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7:52 AM · Sep 13, 2026 |
Friends:
My students shared this with me the other evening. What happened was that someone named "Bo French" saw a group of University of Texas students in burnt orange celebrating a Longhorn touchdown and read something else into the picture: foreignness. Nothing visible in that photograph established where those students were born, what passports they carried, where they went to high school, or how long their families had lived in Texas. Yet French treated their appearance as sufficient proof that something had gone terribly wrong at the state’s flagship university.
The photograph was not, as French initially suggested, a graduation scene. It captured students celebrating a touchdown in the closing moments of UT’s game against Ohio State. French nevertheless posted it alongside the ominous declaration that “the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined” and subsequently argued that foreigners were displacing Americans at the university (Menchaca, 2026). What transformed an ordinary scene of college football fandom into a supposed demographic crisis was not information about the students. It was the way they looked.
The Indian American Advocacy Council identified precisely that problem, condemning French for assuming that brown students pictured at UT must be foreigners (Kharade, 2026). Consider how much French did not know when he made that judgment. He did not know the students’ hometowns, their citizenship, their family histories, or even their names. Dhairya Gupta, one of the young men visible in the photograph, is in fact a naturalized American citizen (Menchaca, 2026). French’s inference therefore worked backward: appearance produced the conclusion, and the conclusion supplied the story. The faces themselves became the evidence.
French subsequently reframed the controversy as a policy question: Should American universities prioritize Americans? But that defense raises an empirical question, and UT’s enrollment structure provides a fairly clear answer. Texas law already makes Texas residents overwhelmingly dominant in undergraduate admissions. Up to 75% of each entering class is filled through automatic admission of highly ranked Texas high school graduates, and beginning with the fall 2026 entering class, UT reduced its automatic-admission threshold to the top 5% of graduating Texas seniors (Dey, 2024).
International students, meanwhile, numbered 1,923 among 44,314 undergraduates—roughly 4% of the undergraduate population (Texas Global, 2026; University of Texas at Austin, 2025). Those numbers do not support the picture of a university being overtaken by foreign students. They describe a Texas public university whose student body increasingly reflects the diversity of Texas itself.
Nor was the objection to French’s rhetoric confined to his political opponents. Republican leaders criticized the post as well, including U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, who described it as intolerant and racist (Kharade, 2026). That matters because the issue here is larger than a conventional partisan disagreement over immigration or university admissions. There is a legitimate public debate to be had about international enrollment, admissions priorities, and who public universities are designed to serve. But that debate begins with facts. It cannot reasonably begin by looking at brown students in a football stadium and presuming that they are foreigners.
And perhaps that is what makes the original photograph so revealing—but not in the way French intended. These students stood in the heat, crowded into the student section, raised their hands in the Hook ’em Horns sign, and erupted when their team scored. There is nothing anomalous about that scene. It is Texas in 2026. The students pictured should not have to produce birth certificates, passports, or family histories to establish that they belong in the stands—or at the university. Their faces are not immigration documents. Theirs are the faces of Texas.
References
Dey, S. (2024, September 16). UT-Austin tightens automatic admission threshold to 5% of Texas' top high schoolers. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2024/09/16/ut-austin-top-five-percent-threshold/
Kharade, P. (2026, September 14). Indian American Advocacy Council condemns Bo French's racist post on brown students from University of Texas. The Free Press Journal. https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/indian-american-advocacy-council-condemns-bo-frenchs-racist-post-on-brown-students-from-university-of-texas
Menchaca, M. (2026, September 14). UT students attacked by Bo French call his comments "disgusting" and too familiar. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/09/14/bo-french-university-texas-austin-students/
Texas Global. (2026). 2025–2026 international enrollment. The University of Texas at Austin. https://global.utexas.edu/about/international-enrollment
University of Texas at Austin. (2025). Facts and figures. https://www.utexas.edu/about/facts-and-figures
UT students attacked by Bo French call his comments “disgusting” and too familiar
In a statement Monday night, university officials indirectly addressed Bo French’s comments, calling students at the game Saturday night “incredible fans.”
by Megan Menchaca Sept. 14, 2026, 9:03 p.m. Central | Texas Tribune
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Texas Longhorns fans and players celebrate following the NCAA football game against the Ohio State Buckeyes at Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin on Saturday. Students said they were not surprised a Republican candidate lobbed racist attacks about South Asian students seen celebrating the win. Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch/ USA TODAY Network via REUTERS |
Bo French, the Republican running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state’s oil and gas industry, on Sunday posted racist comments on X that included an image of UT students of South Asian descent celebrating the victory.
“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote in a post featuring a photo of the students. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”
On Monday, French defended his comments on a conservative radio talk show. But by then, the posts had reverberated across social media, attracting comments like “Bollywood University” “Are we watching a cricket game,” “I didn’t know the stadium was in India,” and “The America we grew up in no longer exists.”
Dhairya Gupta, a senior at the University of Texas, is included in the bottom right of the photo, wearing a burnt orange T-shirt with his right arm extended into a “Hook ’em Horns” hand sign. He said he’s accustomed to seeing racist comments online, but it was “insane” to see a Republican candidate say derogatory things about him and his friends.
“When I look at that picture, I don’t see a problem,” Gupta said in an interview Monday with The Texas Tribune.
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The controversy is the latest in a long line of incendiary comments made by French that have been condemned by his fellow Republicans, many of whom have endorsed him.
The comments also follow years of conservative lawmakers attacking diversity, equity and inclusion policies at public universities like UT.
French — who did not immediately respond to a request for comment — referred to the students’ picture as “foreigners” who displaced Americans, without having any information about their status. The citizenship status of all the students in the photo are unknown, although Gupta told The Dallas Morning News he is a naturalized citizen.
Approximately 26% of degree-seeking undergraduate students at UT are Asian, up from 20% a decade ago. About 29% of students are white, which is down from 44% in the same time period. UT has been prohibited from considering race in its admissions process since a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2023.
Students said the cohort of South Asian students at the football game happened partially by happenstance. Like everyone else, they and their friends waited many hours in line in the heat before the highly anticipated game against Ohio State and ran to the closest seats to the field when UT let them into the student section of the stadium.
“If you were at the game, you know that picture is taken extremely out of context,” said Arsheeya Moyeen, a UT sophomore. “I’m gonna be completely candid. I think, as a politician, as somebody in the public eye, to take something like that out of context and manipulate it to fit your agenda and your views on a certain race is extremely unprofessional.”
Kevin Eltife, chairman of the UT System Board of Regents, shared a statement online Monday evening — about a day after French’s post — thanking students at the game for “making us proud.”
“When I stood on the sidelines at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium Saturday night and looked up at the seats filled with incredible fans, I saw Longhorns,” Eltife said. “It’s the same remarkable view I have at graduation ceremonies and anytime I’m on campus. I’m proud to celebrate all our Longhorn students today and every day.”
UT President Jim Davis said in a follow-up social media post that the university’s students were exceptional and “all of them are Longhorns.” UT did not respond to a request for further comment.
The photo French shared is a screenshot from a video that the official social media accounts of Texas Athletics posted Saturday evening. The 17-second vertical video shows a group of students in one part of the student section celebrating after the Longhorns scored a touchdown in the final minute of the game.
UT sophomore Lisa Varghese, who was sitting in the same section as Gupta and Moyeen, said she was shocked at the ignorance she saw on social media in response to the video and French’s post. She said French was using skin color and “blatant racism” as a divisive factor to tear people apart.
“To complain about skin color and to complain about other people ‘taking over’ UT Austin and how disappointing that is is just disgusting,” Varghese said. “It really is because I feel like football and sports (are) something that should be uniting. It should be a uniting factor. It should be something that we all come together to celebrate.”
Moyeen said racist posts on social media toward certain groups are disappointing, but she believes they have become normalized. She said she initially ignored the “horrible racist generalizations” under UT’s initial video on social media — until French made his tweet.
“There will always be racist people out there who feel OK with hiding behind a screen and commenting things about people that they don’t know, but for a politician running for a public office to come out and say those same hateful things just takes it to a whole different level that you truly can’t ignore anymore,” Moyeen said.
French said UT was “filled with foreign nationals” and argued that the school has prioritized foreign students and workers. However, under state law, 90% of UT freshmen must be in-state residents, while the remaining 10% are international students or out-of-state students. International students comprised about 4% of undergraduates in the 2025-26 school year.
UT offers automatic admission to all in-state residents in the top 5% of their high school graduating class. Under state law, 75% of UT’s freshman class must be admitted under this policy. The remaining students are admitted through a holistic process that considers factors such as grade point average, extracurriculars and personal essays.
Gupta said he’s concerned about the broad sentiment of French’s post and how many people publicly agreed with him. He said, though, it brought a smile to his face seeing the Longhorns who were vocally defending him, his friends and the other pictured UT students on social media.
“It seemed like the actual Texas alumni seemed to be very passionate about the fact that these are also students at the university, and this is the university,” Gupta said. “It’s not defined by the demographic(s) of the university itself, but by the culture of the university.”
Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been a major financial supporter of The Texas Tribune. The Texas Tribune is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in our journalism. Find a complete list of them and more information about our financial and disclosure policies here.
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