UH Profs Criticize Award to Delay : Houston Indymedia

Submitted to the Daily Cougar but NOT published by them. If you want to ask them why they're keeping this story quiet, call (713) 743-5360, fax (713) 743-5384 or email dcougar@ mail .uh.edu.
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"Honoring Delay Sends the Wrong Message"

This coming Saturday night the Houston Alumni Organization will honor Representative Tom Delay of Sugarland, class of 1969, at its "Red and White Ball." Tables for the event have been reserved by, among others, the Colleges of Engineering, Law, Optometry, Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, the African American Studies Program, the School of Graduate Studies, and many other university offices.

Is Tom Delay really worthy of this honor? Is it appropriate for UH, a publicly-funded, diverse, community-oriented institution, to pay its respects to a politician whose career has been marked by anti-democratic actions, support for the rich, disregard for diversity, opposition to environmental safeguards, rejection of racial, gender and sexual-orientation equality, and preference for private wealth over the public good.

While preaching against the evils of "big government," Delay has, from Washington D.C., taken control of the Texas redistricting issue, effectively disenfranchising millions of Texans in order to expand Republican Party control, and intervened against Houston's attempt to develop a light rail system. Delay also advocates huge tax cuts for the rich, wants to further militarize a racist drug war, and believes Social Security should be privatized. He has rejected virtually every attempt to preserve our environment, opposing fuel efficiency laws, fighting clean air and water standards, and favoring oil drilling in Alaska. He also opposes a woman's right to choose and even rejects funding for family planning. Delay too wants to ax welfare and replace it with church-based charity programs. Tom Delay's conception of the public good, simply put, means that the state supports government power while steamrolling over the rights and needs of those outside the centers of power and money.

But it is his views on issues and principles that are supposed to be inculcated by American universities that is most troubling with regard to this honorific. Though UH is the most racially and ethnically diverse urban school in the U.S. , Delay aggressively opposes Affirmative Action programs to enable women, African Americans, and Mexican Americans to enter universities and the work force. Delay is simply hostile to public education, favoring prison construction over schools, advocating a voucher system for religious education, and calling for school prayer. Delay's mission, as he has put it, is to build a "God-centered" nation with a government promoting prayer and the teaching of religious values based on the "Judeo-Christian ethic."

Nor has Tom Delay used his influence in any observable way to enhance the mission or facilities of the University of Houston. When UH honors Tom Delay, it rejects its own mission and ideals, indeed the very basis of higher education; it rejects the values of diversity, tolerance, equality and free enquiry. In honoring Delay, UH insults the rest of us.

Gerald Horne, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of African American History
Martin Melosi, University Distinguished Professor, Department of History
Tom O'Brien, Professor of History
Sue Kellogg, Associate Professor of History
Karl Ittmann, Associate Professor of History
Janice Harper, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Bob Buzzanco, Associate Professor of History
Andrew Chesnut, Associate Professor of History