This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
This is a must-read. The University of Texas at Austin just sent out an email that I think is worth
sharing. Horrifically, someone was assaulted this evening. My
interest in sharing this is that it expresses clear rights and parameters for
consensual sexual activity between women and men. Read the message and be
sure to share this with your daughters and sons, and with your grandchildren,
too, if you have any.
"Don't feel obligated to do anything you don't want to do. 'I
don't want to' is always a good enough reason."
And then
the trauma, the aftermath—including having to contend with the fact that
someone you know was the perpetrator (read official email notice below)—is messed up, sad, and terribly stressful for the survivors, mostly women—but men and children, as well.
Let’s be
more intentional in such matters.And let’s
oppose all forms of violence, especially sexual violence that disproportionately affects women.
As the graphic says, let's also believe survivors, challenge victim blaming, and respect boundaries.
Let's have this young woman and all survivors in our continuous thoughts and prayers. We have so much healing as a society to do and we all need to play some part in that. If you are a UT student, scroll down to read about Student Emergency Services.
And get immediate help if you have been assaulted. Your wellness is a priority.
Angela Valenzuela
INCIDENT NOTIFICATION: Sexual assault
December 16, 2018
At 10:40 p.m., UTPD responded to a report of non-stranger sexual assault involving a UT student and an acquaintance at Jester West Dormitory.
The student reported the incident occurred at 5 p.m.
The UTPD Criminal Investigations Unit is actively investigating this incident.
The most common type of sexual assault is perpetrated by someone the victim knows, not by a stranger. Consent is enthusiastic agreement required by all and can be revoked at any time. Sexual activity requires consciousness and clarity.
Don't feel obligated to do anything you don't want to do. "I don't want to" is always a good enough reason.
Student Emergency Services supports students who have been or know someone who has been a victim of a crime on or off campus. For those services click on the link below:
This notification is provided in accordance with the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Crime Statistics Act (20 USC, 1092(f)). The Clery Act is a federal statute requiring colleges and universities participating in federal financial aid programs to maintain and disclose campus crime statistics and security information.
Latino Studies at The University of Texas at Austin consists of three interconnected units that provide cutting edge research, rigorous teaching, and public programming on the Mexican American and Latina/o communities of the Americas. The Center for Mexican American Studies, the Latino Research Initiative, and the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies work independently and collectively to advance the academic, intellectual, and social agendas of the UT campus and broader community.
Image: Diego Rivera. From Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central. 1947.
This wage gap is systemic and this wage-gap differential is massive, even impacting graduates today from the University of Texas at Austin.
The
54 cent pay gap for Latinas represents the average across all states,
but in Texas, Latinas earn 44 cents for every $1 a white male makes,
according to a 2017 National Partnership for Women and Families report.
It's not as simple as Latinas working in lower-earning fields like teaching. We should also as a society value the teaching field as we value any other and pay teachers well. Let's not shunt our responsibiities here and blame the victim.
Public relations senior Joy Puder worries she will not earn what her white male counterparts earn after graduation. “A Latina woman, to make the same amount of money a white man does in a full year, has to work the whole year and up to November just to get what he does,” said Puder, who is Latina herself. “She has to work, like, twice as hard.” Latinas in the U.S. earn on average 54 cents for every $1 a white male earns, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Last Thursday marked Latina Equal Pay Day, the day an average Latina would catch up to a white male’s yearly earnings from 2016. The national gender pay gap consists of women earning 80 cents for every $1 a white male makes regardless of industry, according to the National Women’s Law Center. “In general, Latinas are going to be (some) of the lowest earning individuals by race and gender,” said Megan Fasules, an author of a 2017 report about earnings for UT System graduates. Fasules said the gender pay gap among UT System college graduates often results from differences in the fields women tend to be attracted to for majors and careers. For example, more women tend to go into education, which is a lower-earning field compared to the more male-dominated science, technology, engineering and math fields. “A big factor is what women choose to major in,” Fasules said. “We tend to have different interests than men, and, unfortunately, our interests tend to earn us less money.” The 54 cent pay gap for Latinas represents the average across all states, but in Texas, Latinas earn 44 cents for every $1 a white male makes, according to a 2017 National Partnership for Women and Families report. “In the nation as a whole, Latinas, once they get a bachelor’s degree … do tend to have higher median earnings,” Fasules said. “In Texas, that’s not the case.” According to the study, Latina UT System graduates earned 75 percent of what white male graduates earned in the three years following graduation. The pay gap between males and females exists among UT graduates of all races. When compared to Latino graduates, Latina graduates earn 93 percent of their pay. White women earn 83 percent of what white male graduates do. Lecturer Victoria DeFrancesco Soto said fixing the general pay gap can be hard because women also lose wages when they become mothers. She said Latinas tend to usually have more children, widening the pay gap. “The truth is that Latinas, in general, have a lower educational attainment than other groups, and we also tend to have more children,” DeFrancesco said. Fasules said providing students with more information about their potential earnings in different fields could help increase the number of Latinas and females in higher-earning fields. UT students can explore earnings by career through the online tool SeekUT. Puder, who is graduating in December, said she wishes she knew more about entry-level wages when she began her search for public relations jobs. “It’s important for me, because I’m a woman of color, and I want to get paid the same because I work just as hard as white men,” Puder said.
UT won an earlier challenge to affirmative action at the U.S. Supreme Court, but this one is in a state court.
Once again, UT alumnus Edward Blum has organized a case against his alma mater.
The use of racial and ethnic preferences in admissions at the University of Texas violates state law and the Texas Constitution, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by a group whose leader who took a similar case to the U.S. Supreme Court twice and lost.
This time, Edward Blum has set his sights on the state courts of Texas rather than making another run at the federal courts. The Supreme Court upheld UT’s use of affirmative action by a 4-3 vote in June 2016.
Blum’s nonprofit, Students for Fair Admissions, which says it has more than 20,000 students, parents and other members in Texas and elsewhere around the nation, contends that UT grants preferences to African-American and Hispanic applicants at the expense of white and Asian applicants. The suit, filed in state District Court in Travis County, seeks a permanent injunction barring UT from using racial factors in admissions decisions.
“It is our belief that the Texas Constitution unequivocally forbids UT-Austin from treating applicants differently because of their race and ethnicity,” said Blum, the group’s president.
Maurie McInnis, UT’s executive vice president and provost, said in a statement that “diversity is central to our pursuit of excellence” and that all students and other members of the campus community reap its benefits.
“The policy is narrowly tailored,” McInnis said. “It complies with state and federal law and the Texas and U.S. Constitutions and has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
UT considers such factors for a relatively small fraction of its entering class. Under state law, UT reserves 90 percent of its freshman slots for state residents, with the remainder for out-of-state and international students. And at least three-fourths of its freshmen from Texas get in under a state law that grants automatic admission based on their high school class rank.
Only the remaining applicants, including those from other states and abroad, are considered under a so-called holistic review that takes race and ethnicity into account along with grades, essays, leadership qualities and other matters. In last year’s Supreme Court majority opinion in Fisher v. UT-Austin, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote “that race consciousness played a role in only a small portion of admissions decisions,” asserting that this was “a hallmark of narrow tailoring, not evidence of unconstitutionality.”
But Students for Fair Admissions contends that the Supreme Court’s ruling has no bearing on its lawsuit, which relies on two passages in the Texas Constitution’s Bill of Rights and one provision of state law.
Section 3a of the state’s Bill of Rights, approved by voters in 1972, says: “Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed, or national origin.” This amendment provides “more expansive protection against discrimination” than the U.S. Constitution, rendering UT’s use of racial preferences “patently unconstitutional under the Texas Constitution,” the lawsuit claims.
Blum’s group says its case is also bolstered by Section 3, which says in part: “All free men … have equal rights, and no man, or set of men, is entitled to exclusive separate public emoluments, or privileges.”
The state law cited by the lawsuit is the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, which includes a provision declaring that an employee of the state “may not, because of a person’s race, religion, color, sex, or national origin … refuse to permit the person to participate in a program owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of the state.” The lawsuit claims that this creates “a broad statutory right to be free of official discrimination.”
Steven Schwinn, a professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago who teaches and writes about constitutional law, said he was “a little puzzled” that the suit wasn’t filed sooner.
“I understand why they challenged the program under the federal Constitution — I’m sure they thought the time was right for bringing the federal challenge,” Schwinn said. “It just smacks of politics to me, but maybe the Texas Constitution and statute give them a little bit more traction than what they got under the federal equal protection clause.”
Mishell Kneeland, a lawyer in Austin with the Culhane Meadows law firm who worked on the Fisher case as an assistant attorney general in Texas, said the new case appears to be designed to wind up at the state Supreme Court. She doubts that the plaintiff will succeed, in part because the state’s constitutional standards are “relatively similar” to the federal version. “The University of Texas’ admissions process is very thoughtfully crafted,” she added.
Blum, a former stockbroker and onetime candidate for Congress who majored in English and government at UT, isn’t a lawyer, but he has made something of a cottage industry out of lining up lawyers, funding and plaintiffs in a 20-year quest to end the use of racial and ethnic considerations in college admissions, voting rights and other aspects of public policy. He has ushered cases into the marble-and-mahogany chamber of the nation’s highest court six times.
His Project on Fair Representation, another nonprofit group, underwrote the lawsuit by Abigail Fisher, a white woman denied admission to UT. In its first opinion in that case, a 7-1 decision written by Kennedy in 2013, the Supreme Court set aside a lower court’s approval of UT’s use of affirmative action and told that court to conduct a “searching examination” of whether such considerations are really necessary to obtain the educational benefits of diversity. The lower court concluded once again that UT’s program was legal, after which the high court took the case a second time.
Blum has also organized lawsuits in which Students for Fair Admissions is the plaintiff against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Those cases, filed in federal courts in 2014, contend that well-qualified Asian-Americans are routinely denied admission solely on the basis of race.
No other state has admissions laws precisely like those governing UT.
A 1997 state law offered automatic admission to UT and other public colleges and universities to students ranking in the top 10 percent of their Texas high school class. In 2009, the law was modified for UT, allowing it to cap automatically admitted students at three-fourths of its freshmen from Texas.
Each fall, the university notifies Texas school officials of the class rank that current high school juniors need to attain by the end of their junior year to be automatically admitted; the cutoff is 7 percent for the 2017-18 and 2018-19 academic years.
Blum’s latest lawsuit against UT doesn’t come as a surprise. In March, he began inviting students who were rejected by UT to provide grades, test scores and a list of outside activities to help build the new case.
