Students Question Reasoning Behind New 'Diversity' Job at Texas A&M
by Jim Brown
November 24, 2003
(AgapePress) - Conservative students at Texas A&M University are protesting the appointment of a new "diversity" official on campus.Last week, James Anderson was installed as Texas A&M's Vice President of Institutional Diversity. The chairman of the campus group Young Conservatives, Matt Maddox, says while administrators have not explained the need for the new "diversity" post, he believes the new VP will be responsible for giving racial preferences to minorities -- which his group opposes.
"The only thing that we've been able to get out of our president is that he's going to use the new vice president position to make the A&M student body and faculty look like the demographics of the State of Texas," Maddox says. "In other words, he wants us to exactly mirror the state census statistics which, in essence, [means] quotas."
Maddox says among other things, the new vice president will be enforcing a 30% quota for minority hiring in the engineering department. He is convinced that students at A&M feel their academic programs are being put on the backburner in favor of the diversity post created for Anderson.
"A&M is well known for its agricultural programs, and just this past semester the dairy sciences program [was] cut when administrators cited expenses of somewhere around $50,000 a year to operate," the student leader says. "And the journalism department ... is actually being cut as well -- costs of $150,000 [a year] were cited [as the reason]. The salary for [the new post] alone is going to be $170,000."
In protest of the newly created post, Young Conservatives held an "Affirmative Action Bake Sale" where white males were charged $1 for a cookie. The same kind of cookie was sold to white females for 75 cents, to Hispanics for 50 cents, and to African-Americans for a quarter.
