I mean, let’s be honest, that’s what this is about.
Gov. Greg Abbott’s office is warning state agency and public university leaders this week that the use of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — policies that support groups who have been historically underrepresented or discriminated against — is illegal in hiring.
In a memo written Monday and obtained by The Texas Tribune, Abbott’s chief of staff Gardner Pate told agency leaders that using DEI policies violates federal and state employment laws, and hiring cannot be based on factors “other than merit.”
Pate said DEI initiatives illegally discriminate against certain demographic groups — though he did not specify which ones he was talking about.
“The innocuous sounding notion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) has been manipulated to push policies that expressly favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others,” Pate wrote.
Diversity, equity and inclusion is a moniker used for policies developed to provide guidance in workplaces, government offices and college campuses intended to increase representation and foster an environment that emphasizes fair treatment to groups that have historically faced discrimination. DEI policies can include resources for underrepresented groups, which can include people with disabilities, LGBTQ people and veterans. In hiring, it can include setting diversity goals or setting thresholds to ensure that a certain number of diverse candidates are interviewed. At universities, DEI offices are often focused on helping students of color or nontraditional students stay in school and graduate.
[…]
Andrew Eckhous, an Austin-based lawyer for Kaplan Law Firm, which specializes in employment and civil rights litigation, said the governor’s office is “completely mischaracterizing DEI’s role in employment decisions” in an apparent attempt to block initiatives that improve diversity.
“Anti-discrimination laws protect all Americans by ensuring that employers do not make hiring decisions based on race, religion, or gender, while DEI initiatives work in tandem with those laws to encourage companies to solicit applications from a wide range of applicants, which is legal and beneficial,” Eckhous said in an email.
“The only piece of news in this letter is that Governor Abbott is trying to stop diversity initiatives for the apparent benefit of some unnamed demographic that he refuses to disclose,” he added.
The letter cites federal and state anti-discrimination laws as the underpinning for why Pate says DEI initiatives are illegal. Those laws notably have come about as a response to discrimination over several decades.
President Lyndon B. Johnson prohibited employment discrimination based on race, sex, religion and national origin as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, during a time when people of color, especially Black Americans, were excluded from higher-wage jobs based on race.
The Chron adds some details.
The letter is setting up a major clash with nearly every public university in Texas, where the benefits of diversity have been championed. The University of Texas, Texas A&M University and the University of Houston have made DEI programs central to their missions.
[…]
On its website, Texas A&M’s Office of Diversity declares its responsibility to help academic units “embed diversity, equity, and inclusion in academic and institutional excellence.”
The University of Texas at San Antonio, through its business school, offers a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Certificate Program.
At UT, each college, school and unit has a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer as well as a website to highlight the importance of those efforts, a change made after campuswide student protests in 2017 led to the removal of statues of Confederate soldiers like Robert E. Lee.
In the warning letter, first reported on by the Texas Tribune, Abbott’s chief of staff Gardner Pate claims such efforts backfire:
“Indeed, rather than increasing diversity in the workplace, these DEI initiatives are having the opposite effect and are being advanced in ways that proactively encourage discrimination in the workplace,” he wrote.
Pate’s letter comes after a high-profile lawsuit last year aimed at Texas A&M University’s hiring practices for college faculty.
A University of Texas at Austin associate professor, who is white, sued the Texas A&M University System on behalf of white and Asian faculty candidates, alleging racial discrimination in a fellowship program intended to improve diversity on the College Station campus. The program sought to hire mid-career and senior tenure-track professors from “underrepresented minority groups.”
The UT associate professor’s lawsuit is being led by American First Legal, a group created by Stephen Miller, former President Donald Trump’s senior policy adviser.
I Am Not A Lawyer, and I know that there’s a case before SCOTUS that’s aimed at gutting affirmative action. It still seems to me that claiming that DEI efforts are “illegal” is at best a wild overstatement. Maybe a claim that they’re not required could be plausible. I expect you could defend that in court. But illegal? Not today, at least, and maybe not even after whatever atrocity SCOTUS commits on the affirmative action case. The idea here is to make people think it’s illegal, and that it’s not worth the risk of incurring Abbott’s wrath, and voila, you get the outcome you want without actually having to change anything. We’ll see how these universities respond, but especially with the Lege in session and the budget being constructed, I don’t like the odds.
UPDATE: Texas Tech is already folding, though UH doesn’t appear to be taking the bait. Could be worse, I guess.
