Kelly Stone’s course on sexuality at Texas State was canceled in 2019, a semester after she and other students say one student continuously disrupted the class. Stone says the school’s director at the time told her, “I know you are being abused, and you just have to take it.”Matthew Busch for The Chronicle
San Marcos, Tex.
Kelly Stone was about 10 minutes into the first day of teaching her “Sexuality Across the Lifespan” course at Texas State University when a student raised her hand to ask a question:
“Are you Christian?”
The gasps were audible, Stone recalls. Nkemjika Chidozie, who was taking the course, in August 2018, was stunned.
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Kelly Stone was about 10 minutes into the first day of teaching her “Sexuality Across the Lifespan” course at Texas State University when a student raised her hand to ask a question:
“Are you Christian?”
The gasps were audible, Stone recalls. Nkemjika Chidozie, who was taking the course, in August 2018, was stunned.
“I was like, OK, that was kind of weird,” Chidozie, now 22, told The Chronicle. “Why would she ask her that in the middle of class?”
Madison Anderson, the student who had posed the question, recalled things differently. The instructor, during her introductory comments, had told the class that she’d been raised as a Christian and had once written a play about Jesus, Anderson said.
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“I definitely didn’t just ask it out of the blue,” she said.
Stone responded by telling students she didn’t practice a specific religion, although she occasionally visits a Buddhist temple in New Orleans.
She also told the class that her spiritual beliefs weren’t relevant.
The exchange shocked Stone, a part-time stand-up comic whose sense of humor had made her a popular lecturer at Texas State.
Many professors, especially those without the protections of tenure, have come to recognize the danger of these situations. All it takes is one irritated or impatient moment — perhaps secretly recorded on a student’s cellphone — to fuel the outrage machine that exists in social-media circles and on conservative outlets like Fox News. Each new controversy feeds the public appetite for stories about misbehaving liberal professors and the narrative, often misleading, that colleges are increasingly unmoored from, and even hostile to, mainstream culture.
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The moment in Stone’s classroom, looking back, marked a turning point in her decade-long career of teaching sexuality at a public university in a reliably red state.
As the semester unfolded, Anderson continued to grab the spotlight. Her attire was built for ideological combat: She regularly wore the same red-and-white Make America Great Again tank top, even into the chill of late fall, adding a long-sleeve shirt underneath for warmth.
You’re almost every single day interrupting this class and saying something bigoted. Yeah, you need to go.
Inside Stone’s classroom, battle lines were being drawn — part of a larger trend on the campus: In the years since Donald J. Trump became president, Texas State has become a caldron of America’s racial and political divisions. Its nearly 39,000 students have come from every county in Republican-ruled Texas. Until recently, most of those students were white, but in 2015 the university’s enrollment became majority minority.
A surge in Hispanic students drove the change: In 2003, Hispanics represented just 18.6 percent of students. By the fall of 2019, that share had more than doubled to 38 percent. White students, meanwhile, made up 44 percent of the student body, and black students were just under 11 percent.
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San Marcos is a laid-back college town in southeast Texas, sandwiched between Austin and San Antonio and built atop the vast Edwards Aquifer. Families spend warm afternoons floating down the spring-fed San Marcos River, which runs through the campus — a relaxing idyll with a magnetic appeal for students.
But in the era of Trump, the university is pulsing with the same raw emotions that define the rest of America in 2020: Fear. Mistrust. Anger.
Minority students at Texas State have protested a lack of support from the university administration. Conservative students complain of being discriminated against because of their political views. And white-supremacist groups have targeted the university to recruit new members — posting racist fliers and signs that sparked concerns about possible violence.
In Kelly Stone’s sexuality course, the tensions spiked during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. A discussion of sexual assault led Anderson, who strongly supported Kavanaugh, to proclaim that the threat of false accusations also placed men at risk.
Several classmates immediately responded by sharing their own experiences of being sexually assaulted. Some were in tears as they spoke.
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Afterward, Anderson told university administrators she’d been bullied.
I have been following her rules every class, and am still getting harassed by her.
“The whole class yelled, and cried at me,” she wrote in an email to the associate dean of students on November 7, 2018. She complained that Professor Stone had “allowed this behavior.”
On another day, the topic was whether transgender people should be allowed to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.
The classroom debate became heated. Anderson later complained to the associate dean of students, writing that Stone had told the class it was “crazy to assume that a transgender person would molest a child or do anything illegal in a bathroom, and claimed that others claiming this are wrong.”
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“I then raised my hand and said, ‘I wouldn’t say that it is crazy to assume this when there have been cases regarding transgender’s [sic] in the bathroom,’” Anderson wrote. “I don’t believe that every transgender is a child molester, the fact that you just stated about it not happening is wrong. When indeed, there have been cases.”
The fear that transgender-friendly bathroom policies could encourage child abuse is a common talking point in some conservative circles, but it is factually unproven. A spokesman for the American Psychological Association said the assertion “has no credibility whatsoever.”
In an interview, Anderson cited the 2016 voyeurism arrest of a transgender woman in Idaho, who was accused of using her cellphone to capture images of a young woman undressing. The case gained national attention because it happened at a Target, which has transgender-friendly bathroom policies. But the case did not involve a minor (the alleged victim was 18 years old), and the incident happened in a fitting room, not a bathroom.
Anderson told The Chronicle that the classroom discussion of transgender issues “spiraled downhill,” but she maintained that it was the professor who had acted inappropriately. She said Stone called her “ill-educated” and “bigoted” in front of the class. Stone denies that.
Kenny Douglas, a student in Kelly Stone’s sexuality class, said one student’s persistent disruptions “went on for so long.”Matthew Busch for The Chronicle
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Anderson’s comments, meanwhile, offended her classmates, one of whom is openly transgender. The student, Kenny Douglas, said Anderson’s disruptions “went on for so long.”
“You’re almost every single day interrupting this class and saying something bigoted,” Douglas said of Anderson. “Yeah, you need to go.”
The sexuality course wasn’t the only place where Stone and Anderson crossed paths in the fall of 2018. Anderson was in Stone’s “Family Policy” course as well. The lecturer said Anderson was disruptive there, too — for example, laughing while other students were talking.
In an attempt to defuse the situation in both classes, the university asked Anderson to sign a classroom-behavior agreement that promised to honor Texas State’s student code of conduct.
Anderson said she refused. She told The Chronicle that her lawyer — provided at no cost by an organization she declined to name — instructed her not to sign the document.
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Stone said that, at one point, Sylvia Crixell, then interim director of the School of Family and Consumer Sciences, told her in a phone call, “I know you are being abused, and you just have to take it.”
Crixell declined an interview request from The Chronicle, instead sending a brief written statement in which she said that Stone had “mischaracterized” her. [After this article was published, Crixell emailed The Chronicle to say that the words Stone had attributed to her in the phone call were “categorically false.”]
The university gave Stone three options: She could allow another instructor to take over the two courses. She could have a campus police officer stand in class to keep the peace. Or she could switch the courses to an online teaching format.
“I wondered out loud, ‘What about having the student removed from my classes?’” Stone said. “Where is that on the list of choices?”
“Family Policy” was switched to an online format. Chidozie, the student who thought it “weird” that Anderson had asked about her professor’s Christianity in the sexuality class, was also in “Family Policy.” Chidozie said she enjoyed attending Stone’s classes in person but was nevertheless relieved when the course moved online, because “it became difficult to learn when dealing with that kind of person in the classroom.”
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Some students vented in their course evaluations about their “frustration” that the last few weeks of class were held online because of the behavior of one student.
And other students, according to Stone, incorrectly assumed that the change to online was the professor’s prerogative. They complained in course evaluations that she “gave up on the class.” The sexuality course had guest speakers scheduled, so online teaching wasn’t an option there. Instead, a police officer stood silently inside the classroom for several sessions.
The changing demographics of Texas State have helped fuel its enrollment growth, but administrators are under increasing pressure to better serve the needs of a diverse student body.
In 2011, Texas State became a Hispanic Serving Institution — a title reserved for colleges with Hispanic undergraduate enrollment of 25 percent or higher. Attaining federal HSI status had been a stated goal of university leaders for several years.
Why were Latina/o students increasingly choosing Texas State? The changing demographics of Texas were a factor, but so, too, were campus administrators’ targeted efforts: The university placed three full-time admissions recruiters in Houston, two in Dallas, and one each in San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley.
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When a university becomes an HSI, it receives special grants from the U. S. Department of Education and other federal agencies. Thus far, Texas State has received more than $38 million in HSI grants.
Yet some question whether the college has fully embraced its new identity.
Alexander Villalobos, a former lieutenant with the campus police force, said there has historically been a disconnect between the administration and Texas State’s Latina/o students. Villalobos also once served as president of the college’s Hispanic Policy Network.
It took years of prodding for the university to finally establish a Latina/o-studies minor, Villalobos said, which it did in 2018.
Claudia Gasponi, a former student-government senator, said Texas State’s Hispanic students have low retention rates and “the administration does not provide the necessary support to bridge the cultural differences and economic barriers that Hispanic students experience.”
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“They get all of this grant money for us attending, and don’t turn it around and pour it into our well-being,” Gasponi, 24, said.
Texas State’s website says its grant money has benefited students in a variety of ways: expanded services for Hispanic students in STEM degree tracks; a U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded program designed to expand the number of Hispanic students pursuing “food safety and inspection” careers; a Global AgLeader program to boost recruitment and retention of minority agriculture students.
Minority students have also complained that university leaders don’t respond aggressively to racist propaganda on campus.
In the years since Trump became president, neo-Nazi and white-supremacist groups have posted recruiting propaganda on campus nearly a dozen times, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Patriot Front, a white-supremacist group, hung a large banner on the exterior of the university’s Alkek Library in 2017.
“America’s a white nation,” it proclaimed.
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One widely criticized statement by President Denise M. Trauth was released in November of 2016, hours after racist fliers and posters were found on campus.
“People of all backgrounds are experiencing different emotions,” Trauth wrote. “Discourse is fundamental to the academic enterprise, and this university strives to protect it. As Bobcats our aim should be to better understand that which causes divisions among us and to work toward strengthening our bond as a university community. Constructive dialogue is the best way to achieve this goal.”
One battered or murdered student of color will be too many.
Trauth’s statement landed with a hollow thud. Debra F. Monroe, a professor of English, responded in an email, “Students of color I teach are terrified.”
Monroe concluded in boldface type: “Please consider stronger action than dialogue. One battered or murdered student of color will be too many.”
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Trauth began issuing stronger statements. In March 2017, after anti-Semitic fliers appeared on campus, she blasted the “hateful, racist” fliers and wrote that the “deplorable sentiments contained in these communications violate our university core values.”
In an interview with The Chronicle, the president said it can be a challenge to quickly issue a statement in such cases, as the facts are sometimes still being sorted out. And it’s important to be accurate, she said.
“I understand students, in particular, want to hear from the president and want to hear quickly from the president,” said Trauth, who has led Texas State since 2002. “But these messages, when I get them out, they have to be very carefully worded.”
Still, Trauth insisted she’s taken a “strong stance” in combating racism.
Trauth’s statement after the anti-Semitic fliers went up ended with these words: “Please do not let people outside our university define who we are as a community.”
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In at least a couple of cases, the white supremacists were former Texas State students. Erik Sailors, a leader of the Patriot Front, attended Texas State until the spring of 2017. Later that year, he and two others received criminal-trespass warnings for posting white-nationalist fliers on campus.
Benjamin Bogard, another former Texas State student, was sentenced in August to more than six years in prison. FBI agents investigated Bogard’s racist, hate-filled online posts as part of a counterterrorism inquiry — the 20-year-old ended one of his videos by saying “Heil Hitler!” and giving the Nazi salute.
The feds found child pornography in Bogard’s possession, which is ultimately what put him in prison.
Beyond race, other identity issues have been flashpoints on campus. One of them is National Coming Out Day, which, for more than three decades, has served as a catharsis for LGBT people nationwide. But at Texas State, conservative students say they, too, are oppressed.
And so, two years ago, the student chapter of Young Conservatives of Texas staged its first Conservative Coming Out Day in the Quad — complete with a door frame through which students pass to symbolize the process of embracing their true identity.
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“The idea of the event is to show students that it’s OK to come out as conservative,” said Sebastian Quaid, chairman of the Young Conservatives chapter at Texas State. “It’s not the end of the world. Your parents aren’t going to hate you.”
Quaid, a 22-year-old political-science major, said the event was inspired by a chapter member who is conservative and gay — and who experienced more difficulty coming out as conservative.
But the Young Conservatives’ “coming out” event sparked a backlash. Critics said it trivialized the struggles of the LGBT community.
A year earlier, a gay Texas State senior had committed suicide in a university stairwell.
Throughout the semester, Kelly Stone was trying to maintain order in her classroom. But she faced a daunting challenge: Administrators weren’t backing her up.
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During one meeting with her department chair and another administrator, Stone vented her frustrations. She complained that other students were being hurt by Anderson’s disrespectful behavior, and that those students were “unheard” by the administration. Stone complained that the administration had created an audience for Anderson by allowing her to do as she pleases in class, and the professor also suggested that Anderson’s “white privilege” played a role.
Crixell, her boss at the time, told the professor to “stop speaking about white privilege in this context,” according to a grievance that Stone filed with the university.
The reason: “Crixell personally found it offensive as a white person.”
Texas State canceled Stone’s sexuality course in February of 2019 — the semester after Anderson had been a student in the class. That same day, the university told Stone it would not renew her teaching contract.
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Douglas, the transgender student, said: “This one girl single-handedly signed up for a course, knew exactly what this course was about … and somehow got not only the teacher removed, but the entire course removed from this whole university.”
Stone’s “Family Policy” class was also canceled, but that decision had been in the works for some time, and Stone says it wasn’t a surprise.
In Crixell’s statement declining The Chronicle‘s interview request, she wrote: “Ms. Stone’s employment as an instructor at Texas State University consisted of teaching two courses that were phased out of the departmental curriculum. I am not interested in addressing Ms. Stone’s allegations except to say that, in my personal opinion, she mischaracterized me both personally and professionally.”
Crixell had declined to comment on Anderson’s behavior because of federal student-privacy laws, but email records show that she once met with Anderson and Anderson’s mother, and that Crixell sought to make sure Anderson understood that she couldn’t behave in “such a way that the learning environment is disrupted.” Anderson was also told by Crixell that “your behavior will be deemed disruptive if the students or instructor feel that what you say or do interferes with the learning environment.”
When a conservative group wanted to stage a rally at Texas State, a counterprotest emerged and four students were arrested.Twitter
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Anderson replied by asking if Stone’s behavior was going to change. “I have been following her rules every class,” the student wrote, “and am still getting harassed by her.”
When Texas State ended Stone’s employment, administrators questioned her qualifications and criticized her teaching style — telling her that she had been “training students to become advocates,” according to Stone’s grievance.
Students interviewed by The Chronicle disagreed with that assessment and said the professor had been fair and evenhanded throughout a difficult situation. Her teaching evaluations from students were consistently positive. In her sexuality course, for example, her overall scores ranged from 4.48 to 4.78 out of five points.
President Trauth declined to talk about Stone’s case, saying “we just cannot comment on faculty personnel issues that are swirling around.”
In June, a university hearing officer ruled against Stone’s grievance, finding that the loss of her teaching position “was not discriminatory or retaliatory in nature.” The hearing officer accepted the university’s explanation that it had planned all along to phase out the two courses Stone taught, and that Stone had been warned of these changes — another assertion the professor disputes.
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Last May, just as Stone was getting ready to administer final exams for the last time, the university’s deep divisions became apparent once again.
Texas Nomads SAR, a conservative biker group (SAR stands for Sons of the American Revolution), planned a two-mile march through campus, carrying flags in support of President Trump.
About a dozen or so students organized a counterprotest. They gathered at the 17-foot-tall Fighting Stallions statue, on the west end of the Quad.
But the Nomads’ appearance, it turned out, was a false alarm. Although a few of the group’s members were spotted on campus that day, their two-mile march never materialized.
And yet, in a sign of Texas State’s struggles, the afternoon descended into chaos anyway.
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Several conservative students were standing next to the liberal counterprotesters — many of whom were students of color.
Words were exchanged. The students debated whether it was appropriate for one of the conservative students to be wearing his red Make America Great Again hat.
Tyvonte Davis-Williams said he hadn’t participated in a counterprotest against a conservative group on campus. He was arrested anyway. Matthew Busch for The Chronicle
Another student, 22-year-old Alejandra Navarrete, wandered over to the Quad during her classroom break, to see what all the commotion was about. She saw the man with the MAGA hat — and snatched it off his head.
Then she kept walking. Friends say she planned to toss it in the trash.
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The campus police swooped in. Quickly, four people were arrested.
Navarette was one of them. Also arrested: Tyvonte Davis-Williams, who saidhehadn’t participated in the counterprotest — he just walked by the scene and got closer when he saw a woman he knew.
She was in a heated discussion with two conservative male students, Davis-Williams said. One of them raised his voice and moved closer to her, Davis-Williams said. So he interceded.
Davis-Williams, who is black, said one of the conservative students mocked him by saying he didn’t “belong” there. He walked closer to respond, but the student hid behind campus police officers gathered at the scene.
That’s when an officer stopped Davis-Williams — and told him to quit walking in that direction.
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Davis-Williams erupted in frustration. It felt like the police were protecting only one side.
“I pay tuition like everybody else!” Davis-Williams shouted, in a heated exchange that was captured on video and posted to social media. “I can walk where I want to walk!”
When Madison Anderson challenged authority in Kelly Stone’s classroom, she received no penalty. But Davis-Williams shouted and cursed at the police. He was punished swiftly.
A police captain placed him in a chokehold, and Davis-Williams was told he was being arrested for inciting a riot.
“He put me in a chokehold immediately. I wasn’t even resisting or anything,” Davis-Williams told The Chronicle. “It was more so the students who were there were pulling them off of me.”
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At the police station, Davis-Williams said the cops warmed up to him once they learned that the 22-year-old communications-studies major is also in the U.S. Army Reserves. He was able to resolve the matter with a reduced misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, which required only paying a fine.
But the experience lingers for Davis-Williams, who grew up poor on the east side of Waco. His childhood was defined by a determination to avoid bad influences and stay out of trouble. He remembers seeing crack cocaine being sold in the family’s home, and hiding in his closet from the sound of neighborhood gunshots.
And yet he still ended up in jail — for the words that he spoke. And it happened at a campus where racist language has repeatedly been tolerated because of “free speech” rights.
“It kind of made me feel like I just didn’t have the power to do anything,” Davis-Williams said. “I didn’t even have the power to speak on how I feel.”
For Stone, losing her job at Texas State was both unexpected and devastating.
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The professor said the university, and its surrounding college town, “have certainly crafted the woman that I am.”
Stone, 41, graduated from Texas State, the first in her family to go to college. She learned about the institution (then called Southwest Texas State University) while attending high-school cheerleading events in San Marcos.
She remembers being a student in an adolescent-development class at Texas State that had only eight students. She was assigned a chapter on adolescent sexuality, and had to deliver an hourlong presentation to the class.
“Here I am now, a sex educator,” she said. Stone said that her own difficult upbringing — being raised by a teenage mother — sparked her desire to teach others about the consequences of their life choices.
Stone became an instructor at Texas State in 2008. Over the years, she built up roots in San Marcos. She shares hugs with students she still sees around town. She chaired the city’s parking advisory board. And if you take a close look at the public art at Children’s Park, there’s a tiny picture of Stone on the wrist of a rainbow-colored mermaid named Blooming Brightly. Stone is friends with the artist who made it. Emblazoned above the image are the words “Talent shines in San Marcos.”
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But now her academic life is in the rear-view mirror.
So Stone embraced a new challenge, and started a bid for state political office: She is a Democratic candidate for the office of railroad commissioner. Despite its name, the office doesn’t actually oversee railroads anymore — its primary function is to regulate the oil and gas industry, which is a very big deal in Texas.
As a candidate, Stone has promised to “protect and defend our environment from Big Oil’s greed and destruction.” But when explaining why she entered the race, Stone also talks about Texas State.
She tells voters that she was harassed by “right-wing extremists” in the classroom, and that her university failed to support her.
“It hurts my heart … in so many ways,” she told The Chronicle. “Honestly, I felt really betrayed by my institution. And that sucks.”
Update (Feb. 14, 2020, 5:50 p.m.): This article has been updated to include a comment from Sylvia Crixell disputing Kelly Stone’s assertion that Crixell had told her, “I know you are being abused, and you just have to take it.”
Michael Vasquez is a senior investigative reporter for The Chronicle. Before joining The Chronicle, he led a team of reporters as education editor for Politico, where he spearheaded the team’s 2016 Campaign coverage of education issues. Mr. Vasquez began his reporting career at the Miami Herald, where he worked for 14 years, covering both politics and education.