Dan Patrick, a Republican, said on Friday that he wanted to end tenure for all new faculty members at the state’s public universities and to revoke the tenure of those who teach critical race theory.
The student newspaper will continue as an online-only news organization after the spring semester. But the university’s unilateral decision to end the print edition without student input has students and faculty concerned about its editorial independence.
Experts said that such work can raise conflict-of-interest concerns but that the University of Florida’s response to three scholars seemed to be a stretch.
Graduates attended a December Texas A&M University commencement ceremony at Reed Arena in College Station. The A&M System is among higher education institutions that will still require people to wear face masks. Credit: Jordan Vonderhaar for The Texas Tribune
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Several Texas colleges and universities
will still require people to wear face masks after Gov. Greg Abbott announced that he will lift the statewide mask mandate and other COVID-19 restrictions starting Wednesday.
Those institutions’ decisions come as COVID-19 continues to spread across the state and Houston became the first city to record cases of all major COVID-19 variants. As of March 3, only 7.5% of Texans have been fully vaccinated far below the recommended threshold for rolling back safety restrictions. Local leaders criticized Abbott’s decision, sayi
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Texas A&M leadership is clearing the air: the much-disputed Lawrence Sullivan Ross statue, honoring the former university president and Confederate general, is staying put.
Interim President John Junkins stressed the school’s intentions to The Texas Tribune on Wednesday, just two days after the university put out a report that characterized the question of the statue’s future as unresolved. Students who have been pushing the university on diversity issues also said they were never told that the issue had been decided.
Junkins said the statue will remain where it is at the center of campus, known as Academic Plaza.