When the police at Texas State University caught eight white supremacists posting threatening fliers on campus in the middle of the night, they issued criminal-trespass warnings and let them go. As abhorrent as their message was, the police said, the individuals had broken no laws.
Five months later, officers reached a different conclusion when they arrested three current and one former student who had blocked the police during a racially charged protest in a parking garage.
The names and mug shots of the students, arrested during finals week, circulated on social media. The names and mug shots of the eight leafleters remained blotted out, their identities unrevealed.
To some students, it seemed unfair that the racist infiltrators were let off with a warning, while people protesting what they saw as racist actions were arrested.
No explanation was given this month when Texas State’s police chief, Jose L. Bañales, suddenly resigned, effective immediately. But the incidents, which reflected the ways his force has been embroiled in controversy, show how the university has become a hotbed of racial unrest over the past few years.
White-supremacist groups have descended on the campus, in San Marcos, which is halfway between Austin and San Antonio, at a time when changing demographics have strengthened the resolve and influence of minority students.
President Trump’s election, an editorial in the student newspaper blasting “whiteness,” and the impeachment of the conservative leader of the student government polarized the campus, leaving people acutely aware of how the kinds of tensions that have simmered at colleges nationwide flamed up there. Minority students say the administration has done too little to counter threats posed by hate groups or to offer a curriculum that reflects the diversity of the student body.
Meanwhile, some conservative students say they object to being associated with white supremacists and complain that the administration hasn’t done enough to support people who hold right-leaning views.
As the academic year ends, the administration has spent time beefing up efforts to ensure that students of diverse backgrounds feel both physically safe and emotionally supported.
“We’re all grappling with that,” says Joanne H. Smith, vice president for student affairs who has played a central role in brokering peace among dueling student groups. How do you help students learn to listen, to compromise and to be resilient? And in the process, “how do you help people feel emotionally safe?”
The tensions started, as on many campuses, with racist fliers posted in the dead of night. The timing, coming two days after Trump’s election and one day after heated post-election protests, couldn’t have been more fraught. The fliers called for violence against university leaders promoting “diversity garbage.”
Diversity Among Students
Diversity is a big deal at Texas State, which prides itself in a student body whose demographics broadly reflect the state’s. In the past few years, white students have been a minority at this rapidly growing university — 47 percent in 2017 compared with 57 percent in 2012. Hispanic enrollment has grown from 28 to 36 percent, and black enrollment from 7 to 11 percent.
As their numbers have increased, minority students have grown impatient with the failure of faculty diversity to keep pace with the changing composition of the student body. From 2012 and 2017, the proportion of black faculty members inched up from 3 to 4 percent and Hispanic faculty from 10 to 11 percent, while the proportion of white faculty members went from 74 to 72 percent.
Students have also pushed for minors in African-American studies and Latino studies, as well as for a full-time lawyer to help immigrant students.
“The thing with ‘be patient’ is that there’s no timeline, nothing holding you accountable,” says Chiemezuo Emmy Orioha, president of the Pan African Action Committee, a student group pushing for more ethnic-studies programs. “You can sit there for 10 years and still hear ‘be patient.’ "
Meanwhile, he says, racist groups from outside the campus are making matters worse by “using Texas State as sort of like a playground to publish their messages.”
In April, the university police said they had logged 14 incidents of racist fliers’ being posted around the San Marcos campus over the past year. Texas State has been working with the FBI and the Anti-Defamation League, which documented 346 such cases on 216 campuses from September 2016 to this past February. Texas has been the state hardest hit.
Racist groups “tend to target universities where they think their message to white students — that their way of life is being threatened — will be well received,” says Lecia Brooks, director of outreach at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Historically, white institutions were places you could pretty much depend upon to look like they did 50 years ago,” she says. “The fraternities and sororities were white, student government was white.”
As demographics have shifted, racist groups direct their appeals toward those groups that have been in a comfortable, dominant position, “with the false narrative that they’re being dispossessed or losing power,” Brooks says.
In October, more fliers promoting white supremacy appeared around Texas State. A week later, a banner proclaiming “America is a White Nation” was displayed outside the campus library. Both were immediately removed, and the university’s president, Denise M. Trauth, was quick to say that the perpetrators, who had shown up after dark, weren’t affiliated with the university.
“At Texas State, we celebrate our diversity and inclusion, and there is no place for hate at our university,” she said in a statement.
Escalating Tensions
The following month Rudy Martinez, a student who said he was fed up with what he considered the university’s inadequate response to the influx of racist propaganda, wrote an opinion piece that would further escalate tensions.
Titled “Your DNA Is an Abomination” it blasted “whiteness” and said the author had met only about a dozen white people whom he considered “decent.” Conservative news outlets pounced on the piece, Trauth denounced it, and Martinez was dropped as a columnist.
Racist reactions appeared on Reddit, which has increasingly become known as a hub of online hate.
The controversy was also heating up out in the open. Connor Clegg, the student-government president, called for the student newspaper, The University Star, to be defunded and its editors fired. That prompted those pushing for greater diversity to demand that he be impeached.
In the meantime, Martinez was under increasing attack, with posters appearing on campus with his name, picture, and the headline “He Wants You Dead! (if you’re white)” Pressure was building on the campus police to catch the people who were inflaming tensions.
More controversy broke out in December when the police said they had caught eight people, all of whom admitted belonging to white-supremacist groups posting the fliers. The police did not identify the outsiders, who were warned that they’d be arrested if they returned to campus.
All along, university officials insisted that none of the infiltrators was connected to the university, and students wondered why groups with no connection to Texas State would target it so relentlessly.
While the campus police blotted out the names of the leafleters, officers with the San Marcos police department who encountered members of the group the same night didn’t. One of the people who admitted spreading the propaganda on campus, those officers said, was Erik M. Sailors, a 26-year-old local resident who is, according to the campus newspaper, a Marine veteran, a member of the Texas-based white-supremacist group Patriot Front. The Chronicle’s efforts to reach Sailors were unsuccessful.
A campus spokesman confirmed that Sailors had attended Texas State for three semesters, dropping out in March 2017. Members of Patriot Front, which espouses racism and anti-Semitism, maintain that their ancestors conquered America and passed it on to them alone. The group has distributed propaganda on dozens of campuses nationwide, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Clegg and other conservatives interviewed say they have nothing but disdain for racists trying to stir up trouble. They resent being lumped into the same category when they disagree with progressive students.
“Any time you are right-leaning on campus, you’re labeled a racist,” Clegg said during an interview during finals week on campus, shortly after he was impeached.
Wearing a College Republicans T-shirt, he spoke with a tinge of bitterness about how, he said, conservative students themselves have reason to feel threatened and marginalized.
‘At a Boiling Point’
His impeachment last month followed a 48-hour sit-in by protesters who wanted Clegg out and a firmer commitment from the university to diversity-strengthening strategies.
The protesters ended their sit-in saying the administration had agreed to all of their demands, including a more specific timeline for rolling out minors in African-American and Latino studies. Administrators pointed out that those changes were already in the works, and that the real change was better communicating a timetable for offering them.
Orioha says he’s excited about the outcome of the student sit-in. “We never thought we’d be in this position. But we also know this is just a start. There are a lot of things that will have to happen to heal the university and to bring it up to speed.”
For instance, he says, “I’m a political-science major and I don’t have a single black professor. It’s almost negligent to bring in so many black and brown students without diversifying the faculty and curriculum.”
Clegg, who says he regrets racially insensitive Instagram posts his opponents uncovered in his past, insists that he and his fellow conservatives are the ones who have been wronged. The administration, he says, “took a student-body president who was openly conservative and threw him out to the wolves. They let 40 students hold the school hostage.”
He says he urged student senators to vote for his impeachment because he worried that violence might otherwise erupt. “This campus was at a boiling point, and if I had survived the impeachment vote, I’m afraid it would have boiled over,” Clegg says. “No students were involved in the fliers and leaflets. This is an attempt by a group with extreme racist views coming from outside the university trying to divide us. We shouldn’t let them do that.”
Shortly after the impeachment vote, the student body’s then-vice president, Jackie F. Merritt, issued a statement on Twitter, written with another senator, seeking to bring students together. It acknowledged the distrust many have in student government and the racial tensions that it said Clegg’s actions had provoked.
“We stand with the students who have raised their voice against injustice during such a tumultuous time,” it said. “We are here for you, and we want you to know that your voice is important and that we want to amplify it.”
Less than 24 hours earlier, Merritt had been one of two student senators whom protesters had blocked from leaving a parking garage in a car and then even with a police escort. The campus police later arrested three students and a recent dropout who were trying to keep them from leaving.
Among them was Russell Boyd, a student activist who ran unsuccessfully against Clegg for student-body president.
“I was honestly disappointed that the university would wait until the week of finals and a few days before my graduation to issue warrants for my arrest,” said Boyd, who was one of those arrested, in an interview with a progressive news website. “The university urges students to use their voice to create change,” he said, but when students speak out against issues that have disenfranchised us, the university retaliates against us for doing so.”
Collin Pruett, a student who is active with the College Republicans at Texas State, expresses little sympathy for the student protesters. “It’s unfortunate to see the spineless administration continue to cave to their demands when year after year they ask for more,” he says.
As conservatives, “we don’t feel recognized at this university, but you don’t see us occupying buildings and disrupting the campus. We go through proper channels. If I wrapped myself in a flag and decided to sleep at the student center overnight, they’d ask me to leave, and if I refused, they’d arrest me.”
Pruett says he has friends who write for student newspapers elsewhere, “and they’re starting to call us the Berkeley of the South.” Texas State, he says, is “being torn apart by two sets of extremists” — the white supremacists and the protesters who he believes overreacted to them.
“Those people are racists and scum, but I don’t think five or six white supremacists coming to Texas State and hanging a banner is the equivalent to having hundreds of students block police cars and occupy campus buildings,” Pruett says.
Joanne Smith, the vice president for student affairs, is optimistic that the changes that are underway, including new courses about racial diversity, the hiring of a lawyer with immigration experience, and a new campus-climate task force, will ease some of the tensions that made the past few years so stressful.
In the fall, she wants the leaders of all student organizations to get together at least every other month. “That way we can keep a pulse on what’s happening,” she says, “and if something’s brewing, we’ll catch it — and talk about it — early.”
Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.
