Texas A&M University is in legal and political trouble.
It faces threats of civil rights liability, the loss of federal funding, and the firing of its president, Mark Welsh III, all because its general counsel, Ray Bonilla, gave the university legal advice that he should have known was unsound.
Journalist-activist Chris Rufo revealed on X that Texas A&M University is sponsoring employees’ travel to a racially segregated diversity, equity, and inclusion conference on March 20 and 21 in Chicago. The conference lists Texas A&M among its “university partners” and excludes Asian and white people from attending.
Internal emails from the university reveal that Dean Michael Withers solicited attendees from among the university’s faculty and Ph.D. students to represent Texas A&M at the conference.
Those emails also reveal that Withers sought the advice of Bonilla, and that Bonilla approved the university’s participation in this racially discriminatory program—even though federal and state law forbid it.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 says that “no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
Texas A&M receives hundreds of millions of federal dollars, and the DEI conference excludes anyone who is white or Asian.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act makes it illegal to discriminate based on race with respect to any “privileges of employment.” According to the internal emails that Rufo obtained, Withers said that the university sends several of its faculty and advanced Ph.D. students to this conference in their official capacities as “representatives” of the school.
Texas has civil rights laws that mirror the federal ones, and it has another law, SB 17, that forbids Texas universities from engaging in DEI activities that, among other things, give racial preferences to any “participant in any function of the institution.”
It’s unclear from the emails that Rufo published why Bonilla advised Texas A&M that it could support and sponsor travel to this racially discriminatory DEI conference. But given that the law is clear, two conclusions suggest themselves: Either Bonilla made an enormous mistake of legal judgment or his judgment was clouded by ideology.
It’s no secret that many administrators at America’s colleges are opposed to race neutrality. Harvard recently lost at the Supreme Court, where it tried to defend admissions policies that discriminated against Asian and white students. Other universities are resisting that ruling to preserve racial preferences. Still other universities spend hundreds of millions of dollars creating racially segregated dorms, graduation ceremonies, and programs about “white supremacy culture.”
Many universities, including Texas A&M, have embraced “anti-racism,” which calls race neutrality “white supremacy” and whose leading proponent argues that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
Bonilla seems to be one of those administrators. Before he served as the university’s general counsel, he was a staffer for a Democratic senator, and according to the political donation-tracking website Open Secrets, Bonilla and his former law firm, Ray, Wood & Bonilla, donated tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates, campaign committees, and PACs.
Of course, Bonilla is within his rights to donate to partisans. As general counsel to a public university that takes billions of taxpayer dollars, however, he has a legal duty not to let his political opinions cloud his legal judgment. He might not like state and federal civil rights laws that mandate race neutrality and nondiscrimination, but he cannot tell his client that it can violate those laws.
Texas A&M is now in serious legal jeopardy. President-elect Donald Trump made opposition to racially discriminatory DEI programs a central part of his platform. So has Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has threatened to sack Welsh over the matter.
Bonilla has put a target on his school’s back. The school could be sued, could lose federal funding, and Welsh could lose his job. Bonilla himself may be at risk with the state bar for advising a state university that it could violate state law.
But the risk to Texas A&M students is the greatest. The loss of funding would devastate the school, but the law is what it is.
The consequences of violating civil rights law are dire because race discrimination is dire. That’s why it’s so important for general counsels to carefully advise their clients to obey the law.
Bonilla’s error, whether motivated my partisanship and ideology or simply poor legal judgment, is enormous, and every university general counsel should be careful not to repeat it.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
