Grading Texas

The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately will decide whether the new state law requiring copies of the Ten Commandments to be prominently displayed in Texas’ public school classrooms is constitutional or unconstitutional, but despite what Attorney General Ken Paxton claims it is not unpatriotic to oppose the law. Nor is it anti-Christian.

Soon after Gov. Greg Abbott signed the law last summer, a group of 16 parents of various religious and non-religious backgrounds with children in public schools filed a federal lawsuit against it. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and other religious freedom organizations, they won a ruling in August from U.S. District Judge Fred Biery of San Antonio, temporarily blocking the law as unconstitutional.

Biery concluded that the law favors Christianity over other faiths and is likely to interfere with families’ “exercise of their sincere religious or nonreligious beliefs in substantial ways.”

The ruling, however, applies only to the 11 school districts in which the plaintiffs have children in school. Other lawsuits with statewide implications are pending in other courts but haven’t been heard, and Paxton has demanded all other school districts comply with the law.

The attorney general, who is appealing Biery’s ruling and has won a hearing before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in January, has attacked the plaintiffs as “radical, anti-American groups trying to ignore our moral heritage.”

Who exactly are these “radical anti-Americans?”

One is a Jewish rabbi who said, “While our Jewish faith treats the Ten Commandments as sacred, the version mandated under this law does not match the text followed by our family, and the school displays will conflict with the religious beliefs and values we seek to instill in our child.”

Another plaintiff is a Baptist pastor who believes, like many other Christians, that “posting the Ten Commandments in public schools is un-American and un-Baptist.”

“Baptists have long held that the government has no role in religion – so that our faith may remain free and authentic,” he added. “My children’s faith should be shaped by family and our religious community, not by a Christian nationalist movement that confuses God with power.”

Like many Christian nationalists, Paxton is intent on rewriting history to deny our country’s founders’ belief in the separation of church and state.

The First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

In a Jan. 1, 1802, letter to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut, President Thomas Jefferson described the First Amendment language as “building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

The Supreme Court already has cracked the wall that Jefferson described by allowing private religious schools to receive taxpayer-paid vouchers from state governments. How it will eventually rule on Texas’ Ten Commandments law in this age of Trumpism, hyper-partisanship and alternative “facts,” I have no idea. But justices who believe as the nation’s founders will vote to strike it down.

Clay Robison

Texas taxpayers and private donors are spending $550 million on a construction project in downtown San Antonio that, when completed, will refurbish and expand the city’s most popular tourist site and include a new facility to be called the Alamo Visitor Center and Museum.

For generations, many politicians as well as everyday Texans have called the Alamo the “Shrine of Texas Liberty” because it was the site of a 13-day siege that ended in a much shorter battle during Texas’ war for independence from Mexico in 1836. All the Alamo defenders, about 200 men, died at the hands of a much larger Mexican army and have been considered heroes by millions of Texans ever since.

But the Alamo was more than a battle site. In 1718, many years before Americans started settling Texas, it was established by the Spanish as Mission San Antonio de Valero with the goal of converting the indigenous people of the area to Catholicism and teaching them Spanish ways and customs. It remained a mission until 1793, when the Catholic Church gave up control. For a while after that, it was a Spanish fort.

There is a difference between a shrine and a museum. Historical museums are supposed to be based on facts – the good, the bad and the ugly. Shrines can share facts, but they also promote legends and thrive on hero worship and similar emotions.

Some shrines are religious. Others aren’t. For many years, the Alamo has been a memorial shrine, with a religious-like devotion from many Texans, including many of Texas’ elected leaders. It commemorates an event and people – the Texan defenders, whose exploits have become legendary, maybe even mythical.

Many adult Texans grew up believing every Alamo defender died fighting, fed by popular beliefs and movie or TV portrayals of Davy Crockett swinging his rifle like a club after running out of ammunition. But based on written accounts left by Mexican soldiers, some historians have concluded that some defenders, including Crockett, surrendered and were executed.

Does their surrender diminish their role in Texas history? No, and the new Alamo Museum must differentiate between facts and legends. Some historians believe the preservation of slavery was a factor in the Texans’ revolt from Mexico and believe the new Alamo Museum also must include that story, even though it is decidedly less than heroic and doesn’t reflect the ideals of freedom and liberty historically associated in the public mind with the Alamo itself.

And to be a real museum – as opposed to a shrine – the museum must tell the true story of the indigenous people who were served and/or exploited at the Alamo when it was still a Spanish mission. Their living conditions were harsh, their work was arduous, punishment for disobedience was severe and mortality rates were high. That period lasted 75 years. The outcome of the Texas Revolution put Texas on the road to statehood, but the Alamo siege lasted 13 days and the battle, which the rebels lost, less than two hours.

At present, the state General Land Office is custodian of the Alamo site, but it is operated by a nonprofit, the Alamo Trust, through a contract. An agreement between the Land Office, the Alamo Trust and the city of San Antonio calls for the new Alamo project to include Indigenous, Mexican, Tejano and Black perspectives, but state Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham seems to have lost her copy of the deal.

Last week, on Columbus Day, a federal holiday that some states (not Texas) also celebrate as Indigenous Peoples Day, someone posted a message on the Alamo’s official X page honoring indigenous people and their history at the Alamo. According to stories in the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle, Buckingham, whose ancestors first arrived in Texas nine generations ago, reacted angrily.

The post on the Alamo’s X site noted that the “Alamo Visitor Center and Museum will feature an Indigenous Peoples Gallery, celebrating the bands, clans and tribes that shaped the region.”

After a right-wing activist tipped her off about the Alamo post, “Buckingham posted this response on X: “I did NOT authorize this post. This is frankly unacceptable, and it has been deleted.”

“Woke has no place at the Alamo,” she also wrote. “This speaks to a pattern of behavior that is completely misaligned with the priorities of my office and the vast majority of Texans who care so deeply for our Shrine of Liberty.” She made clear her priority was to keep a “battle-centric focus” on the Alamo as a defender of liberty and freedom. The Alamo Trust apologized for its indigenous people post.

But Ramon Vasquez, an indigenous scholar on the Alamo project’s museum committee, pointed out “there is nothing woke about facts.”

Vasquez told the Express-News and the Chronicle that he was hopeful that Buckingham’s response wouldn’t sabotage the progress the Alamo project has made in “celebrating the diversity of our state and our city.”

But now that the Alamo has become a front in the culture wars, who knows what kind of story or stories the new Alamo Museum will tell when it opens in 2027. Will it be a real museum or simply an expensive, prettied-up version of an old shrine?

Alamo overseer’s anti-woke demands loom over $550 million project’s future

Clay Robison

So far, President Trump’s main education policy, if you want to call it that, is to wipe out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in schools, and that is part of his larger war to repeal civil rights laws that date back to the 1960s. Restoring the legality of white privilege obviously appeals to Trump and many in his MAGA army of followers.

In the process, he is undermining the future of education in America and jeopardizing the hopes and dreams of millions of young people of all races and ethnicities, including white students.

Consider his recent decision to wipe out special funding for about 600 Hispanic serving educational institutions (HSIs) throughout the U.S. HSIs are colleges and universities, both private and state-supported, with enrollments that are more than 25 percent Hispanic. Announcing the cuts, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said it was “discriminatory” to set aside the funding for HSIs, even though these schools serve students of all races and ethnicities and all students benefit from the grants.

About 100 of these schools with about one million students are in Texas, and these institutions were expecting about $60 million in grants this year. Now, they are scrambling to plug budget holes and trying to save important student programs, including enhanced academic offerings, more research opportunities and better career readiness.

“We prioritize student success, and that’s not going to change,” said Montserrat “Montse” Fuentes, president of St. Edward’s University in Austin, one of the HSIs.

“But not having access to that type of funding would impact the speed and the volume of the support and the initiatives that we can set in place to help students,” she told the Austin American-Statesman. She said the programs funded by the grants helped increase student retention at St. Edward’s, which has many first-generation college students and where half of the students receive student aid through Pell Grants, based on financial need.

Since Trump returned to office, St. Edward’s also has lost federal funding for the McNair Scholars program, which supported economically disadvantaged students, after this year and for the College Assistance Migrant Program, which helped migrant students with financial, academic and emotional support.

The Trump administration cut $350 million in all from HSIs and other minority-serving institutions across the country and used much of the money to increase funding by about $495 million to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and tribally controlled educational institutions.

Andres Castro Samayoa, an associate professor in Boston College’s School of Education and Human Development, told CNN he suspects Trump is supporting HBCUs to gain “political goodwill.” The move will allow Trump to “point to this as engaging in allegedly nonracist behavior,” he said.

Stakeholders in the HBCU community told CNN that they have been able to get extra funding from the Trump administration because their schools don’t practice DEI, and some HBCUs are predominantly white. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, non-Black students made up 24 percent of HBCU enrollment in 2022.

In his executive order on HBCUs, Trump said they were “beacons of educational excellence and economic opportunity that serve as some of the best cultivators of tomorrow’s leaders in business, government, academia and the military.”

He could have accurately said the same thing about HSIs. But instead, he gave them the budget ax.

As long as Trump is president, and he continues to target DEI and civil rights with a rubberstamp Republican Congress, HBCU presidents better not get too comfortable. They will need more funding next year too. Will it be there?

Cuts to Hispanic serving institution funds threaten support for Austin colleges

Trump boosts HBCU funding despite his attacks on DEI programs. Here is why some experts believe this is happening.

Clay Robison

Late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel operates in a different world than schoolteachers and most university faculty, and his earnings dwarf theirs, but the TV star has something very important in common with the educators. They are all on the front lines of protecting democracy, and that makes them political targets in this age of the aspiring dictator, Donald Trump, and his gang of apologists and enablers.

Trump and many of his elected followers keep attacking what autocrats hate and Kimmel and educators represent — things like the First Amendment, real freedom of speech, truth and inclusion.

Trump has made it clear that, in his view, free speech doesn’t include speech or media reports that are critical of him and doesn’t include educational policies or classroom discussions with which he takes issue.

Months ago, he bullied two TV networks — CBS and Kimmel’s ABC — into settling lawsuits he brought over alleged grievances that should have been thrown out of court. Brendan Carr, Trump’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, then strong armed ABC into temporarily pulling Kimmel’s show off the air.

Trump also has withheld funds appropriated by Congress from several, elite universities to force them into dropping diversity, equity and inclusion programs that offend the racists and bigots among his political base and his own personal sense of superiority.

The anti-First Amendment infection has spread to Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Trump’s legislative supporters in Texas have clamped down on what public school teachers can teach their students in our state. This began a few years ago with restrictions on teaching about slavery and race relations, followed this year with a ban on teaching about diversity, equity and inclusion.

Texas leaders also have imposed restrictions on books in school libraries.

A few weeks ago, politics also figured in the firings of two higher education faculty members in Texas. One was a Texas A&M instructor who was axed for allegedly teaching material that was not part of the course catalogue description for her class in children’s literature.

In truth, she was fired for discussing DEI material with a class and being caught on a student’s video. Abbott demanded she be fired for violating state law, even though, unlike the DEI ban in K-12 public schools, there is no state law prohibiting professors from discussing DEI in higher education classes. Under MAGA-inspired political pressure, though, the A&M president fired the professor and then resigned from his own job a few days later.

Now, Angelo State University, citing a legally dubious executive order from Trump, is banning discussions of transgender issues in its classrooms.

A Texas State University professor was fired for allegedly inciting a violent overthrow of our government. He was axed after a video of him speaking at a socialist conference about anarchists and their lack of organization was posted on social media. “Without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven, mad organization in the history of the world — that of the United States?” he reportedly said.

I don’t know if he really was promoting violence — most professors in Texas don’t — or merely trying to make an academic, hypothetical point, a risky endeavor nevertheless for educators in an era when unfriendly digital eyes and ears are lurking everywhere. In any event, he didn’t make the remarks in a classroom, and he is entitled to due process.

The former professor, who had tenure, has sued the university, claiming violation of his free speech and due process rights as well as his contractual provisions.

“Conduct that advocates for inciting violence is directly contrary to the values of Texas State University,” the university’s president said after reviewing the video. “I cannot and will not tolerate such behavior.”

The only violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. government since the Civil War was the Jan. 6, 2021, deadly attack on the Capitol by rioters stirred up by Trump’s claim that the 2020 election, which he lost, had been stolen from him. The rioters delayed but didn’t stop Congress’ certification of the election results favoring Democrat Joe Biden.

Despite numerous court decisions upholding Biden’s election, Trump still wrongly claims the election was stolen. On his first day back in office in January, he pardoned everyone who had been convicted of participating in the riot, including those who had been convicted of assaulting Capitol police officers.

Inciting violent conduct may be contrary to the values of Texas State University and, I hope, to most Texans. But what are the values of a president who is a threat to democracy?

Clay Robison