Texas A&M.
According to a recently published Blaze article, “Texas A&M’s interim president, General Mark A. Welsh, is openly defying the order” and has “signaled to his faculty that DEI business can be conducted as usual.”
While many institutions across the nation find loopholes to dodge bans on DEI initiatives, affirmative action, and teaching CRT, Texas A&M University isn’t even attempting to hide its open defiance of Abbott’s orders.
Its website of job listings is proof.
“An IT manager must be champion of ‘workplace diversity and inclusiveness,’” Chad reads. “A senior graduate student specialist must ‘work to enhance the diversity of the students,'" and the list goes on and on. However, according to a recent report, some of these listings were quickly taken down after Blaze released the article.
“Here’s the problem,” Chad explains. “If your main focus is diversity candidates, you don't care about excellence in the job, in the workplace, [or] in the world of education. You're not caring about pursuing truth; you're just about looking diverse, and it becomes a joke. So now you are producing mediocrity, you're producing subpar performance, [and] you don't have the results that you need to have.”
Texas A&M clearly doesn’t understand that though.
“It's so important for us to pursue mediocrity and subpar performance based on stupid things like skin color or sexual preferences or pronouns or how somebody identifies with a gender ... that we're willing to literally s*** the bed in our academic field of study,” mocks Chad.
To hear more about what’s going on at Texas A&M, watch the clip below.
To enjoy more of Chad's comedy, craziness and common sense, subscribe to BlazeTV—the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.
Texas A&M has scrubbed job postings of illegal pseudo-DEI statements less than 24 hours after Blaze News broke the story exposing how the university was defying Republican Governor Greg Abbott’s executive order banning the use of DEI statements.
The Bush School of Government is hiring four tenure-track assistant professors. On Wednesday, the school was asking all candidates to provide a cover letter containing “past or planned contributions to advancing diversity” (available at the Wayback Machine). By Thursday, the job posting dropped the language relating to “advancing diversity” entirely.
None of the other DEI requirements linked in Wednesday’s article appear to have been changed.
It isn’t the first time Texas A&M brass have scrubbed the school's website of embarrassing and illegal activities.
Last spring, A&M scrubbed its search committee manual of objectionable materials after it was exposed in a report by the Claremont Institute. Suddenly, the Berkeley rubric that makes a candidate’s diversity score part of the initial screening process of candidates disappeared. So did the portion of the committee training that described the use of mandatory DEI statements.
Texas A&M administration seems both proud of its DEI commitments and keenly interested in hiding its secretive use of DEI statements and other diversity loyalty oaths. Texas A&M’s interim president, General Mark Welsh, former dean of the Bush School of Government, has pledged support for the university’s DEI efforts.
Welsh’s support for DEI could get him in trouble, though, so he is trying to play it coy. His colleagues in the Bush School have acted as if his overt support for DEI might sink his chances of becoming Texas A&M’s permanent president. Further, according to a source at A&M who was signed up for the call, Welsh was scheduled to attend a Zoom meeting last week with DEI advocates, but he backed out at the last minute. He reportedly sent word that he would meet with the group after he is appointed officially.
Texas A&M’s Board of Regents is scheduled to meet Friday to name Welsh the sole finalist for the A&M presidency. The public will then have several weeks to comment before the board makes a final decision.
The Board of Regents is at a crossroads. Who governs? Will the board follow the legislature’s wishes and foil the university’s DEI plans, or will it bend to an interim president who shows contempt for the legislature’s wishes and the governor’s lawful order?
Texas A&M has been playing a double game since its extensive commitments to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” were exposed last year. On one hand, the university's leaders have buried the radicalness of the programming so they could deny that A&M is practicing DEI. On the other hand, leaders have redoubled their DEI commitments in defiance of an executive order from Governor Greg Abbott and the express will of the Texas legislature banning the use of DEI statements in faculty hiring.
Texas A&M’s interim president, General Mark A. Welsh, is openly defying the order. Welsh has not only supported racially based hiring in the past but continues to think DEI bans are not in the “long-range” interests of society and that the policy will not change what the university does very much. He has signaled to his faculty that DEI business can be conducted as usual.
The faculty is responding to the unmistakable signals of the interim president. Our investigation of job postings at Texas A&M and within the A&M system shows that Welsh’s comments have real-world implications. Departments are still hiring based on ideological conformity and racial preferences.
Examples are legion on the Texas A&M website. Many jobs are not bothering to hide their defiance of the legislature’s will and the governor’s order. Welsh’s former home, the Bush School of Government, which is hiring four tenure-track professors, asks candidates for a “cover letter” containing “past or planned contributions to advancing diversity.”
An IT manager must be a champion of “workplace diversity and inclusiveness.” A senior graduate student specialist must “work to enhance the diversity” of the students. An assistant professor of marketing must have a “demonstrated commitment to supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion activities.” A technology specialist must promote “inclusion, diversity, equity, and accountability.” Nearly every application at Texas A&M-Commerce must “have an understanding and knowledge of multicultural and diversity issues.” I could go on and on.
Other methods are more subtle. Instead of asking for DEI statements from job candidates, hiring committees expressly tell applicants that the committee is looking to hire candidates who will celebrate diversity or promote inclusion or help achieve equity. Candidates then fashion letters to show that they will conform to the hiring committee preferences.
Such letters are not required, of course. Committees do not ask for a separate DEI statement; they simply tell candidates that they want to hire those who embrace DEI and let the candidates draw their own conclusions.
Job listings often start with either a “lesser” statement of their commitment to diversity or a “strong” one. The “lesser” statement holds that “Texas A&M University is committed to enriching the learning and working environment by promoting a culture that respects all perspectives, talents & identities.” The “strong” statement uses the same language but replaces the italicized wording with “by promoting a culture that embraces inclusion, diversity, equity and accountability” — all central pillars of Texas A&M’s foundational 2010 diversity plan.
The School of Dentistry is looking for a postdoctoral research assistant who “subscribes to and supports” the lesser diversity commitment. Same for dentistry’s administrative coordinator. So is International Student and Scholar Services for its two listings for immigration specialists. Literally hundreds of A&M system jobs take the same exact approach.
Other jobs reference the “strong” statement and ask candidates to respond. Texas A&M’s Health Science Center is looking for a candidate “that embraces inclusion, diversity, equity, and accountability.” And it is doing it again and again.
I have filled up eight pages of links to diversity “suggestions” in the Texas A&M system, especially at the College Station campus. Sometimes units just say they are committed to diversity and inclusivity.
The conclusion is obvious. Welsh wants to keep Texas A&M moving in the DEI direction. The legislature won’t stop him. Only the Board of Regents has sufficient power to choose a different direction as it hires a new president. There can be no question what A&M is getting if Welsh is retained: His actions speak louder than his words.
Independent analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data concerning the fallout of the Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, has revealed that, contrary to previous claims made by EPA officials, there continue to be abnormally high levels of airborne toxins that could jeopardize the long-term health of residents in the area.
A team of researchers from Texas A&M have scrutinized EPA data and found elevated levels of chemicals known to cause not only various symptoms including headaches and eye and lung irritation, but possibly also cancer.
Researchers noted in a Friday Twitter post that the levels of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene — "a group of volatile chemicals referred to as 'BTEX'" — appeared to be similar to "normal" levels.
However, they also noted that "some concentrations in East Palestine (OH) for 9 out of ~50 chemicals EPA reported are higher than 'normal.' If these levels continue, they may be of health concern (especially acrolein)."
The CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry noted that acrolein, a pesticide, is "used to make chemical weapons" at higher concentrations.
If breathed in at low levels for a short time, then individuals exposed may experience watery eyes and sore throats. Those exposed to higher levels may see their lungs "affected more severely and for a longer time. Breathing in very high levels of acrolein might affect your lungs so severely that you might die."
The agency indicated, "No one knows if breathing or eating acrolein or spilling it on your skin causes birth defects, affects your ability to have children, or causes cancer. The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has not classified acrolein as to its carcinogenicity."
"In animal studies, ingestion of very large amounts of acrolein during pregnancy caused reduced birth weights and skeletal deformities in newborns. However, the levels causing these effects were often fatal to the mother," revealed the ATSDR.
According to the Texas A&M researchers' analysis of the EPA data, the "[hazard quotient] for median in East Palestine" after the derailment was 7. The "[hazard quotient] for highest in East Palestine" was 40.
Both these figures are significantly higher than the norm. The "HQ for median county in USA (EPA NATA 2014)" was 0.89, and the "HQ for highest county in USA" was 6.1.
\u201cUpdate (2/3) Compared to EPA National Air Toxics data (NATA 2014), some concentrations in East Palestine (OH) for 9 out of ~50 chemicals EPA reported are higher than \u201cnormal.\u201d If these levels continue, they may be of health concern (especially acrolein).\u201d— Texas A&M Superfund Research Center (@Texas A&M Superfund Research Center) 1677253607
Weihsueh Chiu, a professor of veterinary physiology and pharmacology at Texas A&M, told the Washington Post that while the EPA publicly posted the data it had collected between Feb. 4 and Feb. 21, it provided it without context that shows "potential concern about long-term health effects."
"We can’t say whether these levels are causing the current symptoms," said Chiu, adding that the EPA "would want to definitely make sure that these higher levels that are detected would be reduced before they left and declared everything cleaned up."
Michael Regan, the Biden-nominated administrator of the EPA, claimed in the wake of Norfolk Southern's release of various toxins, including a gas used as a weapon of mass slaughter in World War I, that "if your home has been tested and you've been given the green light, the air is safe."
Regan doubled down this week, telling NPR, "With the air quality analysis we've done — and we're using some of the most, you know, high-experience technology that we have for both air and water — the data is coming back demonstrating that there are no levels of concern for adverse health impacts."
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