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Thoughts from San Diego on Law, Politics, and Culture
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November 30, 2003
Another Aggie Joke? By Gail Heriot Football is serious business is Texas. When Texas A&M suffers a humiliating defeat to Texas, heads often roll. But whose head? Should it perhaps be the head of Bill Byrnes, the highly-paid Aggie coach? He doesn't think so. His finger is pointing in a different direction--at conservative students protesting race-based admissions standards.. Like several conservative campus groups across the country, Aggie conservatives recently staged a "bake sale" to protest the inequity of race-based admissions standards at A&M. Asian Americans were charged $2 per cookie, white males were charged $1, and white females 75 cents. Hispanics were charged 25 cents and blacks were charged 10 cents. There was considerable protest against the protest. Unlike nearby Southern Methodist University, however, Texas A&M did not declare the bake sale hate speech and forcibly shut it down. The Twilight Zone argument that certain speech must be stifled in order to promote a diversity of viewpoints mercifully did not carry the day at College Station. So Coach Bill Byrnes gives us a different Twilight Zone argument: Protesting race-based admissions standards will hurt A&M on the gridiron. "Free speech is not an issue for me, " he says, "[b]ut I'm disappointed over the national attention that Texas A&M received recently because of a few individuals and their idea of a protest." "The Texas A&M Bake sale plays right into the hands of those who recruit against us, in both athletics and in the general student population." Byrnes urges readers to "speak out against anything like this that discredits Texas A&M University." Anyone like me who has ever been married to a Texan has heard enough "dumb Aggie" jokes to fill volumes. But they've also met enough of those Aggies to know it's just a joke. Somehow I get the feeling that Byrnes really believes that Aggies are stupid if he thinks he can convince them that his team's losing season should be blamed on campus dissent over affirmative action. |