On Wednesday, the Young Conservatives of Texas club at the University of Texas at Austin held an “affirmative action bake sale” offering cookies at different prices based on the race and sex of the buyer.
A cookie cost $1.50 for Asian males, $1 for white males, and 50 cents for African-American and Hispanic males. Cookies for American Indians of both genders were free of charge.
[The affirmative action link is in the original of the above quote; I included it so readers can see Instagram’s complicity at the time of my writing (27 Oct) in censoring this bit of news.]
That pricing is a direct reflection of the nature of UT Austin’s affirmative action programs, which similarly varies accesses to the school based on ethnicity and not merit.
But never mind that. The school objected to having its racist policies so blatantly illustrated. Gregory Vincent, the school’s Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement, had this on the matter:
[F]ocusing our attention on the provocative nature of the YCT’s actions ignores a much more important issue: they create an environment of exclusion and disrespect among our students, faculty and staff[.]
Such dialectics are at the core of freely conducted debate, though. This university’s management plainly does not understand actual freedoms acknowledged in the First Amendment.
Embarrassingly, Vincent went on, and unable to form a coherent argument on the matter, stooped to attacking the protestors and not the protestors’ argument.
He…questioned the club’s motive behind the bake sale.
This is what our State’s tax dollars are buying, and it’s not education.