"Texas A&M leaders’ text messages show desire to counteract perceived liberal agenda in higher education" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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Two years ago during M. Katherine Banks’ first six months as the president of Texas A&M University, she announced a major academic reorganization of the flagship campus to help it become an internationally recognized top-tier institution. Her plans included dozens of structural changes meant to streamline and better organize the largest public university in the state.

But text messages released by the Texas A&M University System this week revealed another largely unspoken focus among system leaders that might have also been at play as the school reorganized.

“Kathy [Banks] told us multiple times the reason we were going to combine [the colleges of] arts and sciences together was to control the liberal nature that those professors brought to campus,” regent Jay Graham wrote to regent David Baggett in June as they were discussing the university’s plans to hire journalism professor and former New York Times editor Kathleen O. McElroy. “[W]e were going to start a journalism department to get high-quality conservative Aggie students into the journalism world to help direct our message. This won’t happen with this type of hire!”

Those messages were released as part of an internal investigation conducted to review the failed attempt to hire McElroy, which has rattled the Aggie community in recent weeks amid concerns over how political considerations impact A&M’s operations and academic freedom.

The messages show that many board members, who are gubernatorial appointees, had concerns with McElroy’s perceived left-leaning credentials, including that she taught at the University of Texas at Austin and previously worked at the New York Times. At least some of them displayed a desire to promote conservative causes at the flagship campus and a blatant resistance to recruiting someone who they believed would work counter to those goals.

“While it is wonderful for a successful Aggie to want to come back to Texas A&M to be a tenured professor and build something this important from scratch, we must look at her résumé and her statements made an opinion pieces and public interviews,” regent Mike Hernandez wrote to former president Banks and Chancellor John Sharp, expressing disappointment that the board learned of the hire after it had been announced.

“The New York Times is one of the leading main stream media sources in our country. It is common knowledge that they are biased and progressive leaning. The same exact thing can be said about the university of Texas,” he continued.

Those perspectives are consistent with Texas conservatives’ recent attempts to counteract what they view as a liberal agenda within Texas’ public universities.

“People on the right think that the left controls education and they've been trying to wrestle that control away,” said Jennifer Mercieca, a communications professor at Texas A&M who focuses on the intersection of democracy and communication. “Unfortunately, our journalism program got caught in the middle of that.”

In Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has largely led that crusade within the state’s public universities. A few years ago, he was part of initial discussions with UT-Austin leaders and donors to create a conservative-leaning think tank that would bring “intellectual diversity” to the school. This year, he championed legislation that eliminates diversity, equity and inclusion offices on college campuses, offices that are largely viewed by conservatives as pushing left-leaning ideologies onto students. Patrick also tried to eliminate tenure for faculty, a longstanding tenet meant to bolster academic freedom on campuses.

“People have had it with the intolerance of any ideas but progressive, DEI, propaganda-ish kinds of ideas on campus,” said Sherry Sylvester, a former aide for Patrick who now works as a public policy fellow at the conservative-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation and was an ardent supporter of the legislation to eliminate DEI programs this past session. “That is a big effort, a big movement.”

The impact of that movement was on display in the records Texas A&M released this week surrounding the failed effort to recruit McElroy.

Soon after making an initial offer to McElroy, Banks communicated that she wanted to push the announcement until after the most recent legislative session ended. At the time, university leaders, including those at Texas A&M, were negotiating with lawmakers over the DEI legislation, as well as state funding for public universities.

“Bottom line is that the NYT connection is poor optics during this particular legislative session,” Jose Bermúdez, interim dean of the college of arts and science, said to Hart Blanton, chair of the communications and journalism department, via text message on May 11.

Meanwhile, regents expressed disdain for media and academics they saw as liberal leaning. While regents approve tenure, it is typically unusual for them to get involved in university-level hires. The Texas A&M regents oversee 11 public universities and eight state agencies that employ more than 26,000 faculty across the state.

Higher education experts say that education has long been characterized as political. Recent efforts in places like Texas, North Carolina and Florida have picked up partially due to how well the Republican base responds to the accusations.

“The notion of woke ideology, and how it supposedly has done all this damage to things has just risen as a political talking point,” said Holden Thorp, former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a current professor at George Washington University. “It's easy to say the universities are the places that you want to attack this,” citing that the argument has increasingly shown to poll well among conservatives.

According to the internal report A&M released Thursday, Banks received calls from six to seven regents after Texas Scorecard, a conservative website, wrote an article about McElroy that painted her as a “DEI proponent” for her prior research to improve diversity in newsrooms. Board member Sam Torn emailed a quote from the article to Board Chair Bill Mahomes stating he wanted an explanation before he could approve McElroy’s tenure.

The internal report revealed that Banks was heavily involved in behind-the-scenes discussions to walk back the original offer given to McElroy, contradicting Banks’ previous public statements that she had no knowledge of changes to the offer. Banks resigned two weeks before her text messages were made public.

The internal report showed that regents also raised questions about whether they could approve tenure for McElroy, even though she already had been selected through the university’s standard hiring process.

“Granting tenure to somebody with this background is going to be a difficult sell for many on the [board of regents],” Hernandez said in an email to Banks and Sharp. “My sincere hope is that you both will figure out a way to completely put the brakes on this, so we all can discuss this further. If it’s truly too far down the road for you all to agree to that, the board majority can decide how to proceed and take the heat for the final call.”

Thorp said the regents’ meddling in the university’s hiring process overstepped their role.

“When they approve tenure, what they're doing is saying that they have confidence in the administration to carry out the process that they said,” Thorp said. “The role of the board is to rule against it, if for some reason they think the process wasn't followed. Well, in this case, the process wasn't followed, not because of the content or anything, but because [Banks] didn't put the case forward because of politics.”

Some of the regents also took issue with what they perceived as McElroy’s bias toward conservative viewpoints.

“We can’t just give people a set of facts anymore,” McElroy said in an interview on the public radio program "Here & Now” in 2021. “I think we know that and we have to tell our students that. This is not about getting two sides of a story or three sides of a story, if one side is illegitimate. I think now you cannot cover education, you cannot cover criminal justice, you can’t cover all of these institutions without recognizing how all these institutions were built.”

Sylvester with TPPF pointed to that quote as the reason she was against McElroy’s hiring for the journalism program. She declined to comment on the regents’ text messages but said her organization wants to see more free inquiry within higher education.

“No one is looking for a conservative ideology to drive higher ed,” she said. “But taxpayers and conservative leaders no longer want to underride a left wing divisive ideology that permeates so much of the curriculum.”

Thorp said as the politicization of higher education increases and decisions are made based on politics over policy and procedure, it makes universities “ungovernable.”

“I'm certainly not defending Kathy Banks and her dishonest actions in this, but part of the reason why she resorted to that, probably, is that she didn't have many other choices,” said Thorp, referring to her role in watering down McElroy’s job offer. “Every time you have to do something you're facing this intractable situation where you're either going to get the campus against you or get the board against you. And that's how not functional organizations work.”

Mercieca at Texas A&M said the internal report revealed how McElroy’s hiring was a victim of intervention that creates distrust within what are supposed to be democratic processes within universities.

“What we learned yesterday is that all of those institutional processes and procedures can be overruled by fiat, by powerful others,” she said. “It's not democratic.”

Disclosure: Texas A&M University, Texas Public Policy Foundation, New York Times, Texas A&M University System and University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/04/texas-am-mcelroy-texts/.

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The University of Houston has settled with a conservative free speech group that sued the school over an anti-discrimination policy that the group argued was overly broad and violated students’ First Amendment rights.

As part of the settlement, UH officials will have to pay $30,000 in attorney’s fees to Speech First and UH officials must keep in place its amended anti-discrimination policy.

In this case, Speech First, a group that actively litigates college policies they view as student censorship, targeted UH’s anti-discrimination policy that has been in place since 2012. According to that policy, unlawful harassment was defined as “humiliating, abusive, or threatening conduct or behavior that denigrates or shows hostility or aversion toward an individual or group” or conduct that created a hostile living or working environment or interfered with an individual’s academic or work performance.

Examples of such harassment included “epithets or slurs,” “negative stereotyping” and “denigrating jokes.”

It also stated “[m]inor verbal and nonverbal slights, snubs, annoyances, insults, or isolated incidents including, but not limited to microaggressions,” would be considered harassment if the actions occurred repeatedly and targeted a particular group of people based on their race, sex or gender or other status that keeps them protected from discrimination.

But in May, three months after Speech First filed its suit, the university amended its policy. Later that same month, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes, a Reagan appointee, blocked the university from reinstating its original anti-harassment policy.

“This is a huge win for the First Amendment,” said Cherise Trump, executive director of Speech First, a group that pushes back against what it calls “toxic censorship culture” on campuses. “It sends a message to the University of Houston and other universities that they will be held accountable if they enact unconstitutional policies on campus.”

In a statement, UH officials said they have come to an “amicable” agreement and consider the matter resolved.

“As a result of our discussions, a revised anti-discrimination policy has been adopted,” Chris Stipes, director of UH media relations, said in a statement. “The UH System remains committed to protecting the constitutional rights of our students and employees.”

Speech First filed the lawsuit on behalf of three conservative students identified only as “A,” “B” and “C” who said they felt they could not express their beliefs on campus for fear they would be punished under UH’s older policy.

As examples, the lawsuit listed how the students feared retaliation if they shared personal beliefs such as “affirmative action in college admissions is racist” or “allowing biologically male athletes who identify as female to compete in women’s sports is fundamentally unjust.” All three said they were uncomfortable acknowledging fellow students’ preferred pronouns outside of a cisgender identity.

In documents, lawyers for the university argued that its policy specifically addresses unlawful harassment of students and would not consider those statements and ideas provided by the students in the lawsuit as a violation of the policy.

University lawyers have also argued there is no evidence that the anti-discrimination policy has ever been used against students.

When the university amended the anti-discrimination policy in mid-May, it specified that harassment must rise to the level of creating a hostile work environment for employees or to deny a student equal access to education by creating a hostile learning environment. That is the standard set by the 1999 Supreme Court decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, which states that schools violate the Title IX ban on sex-based discrimination if they remain deliberately indifferent to sexual harassment to the point it prevents a student from receiving an equitable education.

Two years ago, the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights under former President Donald Trump used that definition of sexual harassment when it issued revised rules and standards for investigating Title IX violations on college campuses, which was a more narrow definition for sexual harassment than any previously used.

Speech First lawyers argue that many universities, including UH, adopt harassment policies outside of that guidance that are too broad, providing a chilling effect to students’ free speech.

A UH lawyer said the definition of sexual harassment in the Davis case did not limit schools from enacting other policies to address unlawful harassment and should not be considered the standard for universities as they craft disciplinary policies to address other instances of inappropriate behavior.

“Speech First has tried to bootstrap Davis in numerous other cases, and to date none has held that Davis imposed the outer bounds for addressing unlawful harassment,” they wrote.

But when Hughes, the federal district judge, granted a preliminary injunction late last month preventing UH from reinstating its original anti-harassment policy, he sided with Speech First.

“Restraint on free speech is prohibited absent limited circumstances carefully proscribed by the Supreme Court. Any limitation deserves the upmost scrutiny,” he wrote, stating the group would likely win the case. “The University says that it will be injured if recourse is unavailable for harassment against students of faculty. As important as that is, students also need defenses against arbitrary professors.”

This is the latest victory for Speech First, which has sued universities across the country over free speech policies, including the University of Texas at Austin. The case against UT-Austin took a similar path. Speech First sued the university in 2018 over language in multiple freedom of expression policies. UT-Austin amended some of the policies before settling with the organization and agreed to discontinue the university’s Campus Climate Response Team, part of the division of student affairs and the division of diversity and student engagement that investigated student reports of bias incidents on campus.

This lawsuit comes as other free speech debates have bubbled up on Texas college campuses throughout this past academic year.

At Collin College in North Texas, three professors have sued the school, arguing their contracts were not renewed in retaliation for exercising their First Amendment rights on a variety of issues, including one professor who publicly criticized the school’s COVID-19 response.

Nearby at the University of North Texas in Denton, thousands of students and community members signed a petition calling on school administrators to expel a right-wing student, arguing her campus activism and statements opposing gender-affirming care for transgender children created an unsafe learning environment for transgender students on campus.

In that instance, administrators denounced the student’s comments, but they said she and her right-wing campus group had not violated any university policies.

After the Uvalde mass shooting, GOP leaders are again pushing to boost school security. But similar legislation after a 2018 school shooting has fallen short of its goals, and experts said there’s no evidence such tactics work.

Four years after an armed 17-year-old opened fire inside a Texas high school, killing 10, Gov. Greg Abbott tried to tell another shell-shocked community that lost 19 children and two teachers to a teen gunman about his wins in what is now an ongoing effort against mass shootings.

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“We consider what we did in 2019 to be one of the most profound legislative sessions not just in Texas but in any state to address school shootings,” Abbott said inside a Uvalde auditorium Wednesday as he sat flanked by state and local officials. “But to be clear, we understand our work is not done, our work must continue.”

Throughout the 60-minute news conference, he and other Republican leaders said a 2019 law allowed districts to “harden” schools from external threats after a deadly shooting inside an art classroom at Santa Fe High School near Houston the year before. After the Uvalde gunman was reportedly able to enter Robb Elementary School through a back door this week, their calls to secure buildings resurfaced yet again.

But a deeper dive into the 2019 law revealed many of its “hardening” elements have fallen short.

Schools didn’t receive enough state money to make the types of physical improvements lawmakers are touting publicly. Few school employees signed up to bring guns to work. And many school districts either don’t have an active shooting plan or produced insufficient ones.

In January 2020, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District received $69,000 from a one-time, $100 million state grant to enhance physical security in Texas public schools, according to a dataset detailing the Texas Education Agency grants. The funds were comparable to what similarly sized districts received.

Even with more funds and better enforcement of policies, experts have said there is no indication that beefing up security in schools has prevented any violence. Plus, they said, it can be detrimental to children, especially children of color.

“This concept of hardening, the more it has been done, it’s not shown the results,” said Jagdish Khubchandani, a public health professor at New Mexico State University who studies school security practices and their effectiveness.

Khubchandani said the majority of public schools in the United States already implement the security measures most often promoted by public officials, including locked doors to the outside and in classrooms, active-shooter plans and security cameras.

After a review of 18 years of school security measures, Khubchandani and James Price from the University of Toledo did not find any evidence that such tactics or more armed teachers reduced gun violence in schools.

“It’s not just guns. It’s not just security,” Khubchandani said. “It’s a combination of issues, and if you have a piecemeal approach, then you’ll never succeed. You need a comprehensive approach.”

Insufficient active-shooter plans

Since the shooting, GOP lawmakers have repeatedly suggested limiting access to schools to one door.

“We’ve got to, in our smaller schools where we can, get down to one entrance,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick offered at the press conference Wednesday. “One entrance might be one of those solutions. If he had taken three more minutes to find that open door … the police were there pretty quickly.”

There are still questions about the timing and details of the tragedy, however, including whether the shooter busted a lock to get into the school or if a door was unlocked. A state police official reported Thursday that the door appeared to be unlocked but that it was still under investigation.

Khubchandani and education advocates said locking doors and routing everyone through one entrance is already standard practice in most districts. And safety leaders said locking exterior doors is a best practice, but it’s one strategy that needs to be strictly enforced.

“Sometimes convenience can take priority over safety and you can have a plan in place, you can have policies in place,” said Kathy Martinez Prather, director of the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State University. “They’re only as effective as they’re being implemented.”

At Wednesday’s press conference, Abbott emphasized that the package of school safety laws passed in 2019 required school districts to submit emergency operations plans to the Texas School Safety Center and make sure they have adequate active-shooter strategies to employ in an emergency.

State law dictates that districts must be able to show how they will prepare for, respond to and recover from disasters like active threats, but also extreme weather and communicable disease. These plans must include training mechanisms, communication plans and mandatory drills. Schools must create safety committees and establish a way to assess threats. These are known as emergency operations plans. As part of those, schools need active-shooter plans.

But a three-year audit by the center in 2020 found that out of the 1,022 school districts in the state, just 200 districts had active-shooter policies as part of their plans, even though most districts had reported having them.

That same audit revealed 626 districts did not have active-shooter policies. Another 196 had active-shooter policies, but auditors found those plans were insufficient.

In addition, only 67 school districts had viable emergency operations plans overall, the report found.

Martinez Prather wouldn’t say if Uvalde’s emergency plan was considered adequate because of ongoing investigations into the shooting. But said the center’s review did not find any areas of noncompliance.

The audit reviewed school districts’ emergency plans in June 2020, and Martinez Prather said she was “absolutely” surprised that so many schools did not have clear-cut plans, especially after the Santa Fe shooting and others around the country.

“Our attention to this issue should not be as close to the nearest and latest school shooting,” she said. “We need to keep sending that message that this can happen at any point in time and to anybody.”

She said the center has spent the last year and a half following up with schools to get their plans up to standard.

Arming teachers and staff with guns

Texas leaders have already shunned the idea of restricting gun access in the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting. In fact, in recent years, Texas lawmakers have loosened gun laws after mass shootings.

Instead, lawmakers point to the nearly decade-old school marshal program in Texas as another measure to deter and prevent mass shootings. That program was created in response to the deadly shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 26 people dead, including 20 first-graders.

Designated school employees who take an 80-hour training course and pass a psychological exam are allowed to keep a firearm in a lockbox on school grounds, an idea most attractive to rural schools in areas where law enforcement response can take longer.

After the school shooting in Santa Fe, state lawmakers removed the cap that limited schools to one marshal per 200 students. Today, according to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which oversees the training for the program, there are 256 marshals across the state.

While lawmakers tout it as a potential tool to prevent mass shootings, just 6% of school districts use it, according to a report from the Texas School Safety Center. Martinez Prather at the Texas School Safety Center said many school districts say it’s expensive and the training is time-consuming for educators.

Meanwhile, 280 schools are utilizing an unregulated option known as the Guardian Program, which allows local school boards to approve individuals in schools to carry concealed weapons. Each “guardian” must have a handgun license and take 15 to 20 hours of specialized training by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Nicole Golden, executive director of Texas Gun Sense, said she’s concerned by the “minimal” level of training school staff go through before they are approved to have a weapon in the classroom.

“These aren’t law enforcement officers,” she said. “These are school staff who have some training, and there’s really not a lot of data to support that that’s the safe direction to go in.”

Plus, Golden said, placing more guns on school grounds can be problematic when data shows students of color are disproportionately disciplined.

When lawmakers decided to expand the number of marshals in Texas schools in 2019, Black students and parents said the idea made them feel less safe in school, knowing they are disciplined more than other students.

The study from Khubchandani and Price pointed to a 2018 shooting at a high school in Kentucky where the shooter killed two and injured 14 students in 10 seconds.

“Armed school personnel would have needed to be in the exact same spot in the school as the shooter to significantly reduce this level of trauma,” the researchers wrote. “Ten seconds is too fast to stop a school shooter with a semiautomatic firearm when the armed school guard is in another place in the school.”

$10 per student for safety

Big changes often take big money, and officials have noted that the 2019 school safety bill gives about $100 million per biennium to the Texas Education Agency. The agency then distributes the money to school districts to use on equipment, programs and training related to school safety and security, a little less than $10 per student based on average daily attendance. The money can be used broadly, ranging from physical security enhancements to suicide prevention programs.

According to a self-reported survey of districts by the Texas School Safety Center, more than two-thirds of school districts have used this money for security cameras. 20% used it for active-shooter response training. Nearly 40% of districts installed physical barriers with the allotment.

But Zeph Capo, president of the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, said that money wasn’t enough to pay for the more expensive projects lawmakers were suggesting.

“Districts ended up spending money on some programs, some electronic AV equipment, but I don’t think it was nearly enough to do what needs to be done in most of the schools, which is really change the structures of the buildings so there’s better control over entrance and egress,” he said, noting that AFT believes more gun restrictions is a better solution.

The TEA also received a separate one-time $100 million pool of money to provide grants to districts specifically for physical security enhancements, like metal detectors, door-locking systems or bullet-resistant glass.

It’s unclear how Uvalde CISD spent the $69,000 it received from the state to enhance its physical security. School officials did not respond to questions Wednesday. As of the May 2 report, the district had spent about $48,000 of the grant, which is set to end at the end of the month.

Other remote town school districts received comparable grants per their student population, according to an analysis by The Texas Tribune. For example, the Sulphur Springs Independent School District in East Texas has only a slightly larger student population and received about $71,000 in grant funds.

According to a district document, Uvalde CISD, which enrolls around 4,100 students, had a variety of so-called hardening measures in place that lawmakers and school safety leaders recommend.

The district employed four district police officers, installed perimeter fencing meant to limit access around schools, including Robb, and instituted a policy that all classroom doors remain locked during the day.

There are campus teams that identify and address potential threats, and schools hold emergency drills for students “regularly.” The district employed a threat reporting system for community members to raise concerns. Some schools had security vestibules at their entrances and buzz-in systems to get inside from the outdoors.

But a security vestibule, which is basically a secure lobby to the school, can be a huge expense for school districts already tight on money. In 2019, the Waller Independent School District estimated that the addition of two of these entrances to the junior high school would cost $345,000. Security cameras at a small elementary school can cost more than $20,000, according to industry experts.

In recent years — even before the Santa Fe shooting — school districts have begun to rely on bond proposals to find the money to implement some of these changes.

But Texas voters have expressed hesitancy at the ballot box to approve such bonds in recent years, which the Texas Association of School Boards attributed to the lingering pandemic and political polarization. Recent changes by the Texas Legislature have also complicated bond requests for schools after it started to require districts to write, “This is a property tax increase,” on bond project signs, even when the proposals wouldn’t affect the tax rate.

Overall, Monty Exter, a senior lobbyist with the Association of Texas Professional Educators, said the per-student allotment and one-time grants set aside for school security could never pay for the types of construction projects lawmakers have touted publicly in the wake of the shooting.

“Thinking about making significant changes to 8,000-plus campuses, $100 million doesn’t necessarily go that far,” he said.

"Texas already 'hardened' schools. It didn’t save Uvalde" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them – about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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Disclosure: The Association of Texas Professional Educators, Texas AFT and the Texas Association of School Boards have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

As supporters of then-President Donald Trump surrounded and harassed a Joe Biden campaign bus on a Central Texas highway last year, San Marcos police officials and 911 dispatchers fielded multiple requests for assistance from Democratic campaigners and bus passengers who said they feared for their safety from a pack of motorists, known as a "Trump Train," allegedly driving in dangerously aggressive ways.

"San Marcos refused to help," an amended federal lawsuit over the 2020 freeway skirmish claims.

Transcribed 911 audio recordings and documents that reveal behind-the-scenes communications among law enforcement and dispatchers were included in the amended lawsuit, filed late Friday.

The transcribed recordings were filed in an attempt to show that San Marcos law enforcement leaders chose not to provide the bus with a police escort multiple times, even though police departments in other nearby cities did. In one transcribed recording, Matthew Daenzer, a San Marcos police corporal on duty the day of the incident, refused to provide an escort when recommended by another jurisdiction.

"No, we're not going to do it," Daenzer told a 911 dispatcher, according to the amended filing. "We will 'close patrol' that, but we're not going to escort a bus."

The amended filing also states that in those audio recordings, law enforcement officers "privately laughed" and "joked about the victims and their distress."

Former state Sen. Wendy Davis, who was running for Congress at the time, is among the four plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The new complaint also expands the number of people and entities being sued to include Daenzer, San Marcos assistant police chief Brandon Winkenwerder and the city itself. A spokesperson for the city did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Friday. Daenzer and Winkenwerder could not immediately be reached.

The confrontation between the Biden bus and the Trump supporters made national news after it was captured on video the last weekend of October 2020, when polls showed a tight race in Texas between the two candidates. Trump later praised his supporters' behavior, which occurred months before the former president's backers violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an apparent attempt to stop Congress from certifying the results of his reelection loss.

The Texas highway incident featured at least one minor collision and led to Texas Democrats canceling three scheduled campaign events in Central Texas, citing "safety concerns." The original lawsuit was filed against Chase Stapp, San Marcos' director of public safety, and the San Marcos city marshal's department and claims the plaintiffs continue to suffer psychological and emotional injury from the event. They are asking for compensatory and punitive damages and for legal fees.

The lawsuit alleges that by refusing the help, law enforcement officers violated the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 because they were aware of "acts of violent political intimidation" but did not take appropriate steps to prevent the Trump supporters from intimidating eligible voters.

The provision of the Klan Act that the plaintiffs are citing in the lawsuit has laid dormant for years, but saw a resurgence under the Trump administration, according to Project Democracy lawyer John Paredes, who is representing some of the plaintiffs. It was also recently cited in a federal lawsuit against Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection.

A second lawsuit was filed against a group of Trump supporters who allegedly harassed and followed the bus. That lawsuit claims the group of Trump supporters who surrounded the bus also violated Ku Klux Klan Act and Texas law by organizing a "politically-motivated conspiracy to disrupt the campaign and intimidate its supporters."

"We're not going to escort a bus"

The amended complaint in the lawsuit against officials said that a San Marcos crime analyst and a Biden supporter both alerted city police that the Biden bus was being followed by Trump supporters as it traveled to a scheduled campaign stop at Texas State University in San Marcos.

While Stapp, the public safety director, told the Biden supporter that San Marcos police would send backup, he did not order an escort. The complaint said he sent the information to Winkenwerder, the assistant police chief. Winkerwerder also did not order an escort or assistance, the complaint alleges. Instead, he told officers to "close patrol" the area near the university.

When the Biden bus entered San Marcos' jurisdiction, a New Braunfels 911 dispatcher attempted to get San Marcos police to take over the escort that city had provided along Interstate 35.

The 911 dispatcher in San Marcos put the New Braunfels dispatcher and the Biden campaign staffer who was pleading for assistance on hold and called Daenzer, the police supervisor on duty.

"I am so annoyed at New Braunfels for doing this to us," the dispatcher tells Daenzer, who answered the call and began laughing, according to the transcribed recording in the filing. "They have their officers escorting this Biden bus, essentially, and the Trump Train is cutting in between vehicles and driving — being aggressive and slowing them down to like 20 or 30 miles per hour. And they want you guys to respond to help."

"No, we're not going to do it. We will 'close patrol' that, but we're not going to escort a bus," Daenzer responds.

The transcript shows that the 911 dispatcher passes along information about the sense of danger expressed by the Biden campaign staffer who called for assistance as he was trying to caravan behind the bus in a white SUV.

"[T]hey're like really worked up over it and he's like breathing hard and stuff, like, 'they're being really aggressive.' Okay. Calm down," she said to Daenzer.

The transcription shows that Daenzer said the Biden bus should "drive defensively and it'll be great."

"Or leave the train," the 911 dispatcher responds. "There's an idea."

According to the transcription in the complaint, the dispatcher gets back on the phone with the Biden staffer and tells him there would be no escort.

"If you feel like you're being threatened or your life is threatened, definitely call us back," she told him.

"Are you kidding me, ma'am?" the staffer responded before saying "they've threatened my life on multiple occasions with vehicular collision" and again asking for an escort.

The dispatcher repeated that officers would be there to monitor traffic infractions, but said there would be no escort and indicated that decision was made by a high-ranking police official the lawsuit claims is Winkenwerder.

The bus "could really use your help"

According to Friday's filing, San Marcos police continued to receive 911 calls from other witnesses warning them of reckless driving along I-35, but the police department did not send an escort. The Biden campaign decided to cancel its event in San Marcos and continue north toward Austin.

Eric Cervini, one campaign volunteer and a plaintiff, had already arrived at the San Marcos event location. He alerted Cole Stapp, a deputy in the city marshal's department who was at the site, that the event was canceled and told him the bus "could really use your help," the filing stated.

When Cole Stapp called 911 dispatch to relay the message that the Biden event in San Marcos was canceled, he did not share that the bus needed help, according to another transcribed audio recording in the amended filing.

Instead, he told Cervini the people on the bus should call 911 if they needed emergency services. When Cervini informed him the bus had already called 911 and shared the bus's exact location, Cole Stapp noted the bus was near the police headquarters, the filing states.

"Despite these multiple calls for help from Plaintiffs and others, for the roughly 30 minutes it took to drive through San Marcos on the main highway that runs through it, there were no officers from San Marcos or any other police cars in sight–not on the I-35 exit or entrance ramps, nor on either side of the highway," the filing read.

Without a police escort, those on the bus allege, the Trump supporters grew more aggressive surrounding the bus and the campaign staffers' car. At one point, there was a collision between one of the Trump supporters and the white SUV driven by the Biden campaign staffer who had earlier connected to the San Marcos dispatcher. It wasn't until the bus reached Kyle around 3:46 p.m. that a police escort from that city arrived and the Trump supporters moved away from the vehicle, the lawsuit alleges.

But when the Kyle police escort departed at the Travis County line, the filing stated, the trucks of Trump supporters "resumed their threatening behavior." It wasn't until the bus was able to make it to a campaign stop in Austin that those onboard were able to get off. The Biden campaign canceled multiple events due to safety reasons.

Allegations of poking fun at the attack

According to the filing, plaintiffs argue a text message between some of the San Marcos police officers who refused to provide assistance "poked fun at the attack."

To support that claim, the lawsuit refers to a group text message among San Marcos officers, including Winkenwerder, in which an unidentified person appears to refer to Democrats who drove through town as a derogatory slang term for someone who is mentally disabled.

The following day, Chase Stapp, the public safety director, texted multiple officers about the situation, according to Friday's filing. "From what I can gather, the Biden bus never even exited I-35 thanks to the Trump escort."

Yet in the days afterward, after news of the melee spread, officers started calling the event a "debacle" in internal emails and braced for a "political fire storm" after officers realized that what happened in San Marcos "might lead to political and legal consequences," the complaint alleges.

When Daenzer wrote the report of the incident four days later, he said "due to the staffing issues, lack of time to plan, and lack of knowledge of the route, we were unable to provide an escort."

A spokesperson for the city of San Marcos told The Texas Tribune last year that police responded to requests to assist the bus, but traffic prevented officers from catching up before the bus left the city limits.

Yet Lisa Prewitt, a former San Marcos City Council member who was running for a county commissioner seat at the time, told the Tribune in the days after the skirmish that she had flagged the event to local law enforcement 24 hours in advance and mentioned safety concerns. Prewitt said she had also called Chase Stapp and alerted him the bus was 30 minutes away from the event location in San Marcos and was being followed by 50 or more vehicles with Trump flags.

Last year, Chase Stapp denied that Prewitt specifically requested a police escort or mentioned the "Trump Train" was causing issues, but did not respond to follow-up questions at the time.

"With the exception of the two phone calls to me from Ms. Prewitt, at no time did anyone from the campaign request assistance from the San Marcos Police Department in advance of the event so that the request could be evaluated and prepared for," Chase Stapp said in a statement to the Tribune last year.

"Allen West, GOP candidate for governor, calls wife's DWI arrest in Dallas “insidious"" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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The wife of Texas Republican gubernatorial candidate Allen West was arrested in Dallas County for allegedly driving while intoxicated Friday night, according to the Dallas Police Department and West himself.

Angela Graham-West, 61, was driving home from dinner at P.F. Changs with her three-month-old grandson when she was pulled over and arrested for a suspected DWI. She was charged with driving while intoxicated with a child under 15 years old.

Graham-West was released from jail around 1 p.m. Saturday, according to West, who posted a video on Instagram early Saturday morning from the Dallas County jail. In the video, West angrily denied his wife had been drinking.

West, the former head of the Texas Republican Party, said he had been in Waco having dinner with Ted Nugent when he returned to Dallas to find his wife had been arrested.

He said in the video that he had spoken with people who had dinner with his wife and grandson who told him she only had water and lemonade. West provided a photo of the receipt to the Tribune, which shows a lemonade, but lists no alcoholic beverages.

In the video, West said he was especially angry that his grandson was left on the side of the road with a police officer while officers took his wife to jail.

“I support the thin blue line, but this is insidious," West said. “They put my grandson at risk, at jeopardy, left him with a couple of police officers and carted his grandmother to jail and she had water and lemonade… I'm beyond livid."

Dallas police said in a statement to the Tribune that they stopped Graham-West in the 2300 block of West Northwest Highway at 8:44 p.m. and that the officer “had reasons to believe the driver may be intoxicated."

Police said Graham-West went through a field sobriety test, "which subsequently led to her arrest for DWI."

In a text message to the Tribune, Allen West said his wife was stopped for failing to use a turn signal to change lanes but had “no issues" with field sobriety or breathalyzer tests. He said she refused a blood test, but an officer got a warrant for it.

Dallas police said West's grandson was released to his father. West said his daughter and her husband picked up his grandson from the car on the side of the road.

West announced he was running for governor on July 4, a few days before resigning his position with the state party to start his challenge to Gov. Greg Abbott, a fellow Republican.

Graham-West ran for Garland City Council earlier this year, but did not advance to the runoff election.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/21/texas-candidate-allen-west-police/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

"Whistleblowers say Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is distorting testimony to get their lawsuit dismissed" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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A group of former top aides to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton reiterated in a court filing this week that they believe Paxton committed crimes while in office, and suggested that Paxton is intentionally mischaracterizing witness testimony in their whistleblower case against him for political reasons.

The aides are taking issue with a brief and a press release issued on June 2 where Paxton's lawyers asked the 3rd Court of Appeals to throw out the case four aides filed against the state's top lawyer in which they allege he fired them for reporting his alleged illegal behavior to federal and state authorities. Paxton, who has denied the charges, said he fired aides last year because they had gone “rogue" and made “unsubstantiated claims" against him.

Paxton's lawyer said in June that in a trial court hearing on March 1, former First Assistant Attorney General Jeff Mateer would not say he specifically saw Paxton commit a crime, but only that he had “potential concerns" about Paxton's dealings with real estate developer Nate Paul. Paul is a political donor and friend of Paxton who the whistleblowers allege Paxton helped with his legal issues in exchange for personal favors.

Paxton's lawyers argued that the appeals court should overturn a trial court decision denying the Office of the Attorney General's plea to dismiss because the court doesn't have the jurisdiction to hear the case.

But in a new brief filed on Monday by the whistleblowers' lawyers, they argue Paxton's lawyers took the exchange they cited out of context to argue Mateer never saw Paxton commit a crime. They said Mateer's comment was in response to a specific question about whether any employees raised concerns about Paxton's behavior in June 2020, three months before former employees reported Paxton's behavior to law enforcement.

“This claim distorts Mateer's testimony," the brief states. “In fact, Mateer testified unequivocally that he believed at the time of Appellees' FBI report—and still believes today—that Paxton committed crimes, including abuse of office and bribery." They also point out that Mateer signed a letter on Oct. 1, 2020 that alerted the attorney general's office that the whistleblowers had reported Paxton's behavior to the FBI, further proving Mateer believed Paxton had violated the law.

Mateer, who is not a plaintiff in the case, did not respond to a request for comment, nor did Paxton's lawyer.

The whistleblowers' attorneys say the AG's office did not accurately explain to the appeals court that Mateer's potential concerns were specifically in response to a question about Paxton and Paul's relationship in June 2020.

“OAG took even greater license in its [June] press release, predicting victory because its brief shows that Mateer “swore under oath that Paxton committed no actual crimes," the lawyers wrote in a footnote in the brief. “Given the … OAG's mischaracterization of what Mateer 'swore under oath,' perhaps this portion of OAG's brief was written for an audience other than the justices of this Court."

A lawyer in the case told The Texas Tribune they believed the press release was written for Paxton's supporters and Texas voters, rather than to make a legal argument.

Paxton issued the press release hours before Land Commissioner George P. Bush announced he is running against Paxton for attorney general in the 2022 Republican primary. Since then, former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman has also announced her candidacy for the position.

Paxton will likely face sharp criticism for this lawsuit during the primary campaign, as well as the six-year-old felony fraud case in which prosecutors claim Paxton persuaded investors to buy stock in a technology firm without disclosing he would be compensated for it while he was in the Texas House of Representatives.

The lawyers asked the 3rd Court of Appeals to consider this appeal without hearing oral arguments. If the court decides to hear arguments, the aides requested it happen as quickly as possible.

The four former aides also laid out in detail in the filing the specific instances where they believe Paxton broke the law.

In February, they alleged in a court filing that Paul helped Paxton remodel his house and gave a job to a woman with whom Paxton allegedly had an affair. In return, the aides allege, Paxton used his office to help Paul's business interests, investigate Paul's adversaries and help settle a lawsuit. The filing in February was the most detailed explanation as to what the former aides believe Paxton's motivations were in what they describe as a “bizarre, obsessive use of power."

They also alleged Paxton improperly intervened in multiple open records requests to help Paul gain access to government documents after his company had been raided by the FBI.

“Paxton personally spoke to Paul about the subject matter; told [whistleblower Ryan M.] Vassar that he did not want to assist the FBI or DPS; took personal possession for several days of files that OAG could not officially release to Paul; and specifically directed the release of the FBI's unredacted brief to Paul," the brief states.

The whistleblowers also allege Paxton used AG resources to help Paul in a lawsuit filed against him by an Austin charity and pressured staffers to issue a legal opinion that would help Paul, despite the fact the ruling was inconsistent with previous opinions. The whistleblowers say in the court filing that they reported their concerns to multiple authorities and “spent several hours with two FBI agents telling what they had observed, answering questions, and discussing reasonable inferences they could draw."

The brief also rejects Paxton's repeated argument that he cannot be sued under the Whistleblower Act because he is not a public employee.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/22/texas-ken-paxton-whistleblowers/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

"Texas' divisive bill limiting how students learn about current events and historic racism passed by Senate" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

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After hours of passionate debate about how Texas teachers can instruct school children about America's history of subjugating people of color, the state Senate early Saturday morning advanced a new version of a controversial bill aimed at banning critical race theory in public and open-enrollment charter schools.

Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, introduced a reworked version of House Bill 3979 that also requires the State Board of Education to develop new state standards for civics education with a corresponding teacher training program to start in the 2022-23 school year. The Senate approved the bill in an 18-13 vote over opposition from educators, school advocacy groups and senators of color who worry it limits necessary conversation about the roles race and racism play in U.S. history.

The bill now heads back to the Texas House, which can either accept the Senate's changes or call for a conference committee made up of members from both chambers to iron out their differences.

The Senate-approved version revives specific essential curriculum standards that students are required to understand, including the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. But it stripped more than two dozen requirements to study the writings or stories of multiple women and people of color that were also previously approved by the House, despite attempts by Democratic senators to reinstate some of those materials in the bill.

The Senate did vote to include the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 13th 14th and 19th amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the complexity of the relationship between Texas and Mexico to the list of required instruction.

Yet the most controversial aspects of the bill remain, including that teachers must explore current events from multiple positions without giving “deference to any one perspective." It also bars students from getting course credit for civic engagement efforts, including lobbying for legislation or other types of political activism.

Educators, historians and school advocacy groups who fiercely oppose the bill remained unswayed by arguments that the bill is merely meant to ensure students are taught that one race or gender is not superior to another.

“Giving equal weight to all sides concerning current events would mean that the El Paso terrorist ideology would have to be given equal weight to the idea that racism is wrong," said Trinidad Gonzales, a history professor and assistant chair of the dual enrollment program at South Texas College. “That is the problem, white supremacy would be ignored or given deference if addressed. That is the problem with the bill."

Hughes denied that the bill would require teachers give moral equivalency to perpetrators of horrific violence.

Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said in a statement to the Tribune that Texas schools should emphasize “traditional history, focusing on the ideas that make our country great and the story of how our country has risen to meet those ideals."

But Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, raised concerns on the Senate floor that the historical documents required in the bill only reflect the priorities of white senators.

“There were documents that were chosen, not by Hispanics, not by African Americans in this body, but by Anglos," he said. “No input from us in terms of what founding documents should in fact be considered by all children in this state."

Hughes also told members there have been instances in various school districts where parents have raised concerns about lessons where students have been taught one race is inherently superior to another. He pointed to a particular instance in Highland Park Independent School District where parents were concerned about a book called Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness.

“We do have teaching now that we want to get out that one race or sex is inherently superior to another, or the individual by virtue of the individual's race or sex is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously," Hughes said. “I think we agree we don't want that taught in schools. That's why we need this bill."

But Sen. Borris Miles, D-Houston, pushed back against that premise, reading a passage from the book's author about its intent to help children dismantle white supremacy.

"My point is that we cannot just pick and choose what we are going to teach as history and expect to change things and make things better," Miles said. “It doesn't work that way. This bill is eliminating and excluding some things, and including what you want to say."

Educators also worry the legislation will change how teachers can engage students in hard, but important, conversations about American current events that teachers often use to trace back to historical events.

“Kids get engaged and kids want to dig into your class when they get the relevance and they have some buy-in," said Jocelyn Foshay, a Dallas Independent School District middle school teacher.

The bill, which mirrors legislation making its way through state legislatures across the country, has been coined the Critical Race Theory bill, though neither the House or Senate versions explicitly mention the academic discipline, which studies the way race and racism has impacted America's legal and social systems.

The latest version of the bill also reintroduced an explicit ban of the teaching of The New York Times' 1619 Project, which examines U.S. history from the date when enslaved people first arrived on American soil, marking that year as the country's foundational date. That 2019 work from journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize and was recently thrust back into the national spotlight after the University of North Carolina did not grant her tenure after conserative criticism of her work.

“To suggest that America is so racist at its core to be irredeemable and to suggest that people based on the color of their skin can never overcome biases and can never treat each other fairly, that's a real problem," Hughes said of the project.

Educators also worry the bill language is too vague and will allow students and parents to potentially use the legislation against them if they disagree with how they're teaching history curriculum, regardless of the primary sources and historical texts teachers use to back up their lessons. It's also unclear who would enforce these requirements and how schools or districts would handle these issues.

“It makes it so open for anyone to interpret it the way they want to interpret it," said Juan Carmona, a history teacher in the Rio Grande Valley town of Donna

He sees this bill as a pushback to including more historical voices and perspectives in the teaching of history. In recent years, Texas started to offer Mexican American and African American studies courses to all high school students.

Over the past year, the phrase “critical race theory" has turned into a Republican rallying cry in an apparent pushback against increased conversations about diversity and inclusion and unpacking implicit bias.

This week, 20 state attorneys general sent a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and expressed concern with critical race theory and, specifically, the 1619 Project. The letter says critical race theory analyzes history through “the narrow prism of race."

Georgina Perez, who serves on the State Board of Education, slammed the bill and its supporters, saying they are using buzzwords for political gain rather than to improve education.

“They have no idea what critical race theory is, what it does, who the founders are. They've never read a book, much less a paragraph on it," said Perez. “I understand that maybe some white people are uncomfortable. Well, dammit, when Black people were being lynched, they sure as hell weren't comfortable. Native Americans being removed from their land and Mexican Americans being shot to death in the middle of the night, that shit wasn't comfortable either."

Erin Douglas contributed to this story.

Disclosure: New York Times has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/22/texas-critical-race-theory-legislature/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

After hours of passionate debate about how Texas teachers can instruct school children about America's history of subjugating people of color, the state Senate early Saturday morning advanced a new version of a controversial bill aimed at banning critical race theory in public and open-enrollment charter schools.

Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, introduced a reworked version of House Bill 3979 that also requires the State Board of Education to develop new state standards for civics education with a corresponding teacher training program to start in the 2022-23 school year. The Senate approved the bill in an 18-13 vote over opposition from educators, school advocacy groups and senators of color who worry it limits necessary conversation about the roles race and racism play in U.S. history.

The bill now heads back to the Texas House, which can either accept the Senate's changes or call for a conference committee made up of members from both chambers to iron out their differences.

The Senate-approved version revives specific essential curriculum standards that students are required to understand, including the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. But it stripped more than two dozen requirements to study the writings or stories of multiple women and people of color that were also previously approved by the House, despite attempts by Democratic senators to reinstate some of those materials in the bill.

The Senate did vote to include the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 13th 14th and 19th amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the complexity of the relationship between Texas and Mexico to the list of required instruction.

Yet the most controversial aspects of the bill remain, including that teachers must explore current events from multiple positions without giving "deference to any one perspective." It also bars students from getting course credit for civic engagement efforts, including lobbying for legislation or other types of political activism.

Educators, historians and school advocacy groups who fiercely oppose the bill remained unswayed by arguments that the bill is merely meant to ensure students are taught that one race or gender is not superior to another.

"Giving equal weight to all sides concerning current events would mean that the El Paso terrorist ideology would have to be given equal weight to the idea that racism is wrong," said Trinidad Gonzales, a history professor and assistant chair of the dual enrollment program at South Texas College. "That is the problem, white supremacy would be ignored or given deference if addressed. That is the problem with the bill."

Hughes denied that the bill would require teachers give moral equivalency to perpetrators of horrific violence.

Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said in a statement to the Tribune that Texas schools should emphasize "traditional history, focusing on the ideas that make our country great and the story of how our country has risen to meet those ideals."

But Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, raised concerns on the Senate floor that the historical documents required in the bill only reflect the priorities of white senators.

"There were documents that were chosen, not by Hispanics, not by African Americans in this body, but by Anglos," he said. "No input from us in terms of what founding documents should in fact be considered by all children in this state."

Hughes also told members there have been instances in various school districts where parents have raised concerns about lessons where students have been taught one race is inherently superior to another. He pointed to a particular instance in Highland Park Independent School District where parents were concerned about a book called Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness.

"We do have teaching now that we want to get out that one race or sex is inherently superior to another, or the individual by virtue of the individual's race or sex is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously," Hughes said. "I think we agree we don't want that taught in schools. That's why we need this bill."

But Sen. Borris Miles, D-Houston, pushed back against that premise, reading a passage from the book's author about its intent to help children dismantle white supremacy.

"My point is that we cannot just pick and choose what we are going to teach as history and expect to change things and make things better," Miles said. "It doesn't work that way. This bill is eliminating and excluding some things, and including what you want to say."

Educators also worry the legislation will change how teachers can engage students in hard, but important, conversations about American current events that teachers often use to trace back to historical events.

"Kids get engaged and kids want to dig into your class when they get the relevance and they have some buy-in," said Jocelyn Foshay, a Dallas Independent School District middle school teacher.

The bill, which mirrors legislation making its way through state legislatures across the country, has been coined the Critical Race Theory bill, though neither the House or Senate versions explicitly mention the academic discipline, which studies the way race and racism has impacted America's legal and social systems.

The latest version of the bill also reintroduced an explicit ban of the teaching of The New York Times' 1619 Project, which examines U.S. history from the date when enslaved people first arrived on American soil, marking that year as the country's foundational date. That 2019 work from journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones won the Pulitzer Prize and was recently thrust back into the national spotlight after the University of North Carolina did not grant her tenure after conserative criticism of her work.

"To suggest that America is so racist at its core to be irredeemable and to suggest that people based on the color of their skin can never overcome biases and can never treat each other fairly, that's a real problem," Hughes said of the project.

Educators also worry the bill language is too vague and will allow students and parents to potentially use the legislation against them if they disagree with how they're teaching history curriculum, regardless of the primary sources and historical texts teachers use to back up their lessons. It's also unclear who would enforce these requirements and how schools or districts would handle these issues.

"It makes it so open for anyone to interpret it the way they want to interpret it," said Juan Carmona, a history teacher in the Rio Grande Valley town of Donna

He sees this bill as a pushback to including more historical voices and perspectives in the teaching of history. In recent years, Texas started to offer Mexican American and African American studies courses to all high school students.

Over the past year, the phrase "critical race theory" has turned into a Republican rallying cry in an apparent pushback against increased conversations about diversity and inclusion and unpacking implicit bias.

This week, 20 state attorneys general sent a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and expressed concern with critical race theory and, specifically, the 1619 Project. The letter says critical race theory analyzes history through "the narrow prism of race."

Georgina Perez, who serves on the State Board of Education, slammed the bill and its supporters, saying they are using buzzwords for political gain rather than to improve education.

"They have no idea what critical race theory is, what it does, who the founders are. They've never read a book, much less a paragraph on it," said Perez. "I understand that maybe some white people are uncomfortable. Well, dammit, when Black people were being lynched, they sure as hell weren't comfortable. Native Americans being removed from their land and Mexican Americans being shot to death in the middle of the night, that shit wasn't comfortable either."

Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association Board of Governors said it will only hold college championships in states where transgender student-athletes can participate without discrimination. The Monday warning sets the stage for a political fight with multiple states, including Texas, that are considering bills in their legislatures that would require students to play sports with only teammates who align with their biological sex.

“Inclusion and fairness can coexist for all student-athletes, including transgender athletes, at all levels of sport," the NCAA statement said. “Our clear expectation as the Association's top governing body is that all student-athletes will be treated with dignity and respect. We are committed to ensuring that NCAA championships are open for all who earn the right to compete in them."

Texas lawmakers have filed six bills that target transgender students' sports participation — but only two of those bills would affect colleges and university sports in addition to K-12. While most of the proposals have not yet received a hearing, one bill, which was named a Senate priority, recently advanced out of a Senate State Affairs Committee to the full chamber for a vote. It would require the University Interscholastic League, which runs K-12 sports, to amend its rules to only let students play sports with students who match their biological sex as determined at birth or on their birth certificate. If passed, it would go in effect Sept. 1.

Reps. Cole Hefner, R-Mount Pleasant, and Valoree Swanson, R-Spring, who authored the two bills affecting college and university student athletes, were not immediately available for comment. Their bills have not yet been scheduled for hearings.

Lawmakers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee have already passed bills that would bar transgender girls from participating in women's sports. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, more than 30 states are considering similar bills that would limit transgender students sports participation.

Texas lawmakers are also considering a bill that would classify providing children with puberty suppression drugs or performing gender reassignment surgery as child abuse. Another bill would revoke a doctor's medical license if they perform a sex reassignment surgery for the purpose of gender reassignment to people under 18 years old or prescribe “puberty blockers." Puberty blockers are reversible drugs often used by a transgender child who wants to delay puberty, including changes such as starting a period or deepening voice. The bill would also prohibit gender-confirming surgeries and hormone therapies. The Senate State Affairs Committee heard testimony on both bills Monday, but took no action on the legislation.

The recent NCAA women's basketball tournament was held in Texas. Multiple games in the 2022 NCAA men's March Madness tournament are already scheduled to be played in Fort Worth and San Antonio.

During previous legislative sessions, Texas Republicans, like those in other states, unsuccessfully pursued so-called “bathroom bills" that would prevent transgender people from using the bathroom that matched their gender identity. Business leaders at the time came forward with their opposition to the anti-transgender legislation —a trend that is re-emerging this session.

The NCAA's statement comes as corporations are vocalizing their opposition to other conservative efforts, including proposed changes to Texas voting laws. Multiple Texas based companies, including Dell and American Airlines, spoke out against the proposed law earlier this month.

LGBTQ advocates said conservatives across the country are latching onto issues related to athletics and health care as the latest way to spread fear about transgender children using inaccurate information, despite opposition from medical and athletic associations.

Equality Texas held a press conference outside the Capitol building Monday afternoon, where transgender Texans and parents of transgender children spoke about their efforts to stop the passage of anti-trans legislation.

“We hope that Texans realize what's really happening, which is essentially adults in power bullying trans kids," said Emmett Schelling, the executive director of the Transgender Education Network of Texas.

“What they are doing is just unconscionable. These bills are just bad lawmaking," said Lisa Stanton, a Houston resident and the mother of a transgender girl. “Instead of focusing on issues that focus on and affect all Texans, these legislators are trying to pass bills that harm children, rather than help them."

While the legislation has seen some traction in the upper chamber, it's unclear whether there will be support in the House, where similar bills have yet to get assigned a committee hearing.

In the past, Speaker Dade Phelan, R-Beaumont, has pushed back against bills that would weaken protections for LGBTQ people. After the Senate passed a bill in 2019 that removed nondiscrimination protections based on sexual orientation, the House State Affairs Committee, which Phelan chaired, had the language reinstated.

Phelan said in an interview at the time that he was "done talking about bashing on the gay community."

"It's completely unacceptable," he said. "This is 2019."

In an interview with the Tribune in January, Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, who filed the priority bill and others on the issue, argued the changes were necessary to preserve Title IX.

He said transgender girls in particular — whom he referred to in an interview as “individuals who are quote confused" — could have an unfair advantage in strength and ability.

“This is purely 100% devoted to the preservation of Title IX and allowing women to compete against women in their peer groups in that biological category, so they know they can have an equal and fighting chance based on ability and not over some political narrative of the day that undermines fairness," he said.

Perry declined to comment through his chief of staff about the NCAA action.

On Monday, Perry said during the State Affairs Committee hearing that the bills were trying to protect children who don't possess the maturity to understand the impact of these decisions.

“God created us all in his own image. ...We went outside that creation by our own accord and suffer with some of the consequences of being outside his will since the garden," Perry said, referring to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. “This is another one of those issues that we find ourselves entangled in that unfortunately, the damage is to our most precious, precious being our children, not our personal lineage, but all of God's children and the children in this state."

But during testimony, at least one transgender Texan child pushed back on Perry's arguments.

“God made me. God loves me for who I am, and God does not make mistakes," Kai Shappley, a 10-year-old transgender girl, told the committee. Shappley and her mother, Kimberly, have fought anti-trans bills proposed by the legislature for several years now. The family moved from Pearland to Austin because of discriminatory laws that would not allow Kai to use the women's restroom.

"I do not like spending my free time asking adults to make good choices," Shappley said.

Duncan Agnew and Megan Munce contributed to this report.

Disclosure: Dell and Equality Texas have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Correction, April 12, 2021: A previous version of this story misspelled the last name of the executive director for the Transgender Education Network of Texas. He is Emmett Schelling, not Shelling.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/04/12/ncaa-transgender-laws-texas-legislature/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

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The Texas Longhorns had just lost to rival Oklahoma for the third time in a row — this time after a quadruple overtime.

The bruising loss was quickly overshadowed when then-Texas quarterback Sam Ehlinger stood alone on the field for the playing of the university's alma mater song "The Eyes of Texas," a postgame tradition. The rest of the team, who typically stay to sing the song with fans at the end of games, had retreated from the field.

For many University of Texas at Austin students who had spent months protesting and petitioning the school to get rid of "The Eyes of Texas," it was gutting to see the student leader seemingly taking a stand. (Ehlinger later said he was only lingering alone on the field to talk with coaches.) The song — played to the tune of "I've been working on the railroad" — was historically performed at campus minstrel shows, and the title is linked to a saying from Confederate Army Commander Robert E. Lee.

But hundreds of alumni and donors were more concerned about why Ehlinger was alone. They blasted off emails to UT-Austin President Jay Hartzell, calling the image of the abandoned quarterback "disgusting," "embarrassing" and "disturbing." They demanded that the school stand up to "cancel culture" and firmly get behind the song — or else donors were going to walk away.

Email sent to UT-Austin obtained in a public records request. Credit: Illustration by Emily Albracht for the Texas Tribune

"My wife and I have given an endowment in excess of $1 million to athletics. This could very easily be rescinded if things don't drastically change around here," wrote one donor in October. His name was redacted by UT-Austin, citing open records laws that protect certain donor identities. "Has everyone become oblivious of who supports athletics??"

Hartzell had already publicly stated the university would keep the song, but hundreds of emails obtained through public records requests show that decision didn't quell the furor among some of the most ardent supporters of "The Eyes."

From June to late October, over 70% of the nearly 300 people who emailed Hartzell's office about "The Eyes" demanded the school keep playing it. Around 75 people in emails explicitly threatened to stop supporting the school financially, calling on the university to take a heavier hand with students and athletes they believed were disrespecting university tradition by protesting it.

"The Eyes of Texas is non-negotiable," wrote another graduate who said they've had season tickets since 1990 and whose name was redacted by the university. "If it is not kept and fully embraced, I will not be donating any additional money to athletics or the university or attending any events."

This month, a university committee formed to document the song's history is expected to release its highly anticipated report, likely reigniting the debate within the school community.

While those who emailed represent a fraction of the more than 540,000 UT-Austin alumni, their threats had some university fundraisers sounding the alarms.

"[Alumni] are pulling planned gifts, canceling donations, walking away from causes and programs that have been their passion for years, even decades and turning away in disgust. Last night one texted me at 1:00 am, trying to find a way to revoke a 7-figure donation," President of the Longhorn Alumni Band Charitable Fund Board of Trustees Kent Kostka wrote to a group of administrators, including Hartzell. "This is not hyperbole or exaggeration. Real damage is being done every day by the ongoing silence."

Alumni and donors threatened to cancel season tickets, end donations and boycott games. They complained that Hartzell was not forcefully defending the song and school traditions enough, accusing him of cowing to political correctness.

"It is disgraceful to see the lack of unity and our fiercest competitor Sam E[h]linger standing nearly alone," wrote one graduate whose name was also redacted by the university to protect the identity of a donor. "It is symbolic of the disarray of this football program which you inherited. The critical race theory garbage that has been embraced by the football program and the university is doing massive irreparable damage."

Among the donors who reached out was billionaire businessman and alumnus Bob Rowling, whose holding company owns Omni Hotels and previously owned Gold's Gym and whose name graces a building within the McCombs School of Business.

TK TK Credit: Illustration by Emily Albracht for the Texas Tribune TK TK. Credit: Illustration by Emily Albracht for the Texas Tribune Emails sent to UT-Austin obtained in a public records request. Credit: Illustration by Emily Albracht for the Texas Tribune.

"I am not advising you or taking any position regarding this issue right now, other than to say 'The Eyes' needs to be our song," Rowling wrote to Hartzell. "I AM wanting you to be aware of the 'talk about town' regarding UT. There are a lot of folks on this email chain who love UT and are in positions of influence."

In an interview with The Texas Tribune, Rowling stood by his email and said Hartzell should be cognizant of donors' wishes.

"My advice to Jay was these alumni have given and are giving," Rowling told the Tribune. "We're in the middle of a capital campaign right now. ...We're raising billions of dollars right now. If you want to dry that up immediately, cancel 'The Eyes of Texas.'"

Many of the emails were dismissive or hostile toward students.

"UT needs rich donors who love The Eyes of Texas more than they need one crop of irresponsible and uninformed students or faculty who won't do what they are paid to do," Steven Arnold, a retired administrative law judge and UT-Austin law school graduate, wrote to Hartzell. When reached for comment, Arnold said he had not donated to the university in recent years and has been completely turned off of college football after the events of the last year.

Learn from the past

Hartzell was explicit in July that "The Eyes of Texas" would remain a university tradition, but said the entire school community must try to understand its origins.

"'The Eyes of Texas' should not only unite us, but hold all of us accountable to our institution's core values. But we first must own the history," Hartzell said in a July letter to the university community.

Commitment to the song has been echoed by the Board of Regents and by Steve Sarkisian, the new football coach who was hired in January.

From the start, Sarkisian signaled he would take a different approach than former coach Tom Herman, who said he would respect players who did not want to stay to sing the song.

"I know this much," Sarkisian said, "'The Eyes of Texas' is our school song. We're going to sing that song. We're going to sing that proudly."

Criticism about the song has percolated for years, but this summer as protests swept cities across the nation over police brutality against Black people in the aftermath of George Floyd's death, students demanded universities shed relics of the past that memorialize racist figures.

Before the season started, student athletes threatened to stop showing up at donor events if the university didn't take action and many players left the field when "The Eyes" started playing after the first two home games of the season. In September, students started a petition to boycott the song coinciding with a social media campaign called "Rewrite, not Reclaim."

"If something offends a certain demographic of people, and they've been outspoken about it, and they have every right to be offended by it, I think we should be listening to them," said Madison Morris, a freshman who is part of the Longhorn Athletic Agency within UT-Austin student government.

In early October, Hartzell announced Richard Reddick, a professor and associate dean in the College of Education, would chair a committee to review and document the history of "The Eyes of Texas," providing options for how the school can share and learn from its past — even as it had no intention of abandoning the song.

The committee announcement caused some alumni to again question whether the university was leaving the door open on the song. Rhetoric among donors and alumni intensified as pleas to keep the song over the summer turned into frustration that Hartzell needed to take a more aggressive approach. They demanded students and players be required to participate in the university tradition. Some of the emails were racially charged.

Email sent to UT-Austin obtained in a public records request. Credit: Illustration by Emily Albracht for the Texas Tribune

"It's time for you to put the foot down and make it perfectly clear that the heritage of Texas will not be lost," wrote another donor who graduated in 1986. Their name was also redacted by UT-Austin. "It is sad that it is offending the blacks. As I said before the blacks are free and it's time for them to move on to another state where everything is in their favor."

At least two people argued that because the Black student population at UT-Austin is small, their voices should not outweigh the larger wishes of the alumni base.

"Less than 6% of our current student body is black," wrote Larry Wilkinson, a donor who graduated in 1970, quoting a statistic UT-Austin officials have stated they're working to improve. "The tail cannot be allowed to wag the dog….. and the dog must instead stand up for what is right. Nothing forces those students to attend UT Austin. Encourage them to select an alternate school ….NOW!"

Wilkinson reiterated his opinions in an interview with the Tribune. "Everything in life all comes back to money," he said. He said he did not get a personal response to his email from Hartzell, only a generic message that said the song would remain.

Trial by fire

The controversy of "The Eyes" has been a trial by fire of sorts for Hartzell, who started as interim president in April and was officially offered the job in September.

In an interview with the Tribune and follow up emails last fall, Hartzell acknowledged the fierce debate the song had created.

"Many believe the song is a positive unifying force that inspires Longhorns to do their best. We also recognize that some feel differently. This is why we have taken the approach that we did, conducting an in-depth study of the history and origin of the song," he wrote in an email. "My hope is that with clarity of the facts, we can begin the process of learning about and reckoning with 'The Eyes of Texas' in a way that can be a model for having difficult conversations, bridging divides and understanding diverse points of view."

Email sent to UT-Austin obtained in a public records request. Credit: Illustration by Emily Albracht for the Texas Tribune

Hartzell would not say whether donors played a role in his decision to keep the song, but emails show that staffers in his office closely monitored and tallied the messages from people weighing in on the song.

"Went through the [Eyes of Texas]-themed mail inbox again this morning," Gary Susswein, former chief communications officer, wrote to Hartzell and his deputy, Nancy Brazzil, in mid-October. "Nearly 100 percent support for the Eyes of Texas."

After Hartzell sent out a letter announcing the creation of the committee to study "The Eyes," Susswein also documented the reaction on social media.

"Opponents of the song worry the upcoming work will amount to only a justification for keeping 'The Eyes' intact," Susswein wrote. "Those who favor the song say they'll continue singing it regardless of what the university may decide."

Recently, Texas A&M University examined what the impact on donations could be if they removed a campus statue of a former university president and Confederate general, Lawrence Sullivan Ross. The university has been embroiled in similarly tense debate over the monument there. According to the report, interviews with fundraising groups at Texas A&M found that the university could expect a short-term drop, but long-term fundraising would likely remain unaffected.

A UT-Austin spokesperson said they have not done a similar review.

Meanwhile, Hartzell has skillfully avoided sharing his personal opinions on "The Eyes" in interviews. But in emails, he shared his feelings that the raging debate had been weighing on him.

"I woke up yesterday, and my dog had pooped on my kitchen floor," he responded to a friendly alumnus who emailed him applauding his leadership during the firestorm. "I thought that was a metaphor for my week!"

Emails show the issue privately consumed the president's office, even as school was reopening during a pandemic.

When an email from a UT-Austin parent sharing her son's mental health issues appeared to go unintentionally unanswered, a student affairs employee asked if Hartzell's office wanted to respond directly. But the president's office declined.

"If you think we can help [redacted], then please proceed," wrote Geoff Leavenworth, a former communications director at UT-Austin who was hired temporarily to help the office with correspondence this fall. "I'm afraid The Eyes of Texas issue is requiring a lot of bandwidth right now."

Cancel culture

In one email chain, alumnus Trey Hoffman circulated a letter in support of keeping the song which garnered 257 signatures. He also shared criticism and worries about the committee tapped to review the history of "The Eyes of Texas," headed by Reddick. The email contained a large photograph of Reddick, who is Black.

"This professor is in charge of the team/ that tells us whether the song is racist or not? His Twitter account is filled with race baiting and cry baby [Black Lives Matter] junk," the caption below the photo read. "UT better get it together and use its brains, not this biased 'victim' professor at UT!"

Hoffman's email was flagged for Hartzell's attention noting his history of donations to the school.

"His opinions are uninformed and inaccurate," wrote Scott Rabenold, vice president of development, who pointed out Hoffman has donated $70,000 to Longhorn athletics. "But his message is/will resonating."

When reached for comment, Hoffman walked back his criticism of Reddick. He said he didn't author the comments in his email criticizing Reddick, but did copy them from a post he saw online.

"I happen to believe that Professor Reddick is a long time supporter of UT and its traditions," he said. "While his committee has not completed its report, I am hopeful that they will produce a positive outcome that everyone can live with."

Emails show other alumni argued the committee promoted "Marxist ideology" and called it a product of "cancel culture." Multiple alumni who emailed the university called students "snowflakes," a term made popular by the alt-right to criticize progressives they think are too sensitive.

Email sent to UT-Austin obtained in a public records request. Credit: Illustration by Emily Albracht for the Texas Tribune

Nearly a dozen emails questioned whether conservative voices would be represented on the committee and accused the university of silencing non-liberal students on campus.

"I truly hope that you value diversity of opinion...but if you are similar to today's academia you will shut down conservative viewpoints and true facts," wrote one alumni identified as Myers, who called themselves a "disgusted alumni" from the class of 1984. "I do not support UT anymore (even though my family has 3 generations of graduates) because it has become a bastion of far liberal indoctrination and only teaches one point of view...liberalism. Sorry, but it is clear at UT that the white male is totally screwed unless you are 'woke'."

In an interview, Reddick said he's mostly received support and encouragement from people over the committee's work, but said he was prepared for the split opinions.

"I do public scholarship all the time. I'm used to people having strong opinions about what's done, and I'm used to people maybe not really approaching with open minds," he said. "But this is a collective effort. It's not the work of Rich Reddick. It's the work of the 25 people in our community. And we stand behind the work that we do."

While the vast majority of those who emailed pleaded with UT-Austin to keep the song, a small handful of alumni urged the president to get rid of the alma mater, with a few threatening to pull donations unless the song went away.

And some creative alumni suggested simply rewriting the lyrics to the disputed song.

Alumnus Ken Knowles suggested renaming the song to "The Might of Texas."

He submitted the lyrics: "The Might of Texas is upon you/Hail the Orange and White/ The might of Texas is upon you/Together we will fight."

Another alumna and her grandmother also submitted revised lyrics which included a new second stanza, "Do your best to be a Texan — From night till early in the morn! The skies of Texas are above you, Till Gabriel blows his horn!"

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin, UT-Austin's McCombs School of Business, Texas A&M University and Robert B. Rowling have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/01/ut-eyes-of-texas-donors-emails/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

By Erin Douglas, Kate McGee and Jolie McCullough, The Texas Tribune

Feb. 17, 2021

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/17/texas-power-grid-failures/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.