Christopher Rufo has obtained a cache of documents from the University of Texas, and if you’ve wondered how extensive the rot is at UT Austin, wonder no more.
The University of Texas has created a radical DEI bureaucracy that equates “objectivity” with “white supremacy,” recommends the word “wimmin” as a replacement for “women,” and affirms “polyamory” and “polyfidelity” as positive sexual identities.
I have obtained a cache of documents through public-records requests revealing the DEI bureaucracy’s stunning conquest of Texas’s flagship state university.
The transformation began in the aftermath of the George Floyd riots, when university officials adopted the narrative of critical race theory, arguing that America was saturated with “white supremacy.” During this period, UT’s College of Communication promoted the idea that “objectivity,” “individualism,” and “worship of the written word” were all “characteristics of white supremacy culture.” As a professor of educational psychology and African and African Diaspora Studies explained, “white supremacy is so pernicious . . . it is responsible for virtually every ill that we see within our communities.”
This narrative justified a massive expansion of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programming. The university’s DEI bureaucracy has now embedded itself within virtually every administrative and academic unit. These programs employ dozens of full-time staff and organize hundreds of seminars, trainings, courses, reports, student groups, and political activism.
One example is the university’s Multicultural Engagement Center. The MEC manages racially segregated student groups, hosts workshops on “social justice” activism, and explicitly trains students to “be the agents of social change,” as opposed to dispassionate and careful scholars. The program’s workshops follow the basic narrative of critical race theory: America is a nation defined by “systemic inequities,” one that accrues “social benefits that some people have because of their identities,” and in which minorities endure a constant barrage of “microaggressions,” “microinsults,” “microassaults,” and “microinvalidations.”
For the MEC, identity is the foundation of politics. The program’s workshop series begins by focusing students on their identities and categorizing them along the axis of oppressor and oppressed. In the “Power and Privilege” training, MEC administers a “Privilege Self-Assessment,” which includes checkboxes about race, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
According to intersectionality theory, “dominant group[s]”—that is, white, straight, cis-gender (identifying as the sex one is born as), male, Christians—occupy the oppressor role, and, consequently, must work to “equalize power.” To that end, the MEC proposes a series of “action steps,” in which students are instructed to “acknowledge whatever privilege [they] have,” “be an ally for those who do not have privilege,” and work on “undermining the system of oppression and privilege that hurts all of us.”
The ultimate goal of the program is political activism. The MEC directly instructs students to “lobby, organize, campaign, protest, recognize, and act against both external and internal forms of oppression and privilege”—in other words, to use the publicly funded university system as a base for partisan, left-wing advocacy.
The other primary ideological line for the university’s DEI bureaucracy is radical gender theory. The Gender and Sexuality Center is the center for the perpetuation of queer theory and transgender activism on campus. The GSC manages several student groups and activist programs, which promote the narrative that American society is overrun with “systematic, institutional, pervasive, intentional (or subconscious), and routine mistreatment” of women and sexual minorities.
The sexuality training seminars begin with a “land acknowledgement,” implying that European whites are illegitimate colonizers on land “traditionally inhabited by Comanche, Coahuiltecan, Apache, Tonkawa, [and] Mexica” tribal populations. As with race, the university promotes the idea that straight, heterosexual students must atone for their “cisgender privilege” and “heterosexual privilege.” On the other hand, following the logic of intersectionality, administrators promote the adoption and automatic affirmation of anti-normative sexual identities such as “non-binary,” “pansexual,” “asexual,” “queer,” “transgender,” and “two-spirit”—all of which offer an avenue for sexual liberation.
Following the ideology of queer theory, the GSC wants to “break the binary” between man and woman. The university recommends against using terms such as “ladies,” “gentlemen,” “boys,” and “girls” in favor of genderless language and neologisms, such as “babefriend” and “datefriend.” In addition, UT provides a guidebook for the use of pseudo-pronouns, such as “they/them” and “ze/zir,” and instructs students to “apologize right away” if they violate usage rules. If not, administrators note, students could be found in violation of the official non-discrimination policy, with potentially severe consequences.
Finally, the GSC has published guidebooks on sexuality, including materials affirming the practices of “asexuality” and “polyamory.” In a document titled “Affirming Asexuality,” the university explains that “unlike celibacy, which people choose, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who we are.” Students are instructed that they may be “gray-sexuals,” who “experience sexual attraction infrequently,” or even “demisexuals,” who can “experience sexual attraction only after developing a close emotional bond with someone.”
The GSC also promotes “polyamory” and “polyfidelity,” which the university describes, respectively, as “the practice of loving multiple people simultaneously” and as “a group in which all partners are primary to all other partners and sexual fidelity is to the group.” These anti-normative sexualities are presented as glamorous and progressive, with the university offering students resources on “coming out” as polyamorous and navigating “multiple-partner relationships and families.” The GSC includes a recommendation for practicing “pagan polyamory” and connects students to a local polyamory organization that advertises a “kink based social networking site” and “live performances about sexuality.”
The University of Texas at Austin is wasting untold millions on race and gender narcissism. Its DEI bureaucracy has embraced every fashionable left-wing delusion, from pseudoscientific concepts such as “post-traumatic slave syndrome” to preposterous language substitutions like “wimmin,” which the university recommends in place of “women,” so that students and faculty can “avoid the word ending ‘-men.’”
Both the overwhelming majority of Texas voters have rejected radical leftwing social justice, and Texas state government officials have constantly issued rulings and memos designed to reign in or eliminate critical race theory, transgenderism and other social justice madness metastasizing under the DEI rubric.
This has obviously proved insufficient.
It’s up to the UT board of regents to demand a stop to this cancer. Both the Multicultural Engagement Center and the Gender and Sexuality Center need to be eliminated and everyone involved with them handed a pink slip, and then all the remaining DEI weeds need to be pulled out by the roots. And if they won’t do it, then Governor Greg Abbott (who appoints the board) needs to replace them with people who will.
Tags: Christopher Rufo, education, Gender and Sexuality Center, Multicultural Engagement Center (UT), Social Justice Warriors, Texas, University of Texas, UT Board of Regents
When the leftists give up electricity and clean water, have some human sacrifice of indigenous people to stop global warming, then we can talk.
Until then, they are just white people complaining about how easy life is.
Has Governor Abbott shown any sign of addressing this problem? Has he even publicly spoken about what is happening at UT? For all I can see, the Governor acts like this isn’t a problem at all. I’d dearly love to be mistaken about him.
Reality will ensue for most of these idiots, eventually. The thing that irks me is how many of “the rest of us” are going to get caught up in the gears when it does.
I have to wonder, though… How blind, stupid, and generally obtuse do you have to be to miss the fact that once they’ve succeeded in discrediting the institutions they take over, then the whole point of having taken them over evaporates?
Why should anyone accept a credential from UT, at this point? What value does it have? Who can rely on one of their alumni being anything other than an indoctrinated dipwit?
Same with the media; what value does Fox News have, now that they’ve blown their credibility? Their audience?
No matter what, objective truth and actual consequence will have their due; you can’t hide from either one. You either succeed, or you fail. You cannot actually hide from any of that, no matter what. The fat lady sings, the curtains go down, and the audience has to go home. You can’t pull fraud on this scale off, and the real facts about these institution’s credentials being essentially worthless will manifest themselves in hiring decisions. I already know of a couple of local firms who automatically “circular file” any resume coming in with an Ivy League diploma listed on it, mostly because of disastrous experience with the people holding such worthless things.
The Boston University alumnae who haven’t sued the University out of existence for having granted a diploma in Economics to AOC are idiots. Single-handedly, she’s turned their entire educational effort into a sad joke… Just like the rest of this nation’s academics.
I have a friend who is an Associate Professor in one of the liberal arts departments at UT. She’s won awards both for her scholarship and for her teaching, and for many years taught undergraduate classes.
During one recent lecture, she spotted a student wearing a sweatshirt bearing the seal of my friend’s *alma mater*. She told the class that was where she’d gotten her degree, and told the student she looked good in the sweatshirt.
Not long after, my friend was contacted by the UT Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. She was informed that an anonymous student had complained that she had violated standards by commenting on another student’s appearance. She was summoned to various meetings where she was told the error of her ways, lawyers were contacted, weeks of paperwork went on, and finally a stern letter was placed in her permanent record.
Rather than continue to teach in an environment like that, my friend is taking early retirement. It’s a loss of a very well-liked, well-respected educator.
I doubt that hers is the only story like that at UT. The DDCE has to justify its existence by prosecuting wrongthink, and to that end has turned students into anonymous snitches. It’s a deeply unhealthy, fearful, paranoid environment on campus. A bad environment for either scholarship or educating— but an ideal environment for indoctrination.
[…] EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The DEI Rot At UT. “Christopher Rufo has obtained a cache of documents from the University of Texas, and if […]
As a therapist I can tell you the most miserable clients are the ones who have bought the whole DEI stuff hook, line and sinker. They are constantly seeking to find ways in which they experience microaggressions and they are completely blind to how their negative mindset actually contributes to their negative experience of life.
and memos designed to reign in or eliminate critical race theory, transgenderism and other social justice mad
The expression is “rein in”. Horses, not kings.
SB17, which has passed the Senate, would at least *start* to address the DEI rot at UT and other state universities. It’s not perfect (the Senate watered down enforcement a lot), but it would be a start.
And yet very early this morning, thanks to our wonderful RINO House speaker (who is reported to be against it) and his equally spineless henchmen, SB17 was left stranded in the higher ed committee, apparently because they realized that if they passed the EXTREMELY watered-down committee substitute, it would likely get amended back to the Senate version, either on the House floor or in the Conference Committee.
Phuck Phelan. Just another RINO crook like his mentor Joe Straus.
Perhaps Texas is not the bastion of liberty that they want us to think. Check the Texas House of Representatives which can’t seem to pass the conservative bills that the Texas Senate has already passed.
“Has Governor Abbott shown any sign of addressing this problem? Has he even publicly spoken about what is happening at UT? For all I can see, the Governor acts like this isn’t a problem at all. I’d dearly love to be mistaken about him.”
You’re not mistaken.
It was only after John Sailer’s WSJ expose on the use of “diversity statements” as political litmus tests in hiring at Texas Tech did Abbott’s chief of staff come out with a modest statement against DEI a few weeks back. Abbott himself has been AWOL on this for years, and the spineless wonders he has appointed as regents of state universities have done nothing to stop it. Indeed, longtime UT critic Mark Pulliam got an audience with Abbott’s chief adviser on higher ed a few years back, and was essentially told Abbott didn’t see anything wrong with the wokism that was taking hold at UT and other state schools.
Former UT regent Wallace Hall (the last UT regent to actually take his oversight / fiduciary responsibilities seriously) has said that the biggest impediment to higher education reform in the state is Greg Abbott. From what I have seen, he’s 100% correct.
“worship of the written word” were all “characteristics of white supremacy culture.”
So have they cancelled their English department yet?
For Rick Perry’s problems, he at least believed the things he talked about. Abbott is all about telling the rabble what he thinks they want to hear.
I was the first of 145 registered witnesses on Senate Bill 17 before the House Committee on Higher Education last night‚ and I gave testimony at about 11pm. So, the Committee was in for a very long night. I don’t know when the witnesses finished, but I’m not surprised that the Committee adjourned before debating and voting on the bill. If you’d like to read my testimony: http://philosophical.space/SB17Testimony.pdf
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I’ve seen some of the testimony from various Texas school officials, in which they say if SB17 is passed, they nevertheless intend to continue doing exactly what they are doing now.
What they are claiming, of course, is that DEI is just this innocuous, friendly, cuddly bunch of nice people trying to help students feel welcome. But as Rufo and others (such as Prof. Bonevac and me) have extensively documented, the reality is VERY different. University official do indeed intend to defy any law against DEI practices (like Kendian discrimination against white and Asian men) because they believe such practices are moral imperatives.
That the university officials believe they are above the law is nothing new. When publicly confronted by UT dissident prof Rich Lowery about UT’s DEI initiative, UT President Jay Hartzell justified (on camera, no less) UT’s race-based hiring preferences as being necessary to provide a sufficient number of faculty “role models” of the same demographics as “underrepresented” groups. Only one problem: SCOTUS declared race based hiring in education based on a “role model” justification to be illegal almost 40 years ago (Wygant case). That’s been clearly established law for decades . . . but Hartzell believes it doesn’t apply to him.
That’s my issue with SB17 as currently written. The substance of the bill is good, but the enforcement is pretty toothless, and school officials are already stating they will just ignore/evade the law. Had they gone with the private right of action that was in the original drafts of the legislation, school officials that act in defiance of the law would have been personally liable, and that would have solved the problem in very short order.
But I don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. SB17 as written is at least a start. If Phelan and his minions block it, the Texas GOP has no one to blame but itself.
They are constantly seeking to find ways in which they experience microaggressions and they are completely blind to how their negative mindset actually contributes to their negative experience of life.
I’ve heard some people described as “grievance collectors” — they focus on negative experiences and obsess on them. Sounds like DEI is intended to both create grievance collectors and make them supremely sensitive to perceiving normal incidences as insults.
When will Boards of Regents for State universities across the country start to do their jobs? When will the States’ Governors and Legislatures start to demand they do so – or replace their members with people who will?
RonF:
In the case of UT, the answer is “never.”
After Gov. Perry appointed Wallace Hall as a UT regent, and Hall uncovered all sorts of slimy dealings on campus (e.g., secret admissions for children of politicians, slush fund for allies of the UT Law School dean, etc.), the politicians struck back. They tried to impeach Hall for doing his job, and then Gov. Abbott refused to reappoint him.
Worse, the UT Board then adopted a rule that regents cannot do ANYTHING that’s not on the official meeting agenda . . . and what goes on the agenda is controlled solely by Chairman Eltife. As such, all the board can do / discuss is what Eltife wants them to.
Ergo, let’s say I’m on the UT board and I want to open an investigation into DEI activities on campus. If Eltife (who is a complete tool) doesn’t agree to put it on the agenda, I can’t do it on my own, and if I do so it’s grounds for me being removed for the board.
But more fundamentally, who is Abbott appointing as regents? (Recall he’s appointed 100% of the regents of state schools.) He’s not appointing Chris Rufos or Wallace Halls. Instead, he’s appointing donor class potted plants who will just cheerlead for the school (and enjoy the perks of overseeing a $60 billion endowment), with retread politicians like Eltife and John Sharp (chair of the TAMU board, who I understand has similar power) in complete charge.
Aaaaaand . . . agenda for the final meeting of the House Higher Education committee is up. Guess what: none of the anti-DEI bills that passed the Senate will get a committee vote.
Apparently, Phelan and his minions were worried that if the watered down versions they had written (which they didn’t share with those opposed to DEI, but instead leaked them to the hard left Texas Tribune) were voted on, they would have passed the committee, and would then have been amended back to the Senate version either on the House floor or in the conference committee. So instead they killed the bills by not voting on them at all.
The Texas RINOs strike again.