Governor Greg Abbott threatened to defund Texas A&M University late Monday night after branding the state's largest public school as woke for reportedly declining to say whether it would abide by an order from President Joe Biden on changes to the federal anti-discrimination policy Title IX.
But Abbott may have based the insult on bad information given the fact that Texas A&M University officials had informed schools in the system a week ago that they wouldn't be enforcing the new federal rules in line with the Republican governor's demand to defy them.
Abbott threw down the gauntlet in a post on X that he based on a report that the Houston radio station KTRH picked up from the conservative publication Texas Scorecard.
"Woke Texas A&M Plans To Implement Biden’s Controversial Title IX Rewrite." If they do, if they act contrary to state policy, they are jeopardizing state funding, including money from the PUF fund," Abbott warned. "Bowing to the leftist agenda will reap consequences."
The KTRH piece that was published online quoted Texas Scorecard as saying that Texas A&M plans to put the revisions to Title IX into effect this summer. The author of the Scorecard story - Brandon Waltens - elaborated in an interview with the Houston station.
"Texas A&M's response so far has been to say they're considering it, but they haven't said that they're not going to implement it which is pretty shocking, especially after the governor comes out and specifically told them not to," Waltens said.
"Now you have more people waking up to this" Waltens added. "The Texas legislature and the governor will hopefully be reining them in and exercising their authority, because they're ultimately accountable to us."
The Republican governor ignored pro-Palestine protests on the campus in College Station in recent weeks while ordering mass arrests at the University of Texas in Austin for the same basic behavior. Abbott's portrayal of the Aggies as woke - a trendy slang word on the far right for liberal - may seem curious in light of Texas A&M's reputation as the most conservative public institution of higher learning in the Lone Star State.
Texas A&M - for the record - ranked number two behind Utah State University in the Niche assessment of the most conservative public colleges in the nation for 2024. Utah State and Texas A&M were rated 10th and 13th respectively when private schools were included in the equation. Southern Methodist University in Dallas was the only school ranked as more conservative than A&M in Texas in the study.
But Texas A&M is the highest ranked conservative college in the nation on the U.S. News & World Report analysis of the best national universities that has the Aggies in 47th overall. Rice University and UT-Austin are the only Texas institutions that rated higher than Texas A&M at 17th and 32nd respectively.
Abbott is putting A&M in a major bind with the position that officials there should view the orders from a governor to carry more weight than those of an American president. Texas A&M University stands to lose substantial federal funding if it deems that gubernatorial directives supercede orders from the nation's commander in chief.
more to come ...
