Texas universities, similar to Iowa’s Public Schools, maintain affirmative action plans, likely in noncompliance with state legislation, recent executive orders, and the Department of Education’s (ED) latest Dear Colleague letter.
Passed in late 2023, Texas’s Senate Bill 17 specifically banned “policies or procedures designed or implemented in reference to race, color, or ethnicity.” Affirmative action plans directly contradict this, mandating race-based “strategies” to achieve race-based hiring “goals.” Per the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Compliance Manual, employers must “identify potential underrepresentation of protected groups” and establish “measurable goals to increase representation of underrepresented groups, focusing on achieving balance.”
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission invites all employers to submit affirmative action (AA) plans as part of its guidelines. Most universities, including Texas public universities, submit Plans voluntary to reduce exposure to discrimination lawsuits. Once hiring goals are set, they inform strategic planning, vision statements, hiring manuals, and job postings as the mandate to “increase diversity.”
All university employees are expected to “increase diversity”—in other words, to use race in hiring. As the University of Texas – El Paso notes, “responsibility for implementing the Equal Opportunity Policy and Affirmative Action Plan rests with every member of the University community.”
[RELATED: Despite DEI Bans, Texas Keeps Funding DEI Activist Pipelines]
Texas Tech University’s hiring manual illustrates several of the tweaks in hiring practices commonly employed by diversicrats: committees must contain “a diversity of backgrounds,” each committee member must undergo “equal opportunity” training, and all searches must pass a “review of search efforts to recruit qualified women, minorities, protected veterans, and individuals with disabilities.”
Texas Tech admits to engaging in “active recruitment of qualified underutilized minorities.” It identifies minorities “by the Office of Federal Contractor Compliance Programs (OFCCP) and as used in connection with the TTU AAP [affirmative action plan]” as “Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, Native Americans/Alaskan Natives, and individuals who identify as two or more races.”
Similarly, Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, notes in its hiring procedure that “funds are available through the Human Resources Office for minority recruiting advertising.” Universities disguise race-based recruitment strategies such as this one as “active” or “targeted” recruitment, emphasizing discrimination.
While some Texas universities have removed their AA plans from their websites, many AA plans are still publicly available. Some were even resubmitted or reapproved by Texas institutions in the year since SB17 was passed.
According to SB17, Texas public institutions will undergo a compliance audit once every four years. They would do well to eliminate their affirmative action plans and references to “increasing diversity” in university documents. State auditors, meanwhile, should pay close attention to these mechanisms, which perpetuate odious, race-based hiring practices despite de jure condemnation.
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Image: “Sul Ross State University Alpine Texas” by Adavyd on Wikimedia Commons
Please see Texas Labor Code Sections 21.201 – 21.504 that requires state agencies, including institutions of higher education to conduct a biennial workforce analysis, and then develop and implement an affirmative action plan to recruit… Recruiting does not violate SB17 as long as preference in hiring is not given.
This is required by the Texas legislature. So, damned if we do; damned if we don’t…
It would be best to understand all legal requirements when reporting on an issue, and that we are all doing our very best to fully comply with the law.
” Recruiting does not violate SB17 as long as preference in hiring is not given.”
It might violate SFFA.
There are precedents from Jim Crow.
SFFA is about student recruiting. This article is about employment. Different analyses apply.
If I read this correctly, Texas SB17 contradicts requirements of federal law.
This sounds like a very uncomfortable in which to put the Texas universities.
Furthermore, “affirmative action” per se is not illegal, it has explicitly approved by the Supreme Court.
Massachusetts has a blasphemy statute still on the books — 272 MGL 36 — and what you are stating is as asinine (and incorrect) as stating that the US Supreme Court has “approved” the Commonwealth’s enforcement of it. I’ll even name two cases: _Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer_, 582 U.S. 449 (2017) and _Carson v. Makin_, 596 U.S. 767 (2022)
Or do you honestly believe that Massachusetts can put someone in jail for up to a year for “denying, cursing or contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final judging of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching or exposing to contempt and ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures” — and how many jails do you think the Commonwealth would have to build were it able to enforce this?!?
So exactly which decision are you citing? Baake? That was just one long-dead Justice pontificating — just one and then 46 years of Majority Opinions saying “not really.”
46 years of SCOTUS closing the wiggle room until the SFFA decision left none at all.
And exactly what Federal law requires it? What part of the United States Code requires it? (Hint, Federal Laws are cited in a number-USC-number format, such as 18 USC 242 which actually criminalizes it. Yes, violation of civil rights under color of law, and Bondi might actually enforce this…)
That said, even if the EEOC *regulations* were legal, and mandating racial discrimination in hiring is not, they would only involve hiring — not admissions. Any Federal mandate for Affirmative Retribution, while illegal, would only affect the receipt of Federal funding. Perhaps you have heard of this issue relative to both Columbia and the University of Maine?
So we have no Federal Law and no supporting SCOTUS decision…
We do have regulations that need to be challenged and perhaps conservatives can play the “worldwide injunction” game as well….
Dr. Ed: I suggest you begin by reading paragraphs 3 – 4 of the article.
The problem is twofold — illegal Federal regulations arguably supersede state law, and that is why they need to be challenged.
But the larger issue is that people are not going to enforce regulations that they don’t want to. Who in Texas is going to be enforcing this, and do they honestly want to???
On a related note, there is an interesting story coming out of Wisconsin.
It appears that in the course of complying with the legislature’s request for information, the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered that its “diversity, equity and inclusion chief LaVar Charleston improperly approved lump-sum bonus payments, raises, and inappropriate travel and event expenses, leading to his dismissal from the role in January….The Department of Diversity, Equity and Educational Achievement gave out both the second-highest number of bonuses and the second-highest dollar total of all university departments in 2024, amounting to $236,250 that year, records show. Some of the bonuses were as high as 8% or 9% of an employee’s base income, averaging $3,327 in bonuses per individual.” [!!!]
It gets better — “Between 2022 and 2024, the department’s budget increased by 59%, from $7.9 million to $12.6 million in 2024….Charleston himself made $364,207 in the role, receiving a more than $50,000 raise from the year prior.” Giving yourself a pay raise with state funds — wow… (Amongst other things, in Massachusetts that would be a violation of the ethics laws and he’d have to give the $50K back…)
“The department also spent thousands of dollars in reimbursements for travel, lodging and conferences, both in person and online, under Charleston’s oversight. One employee was reimbursed about $45,000 over the span of two years for travel and online conferences. Another program was comped $32,000 for a trip to Maui, Hawaii, including $14,000 in lodging.”
The rest of this is at https://www.smry.ai/proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmadison.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Feducation%2Funiversity%2Farticle_08215b62-00ea-11f0-90ee-dfe966018df2.html
A hilarious cartoon is at https://madison.com/opinion/cartoon/article_89f9bfd0-03a6-11f0-951f-e702bd311003.html — Dumb Expenses Incurred…
And what really sucks is that he isn’t going to jail, or even being fired — he’s being given a faculty gig in the Education Department. Never mind that he’s never taught there, and that they may not need anything he is able to teach, they are not only going to be stuck with him but (likely) he will take a faculty budget line that could have gone for a professor they actually needed.
The response to this article by Alan Stucky, Vice Chancellor & General Counsel at UNT, is very illustrative:
“Our hands are tied”