Syllabi from a fall 2024 Texas A&M course revealed divisive and far-left messages taught to students.
The class, titled “Race and Politics in the United States,” is a political science course. TAMU’s political science department is within Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service.
Two sections of the course were offered this fall semester, revealing much about the state of the Bush School.
One of the learning outcomes for the Race and Politics class is to “explain how systemic racism affects political representation, behavior, and outcomes.”
Students spent the first four weeks discussing race and racism, with the syllabi assigning readings from the widely criticized 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine. Students also watched a documentary on Netflix titled “Stamped from the Beginning,” based on a book of the same name by Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi is also the author of the controversial book “How to Be an Antiracist.”
In addition, students were assigned to read portions from the book “Racism Without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States” by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. In the preface, the author repeats the widely debunked hoax that President Donald Trump called Nazis and white supremacists “very fine people.”
Additional signs of far-left ideology were found in the book. On page 39, Bonilla-Silva wrote of “the vulgar explicit racism that has been around us throughout this new period—the Reagan era, the ‘Tea Party’ movement during the Obama years, Trump and his supporters, and the many White nationalist groups that surfaced from the election of Obama as president onward and have grown since in size and visibility.”
Following the Bonilla-Silva readings, the syllabi scheduled students to discuss “the role of race in US politics” from weeks five through seven.
Assigned readings included chapters three and four from Zoltan Hajnal’s book “Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American Politics.”
Hajnal analyzed which groups win or lost American elections in chapter three. He claimed that a table of data points in his book showed “a clear racial hierarchy” in American elections, “with Whites on the top and African Americans on the bottom.”
“Overall, 41 percent of all Black voters can be characterized as ‘super losers,’ meaning that they choose the loser in all three contests [president, senate, and governor],” Hajnal claimed on page 107. “Blacks also stand out in terms of how often they win. Across the three contests, the average Black voter wins only 0.76 times, a rate that is far below the figure for Whites (1.67 wins on average), Latinos (1.87 wins), and Asian Americans (1.14 wins).”
Pages in the book’s introduction revealed a pro-Democrat Party bias.
“When Democrats control the White House and Congress, all or almost all of the racial imbalance in policy responsiveness fades away. And these results extend beyond policy. I show that Democratic Party control matters for a deeper, more fundamental outcome—the economic well-being of racial and ethnic minorities,” Hajnal wrote on page seven. “When the nation is governed by Democrats, racial and ethnic minority well-being improves dramatically. By contrast, under Republican administrations, Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans generally suffer losses.”
Previews of the above books were available on Google Books as of November 25.
Scott Yenor, a senior director at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life, reviewed the syllabi. “The syllabus seems to be based on the premise that America is systemically racist and that can be the only explanation for inequities in representation and so on,” he wrote.
Students also read a 2017 paper that Hajnal co-authored with Nazita Lajevardi and Lindsay Nielson titled “Voter Identification Laws and the Suppression of Minority Votes.” They claim that an analysis showed “that strict identification laws have a differentially negative impact on the turnout of racial and ethnic minorities in primaries and general elections. We also find that voter ID laws skew democracy toward those on the political right.”
An election integrity specialist says this is not so.
“I question the validity of this study, but even if it were true, efforts should be made to assist people in obtaining IDs, not dropping the ID requirements for voting,” wrote Christine Welborn of Advancing Integrity, an election integrity organization. “Also, it could be said that one side receives fewer votes when IDs are required because they can’t cast as many illegal votes.”
Dr. Kristy Pathakis teaches both sections of this course. In the syllabus, she offered a list of reasons students could come to her office hours. One of them was, “Maybe the current racial climate in this country is adding to your daily stress and you want to talk, or you want help finding resources.”
Texas Scorecard asked Texas A&M and the Texas A&M University System for comments on how the class represents Aggie values. No response was provided before publication.
Texas Scorecard will continue to examine higher education in the state. If you or anyone you know has information regarding universities, please contact our tip line: scorecardtips@protonmail.com.
Source Documents
For this article, the following documents were reviewed:
Race and Politics in the United States—Syllabus One
Race and Politics in the United States—Syllabus Two
This article contains highlights from these documents. Citizens wishing to conduct a deep dive should click the links above.
