(NewsNation) — Texas A&M University is being sued by a white professor from the University of Texas at Austin, who claims A&M’s hiring practices are discriminatory toward white and Asian male applicants.
The lawsuit, filed by finance professor Richard Lowery, contends that Texas A&M’s fellowship program —the Accountability, Climate, Equity and Scholarship Faculty Fellows Program — uses discriminatory hiring practices because it focuses on African Americans, Hispanic and Latino Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives and Native Hawaiians.
America First Legal, the law group started by former controversial Trump adviser Stephen Miller, is representing Lowery in the case.
Gene Hamilton, one of the lawyers working the case for America First Legal, said he thinks schools including Texas A&M do things like this because “they think they can get away with it.”
“These university administrators have been so captivated by the institutional left, by these woke institutions who think what we have to do in this country to thrive together as a national body is to hold down certain racial minorities while we bring other ones up,” Hamilton said Tuesday on NewsNation’s “On Balance with Leland Vittert.”
The actual fellowship itself makes no mention of being “woke” or of being aligned with “the left,” but rather says its goal is to offer “mid-career and senior tenure-track hires from underrepresented minority groups, that contribute to moving the structural composition of our faculty towards parity with that of the State of Texas.”
Despite Hamilton’s claims of “woke” politics being at play, there are statistics that support the idea of some races being underrepresented as faculty on university campuses.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 51% of university professors are white males and 28% are white females. Black males and females make up 2% each, as do Hispanic males and females. Asians and Pacific Islanders, the other group not included in the fellowship with whites, make up 12% of professors nationwide.
