[Editor's note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]
By Tony Kinnett
The Daily Signal
Public universities in Texas are in the sights of the latest undercover investigation by the Accuracy in Media team to reveal schools’ flagrant disregard for the law in red states.
“Now that a number of states have prohibited DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and critical race theory in higher education, we decided to take our cameras to those universities to find out if they were actually adhering to the law,” Adam Guillette, president of Accuracy in Media, told The Daily Signal in a recent interview.
“Not surprisingly, a half-dozen universities in Texas, funded by our tax dollars, had administrators that bragged to us about how they ignored the law,” Guillette said.
Accuracy in Media’s latest investigation produced undercover footage showing administrators at the University of Texas at Tyler, Tarleton State, the University of North Texas, and the University of Texas at Dallas skirting state laws that forbid racially discriminatory offices and programs at public universities and colleges.
Administrators such as Tarecka Payne, director of “student belonging” at the University of Texas at Tyler, told an undercover reporter for Accuracy in Media that the university had changed the name of its DEI office three times to subvert the ban that Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed into law last year.
Accuracy in Media’s investigation also uncovered a “transition closet” at the University of Texas at Dallas, where students could change into clothes they thought more appropriate to their gender or sexual preferences. Although the school can’t call it a “transition closet” any longer, it does provide a “diverse selection of clothing so it is not identified as a closet for transitioners,” Guillette said.
Guillette told The Daily Signal that the University of North Texas had changed the name of its DEI office to the Department of Belonging.
“I imagine if a conservative went in [to that department] feeling like they don’t necessarily belong on campus, they’d be laughed right out of the room,” Guillette quipped in the Feb. 16 interview.
A torrent of investigations and whistleblowers have shown that DEI programs routinely discriminate along racial and sexual lines.
White male students at Arizona State University were surrounded by other students, yelled at, and told “This space isn’t for you” when they tried to sit and study in a so-called multicultural space on campus in 2021.
The Supreme Court ruled in June 2023 that Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against white, Jewish, and Asian students in their admissions processes.
Guillette told The Daily Signal that these discriminatory departments at colleges and universities aren’t just limited to liberal states.
“This isn’t Boulder. This isn’t Berkeley. This is Texas Tech, A&M, University of North Dallas, and colleges like that,” he said. “These aren’t what we would think of as radically left universities.”
Regardless of public perception, practices at many of the universities in conservative or “red” states are still just as discriminatory, and administrators appear willing to do whatever it takes to sneak around regulations.
Although the University of Houston no longer is allowed to directly host a “lavender graduation ceremony” exclusive to “LGBTQ students,” Associate Director of Student Advocacy Kevin Nguyen told Accuracy in Media, responsibility for the exclusive event has been passed down to “student organizations.”
Guillette told The Daily Signal that he believes such findings demand “major funding cuts and a major reshaping of how we view public education in the higher education space in America.”
“Why are we taking tax dollars from people by force to fund degrees that are nothing but radical ideology and will never help anyone get a job?” Guillette asked about woke degree programs at public universities. “The honest answer, of course, is that these universities don’t exist to educate anyone, any more so than K-12 does.”
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by The Daily Signal.]
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