Battle For Texas: #SaveBillPowers Has Strong Record on Race & Gender
Yesterday I blogged “July 4 Coup”: Governor Perry and Lackey Cigarroa Trying to Fire Powers. The debate is much larger than UT-Austin. Inside Higher Education quoted Hunter Rawlings III, president of the AAU.
I thought the State of Texas had in the past two years reached the outer limit of political intrusion into academic institutions, but apparently not: now a board appointed by a lame duck governor, and, astonishingly, a lame duck chancellor, are threatening to oust a highly accomplished and popular president of Texas’ flagship university, and a national leader in higher education.This lengthy battle has been extremely corrosive, and clearly damages one of the nation’s great research universities. Believe me, faculty members and researchers and graduate students across the country know what is transpiring in Texas: the complete politicization of higher education. This latest fiasco makes a bad situation much worse.
Today Black faculty have come out in support of President Powers. Here is an open letter to UT-System Chancellor Cigarroa that I just received from the chair of the black studies department.
Dear Chancellor Cigarroa,As chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin I write to offer strong support for President William Powers and to respectfully request that you support the continuation of his presidency of our university. By any measure President Powers has been an outstanding leader of the University of Texas over the last nine years. The list of his accomplishments is well known including the opening of the new Dell Medical School, the championing and enhancement of undergraduate education, the successful 3 billion dollar campaign, his national leadership position as president of the prestigious AAU, to name only a few.What is less well known is that President Powers has played an unprecedented role in the diversification of the University of Texas so that it better represents the diverse people of the state. During his time as president of our University, as a direct result of his policies and actions, President Powers has presided over a substantial increase in the representation of every historically underrepresented ethnic group at both the student and faculty levels. Over the course of this period there has been a substantial increase in the percentage of the faculty who are women. PresidentBattle For Texas: #SaveBillPowers Has Strong Record on Race & Gender | Cloaking Inequity: