Money Talks

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, the Young Republicans on the University of Texas (UT Austin) campus came up with a slogan that took hold. “Money Talks and Bullshit Walks.” The basic idea was that if you weren’t on the side of industry (the then GOP’s base of support), your voice and ideas were bullshit. Sigh.

A decade ago, I supported my alma mater (undergraduate and graduate school) with scholarship donations as well as donations to support endowed professorships – a few thousand here or there, but not the amounts of money that get a building named after you. Still, the sum of all small donations to public universities is a considerable sum of money.

In the past few years, the offices of community engagement at UT and also Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) have reached out periodically asking for donations – including asking that we add them as beneficiaries in our wills and IRAs.

We continue to support BCM, but we have withdrawn from supporting UT. I sent the following letter to the UT office a few weeks ago.

Dear …

“Susan and I withdrew our support from UT the year that the Texas Legislature and Governor decided that it would be a good idea to allow the concealed carrying of guns on state university campuses. More recently, the Legislature’s decision to prohibit DEI activities on campus has only served to tell us that UT’s values have drifted even further from our own.

Supporting a University that behaves in a manner antithetical to our values, albeit doing so at the behest of the state government, is untenable for us. It makes more sense for us to throw our support behind Everytown and Texas Gun Sense than to give it to UT. It makes more sense for us to support groups that fight for minority rights and opportunities, the inclusion of dreamers, and organizations that support LGBTQ folks than it does for us to support UT.

I think that your efforts to strengthen UT’s public ties are better invested in folks who are okay with daily mass shootings as the price for better access to firearms and those whose worldview is okay with limiting the rights and opportunities of minorities.  I hate to acknowledge it, but there are probably more of those folks in Texas than there are folks like Susan and me.

Best of luck in your work.”

Today I read a Texas Tribune item noting that UT had fired 60 employees who had been involved in the university’s DEI and multi-cultural offices. The UT President fired them to prove to the GOP majority in the Texas legislature that the university was complying with their bill that called for the dismantling of DEI programs in Texas public universities.

It is ironic that conservatives rail at universities claiming that they are staffed by leftist intellectuals who indoctrinate their students in liberal values. If that is true, at least it isn’t indoctrination mandated by fock-up, Republican state politicians.

Money Talks.