A historically acclaimed Texas university is as bad as other universities nationwide. Taxpayers are funding woke classes at Texas A&M, and woke professors there promoting antisemitism, LGBT ideology, critical race theory, and degeneracy.
It is important to note that this has all happened under the watchful eyes of the university’s appointed board of regents. They are the ones who hold the power and are accountable for a university’s direction, and they can be moved to take action. This has been shown by the efforts of Bill Ackman, investor and CEO/Founder of Pershing Square Holdings, to hold former Harvard President Claudine Gay accountable for Gay not standing against antisemitism on campus. He published an open letter he wrote to Harvard Governing Board on December 10, 2023.
Gay resigned as president on January 2, 2024, but remains employed at the institution as a faculty member. Ackman demonstrated the power alumni and donors have over universities. By leveraging his connections and financial resources he was able to build enough public pressure to force Gay’s hand.
Woke Classes
Despite what their names claim, colleges of education do not provide the next generation of teachers the skills of mentorship and instruction. In a previous interview, Scott Yenor, Senior Director of State Coalitions at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, told Texas Scorecard that since the mid-1970s, such colleges promote a “multicultural education.” That title is not as innocent sounding as one would initially believe. “Schools of education are like a smorgasbord of all the critical theories,” he said. “The way they understand multicultural education is to dismantle the previous white heteronormative culture, and build respect for a new non-white, non-heterosexual culture,” he said.
The end result of this, according to Yenor, is training the next generation of radical activists. “Black Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies departments go deep into one aspect of that multicultural project, and they also are there not simply to promote multiculturalism or critical theory in education, but also to prepare activists to work in the NGO archipelago that we have in the country.” Yenor explained that this means protestors for the lawless Black Lives Matter movement as well as corporate human resources departments.
This poisonous ideology is present at Texas A&M (TAMU) as well. Not only that, but a document Texas Scorecard obtained through an open records request confirmed state taxpayer funding of a number of such classes. We requested the sources of funding for the following classes, and were provided the amounts and sources from the university in response. Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies received more than $5,700 of state taxpayer funding; The Economics of Gender and Race received more than $8,700; and Reproduction, Birth and Power received more than $9,700.
There is also a Political Islam and Jihad class that received close to $17,000 of state taxpayer funding, including “salary and benefits for a faculty member.” All the above are classes offered by Texas A&M during the 2023-2024 school year.
When asked, TAMU spokesperson Kelly Brown did not deny that state taxpayers did pay for these classes. “These figures are not accurate. Funding is typically allocated based on specific credit hours,” she replied. In an overall response to our questions, Brown stated TAMU is “fully compliant” with the state’s DEI ban. This statement is printed in full is at the end of this article.
“As a lawmaker and proud Texas Aggie, this is outrageous,” State Rep. Brian Harrison (R–Midlothian) told Texas Scorecard after being shown these records. “What is the possible state benefit to a minor in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies? Texas should be fighting taxpayer funded liberal indoctrination — not subsidizing it. I’ll be demanding answers from the leadership of my alma mater.”
On social media platform X, he also criticized the university for offering a minor in LGBTQ Studies, adding he’ll be asking Texas A&M leadership for answers “on why they think my constituents should be forced to subsidize this.”
Texas Scorecard is continuing to investigate what other such classes, if any, are funded by state taxpayers.
Further investigation found more ideological programming at Texas A&M. A document from their own College of Education shows it emphasizes three key points: Cultural and Linguistic Diversity, Power and Privilege, and Urban Education.
The document provides details on each emphasis.
Cultural and Linguistic Diversity “critique[s] language as a tool for social and cultural oppression,” and focuses on how different educations “have contributed to linguicide and culturicide, and forms of social resistance employed to counter dehumanization.” They even state that they “define linguistic diversity with a minimal focus on language acquisition.”
As the title suggests, Power and Privilege seeks not to empower students with cutting edge tools of instruction, classroom management, or student engagement. Rather, it approaches education from a highly politicized and ideological point of view and focuses would-be educators on those things that cannot be controlled, rather than improving themselves. It “explores how economic disparities, power differentials, and social hierarchies impact educational systems and structures (policy, academic tracking, teacher quality, funding, formulas, the safety of facilities, and enrichment opportunities).” It also teaches students “to research methodologies suited for strength-centered research into the social and educational inequalities that persist at the intersections of social class, race, ethnicity, and gender, particularly in diverse, urban, and high-need schools.”
Then there’s Urban Education, which emphasizes critical race theory. “Students will engage in research methodologies responsive to the complexities of these ever-evolving social, cultural, and educational spaces and promote affirmative solutions to improve teaching and learning in urban schools through applied critical race research,” the document states.
Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is an ideology that injects hate into minds, not love. “Critical race theory (CRT) makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life, categorizing individuals into groups of oppressors and victims,” states the Heritage Foundation.
This woke rot is not contained to Texas A&M’s College of Education. Texas Scorecard found multiple other such examples.
The College of Arts & Sciences has it too. Consider Associate Professor Tasha Dubriwny of the Department of Communication & Journalism. She is on record teaching multiple classes with key titles such as: Gender and Communication; Gender and Citizenship; Gender, Health and Activism; Feminist Theory; and Theories of Gender.
Her biography reveals much about this Texas A&M-employed educator. “She is a feminist rhetorical scholar whose work focuses on the intersections of feminism, health, and politics,” it reads. “Her current research on reproductive politics adopts an intersectional feminist and reproductive justice framework to argue for the importance of all people’s reproductive freedom.” Furthermore, she is working on a book titled “The Tyranny of Choice.” This book seeks to deploy the ideology of “reproductive justice” to “understand the dynamics of choice rhetoric across a series of case studies including school choice, the choice of surrogacy for LGBTQ parents, and the choice of sterilization by young affluent women.”
As expected from her bio, Dubriwny is very much against the pro-life movement, going so far as to write a paper titled “Justifying Abortion.” Seeking to attack pro-life measures, the paper approaches abortion “narratives from a critical perspective rooted in intersectional feminist theory and praxis and reproductive justice.”
Dubriwny is only one of multiple professors with concerning ideologies at Texas A&M, particularly their College of Arts & Sciences.
Woke Professors
Across the nation, efforts are being made to erase history of the American Civil War by removing the statues of Confederate soldiers. It is now starting to creep into American history in general. It was widely reported that recent efforts to remove a statue of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania in 1681, were rescinded.
Associate Professor Michael Alvard, also of Texas A&M’s College of Arts & Sciences, specifically the Anthropology Department, is part of such pushes to erase history. He participated in a June 2020 protest calling for the removal of Texas A&M’s statue of Sullivan Ross—the institution’s founder and a former Confederate general. He was arrested for crossing into an “exclusion zone” set up by law enforcement to be a barrier separating the protesters and a group of counter-protestors. The police report said Alvard repeatedly refused requests to leave the “zone” and return to his side of the line. Alvard was helped by the Young Democratic Socialists of America at Texas A&M University. They claimed to have raised $3,000 to bail Alvard out.
Following his arrest, Alvard emailed a long statement to KBTX, where he claimed to be a “white male of privilege,” and that the Sullivan Ross statue represents “institutional racism,” “a life of ethnic cleansing, violence, slavery, segregation,” and “Jim Crow racism.” He stated he planned to confront Texas A&M leadership, including the board of regents, about the Ross statue.
Alvard continues to attack A&M history. In November 2021, Students for a Democratic Society College Station (“a multi-issue progressive student activist group focused on building the student movement at Texas A&M”) announced on X that Alvard would be presenting a talk that month on Ross’ alleged “ties to white supremacy.”
Alvard is the Cultural Anthropology Program Coordinator.
Then there’s his colleague Sheela Athreya. She states in her biography that she is currently working on a project that “aims to decolonize the study of our evolutionary history.” Related to this work, she also admits to teaching and publishing “on critical issues of voice, inclusivity, diversity, representation, and postcolonialism in science more broadly, and biological anthropology specifically.”
Left to Right: Sheela Athreya, Michael Alvard.
Bottom: Tasha Dubriwny.
A review of her social media postings finds Athreya to be a supporter of Kathleen McElroy, the DEI advocate from the University of Texas and former editor at the New York Times that Texas A&M tried hiring to run their journalism program. When public outcry forced the university to waterdown the proposed contract, and remove tenure, McElroy refused the job offer.
Athreya shared posts in support of McElroy.
Athreya has other controversial views. She has shared multiple posts on X criticizing Israel during the ongoing Israel-Hamas War.
Athreya is also unashamedly a supporter of the LGBT agenda.
She has also expressed bigoted attitudes towards white people. She reposted a series on August 18, 2023 of posts from Hakeem Jefferson, Assistant Political Science Professor at Stanford, advising departments to “spend some time in self-reflection & consider why your dept has been so white for so long.”
“Is there a way for me to like this 100 times?” Athreya asked when she reposted the thread on X. “Once seems like it’s not enough.”
As her social media posts reveal, her anger towards white people is not a blip but is a part of her character. In another post, she complained about sending hominin—another word for homo sapiens—into outer space. “We are ages away from being anti-racist bc we keep reproducing/rewarding white men who make grand ‘discoveries’ about humanity,” she wrote.
Athreya is a “Chancellor’s EDGES Fellow and Presidential Impact Fellow Professor.” As her profile states, she has taught the following courses at Texas A&M: Introduction to Anthropology, Introduction to Biological Anthropology, Human Biological Variation (Writing intensive), The Neanderthals (Writing intensive), Biological Anthropology (Core course), Issues in Human Evolution Theory, Origin and Evolution of the Genus Homo, and Pleistocene Peopling of the Old World (co-taught with Dr. Kelly Graf).
Texas Scorecard’s investigation brought us back to Tasha Dubriwny’s area: the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M’s College of Arts & Sciences. It is there that we found more woke professors alongside Dubriwny.
Consider Sarah Beck, a “scholar” that is “concerned with the lives of queer, trans, and lesbian women and non-binary folks” using “feminist and queer theorizing.” Beck “utilizes feminist and queer theorizing to argue for the importance of these everyday spaces and their potential to enable communities to thrive and develop inventive ways of responding to the current social and political landscape.”
Next is Joseph “Joey” Lopez, whose profile says “he is often described as a degenerate who is looking for other degenerates to cause ‘otherness’ with.” In addition to teaching at A&M, Lopez is the Director of the Media & Gaming Lab at the Department of Communication. His work includes Chicana Feminism, automotive journalism, and “hardware and software cheerleading.” Lopez also helped form the Convergent Media Collective in 2013, after he started teaching at the University of the Incarnate Word, the largest Catholic university in the state. The Collective includes artists, activists, teachers, musicians, and more. Their goal is “to do cutting edge new media works throughout the world,” and to that end have worked with multiple non-profits, including the Smithsonian Affiliations and the University of San Antonio’s Institute of Texan Cultures. Lopez’ profile on the Collective’s website states that “his theoretical explorations include but are not limited to race, gender, entrepreneurship, advocacy, alternative pedagogy and civic engagement.”
Left to right: Joseph “Joey” Lopez, Sarah Beck, Lu Tang, and Kristan Poirot.
Kristan Poirot is the Executive Assistant Head of the Department of Communication & Journalism and is an “affiliated faculty member of the Africana Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies programs.” She studies “social movement rhetorics and public memories about resistance and white heteronormative male supremacy.” Furthermore, her profile states that “her focus on place and context enables a feminist intervention that grapples with both the conceptual and material entailments of sex, gender, and racial disparity.”
Poirot shared a post that compared the January 6 protest with a Ku Klux Klan rally and “non-violent BLM marches” with a Civil Rights march.
She also shared a post favoring the impeachment of Donald Trump.
Poirot’s fellow educator in the department, Professor Lu Tang, expressed similar sentiments in a post she shared from The Daily Show, a pro-Democrat comedy program.
Tang also joined in attacking those opposing vaccine mandates.
Tang also attacked State Sen. Lois Kolkhorst’s (R–Brenham) proposal—Senate Bill 147—to restrict certain foreign ownership of Texas land—specifically owners from nations identified as hostile to the United States: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. “Texas wants to ban Chinese citizens from buying homes,” Tang claimed.
Bin Xie, a Chinese American, disagrees with Tang’s assertions. “I simply don’t see the bill will hurt any naturalized U.S. citizen like myself or green card holders or asylum-seekers in any way. We Chinese Americans can still buy land and homes as usual,” he wrote in a commentary published by Texas Scorecard. “The bill will only make the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] or any totalitarian party in the four countries unhappy.” Kolkhorst’s proposal passed the Texas Senate and died in the Texas House during the regular 2023 legislative session.
In her post, Tang tagged Lisa Gray, the Houston Chronicle’s op-ed editor, and A&M Professor Jennifer Mercieca, who is in Tang’s department. Mercieca’s A&M profile page notes that she wrote a book (published in 2020) on former President Donald Trump titled “Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump.” Her page also notes that establishment media, such as the Washington Post and the Austin-American Statesman, have praised her work on the former president.
Three more woke professors round out our findings in the Dept. of Communications & Journalism.
George Villanueva primarily focuses on “researching how marginalized communities of color survive the material realities of structural oppression that have been reproduced along the intersectional social identities of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class.”
His social media posts also reveal much about his ideology. He posted the photo of a flyer that repeated narratives against Israel.
He has called Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star an “immoral act of cruel intentions” and “anti-human life.”
He’s also shared advertisements for an event that occurred at Texas A&M: a talk on “Queer Indigenous & Asian Diasporic Survivance in the Settler Capitalist City.”
He also announced he would be participating in a “Latinx Creative Consortium.”
Villanueva is a Doctoral Program Coordinator. His coworker, Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, is just as controversial.
He is the Director of Race and Ethnic Studies Institute and “teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in rhetoric, critical race studies, Latinx studies, social movement, and more.” In an introductory essay, he argued that “rhetorical studies is fundamentally racist and needs some substantive antiracist attention” and focused on what is “necessary to challenge the whiteness of rhetorical studies.” He wrote a book titled The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation, which “crafts a critical rhetorical history of the Latinx social movement organization and treats them as a touchstone for building decolonial theory and praxis.”
Left to Right: Bryce Henson, George Villanueva, and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano.
He also publicly opposed Texas’ anti-DEI law, Senate Bill 17, as it was making its way through the state legislature in 2023.
“The anti-DEI measure is rooted more in moral panic and white grievance than in any kind of evidence of harm being done in the status quo,” he wrote.
Finally there is Bryce Henson. He claims to be a “Black diasporic cultural studies scholar” who “teaches courses on Black cultural studies; media & intersectionality; diaspora; cultural theory; qualitative methods; and popular culture.” Henson’s profile states that he “focuses on the intersection between anti-Black racism and Black lived, expressive, and mediated cultures of political resistance and possibility in the Americas.” He also co-edits “Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (2020).”
Texas Scorecard sent inquiries to the Texas A&M Board of Regents and TAMU spokesperson Kelly Brown about the professors in this article. Brown replied:
Faculty and staff also have the First Amendment right to speak freely on matters of public concern, which includes the right to post on their social media pages, present at conferences, publish articles and speak out on the leading issues of our day. The U.S. Constitution, the Texas Constitution and the Texas Education Code 51.9315 all require that institutions of higher education protect the right of free expression not only of our faculty and students, but all members of the Texas A&M community. A faculty member has freedom in the classroom provided that comments are appropriate for and relevant to the classroom topic and are subject to the faculty member’s responsibility to maintain and exhibit professional competence in the classroom, to demonstrate professionalism and to show respect for their students. The university’s statement on Academic Freedom, Responsibility, Tenure and Promotion can be found here.
But this is not all that was found at Texas A&M.
In part two, Texas Scorecard will examine the pushing of transgenderism on campus.
Texas A&M Overall Response to Questions
“Texas A&M University has worked to comply with Senate Bill 17 on advice and guidance from The Texas A&M University System. The university is fully compliant and equipped with mechanisms to promptly report and resolve compliance issues. The examples cited below in the emails either occurred before S.B. 17 went into effect on Jan. 1, 2024 or are specifically exempt per the new state law. S.B. 17 does not apply to academic course instruction, scholarly research or creative work. Additionally, student organizations are also exempt. Our core educational mission is to prepare students in leadership, responsibility and service to our society, and this requires a complete understanding of one’s chosen field and the cultural competencies to be successful in the modern world. We don’t endorse or advocate, but rather we educate and empower students with critical thinking skills to make up their own minds.”
Source Documents
For this article, Texas Scorecard reviewed multiple documents.
Texas A&M University System’s Appeals to the Texas Attorney General (A and B).
Texas A&M College of Education Multicultural Education Emphasis Document.
Records of state taxpayer funding of certain classes.
This article contains highlights from these documents. Citizens wishing to conduct a deep dive should click on the links above.
