How Texas A&M Went Woke
Scott Yenor | 2.13.2023

https://americanmind.org/salvo/how-texas-am-went-woke/

Sane Texans must act to remove all traces of DEI in the state.

Texas A&M is among the most conservative public universities in America, with a student body well to the right of its peers at other schools. Its traditions of military service and commitments to agriculture and mechanical sciences (the original meaning of A&M) connect it to meritocratic invention.

Yet, for more than a decade, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies have transformed the university. Those governing Texas A&M think the school itself is racist—and they have adopted increasingly radical policies to transform it into a typical, leftist American university.

As I discuss in a newly-released report, radical efforts to transform A&M began with its 2010 Diversity Plan, which sought to achieve greater faculty equity and to transform the campus climate through DEI programming. Diversity, it held, is “an indispensable component of academic excellence.” The 2010 Diversity Plan established two committees to evaluate departments and dole out diversity bonuses to conforming colleges.

Diversicrats began building a DEI empire through faculty equity policies and the promotion of campus climate programming. It started slowly. By 2017, STRIDE training, aimed at revealing the systemic and implicit biases of such fraught categories as “best candidate” and “merit,” was mandatory for faculty assigned to search committees. Similar programs were adopted for tenure and promotion committees. Accountability, Climate, Equity, and Scholarship Faculty Fellows Program (ACES) fellowships sought to recruit minority candidates with “diversity skills” to A&M. Hate reporting systems were adopted to help transform the campus climate.

Over time, however, A&M administrators became frustrated at the campus’s lack of progress toward diverse and equitable inclusivity. The percentage of black students actually fell at A&M between 2010 and 2020, while the percentage of black faculty remained unchanged. More and more students, from all ethnic groups measured, felt excluded from campus life. Then came the death of George Floyd and the madness of the 2020 riots. A&M exploded with demands to remove statues and institute new DEI plans and mandates.

A&M administrators doubled down on DEI ideology in the 2020 State of Diversity Report. They attributed A&M’s shortcomings to the systemically racist A&M community. As they write, “problematic trends…are attributable to institutional practices, policies, mindsets, and cultures that persistently disadvantage Black students and sustain inequities.” Among the “systematic racist and discriminatory practices” that need to be dismantled are “innocuous-sounding words and sentiments such as meritocracy, legacy, color-blind, race-neutral, best-qualified, good fit and isolated incident.” These deceptively anodyne terms “have been used to establish and maintain racist and discriminatory practices and sentiments.”

The idea of merit itself, according to the Report, “masks ways in which certain groups have benefited and others have been excluded from access to networks and resources.” Color-blind hiring and admissions “mask favoritism, bias, and discriminatory practices.” Referring to a problematic event—such as the appearance of a speaker who doesn’t agree with the principles of DEI—as an “incident” (instead of as part of a system) is dangerous because it “implies that the occurrence is occasional, one-time, or an isolated event as opposed to an indicator of pervasive and systemic racism.” Anything that violates the norms of the equity regime must be scrutinized, and the racist motives behind it excavated, for the rot is always said to run deep.

The solution is to turn A&M into an institution that creates more leftist and anti-racist activists. “Pedagogy is the most powerful and effective form of activism…. We must all become education-activists. One can think of the 2020 State of Diversity Report as a roadmap for such activism.”

A&M’s DEI regime began with the claim that true meritocracy is inseparable from diversity, but it has ended with the claim that meritocracy is itself a racist idea.


-- excerpt, rest at link above --