Texas Tech Health Sciences Center agrees to stop considering race in admissions, ending federal inquiry

The Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center has agreed to stop considering race in its admissions decisions, part of an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education that may be a bellwether for how the agency approaches colleges' affirmative action practices going forward.

The voluntary agreement, entered into in February, concludes a 14-year investigation into the Lubbock-based school, which operates independently of Texas Tech University within the Texas Tech University System. The center's programs include pharmacy, nursing and medical schools, the last of which was the focus of the investigation.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights initiated the case in 2005, after two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases found universities could use race as a factor in their admissions processes under certain circumstances.

The Tech System’s governing board announced around that time that the four-school system would begin considering race and ethnicity as part of a holistic review of its applicants. The decision prompted Roger Clegg, from the anti-affirmative action group Center for Equal Opportunity, to file a complaint.

In a February 2019 letter sent to the Education Department, a Tech System official said the federal investigation had been triggered by a complainant who never tried to gain entrance to the medical school and would not have been “impacted in any way” by its admissions process.

The Tech official, Vice Chancellor and General Counsel Eric Bentley, said in his letter that the system believes it can show its admissions process complies with the standard laid out in a recent Supreme Court case. But Tech officials, he wrote, were "willing to sign the Resolution Agreement in an effort to resolve this matter and focus on educating future health care providers.”

Under the terms of the agreement, the Health Sciences Center is required to issue a memorandum instructing medical school staff to no longer consider applicants’ race or national origin in its admissions process. The college will also need to revise its catalogs and website to strike mention of race and national origin from factors in admissions.

A Tech official confirmed the memorandum has been sent and that the school opted to end the use of race in admissions entirely. In a letter sent to Clegg, the Education Department had faulted the school for not conducting periodic reviews of its race-based admissions decisions to determine if student-body diversity could be maintained using alternate means.

Still, Bentley, the Tech official, wrote that the medical school is “committed to exploring race-neutral alternatives to enhancing diversity,” and would monitor whether they yielded results that meet the school’s "diversity and educational goals.”

“If a determination is made in the future that using race as a factor in admissions is necessary to achieve this compelling interest,” he wrote, the system will notify the Education Department, in accordance with the agreement.

The resolution, which is not a concession of wrongdoing, comes as the Education Department has opened investigations into the admissions policies in place at Yale and Harvard universities. Under Secretary Betsy DeVos, the agency has appeared to urge race-neutral admissions policies and has rescinded Obama-era guidance encouraging the use of affirmative action in higher education institutions.

The complaint was filed against every school within the Health Sciences Center, but the medical school is the only one to have recently considered race or national origin in admissions decisions. The pharmacy school, within the Center, used race as a factor in admissions between 2005 and 2009, and the system’s flagship campus, Texas Tech University, stopped considering it in 2013.

Clegg, the initial complainant, said the agreement reflects a sea-change in how the Education Department has approached affirmative action under the stewardship of different leaders.

"Today is another instance where the Trump Administration has made it clear that, unlike the Obama Administration, it's going to enforce the civil rights laws in a way that protects all Americans,” he said. “As America becomes increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, it becomes more and more untenable for the government to encourage different Americans to be treated differently based on their skin color and what country their ancestors came from.”

"I think schools are being put on notice that if they insist on continuing to treat students differently,” he said, "they better be able to show that they have met the strict requirements that the Supreme Court has set out.”

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Michigan Education Board to mess with history

In the same week we heard incredibly hopeful and uplifting news from Detroit Public Schools Community District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti as he delivered the district's first State of the Schools address, we also heard on my radio show and read in the newspaper some very disconcerting and unacceptable news regarding the direction the State Board of Education wants to take with our students.

The bearer of the bad news regarding the current direction of public school education was Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Michael Warren, who served as a focus group and task member for the revision of the social studies standards for our public schools.

As Judge Warren put it: “If you are under the impression that Socrates, Plato, Julius Caesar (or any other Caesar), Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, Alexander The Great, Columbus, James Madison, Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, FDR , or Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are important historical figures that should be taught to every child, the Michigan Department of Education begs to differ.”

Judge Warren continued:

“In an astounding draft set of K-12 social studies standards that were received by the State Board of Education, these key individuals are not required content. Other key concepts and events such as taxation without representation, constitutional amendments and conventions, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions are also omitted. Although some of the individuals or events might be suggested as examples, or there may be a hope that some might be taught even if not mandated, the cold hard reality is that if the standards are adopted, a student could attend 13 years of public schooling in Michigan and never hear of any of them.”

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Thinker Mark Bauerlein:  An academic who approves of Western Civilization

Where to start with Mark Bauerlein? He is a thinker whose time has come. He recently wrote that the boxing gym is the most civil and courteous place he has been. The 60-year-old professor of English plays Fortnite with his son, the game Prince Harry wants banned. And he is in Australia this week as a guest of the Institute of Public Affairs, to tell us why the great books of Western civilisation matter. And why the Left won’t cede an inch of control over campus.

He made a splash with his 2008 book, The Dumbest Generation, decrying the digital age for producing a society of know-nothings. During lunch on a warm autumn day in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, I suggest he’s too hard on millennials; mine at home don’t fit his thesis. Happily, he is more curious than querulous. And he laughs a lot. Bauerlein was a Left-liberal for most of his life; a secular, militant atheist, too. He grew up in California, after all.

Then he looked around at the people, the ideas, the predictability and grew bored. So he read other stuff, found the locus of freedom in conservative thought. Now he is a Catholic and writes for First Things, a leading American conservative magazine.

He defends Milo Yiannopoulos and Donald Trump, and thinks Bernie Sanders is a much bigger threat than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He has worn a Make America Great Again T-shirt under his buttoned-up shirt on campus at Emory University where, for decades, he taught.

His English students learned the greats: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Hen­ry James, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens. And Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Heideg­ger, Derrida and Foucault featured in his philosophy lessons. He retired from teaching a few months ago and is back working in Washington, DC.

Outside the boxing ring, Bauerlein packs a punch, too. Here’s a snapshot from a two-hour rumination over why Western civilisation matters and why the Left is a place for misery guts.

The perfect segue, then, into the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation. “Ramsay asked for this little tiny piece of ground in this big university, just a little sliver for us to do our Western civ thing. Uhhh. No, said the activists. We’ve got 100 acres and we’re not going to give you a square foot. We don’t want you around.

“They know where these kids are going if they have the choice between a course on queer theory and cross-dressing or a course on Macbeth or King Lear.

“Kids know they are entering into the adult world, into the monumental, the historic, the sublime, the great books. Here we have Lady Macbeth walking up and down the hallway rubbing her hands clean, saying: ‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’

“They want moments like when Dido piles up all the furniture that she and Aeneas make love on, and Aeneas has taken off with his buddies in the night, and she has this moment of great rejection and kills herself.

“It’s flattering to be told: ‘We’re teaching you the epic, the grand, the momentous occasions.’ ”

Why identity politicians are uninspiring. “They have trans­lated the campus into their own strange therapeutic method. In the identity politics classroom, you can act on your resentment because your father was a jerk or life hasn’t turned out so good. They know they can’t compete with the colossus of civilisation, so they’re not gonna give you anything. These are not pluralistic souls, these are minor league totalitar­ians.”

But understand the temptation. “Identity politics produces a very emotionally satisfying moral drama. In a chaotic world, you know who the good guys and the bad guys are. You have a whole script about the past and the present, about politics. Everything lines up very nicely. It is a place to put resentment, disappointment, struggle, victimhood.”

Beware young revolutionaries: “They are much more dangerous than old revolutionaries. The strongest accusers in the Cambodian revolution were the young.

“Before I arrived in Sydney, I watched a YouTube clip of a panel on your (ABC) Q&A show. A young girl in the audience, about 21 years old, announces she is a young socialist, and she goes on this rant, first about Tony Abbott, she called him a toxic racist, or something, then she rails against Western civilisation for its col­onialism, its racism.

“All the panellists were passive. She had all the force in the room, the rage, the indigna­tion. Identity politics has given her power and confidence to berate them, unfettered by knowledge.”

The loss of humanities is a terrible thing. “History is a permanent instruction in original sin. But kids don’t get that instruction.

“A 21-year-old social justice warrior hasn’t read (those essays by ex-communists in) The God That Failed, or Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, they don’t know what Stalinists did in the Spanish civil war, they don’t know about the assassination of Trotsky or what happened in the French Revolution.

“That’s the advantage of being young, you haven’t seen this happen yet and that’s the advantage of not knowing any history. They don’t know the fate of Robes­pierre. One day you’re leading the charge, next day your head is in the guillotine.”

Why learn the classics? “The great books give you standards of judgment that enable you to filter the good from the bad, the relevant from the irrelevant, the significant from the insignificant.

“It’s really good to have read Plutarch or listen to Mark Antony’s speech over the death of Caesar, or to know the great orators of the past; they give you standards of how to judge the orators of the present, how bad they are. This is what humanistic learning does, it gives you a critical yardstick.”

Why identity politicians don’t believe in greatness: “They suffer from this condition that Nietzsche brilliantly identified as ressentiment, the French term for resentment. Not ‘I resent this or that’. Ressentiment is a general attitude towards the world. They resent great things. Greatness makes them feel their own mediocrity. They don’t believe in heroes because heroes remind them of their inferiority.”

Or heroes. “People with ressentiment want to tear down heroes and statues. They look at a hero like Thomas Jefferson and say: ‘He’s a slave owner.’ But if you don’t suffer from ressentiment, you look at Jefferson and say: ‘Don’t you understand, Jefferson grows up in a slave society, his family owned slaves, his plantation depends on slaves, his material wellbeing depends upon slaves, everything conditions him to be a full-on supporter of slavery.

“Jefferson, in spite of all his conditioning, was able to write the Declaration of Independence that becomes an inspiration for Frederick Douglass, the abolitionists, Martin Luther King, all these oppressed groups. In Europe, European revolutionaries in 1848 loved the Declaration of Independence. If you have ressentiment, you choose slavery guilt over giving Jefferson any credit.”

Why the Left hates Trump: “Guilt is the strongest sociopolitical weapon the Left has had for 50 years. And it didn’t work on Trump. He has no male guilt, no white guilt, no Christian guilt, no American guilt, he’s not going to apologise for anything because he doesn’t feel guilty.”

Why the Left hates Milo: “The Left has a long history of provocateurs, comedians, performers who trash the Right. That kind of ribald humour directed at conservatives did a lot of damage, making them out as old-fashioned curmudgeons. Milo did the same. Only he aimed at the Left. He made people laugh at the feminists, at Hillary (Clinton). He took their weapon and they couldn’t bear to lose it. Now they are the boring puritans.”

Bauerlein returns to where he started, with the Ramsay Centre and how to teach the big touchstones of Western civilisation.

“They are wasting their money,” he says. “I have seen efforts like this in the US for 20 years, trying to establish a beachhead on a college campus. These programs have done nothing to change the ideological climate or the wider curriculum of the campus. Political correctness is worse now than it has ever been.”

But there is hunger among students to learn about our colossus civilisation. Bauerlein mentions other platforms, podcasts, YouTube, new ways for teachers to reach kids about the strength of our great ideas.

Then a final lesson for the afternoon. “Freedom? This is an unusual idea,” he says slowly, with deliberate intonation. “Do you think it came out of thin air? Someone had to develop these ideas. Cultures had to say this is a good idea, and there weren’t many that did that. One of them was Athens. Another was Rome under the republic before the emperors took over. Someone did this. And it can be undone very easily.”

This is not academic chitchat. For years now, the Lowy Institute has polled attitudes to democracy in Australia, finding that about half of Australians aged 18 to 24 do not think democracy is the most preferable form of government. Those dismal numbers tell us that you are not likely to defend what you do not understand. That means we need many more Bauerleins teaching the epic history of liberal democracy.

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