The newly nominated U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, has been praised for increasing the number minority students at Texas A&M University, where he is currently president. Reportedly he has been able to increase diversity without using race as a factor – but according to one leading education official, that is not entirely true.
“He uses race, it’s just in a more indirect way,” says Dr. Antonio Flores, president and CEO of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities.
Instead of directly applying race to the admissions process, Gates ramped up Texas A&M University’s efforts to recruit minority students by creating 2,300 new scholarships aimed at underrepresented groups. He also ditched the school’s tradition of giving admission preference to relatives of alumni, a practice critics say favored White applicants.
In addition, Gates opened satellite outreach offices — called Prospective Student Centers — in large Texas cities including Corpus Christi, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, says Alice Reinarz, assistant provost for enrollment at Texas A&M. The centers cost $3 million annually to operate, university officials say.
Texas A&M opened in 1876 as an all-male, all-White military school, and it excluded women and minorities until 1963. Any gains made through integration, however, were nearly wiped out when law student Cheryl Hopwood filed suit against the University of Texas at Austin, saying she had been denied entrance to UT’s law school in favor of less-qualified minorities.
The federal court found in Hopwood’s favor and struck down UT’s affirmative action policy in 1997, ruling that race-conscious admissions discriminated against Whites. The ruling was broadened to include all of the state’s public universities.
Before the Hopwood case, Asian Americans, Blacks and Hispanics together comprised 14.8 percent of the total student enrollment at Texas A&M. After Hopwood, enrollment for those three ethnic groups plummeted. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that universities could use race as an admissions criteria, UT reinstituted the practice. Gates, however, refused, saying in a 2003 speech that he wanted A&M students to know they’d been admitted based on merit, and “on no other basis.”
