Texas A&M University System administrator Rick Olshak is the Director of Title IX and Student Conduct Compliance.
Olshak recently lamented the fact that the new Biden administration Title IX rewrite did not go far enough in extending to transgender competition in athletics. State lawmakers passed a law against that practice just last year. Questions were raised regarding Olshak’s adherence to Texas values.
Texas Scorecard began investigating Olshak after his comments and contacted Texas A&M on the afternoon of May 15 regarding their employment of him.
“Chancellor John Sharp has directed that Rick Olshak be suspended with pay in accordance with System policy while allegations about his job performance as a System employee are investigated,” Laylan Copelin, Vice Chancellor of Marketing and Communications, told Texas Scorecard the morning of May 16. “Please note that the allegations under investigation do not include his private social media posts, as this activity is protected by the First Amendment.”
Background
The Texas A&M University System hired Olshak in 2016.
They tasked him with overseeing their compliance with a federal civil rights law originally designed to prohibit sex-based discrimination in education, known as Title IX. In April 2024, the Biden administration announced they were going to change the federal law to add “gender identity” as a protected class. In practice, this meant schools would have to choose between letting biological males into female spaces or forgoing federal taxpayer funding.
Few in Texas knew who Olshak was. Title IX wasn’t a topic for coffee conversations either. That changed when the Biden administration altered the law.
Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Education Agency to ignore this change. Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration. However, The Battalion, Texas A&M’s student newspaper, reported that the Texas A&M University System (TAMUS) was following President Joe Biden. Olshak even lamented that the Biden administration was holding off on the “transgender participation in athletics” requirement for now. The Battalion reported Olshak expressed he wanted unanimous agreement that others should be treated equitably, as opposed to equally.
Such a statement from an A&M staffer differs from the university’s reputation as a conservative institution.
Olshak’s comments and TAMUS’ reported actions proceeding with Biden’s Title IX changes birthed a backlash, then a backtrack.
At the May 14 Texas Senate Higher Education Subcommittee Hearing, TAMUS Chancellor John Sharp engaged in damage control. “The Title IX director said they’re working real hard to implement the new Title IX regulations. Immediately thereafter, I sent a memo to all the presidents saying, ‘We’re not doing that,’” Sharp told senators.
An investigation into Olshak himself suggested that such a conflict was highly likely, which raises the question as to why TAMUS hired him in the first place.
Blog
Olshak’s personal website revealed more of his political leanings. He wrote multiple blog entries this year. Since contacting TAMUS about these, Olshak has hidden the posts below. Archives of them exist and have been linked to in this article.
He wrote in March 2024 that he was “horrified” at what he called the Republican Party’s “de-evolution” since 1964, and he claimed the “Trump and the MAGA movement” normalized racism, hate, and misogyny. Olshak also advocated for packing the U.S. Supreme Court.
“In my view, reelecting President Biden this fall is our only short-term hope of saving our form of democracy, and even then must be coupled with Democratic control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate,” Olshak wrote.
Back on February 12, Olshak chose to elevate and agree with a social media post that compared former President Donald Trump to Nazi Dictator Adolf Hitler. This was in response to Trump’s promise to drive out “Communists, Marxists, and Fascists” from government, among other factions.
Olshak has also dreamed of federal power slamming the scales towards the education establishment.
“In my little corner of the educational universe, I am hopeful that we will utilize the power of the federal government to shut down the religious and cultural wars that are threatening the very fabric of this nation, and restore the requirement to once again teach civics in the primary and secondary settings,” Olshak wrote in March 2024 on his personal blog.
These themes repeated in his support of Biden’s Title IX changes. Olshak attacked Congresswoman Virginia Foxx of North Carolina in an April 2024 post. Foxx had stated the new Title IX rule “dumps kerosene on the already raging fire that is Democrats’ contemptuous culture war that aims to radically redefine sex and gender.”
“This comment is coming from the same set of people who opposed LGBTQ+ rights in principle (the related Venn diagram is likely two overlapping circles) and the same people who seek to deny women of being able to make their own medical decisions even where their lives are on the line,” Olshak wrote. “I have no kind words for this level of idiocy and lack of empathy.”
But there could be another factor behind Olshak’s anger. It was found in his March 2024 blog post. He wrote that the new Title IX changes came as he co-founded a new consulting firm: Resolution Solutions, LLC. He’s also its Chief Operating Officer. “Unlike previous efforts that I have been involved in that focused solely on the educational environment, this one will focus on the higher education environment while also providing resources for social workers and therapists,” he wrote.
More signs of trouble were found in Olshak’s connections.
DEI
Be it in the film industry, video games, or education, divisiveness has sprouted wherever DEI was sown.
Grassroots voter energy resulted in Gov. Greg Abbott’s signature on Texas’s ban of DEI in higher education—Senate Bill 17—on June 17, 2023. It came into effect on January 1, 2024.
Olshak was on the side that chose to fight the measure.
He is a member of the board of advisors for the Association of Title IX Administrators (ATIXA). He also is an “affiliated consultant” with TNG Consulting—a firm for higher education schools, and more. In an April 2024 post titled “DEI is Essential to the Educational Enterprise,” these Olshak-linked groups opposed state action against DEI. They were joined by the National Association for Behavioral Intervention and Threat Assessment (NABITA).
All three encouraged higher education and K-12 schools to resist state lawmakers outlawing the DEI ideology. They encouraged “college presidents and trustees” to “resist” the efforts of state lawmakers to hold them accountable to eliminate DEI. They encouraged “higher education institutions and K-12 schools and districts” to shield DEI “programs, positions, and professionals,” even suing “when necessary.” They also encouraged pro-DEI lawmakers to “dilute anti-DEI and anti-CRT bills.”
Will TAMUS Keep Olshak?
Texas A&M has long had an image of being a conservative stalwart. Since 2023, multiple reports have challenged that branding. The employment of Olshak is only the latest challenge.
Then there’s the question of his work with consulting firms that profit from education which he does while working for TAMUS.
Our review of Olshak produced more questions than answers. Most notably, for a university that bills itself as the beacon of traditional values in Texas, why was Olshak hired and will they choose to keep him?
