Author: Sherry Sylvester

It has been observed that if California Gov. Gavin Newsom learned that the University of California system included professors and staff who persistently engaged in pushing free-market, merit-based achievement, and pro-capitalism messages, he would shut them down immediately.  If he found out that the administrations of state colleges and universities were almost exclusively made up of individuals whose only job is to promulgate theories of American exceptionalism, he would not hesitate to fire them all.

So how is it that state universities in Republican states like Texas persist in allowing taxpayer-funded universities and colleges to continue their war against the principles and ideals of entrepreneurialism and traditional values that have made our country great and Texas prosper? Left-wing thinking and crazy “woke” notions on race and gender are now the norm on virtually every Texas university campus. Students who have a different opinion are censored and, consequently, are too often afraid to speak up. Conservative professors are in constant fear of being identified and exiled.

At the University of Texas and most other Texas institutions, every teaching or administrative job applicant must provide what is known as a “diversity statement” explaining what they have done personally to further “diversity” in their professional career.

Diversity, along with equity and inclusion, are deeply rooted American values that embody our founding belief that all people are guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  However, in the woke world of college campuses, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have been twisted into code for an anti-American mindset based on the belief that racism and inequality dominate every aspect of American life including our commerce and culture and certainly the university.

Job applicants on Texas campuses must explain what steps they have taken and will take to make the university “anti-racist.” Job killing climate change policies and wealth redistribution are included under this required anti-racist, anti-American rubric. Guides on writing “diversity statements” warn applicants that saying “I treat all students equally” will be counted against them.

Requiring “diversity statements” means that every applicant must sign a statement affirming their commitment to left-wing Marxist ideology in order to get a job at a Texas college or university.

At Texas A&M University, fully 46 administrators, including deans with six-figure salaries, have the words DEI in their title. The University of Texas and Texas Tech have roughly the same number of DEI administrators.  Their job is to ensure that DEI is the framework for all curriculum and programming, keeping campus culture and environment firmly ensconced on the far left fringe. Leadership, merit, personal achievement and discipline are de-emphasized and discredited.

Students learn about identity politics and multi-culturalism with no freedom to challenge the concepts. They are taught to believe that all inequities in America are part of the legacy of slavery and cannot be overcome with on-going efforts to ensure equal access to opportunity. The DEI regime rejects historic civil rights laws and Title IX designed to protect everyone from discrimination, insisting instead on exclusionary efforts in hiring and student recruitment that ignore achievement in favor of preferences based exclusively on factors like race, ethnicity and gender.

When you wonder how the environment on Texas campuses got so far off track, DEI and other left-wing ideologies on college campuses are the answer—and they continue to do it all with funding from Texas taxpayers.

Even more importantly, these colleges and universities also train public school teachers, which is how these distorted ideas, including critical race theory, made it into public school curriculums.

Wokeism has existed for decades on college campuses, but it has now become ubiquitous in every aspect of American life. The root source of wokeism is academia.  It must be shut down and to do so will require a comprehensive strategy on several fronts. The accreditation cabal, which insulates campuses against public feedback and change must be drastically reformed. All DEI offices on the campuses of state colleges and universities must be closed and the use of left-wing litmus tests like diversity statements must be stopped.  DEI training must also be strictly prohibited.

Instead, our universities must aim to be truly inclusive ensuring that every Texas student can pursue their dreams.  Discrimination against any faculty member or student based on their point of view must end.  University boards must challenge faculty councils and reaffirm their commitment to intellectual freedom and open inquiry. Legislators (and taxpayers) must hold them accountable when they fail.

While a number of leaders of Texas colleges and universities support these reforms, the woke infrastructure anchored in faculty governance will fight back at every turn. In 2016, the Tennessee Legislature ended DEI at the University of Tennessee—the reforms lasted for about a year.  The academic leadership rolled over the new state laws as if they hadn’t passed.

Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick affirmed earlier this week that he is committed to challenging the forces at Texas academic institutions who suppress freedom of speech and intellectual diversity.  It’s time for every Texas legislator to stand up to entrenched DEI and wokeism on Texas college and university campuses. When it comes to higher education, Texas lawmakers need to ask themselves, if the situation were reversed at California colleges, “what would Gavin Newsom do?”

There’s a political tactic called “inoculation” that came into mainstream parlance in the Bill Clinton era—it’s a kind of pre-emptive strike designed to protect against expected attacks and allegations.

Going down to the wire to Election Day on Nov. 8, Texas Democrats have begun an inoculation strategy, deploying their strongest resource, the Texas press, to help blunt the reprisals that are sure to come when Texas voters once again reject their woke, left-leaning candidates.

Texas Democrats never reflect on what they did wrong when they lose. They never ask why Texans don’t vote for their big spending, anti-business, teacher-union backed, anti-fossil fuel candidates. Instead, many of them, particularly those in the media, will insist without evidence that Democrats were defeated by “voter suppression.” They will ignore the fact that 85% of Texans, including a majority of Democrats, support election accountability reforms.

We know there will be long, post-election analyses explaining that the deck is stacked against Democrats—because they have been delivering the same message since 2011 when photo voter ID passed. The media provides the groundwork for them to make these outrageous claims.

This year, after the primary election in March, Ross Ramsey at the Texas Tribune claimed that voter suppression was responsible for the fewer than 1% of mail-in ballots that may have been rejected because new reforms require those who vote by mail to have the same identification as those who vote in person. Most voters who had problems corrected their mail-in ballots or voted in-person.

There was a drop in mail-in ballots in March, but not because Democrat votes were being “suppressed.” About the same number of Democrats cast their ballots by mail in the 2022 primary as did in the last gubernatorial election in 2018, but in the largest 15 counties, Republicans who had voted by mail in the past decided to vote in person—a 40% drop.

It was no surprise to hear Ramsey echo President Joe Biden, who called election accountability reforms “Jim Crow 2.0” and likened Republican reformers to southern segregationists and even Jefferson Davis.

The Houston Chronicle won a Pulitzer Prize for making the same allegation, insisting that Texas politics has been rooted in racism and voter suppression since Reconstruction.  Its award winning editorial claims:

“[Election] Integrity is no more the goal for them [Texas Republican leadership] than it was for the white primary associations of the 1900s. Only today’s voter fraud warriors have laser pointers.”

Despite the Houston Chronicle’s big award, no serious evidence of voter suppression has emerged. States that have passed reforms, most notably Texas and Georgia, have seen voter turnout dramatically increase. Turnout in Texas increased 40% in the 2020 presidential election and 76% in the 2018 gubernatorial election.

Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre recently waived away that data saying bluntly that increased voter turnout and voter suppression can happen at the same time.  That is roughly equivalent to saying the sky is green.

During the 2020 election, a left-leaning group called the Election Protection Coalition reported 267 reports of voter intimidation in Texas but even they admit what their study reveals—almost all of those reports were in response to campaign rallies, not instances of people actually being prevented from voting.

Where are the victims of the election accountability reforms? A Texas Association of Business poll conducted during the 2021 legislative session found that fully 95% of Texans say it is easy to vote in this state. That’s Democrats, Republicans, and Independents—virtually everybody. Among the reforms in 2021, the two-week early voting period, one of the longest in the country, was extended to include more hours.

On October 20—two and a half weeks before the election, the liberal Brennan Center issued a big flashy report boldly proclaiming Massive Disenfranchisement and Racial Disparities in Texas giving the Texas press a hook to follow up with more matter-of-fact stories of voter suppression they insist are happening in Texas. Again, no victims emerge.

The Houston’s Chronicle’s Pulitzer Prize winning insistence that if it weren’t for voter suppression, Texas would be a Democrat state seems out of touch with reality. Still, you can expect to hear cries of “voter suppression” coming from Texas media analysts on Election Night—because press coverage of things like the Brennan Center report have teed it up for them. That’s how inoculation works.

A poll this fall from the University of Texas at Tyler and the Dallas Morning News found that fewer than 20% of Texans get their political news from the Texas media. This is why.

In 2007, when photo voter ID was first being debated in the Texas House, State Rep. Rafael Anchia, a leading Democrat leader from Dallas, spoke against it, telling his fellow legislators that they were targeting the wrong problem:  “…Vote by mail that we know is the greatest source of voter fraud in this state,” Anchia said.

Today, years after the Texas photo voter ID law finally passed and has the support of 85% of Texas voters, the left is still trying to get rid of the rules.

In the latest case, Texas State LULAC v. Paxton, which was just heard at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) argues that voters should not have to prove where they actually live when they register to vote. The Texas Public Policy Foundation has joined Attorney General Ken Paxton in arguing in support of new law that requires proof of residency.

When the left argued against photo voter ID, they said it was racist to make voters prove who they are. Now, they are using the same outrage to argue that requiring people to register to vote at their actual home—not their office or a house where they used to live or even a post office box—is somehow a violation of, among other things, the Fourteenth Amendment.

What is ironic about this is that the Fourteenth Amendment, which ensures the right of every citizen to vote, is also where representational voting is defined. Voters are apportioned by where they live so they can elect people to represent them. To do that, voters must demonstrate not only that they live in Texas, they must also show what county they live in, what city and what precinct. Because nobody actually lives at say, P.O. Box 431, a mailbox can’t be used without other proof of residency.

The people at LULAC undoubtedly know this, but that’s not the point of this lawsuit.  Instead, they went to court to challenge the law as part of the same old media strategy to paint Texas election laws as some kind of “voter suppression” plan.

LULAC certainly aren’t the only people pushing the “voter suppression” lie in Texas.  Earlier this year, the left-wing Houston Chronicle won a Pulitzer Prize for accusing Texas election reforms of “voter suppression” going so far as predicting that the state would lose more than $31 billion in economic activity and 223,000 jobs by 2025 because of backlash over photo voter ID and other election reforms. In fact, Texas lost no money and zero jobs because of election reforms.

And who can forget the Texas House Democrats who shut down the Texas House in 2021 and flew to Washington D.C. to protest the “voter suppression” in the election reforms bill? A Texas Public Policy Foundation poll showed that Texans opposed the walkout by a 2-to-1 margin. The Democrats returned home with their tails between their legs and never mentioned it again.

The Democrats’ stunt didn’t pay off because the whole idea that anyone who is eligible to vote in Texas is intentionally prevented from voting just doesn’t hold water. Voter turnout in Texas increased 40% in the 2020 presidential election and 76% in the 2018 gubernatorial election. In 2012, 58% of registered Texans voted but in 2020, almost 67% voted.

A Texas Association of Business poll conducted last year found that 95% of Texans said it was easy to vote here. That’s Democrats, Republicans, Independents, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, everybody. The same poll found that 81% of Texans believe the identifications requirements for voters should be the same for voting in person as they are by mail. Anyone who votes in-person in Texas knows that the first thing they ask you when you show up to vote is “what is your address?”

As Rep. Anchia pointed out years ago, mail-in ballot fraud has been a long-standing problem in Texas because mail-in ballots are inherently less secure. There is no way to guarantee that the ballot was received or filled out by the voter who applied for it. The “protections” that were in place in the past, including matching of signatures, proved meaningless.

Texans have dealt with mail-in ballot fraud for decades and they want it to end. That’s why the Legislature instituted common sense mail-in ballot reforms to ensure Texans have elections they can trust, and why Attorney General Paxton and TPPF are fighting in court to protect them.

Despite the bleak report on learning loss following pandemic school closures, Texas got some very good news last week with the release of the annual A-F school ratings. Fully 95% of the 38 school districts and 10 charter systems in the Region One Education Service Center area received either an A or B rating in the latest round of state public school grading, compared with 87% for school districts statewide.

Region One includes Laredo and runs south through the Rio Grande Valley to Hidalgo County. Region One also had the most individual campuses of any other district in the state receiving an A grade. The vast majority of the students in Region One are economically disadvantaged or living in poverty, and 96% are Hispanic.

If we’d left it up to the teachers’ unions, we would never know how well the students in Region One were doing. Leadership in Texas’ public schools, including teachers unions, school administrators and school boards fought against enacting an A-F grading system  for Texas public schools for almost a decade. They spent millions to convince Texas lawmakers that holding public schools accountable with an A-F letter grade—like we do public school students—was a threat to our children and communities. They insisted that poor schools and poor communities would get bad grade ratings that would stigmatize the children and their schools.

Superintendents flocked to the Legislature to argue that A-F ratings ignored the “real” problem—which was the lack of funding. Sen. Sylvia Garcia, then a Houston state senator and now a member of Congress, said called A-F “redlining.” She added, “Poor performance is more because of lack of resources than anything else. I would really caution us from getting into any scheme that redlines school districts.”

A-F opponents said the old pass/fail rating system was good enough. Before A-F was established, a school was rated either “Met Standard” or “Needs Improvement.” Those ratings obscured any real problems at schools from parents and the community—and that was the point. It is hard for parents to demand that schools do better if they don’t know how they are performing in the first place. Teachers unions and school administrators predicted the results would be obvious—poor kids would do poorly in school, and those schools would get bad grades. These educators had apparently never heard of the idea of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Teachers unions were so afraid of being held accountable for the performance of their students that in 2017, when A-F ratings finally passed the Texas Legislature, they demanded that the ratings only be given to school districts for the first year—not individual campuses.

Teachers unions fought against A-F ratings until the last minute before they were finally released, but once the public school ratings came out, the lies of the teachers unions, school administrators and school boards became crystal clear.

Region One in the Rio Grande Valley established the record that it repeated last week. No Region One school was graded lower than a B. Teachers in those schools proudly talked about the positive impact of having high expectations and a “no excuses” attitude when it comes to their students.

They also talked about innovative ideas including making sure that their students were fed—both breakfast and lunch. Both meals are known to be key factors in improving school performance.

Parents love A-F ratings. If their child’s school is doing poorly, they want to know why. They get engaged, and, if possible, they can make another choice. Many parents have no idea that their elected officials, school administrators and teachers had been working against A-F ratings for years.

That’s partly because teacher-union backed lawmakers who had led the battle against A-F showed up at A-rated schools for a photo ops and pretended they’d supported A-F all along. About a third of public schools were A-rated this year, including schools that are in low-income communities.

In terms of the Rio Grande Valley, there are a number of factors in play that likely led to the high quality of public schools there, including a strong network of charter schools, which fostered competitiveness in innovative teaching strategies.

Of course, teachers unions are now fighting charter school expansion too, just like they fought to keep schools closed during the pandemic and they tried to block A-F school ratings in Texas. They also oppose increasing transparency in schools and expanding parent empowerment and increasing parental choice. Clearly, their track record is no good when it comes to our children. Parents and policymakers should ignore them.

It has been said that Texas is the best expression of the American idea—and Red McCombs is one of the best expressions of everything it means to be a Texan. He came from a tiny town in the southern panhandle, started as an Edsel salesman in Corpus Christi and went onto become one of the richest men in the world. McCombs has been enormously generous in so many ways throughout his life—a gift to the Lone Star State that keeps on giving.

An advertising genius who, literally, invented product placement, McCombs’ business successes have contributed to Texas’ growth and economic prosperity in a dozen different ways. In my hometown of San Antonio, he is known for bringing NBA basketball to our city with the Spurs. The key for him in his first professional sports venture was understanding the importance of television in moving San Antonio onto a national stage.

When the movie “The Alamo” was being filmed in 1960 at Bracketville, McCombs sought out John Wayne and got him to agree to open the film in San Antonio, pulling the klieg lights and red carpet out of Hollywood and into downtown San Antonio again, putting Texas on the map.

McCombs also brought Formula 1 racing to the United States after he learned that over 1 billion people watched those races. The possibilities of a billion viewers around the globe all looking at Texas motivated him to make sure the “Circuit of the Americas” was located here.

McCombs has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to all kinds of charities in Texas including the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. In 2000, he contributed $50 million dollars to establish the Red McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, a gift which leveraged an additional $100 million to ensure that the state that has repeatedly been identified over the past two decades as the best state for business anywhere in America has a first-class business school.

Knowing what McCombs has done for the state and for the University of Texas, you can imagine how outrageous it was to see that when the template for the fall schedule at the McCombs School was released this week it included a warning for students that some business topics may be “traumatic.” Professors must promise to give their students a heads up if some really scary business topic is about to be discussed.

Are they kidding? Anyone who knows Red McCombs knows he is not afraid of anything.

There are also directions requiring every professor to “identify their pronouns (she/he/they/zhe).”

Zhe?

They seem to be serious. There is an entire section on “personal pronoun preference.”

Farther down in the syllabus template, professors are directed to let their students know that they “acknowledge that we are meeting on the Idigenous [sic] lands of Turtle Island, the ancestral name for what is now North America.” They must also affirm: “I would like to acknowledge that Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo/Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Kickapoo, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa, Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo and all the American and Indigenous Peoples who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories of Texas.”

The Comanche arrived in Texas after the Spanish, so why aren’t those great minds over at the prestigious “40 Acres” acknowledging that they are on the lands of Carlos III de Bourbon, His Most Catholic Majesty and King of Spain? And the “Turtle Island” reference is nonsense. It’s a creation story from native tribes in the Northeast, not Texas.

The point is, why aren’t professors at the McCombs School of Business required to inform their students that if it weren’t for Red McCombs, they wouldn’t have a building, desks or, indeed, a business school?

Furthermore, McCombs School of Business students should know that McCombs is one of those Texas giants who understood from the beginning that Texas—now the best reflection of the American idea—is not an accident. It has been and continues to be a hard-fought battle to maintain a state where freedom and liberty are harnessed to ensure businesses are free to innovate to create jobs and prosperity for all. McCombs never walked away from that fight.

Texas universities are on very shaky grounds these days. Enrollment is plummeting because students are no longer willing to pay outrageous tuition to have a steady diet of “pronoun protocols” and “land acknowledgements” shoved down their throats. They have also had it with the constant drum beat of so-called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI), which actually means exclusion, injustice and essentially a stacked deck for anyone who does not genuflect to the woke ideology that is destroying our colleges.

Other states are fighting back. Florida passed a “Stop Woke” Individual Freedom law designed to eliminate these kinds of ridiculous and divisive antics on campus and to affirm the principles of actual equality, merit and hard work. It requires that students be reminded that in America, we work together to overcome challenges and hardships—we don’t band together to blame others for them.

The University of Texas needs to wake up before somebody shows this syllabus to Red McCombs—and he demands his money back.

When I saw a June 30, Texas Tribune a story headlined: “State education board members push back on proposal to use “involuntary relocation” to describe slavery,” it was immediately clear that it was riddled with inaccuracies, misinformation and blatant left wing propaganda, but it was such non-news that it hardly seemed worth the effort to challenge it. The Texas media – particularly the Texas Tribune — is dogmatic and unapologetic and cannot be reasoned with or even shamed into caring about the truth.

But then the story, misinformation and all, was picked up nationally and the San Antonio Express-News published an equally uninformed and outraged editorial complete with a 48 point headline, and it became imperative to point out the facts.

The media uses several tactics to create and repeat false narratives day after day, both in the stories they write and the stories they ignore. In the Texas Tribune story about the Texas State Board of Education [SBOE] it’s clear how they made 2 plus 2 equal 5 by reporting a tidbit of non-news and linking it to a left-wing narrative. Here’s the opening line:

A group of Texas educators have proposed to the Texas State Board of Education that slavery should be taught as “involuntary relocation” during second grade social studies instruction, but board members have asked them to reconsider the phrasing, according to the state board’s chair.

The “group of Texas educators” were volunteers who were making suggestions to the professional historians who advise the SBOE on curriculum. As soon as term “involuntary relocation” was pointed out, it was immediately rejected by everyone in the meeting.

It is not clear from the news report why the SBOE was looking at what was essentially an un-reviewed draft of some suggestions from these teachers, but whoever proposed the term “involuntary relocation” did not defend it. The volunteers were told to go back to the drawing board. There was no discussion or debate regarding the term “involuntary relocation” and there was never any chance it would show up in a Texas classroom or a text book.

Still CBS national news reported that Texas officials propose changing slavery to “involuntary relocation” and Forbes Magazine joined dozens of other media outlets in repeating and adding new misinformation to the Tribune news report. Their headline was: Downplaying Slavery, Texas educators will call it “involuntary relocation.”

Brian Lopez, the Tribune reporter who wrote the story, intentionally created this controversy by embellishing his news story with several statements from other educators who were adamant about the inappropriateness of the term “involuntary relocation.” He gives the impression that it was only their outrage that stopped “involuntary relocation” from being substituted for slavery in Texas public school classes.

If Lopez had been interested in reporting facts, he could have added that the term “involuntary relocation,” was in a section of the proposal entitled “Enslaved People in America.” He could also have talked with any of the prominent historians who are actually developing the content for the social studies curriculum and given his readers some insight into that process.

He might also have explained that the new social studies guidelines for K-2 were being developed for the first time because the SBOE decided this spring that history will now be taught in every grade. Previously history and social studies were only taught in Texas in the 4^th and 7^th grades.

Instead he “explained” that slavery is not currently taught in second grade.

By throwing the word “slavery” into his story, he can then falsely blame Senate Bill 3, the ban on using critical race theory as a basis for instruction in Texas public schools, for the “involuntary relocation” wording.

He chooses words like “dictates” to suggest that Senate Bill 3 restricts or even prohibits teaching about slavery in Texas schools. In fact, Senate Bill 3 makes it clear that slavery and the issues surrounding it must be taught. A few of the minimum requirements for history students include learning the basic facts of the civil war, reading the writings of Frederick Douglas, reading both fugitive slave acts and “the history of white supremacy, including the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong…”

Reporter Lopez then returns to a familiar and inaccurate talking point for him — that Texas conservatives are restricting the teaching of slavery in schools in reaction to critical race theory which he insists is not being taught in Texas schools. To “prove” his point he links to several teachers who insist they never teach it. He ignores the fact that Texas public schools have frequently been found to use the precepts of critical race theory, which states that racism permeates every American institution and all white people are racists, whether they know it or not.

In fact, Senate Bill 3 ensures that, in Texas public schools, no child can be blamed for any action because of their race. It also affirms that no child will be regarded as a victim solely because of their race or ethnicity.

In order to get in one more slam against conservatives, none of whom are quoted in his story, he finishes his phony narrative that the teaching of slavery is restricted in public schools by noting that both the Texas governor and the lieutenant governor have announced their support for the so-called “Don’t Say Gay,” bill which he says “limits classroom discussions about LGBTQ people.”

As everybody except the left-wing press seems to know, that Florida legislation limits discussions of sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.

There’s no prohibition against saying “gay” in schools in Florida and few seriously question that it’s inappropriate for teachers to discuss sexual orientation and gender identity with 5, 6 and 7 year olds. But the Texas Tribune goes with the inaccurate spin rather than the facts to feed their false, anti-Texas narrative. It is difficult to say what is the most inaccurate and biased news outlet in Texas, but the Texas Tribune is always a top contender.