Last week, America First Legal (AFL) filed a class-action lawsuit against Texas A&M University over the university’s racially discriminatory faculty hiring programs.
According to their website, America First Legal’s mission is, ” to save our country from this coordinated campaign. With your support, we will oppose the radical left’s anti-jobs, anti-freedom, anti-faith, anti-borders, anti-police, and anti-American crusade. For years, progressives have used the court system to attack our founding documents, undermine the rule of law, and erode our nation’s most cherished principles and traditions.”
“With America First Legal, we are turning the legal tables on the radical activist left. We will wage a forceful defense of our rights, our country, and our cherished American way of life.”
AFL’s Board is led by senior members of the Trump Administration who were at the forefront of the America First movement including Stephen Miller , former Senior Advisor to the President, Mark Meadows former White House Chief of Staff, Matthew Whitaker former Acting United States Attorney General, as Chief of Staff to the Attorney General, Russ Vought, former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Gene Hamilton, former Counselor to the Attorney General at the United States Department of Justice.
Additional Board members include Gene Hamilton, Counselor to the Attorney General at the United States Department of Justice from 2017-2021, Ed Corrigan, C.E.O. and President of the Conservative Partnership Institute, and Wesley Denton, Chief Operating Officer of the Conservative Partnership Institute.
A University of Texas at Austin professor has sued Texas A&M University claiming a new faculty fellowship program designed to increase diversity at the flagship university in College Station discriminates against white and Asian male candidates.
Richard Lowery, a finance professor at UT-Austin who is white, filed the federal class-action lawsuit on Saturday against the Texas A&M University System and its board of regents; Annie McGowan, Texas A&M’s vice president and associate provost for diversity; and N.K. Anand, Texas A&M’s vice president for faculty affairs.
Texas A&M has engaged in a discriminatory hiring practice, choosing which candidates to hire based on their race or sex.
In June, Texas A&M announced in an email to all of its deans that, based on its designation as a Hispanic Serving Institution by the United States Department of Education, it had been “charged with expanding the capacity of low-income, first-generation Hispanic students, and other underserved students and their communities.” Texas A&M stated that “increasing opportunities for underserved students to interact and engage with faculty that share their ethnic, life, and cultural experiences are essential to achieving this goal. The presence of faculty of color is also integral to the University’s mission to provide the highest quality of undergraduate and graduate education and develop new understandings through research and creativity.”
So Texas A&M created the “ACES Plus” Fellowship–ACES standing for “Accountability, Climate, Equity, and Scholarship”–dedicating $2 million dollars to provide matching base salary and benefits for “new mid-career and senior tenure-track hires from underrepresented minority groups, that contribute to moving the structural composition of our faculty towards parity with that of the State of Texas.” White and Asian applicants do not qualify.
Additionally, Texas A&M has established faculty-hiring lines that are reserved exclusively for members of “underrepresented” racial minorities.” AFL obtained an email confirming that this practice was occuring, and that positions were being set aside that were not available for White and Asian applicants.
AFL argues that the practices violate the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
The lawsuit asks the Court to:
- certify a class of all White and Asian men who stand ready and able to apply for faculty positions at Texas A&M;
- declare that Texas A&M is violating Title VI, Title IX, 42 U.S.C. § 1981(a), and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment;
- permanently enjoin Texas A&M from considering race or sex in the appointment, promotion, or compensation of its faculty;
- appoint a court monitor to oversee all decisions relating to the appointment, promotion, and compensation of faculty at Texas A&M to ensure that these decisions are free from race and sex discrimination of any sort, and require that all decisions relating to the appointment, promotion, and compensation of faculty at Texas A&M be pre-cleared by this Court;
- appoint a court monitor to oversee the “diversity office” at Texas A&M to ensure that it does not aid or abet violations of the nation’s civil-rights laws.
AFL President Stephen Miller says of the lawsuit,
“History is being made today. America First Legal has filed a landmark class action lawsuit against Texas A&M University for its illegal and unconstitutional racial discrimination regime. Texas A&M is hiring—and excluding—professors solely due to the physical appearance of their skin or the ancestry of their family tree. This is vile and outrageous. We must extract the poison of bigotry coursing deep through the leadership of Texas A&M and restore civil rights and equality for all. Our lawsuit will send tremors through our corrupt institutions of ‘higher learning’ making clear that racial discrimination will be met with righteous legal action in our courts of law. This action is being taken through AFL’s new Center for Legal Equality, which continues to blaze new trails for justice in America,” said Stephen Miller.
The full lawsuit can be read here.
