Austin American Statesman. April 4, 2024.
Editorial: The harsh consequences of the Texas GOP’s fervor to crush DEI at UT
The work of public universities – communal investments in the thinking skills and innovation needed to build a healthy society – needs to nurture a broad range of thought and experience in order to flourish. This week, though, under the pressure of Senate Bill 17, an anti-DEI law, the University of Texas by some estimates laid off at least 60 of its staffers dedicated to protecting that freedom for Texas college students.
That’s at least 60 workers laid off not over questions of competence or relevance – but for their effort to facilitate academic success for every student. That’s more than 52,,000 students getting the message that their state has marshalled both law and political pressure to remove school-funded DEI offices and initiatives, or staff that perform DEI functions, that allow students to find support, learn about differences, and feel welcome in their academic home.
And that’s Texas – driven by Republican fervor to hunt down and crush what they’ve deemed “woke” tendencies in education – gnawing deeply into the reputation of its magnificent higher education system. It’s the state alienating already-admitted UT students who might be its next energy game-changers or medical giants. It’s Gov. Greg Abbott heedlessly sabotaging a future that depends on thinkers from a broad range of background s, ethnicities – and yes, life experiences – for economic success.
Senate Bill 17, which went into effect in January, forbids the state’s public universities and colleges from funding any office, initiative, or program that supports diversity, equity and inclusion objectives. This week 40 employees of the UT’s Division of Campus and Community Engagement lost their jobs. UT said the layoffs were for efficiency after it made changes to comply with SB 17 in January.
As a public institution, the university has had to comply with SB17 and, presumably, protect itself by speaking with neutrality. “The new law has changed the scope of some programs on campus, making them broader and creating duplication with long-standing existing programs supporting students, faculty and staff,” UT President Jay Hartzell wrote to the university community on Tuesday. “Following those reviews, we have concluded that additional measures are necessary to reduce overlaps, streamline student-facing portfolios, and optimize and redirect resources into our fundamental activities and research.” Funding for DEI initiatives will now be redirected to teaching and research, he said.
Such corporate-speak can hardly obscure the disinformation and practical consequences on Texas education.
Contrary to the rhetoric that created SB 17, DEI is not a plot to undermine merit in university admissions or campus life. It is part of a generations-long trend, with its roots in the civil rights movement, to address the obstacles that blocked minority groups from the education, job opportunities and chance for upward mobility that define America at its best.
Only gaining admission to universities – itself a generations-long struggle – isn’t enough. To excel in classes, shine on sports teams and enjoy the mental health and feeling of community that bolster achievement as a citizen, students at Texas universities deserve the right to supportive groups and clubs. Students from outside these groups learn and flourish by their proximity and participation in these campus-sanctioned groups.
The outcome of these initiatives is not a tidal wave of political correctness drowning the thinking of Texas students, as Republican critics of DEI policies would have us believe. And it’s not even the valuable prospect of students choosing Texas public universities and colleges.
The outcome is a Texas where students of all backgrounds can take full advantage of their education, where graduates benefit from social networks and new ideas far outside their own life experience. It’s a Texas that thrives because, as research shows again and again, diversity is the only way to access the full, rich talent pool available to us.
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Dallas Morning News. April 4, 2024.
Editorial: Why is Texas pausing Native American studies course?
We can’t sanitize history for either side.
The history of our country cannot be told without accounting for the reality that Native American people were violently pushed from their lands in the long westward march of American settlement.
To say that is simply to state a truth about our nation. But that truth is so disquieting that we worry it is the reason why, once again, the State Board of Education is delaying approval of an American Indian/Native Studies course in Texas schools
The board’s chairman, Aaron Kinsey of Midland, said the course approval is being delayed to provide more time to review its curriculum. And longtime board member Pat Hardy said there needs to be more balance in the course with a focus not only on the mistreatment and enslavement of Native people by European settlers and their descendants but on intertribal enslavement.
There is no question that the long pre-colonial history of Native peoples included violence, war and enslavement. And that remained true well after white settlers began staking claim to tribal land. In Texas, we can tell the tale through the ascendance of the powerful Comanche tribe after their mastery of the horse. That history has been well told in many places, including in our former colleague S.C. Gwynne’s excellent and unsentimental book Empire of the Summer Moon.
Like any serious history, Gwynne’s work addresses the violence the Comanche wrought on other tribes as well as on white settlers. He neither condones nor condemns this but writes it as the history has it.
But his work appropriately focuses more deeply on the greater narrative of the decimation and forced assimilation of tribal people as a result of the Manifest Destiny policies of the American government. That’s the only choice of a serious historian, because that is where history takes us.
Some practitioners of what’s known as settler colonial history do advocate for a sentimentalized version of history that creates a caricature of the facts. This is often done with a goal of politicizing students. History should be taught with a neutral eye, and if that’s the goal of the State Board of Education, it’s worth the pause.
But we’re skeptical. We are worried this is about swinging the pendulum the other way to diminish the inescapable fact that our nation, by policy and by repeated lies and an endless string of broken treaties, killed Native people and forced those who survived onto squalid reservations where they starved or scratched out the most meager lives possible far from their homelands.
We have to reckon with that history. It is terrible. It is shameful. And it is ours.
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Houston Chronicle. April 2, 2024.
Editorial: Texas Medical Board abortion guidance can only go so far
In December, the Texas Supreme Court threw up its hands when asked whether the case of Kate Cox qualified for an exception under the state’s near-total abortion ban.
Cox argued in a lawsuit that her health and her ability to have children in the future were at risk if she was forced to continue her pregnancy after doctors diagnosed her fetus with full trisomy 18, a chromosomal abnormality that’s nearly always fatal.
Texas women in other urgent situations have had to either leave the state or wait until deadly infections spread or ectopic pregnancies nearly ruptured before receiving abortion care from doctors fearful of losing their licenses and going to prison under Texas’ opaque and uncompromising post-Roe abortion law.
After a lower court ruling in Cox’s favor, many hoped Texas’ highest civil court would take a stand. Instead, it didn’t grant Cox’s emergency abortion and punted on the larger questions, suggesting the Texas Medical Board could sort through it all.
“That is not our role,” medical board chair Dr. Sherif Zaafran said at the time.
He’s right that issuing guidelines on abortion is somewhat outside the day-to-day work of the board, which deals with licensing doctors and related oversight.
Then, after two lawyers petitioned the agency to weigh in, the board put the matter on its March agenda so it could hear testimony and propose guidelines. Women, desperate for some relief, went before the board.
“I heard you say you don’t make the law, but I’m here today because I tried to get the Legislature to act when I lobbied last session and couldn’t even get an amendment on fetal anomaly out of committee,” said Kaitlyn Kash at the March 22 medical board meeting in Austin. “I tried to get the courts to help us … and they said we needed to wait for you.”
In their petition, the lawyers offered language that included a list of conditions that could reasonably qualify someone for an emergency abortion. But the guidelines put out by the medical board after the March 22 meeting don’t have such a list.
Instead, they simply reiterated the definitions of certain medical conditions that are already found in different statutes: “major bodily function,” “medical emergency,” and “reasonable medical judgement,” for example — and they suggested documentation that doctors should be prepared to present to help back up their decision-making. The board made clear that even following these guidelines won’t necessarily protect doctors against prosecution that could result in a life sentence.
The public has 30 days to offer comments, but so far, many of the reactions have been negative.
“This is not going to help doctors and patients,” Molly Duane, senior attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, told the editorial board. Duane is also one of the lawyers representing Amanda Zurawski, Kash and nearly two dozen other plaintiffs in a case still awaiting a decision from the Texas Supreme Court. “You can’t just repeat the language of the statute, not provide a substitute for the list and then create additional burdensome requirements.”
“There are broad categories of risks to patient health that everyone can agree on,” she added.
It can be risky, of course, to establish a finite list of medical conditions that may require abortion care. It’s impossible to anticipate all scenarios, and some experts worry that an official list of conditions would undermine physician discretion and create more barriers than it would remove.
We believe it’s worth trying to make the guidelines on the table clearer, and we encourage experts to weigh in during the comment period and at an upcoming stakeholder meeting.
Ultimately, the frustration many are feeling, and that we certainly share, stems from the inherent limitations of what the medical board can do and promise. The board can’t write new laws. It can’t completely protect doctors from prosecution.
As an anesthesiologist, Zaafran won’t likely face the career- and freedom-threatening decisions that some of his peers are. But he is in labor-and-delivery rooms regularly and he understands his colleagues’ concerns.
“If there’s any message I could put to my colleagues out there, it’s that it’s your peers, it’s your colleagues, who are going to be determining what that standard of care is, what an emergency procedure is, what permanent bodily function might be,” Zaafran told us in an interview Monday. He explained that a panel of OB-GYNs appointed by the medical board would be the ones to make decisions on whether a doctor acted within the guidelines, not the actual medical board, which is a governor-appointed mix of people, only some with medical experience and currently only one with directly relevant experience. “I hope that gives everybody a certain amount of comfort.”
Not exactly. The most dire consequences for doctors aren’t just up to a panel appointed by the medical board. They have the power to decide whether a doctor acted appropriately and should keep their medical license, but doctors can’t be sure that prosecutors and courts would respect the board’s opinion when deciding whether to pursue criminal charges.
So far, it’s been a mixed bag for Texas women who might get relief at one level, only to have it overturned at the next. Certainly, we can’t trust that elected leaders won’t try to inject politics into a doctor’s controversial decision. Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton isn’t above convicting a doctor in the court of political opinion to influence his or her fate in the court system.
We’re still waiting to hear from the Texas Supreme Court on the Zurawski case, in which the lead plaintiff had to wait until she came down with a life-threatening infection that permanently damaged one of her fallopian tubes to receive the care she needed.
“Regardless of what the Texas Medical Board does, we still need an answer,” Duane said.
We hope the courts will seriously listen to medical professionals. We urge the medical board to do the same, and be as clear as possible in their guidance. That may mean providing a list of medical conditions that can be treated with abortion, as long as the board makes it clear that it’s not an exhaustive list, nor a substitute for professional medical judgement.
In the end, though, the medical board can’t heal the harm that Texas lawmakers inflicted with their reckless legislation. The lawmakers didn’t listen when they were warned that such severe bans, even those with some limited exceptions, weren’t protective of human life and health. They must correct their grievous errors.
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AIM Media Texas. April 6, 2024.
Editorial: Voters should remember that major party candidates are not their only options
For the third consecutive presidential campaign, both major parties are fielding candidates whose disapproval ratings are higher than their positive ratings. Low voter turnout in state primaries and caucuses has enabled extremists to dominate the process and select candidates who aren’t in line with the preferences of most party members, and voters.
Some analysts and candidates have expressed fears that the negative perceptions might lead many voters to opt out this year and not participate in the elections at all.
We hope that doesn’t happen. In fact, voters should recognize that they have other options. They always have.
Voting is important not only in the presidential race, but in congressional, state and local races that also will be on the ballot.
Most Americans have been led to believe that we have a political two-party system. It largely is, but it doesn’t have to be. In reality, almost a dozen political parties are registered and active. People who have voted in previous presidential elections might remember a surprisingly long list of candidates on their ballots, either tied to other parties or running as independents.
The largest and most successful alternative group is the Libertarian Party. A recent high-profile group is the No Labels effort, formed after the 2016 campaign involving Hilary Clinton, Donald Trump, Gary Johnson and others.
Other parties include the Green, Constitution, Socialism and Alliance, among others, including the independent campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that he calls the We the People Party.
To be sure, some groups focus on one or a few issues they deem most important, and the Democrats and Republicans traditionally both attack alternative candidates and parties, knowing that reducing voters’ options increases their chances of success. Kennedy already is facing the major parties’ common attack strategy of warning voters that alternative votes will split the support for their party and put the opposition in the White House.
Another tactic common among the major parties is the insistence that a third-party vote is wasted because those candidates don’t have a chance of winning.
But given the negative opinions those parties have among the voting-eligible population, some might decide that it’s time to give the other options a more serious look.
Voters could make a strong statement if, instead of choosing not to vote at all, they cast votes for candidates whose platforms are more in line with their views. Large numbers of alternative votes would make it clear that voters do want to continue participating in our political process, but want better candidates.
A country whose citizens are as free and diverse as ours don’t have to be limited to just two political parties. Inclusion of other groups not only would pressure major parties into listening to voters rather than demagogues, but they likely would make coalitions and negotiations more important in our lawmaking process, which could be a major improvement.
Voters needn’t opt out if they don’t like either major candidate. They have other options, and it might be time to give them a look.
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Lufkin Daily News. April 5, 2024.
Editorial: Wildflowers: Show-stopping display of nature’s bounty available for motorists to enjoy
While traveling around the Lone Star State this spring, motorists are being treated to a show-stopping display of bright blues, vibrant pinks, deep reds and rich yellows. And recent rains brought us an early explosion of color that’s only going to get better before the season ends.
Every region in Texas boasts some of the state’s 5,000 different species of wildflowers, including right here in East Texas, where trout lilies, trilliums, mayapple, violets, purple meadow-rue, groundsels, blue iris, wisteria, flowering dogwood, blue-star, spider lily, yellow jasmine, crossvine, jack-in-the-pulpits, Virginia sweetspire, hawthorns, spiderworts, white-flowered milkweed, azalea, fringe tree and silver bells are scattered across the Pineywoods.
And contrary to popular myth, it’s not illegal to pick wildflowers — including bluebonnets — in Texas, although there are laws against damaging rights of way or government property. So while picking a few flowers is probably OK, individuals should avoid digging up clumps of flowers or driving their vehicle into a field.
But far more popular than flower-picking these days (thanks to the droves of budding amateur photographers who’ve taken up the hobby in recent years) are photography sessions with friends and family among the many Technicolor floral displays along our Texas roadsides.
We’ve recently spotted families stopping to take advantage of the seasonal photo-ops in the large patch of bluebonnets near the entrance to Angelina College on U.S. Highway 59. That location offers the perfect setting with safe parking on the campus nearby.
The Texas Parks & Wildlife Department encourages Texans to exercise caution when taking wildflower photos on busy roadways, however, by using emergency lights, being mindful of disturbing the wildlife resting or hiding in a particular location (such as nesting birds) and avoiding undesirable encounters with venomous snakes and fire ants. And our Texas State Parks offer picturesque settings for family wildflower photos away from busy roadways during this prime time for unique and diverse wildflower displays.
More than 90 Texas State Parks present some of the best and safest places to view and photograph nature’s bounty of wildflowers and blooming shrubs and trees, including Huntsville State Park, where Redbud trees, bluebonnets and Dogwood blossoms are among some of the more annual sightings.
Citizens should also bear in mind before stopping on the side of that county road that some of these beautiful fields of flowers could be on private property, which means photographers and their subjects could be trespassing while shooting photos. But if you are shooting on the side of the road, be sure to take traffic laws into consideration for the safety of yourself and others by following these tips from the Texas Department of Public Safety:
Signal before leaving or entering the roadway.
Park off the roadway (off of improved shoulders), parallel to the road in the direction of traffic.
Don’t cross lanes of traffic on foot to get to the flowers.
Obey signs that prohibit parking on a particular stretch of roadway.
Remember that failure to follow the rules of the road could result in a ticket any time of year. So exercise caution and be practical while enjoying the Texas wildflowers during this particularly spectacular season.
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