Perry’s op-ed ignores A&M’s major strides
Rick Perry may need to adjust his prescription eyewear, because he can’t seem to see the big picture. The former Texas governor managed to find time away from his new Cabinet post to fret about the outcome of a student election at our alma mater, Texas A&M University.
Perry, channeling his new boss, claims the results were rigged. Bobby Brooks, the first openly gay student body president in A&M history, didn’t win the popular vote. His opponent, Robert McIntosh, was disqualified for expense account violations that Perry dismisses as inconsequential.
Perry criticizes A&M administrators for failing to intervene and for not informing the board of regents. As the guy who appointed those regents, Perry should understand the limits of their power. Student elections don’t fall under the administration’s purview. Perry may struggle with the concept of separation of powers because when he arrived at A&M in the late 1960s, the administration had recently fired the editor of the student newspaper, The Battalion, for failing to submit to censorship. (The Batt later became independent of university control.)
Perry claims McIntosh was treated unfairly, the result of student election officials who favored diversity over democracy. “Every Aggie ought to ask themselves: How would they act and feel if the victim was different. What if McIntosh had been a minority student?”
For so many years, of course, they were different. Minorities, homosexuals and women were long marginalized at A&M, a white-only, all-male school until 1963.
When Perry pranced the sidelines in overalls at Midnight Yell Practice, minority enrollment was miniscule, women were a novelty and gays kept quiet. None dared run for student body president.
Just four years after he graduated, A&M’s Gay Student Services sued the university for free speech violations after being denied official recognition as a campus organization. A&M fought the case for six years, losing multiple times at the appeals level before the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear it.
During that time, the backlash was loud and severe. Students marched in protest. Former students and parents wrote letters to The Battalion decrying the end of the institution, the nation and all civilization. Those of us who supported GSS’s right to exist were told we were going to hell, or worse, Austin.
In 1979, a female cadet — the Corps began accepting women in 1974 — sued the university for barring her from joining the Ross Volunteers, an elite unit that serves as the governor’s color guard. A&M fought that case until 1985, when the state attorney general settled it over the objections of A&M’s regents. The cadet graduated during the legal battle, and the university president refused to shake her hand at graduation. The settlement opened the Aggie Band and other menonly Corps units to women.
Back in the mid-’80s, I wrote a column in The Batt criticizing a Ku Klux Klan march in Houston. I received, among other hate mail, a seven-page missive from a fellow student who declared himself a “white patriot” and me a “race traitor.”
I mention these things not to besmirch my school or to minimize the vast strides that A&M has made in the ensuing three decades. Quite the opposite. Today, for the second year in a row, a woman commands the Corps thanks to the battles fought in the ’70s and ’80s.
I have watched with pride as my school has supported diversity at both the administration and student level. Earlier this year, A&M set an example for universities nationwide in how to balance free speech when it permitted, despite widespread public outcry, a talk by hate monger and white supremacist Richard Spencer. While he supported Spencer’s right to speak, A&M President Michael Young condemned his message, and the university sponsored an “Aggies United” event at the same time.
It’s because of A&M’s great strides forward that Perry’s essay in this paper (“Did A&M favor diversity over right to due process?” Page A15, Thursday) strikes such a deaf tone. He weeps for the white male who he claims was slighted by a system that for 100 years kept the school the exclusive domain of white males.
A&M’s love of its own traditions has long bound it to the past. Over the years, many have clung to those traditions to justify denying opportunities to women and minorities. Despite their efforts, A&M has changed. Just as it opened to women and minorities in the 1960s and Liberal Arts in the 1970s, the A&M of today strives to move beyond the baser aspects of its past.
I don’t know if McIntosh’s use of glow sticks in a campaign video violated student election rules, or if that was the reason he was disqualified, as Perry claims.
Perhaps the Student Government Administration and its Judicial Court erred. Perhaps they acted deliberately, as Perry insists, because their zeal for diversity tainted their interpretation of campaign finance rules.
Perry’s defense of McIntosh, though, raises a far more interesting point. If he’s right, then enough Aggies cared enough about diversity that they conspired to throw a student election. How far we have come.
If that happened, of course, it was a mistake. A wonderful, wonderful mistake.