EXCLUSIVE — Texas A&M University is being accused of actively discriminating against white and Asian faculty job applicants in a lawsuit filed by a conservative legal organization.
America First Legal filed the lawsuit last week on behalf of Richard Lowery, a professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin who says he is “able and ready” to apply for a job at Texas A&M but that the university’s racially preferential hiring system prevents him and other white and Asian men from fairly competing for open positions.
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“The racial preferences and set-asides established by Texas A&M prevent Professor Lowery from competing with other applicants for these faculty positions on an equal basis,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, claims the university “giv[es] discriminatory preferences to female or non-Asian minorities at the expense of white and Asian men” in its hiring practices for faculty positions, a practice the filing says is “patently illegal.”
“These discriminatory, illegal, and anti-meritocratic practices have been egged on by woke ideologues who populate the so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion offices at public and private universities throughout the United States,” the lawsuit says. “The existence of these offices is subverting meritocracy and encouraging wholesale violations of civil-rights laws throughout our nation’s university system.”
The lawsuit specifically cites a university office of diversity memo from July 8, 2022, that told all faculty deans that Texas A&M was charged with “expanding the capacity of low-income, first-generation Hispanic students, and other underserved students and their communities” because the university had been recognized by the Department of Education as a Hispanic-Serving Institution. (The department recognizes institutions with at least 25% Hispanic enrollment as such.)
According to the memo cited in the lawsuit, the university set aside additional salary funds for “new mid-career and senior tenure-track hires from underrepresented minority groups” through a university program meant to ensure the university’s faculty demographics were consistent with the state of Texas as a whole.
The memo defines underrepresented minority groups as “African Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians.”
“Texas A&M is basically setting aside faculty positions for what they deemed to be underrepresented minority groups in an effort to make their faculty ‘look like the state of Texas,’ which is a goal that they cannot achieve without engaging in blatant racial discrimination,” America First Legal Vice President and General Counsel Gene Hamilton told the Washington Examiner in an interview. “It’s egregious, it’s unlawful, and it cannot continue.”
Hamilton said it was noteworthy that the alleged racial discrimination was taking place at Texas A&M, a public university in a state with a conservative reputation.
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“The logical conclusion is that this must be happening to even a greater degree at other universities in places across the country that are not as perceived as conservative as Texas A&M,” Hamilton said, adding that America First Legal “stands ready, willing, and able to challenge this … blatant[ly] discriminatory hiring practice wherever it rears its ugly head.”
Texas A&M spokesman Laylan Copelin said in a statement to the Washington Examiner, “Granted, it’s an unusual job application when Mr. Lowery says in the lawsuit he is ‘able and ready’ to apply for a faculty appointment at Texas A&M. Our lawyers will review the lawsuit, confer with Texas A&M and take appropriate action as warranted.”
