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IN THE NEWS
The Rudder Association Supports Decision for
New TAMU President Sole Finalist.
Dear Aggie Member,
The announcement that Executive Vice Chancellor Susan Ballabina will be the next President of Texas A&M was welcome news. This board of regents has made strong selections for chancellor, vice-president for student affairs, commandant, and football coach. Like those decisions, this needed to be a long-term commitment. Which means that it needed to be a proven, competent leader who is in alignment with the vision and goals of system leadership and the primary stakeholders–the tax and tuition payers. Dr Ballabina has a track record in our system and on our main campus that gives us great confidence in her qualifications, and the leadership of TRA is thrilled that she accepted the offer.
As you may recall, TRA voiced several concerns about the candidacy of then interim president Mark Welsh for the permanent presidency of Texas A&M. We have no such reservations this time. Dr Ballabina has been accessible, transparent, and responsive in her interactions with TRA leadership for the past five years and in three different senior administrative roles.
Susan is a “System Aggie” and Distinguished Graduate of Tarleton State. But as we told the Chancellor, “Dr. Ballabina is an excellent choice, given her consistent record of successful academic leadership. She understands and respects our traditions and core values, embodying the spirit of an Aggie in the best sense of the word. Texas A&M and higher education will be well-served by this decision.”
For far too long and in too many ways, Texas A&M has been following the rest of higher education in the wrong direction. This is another indication that Texas A&M will now be leading higher education in a better direction, while maintaining and strengthening its unique spirit, values, and traditions. We look forward to working with her to achieve these goals.
The Rudder Association,
President and Board of Directors
SEC distributing more than $1B to its schools for 2024-25
The Southeastern Conference is distributing more than $1 billion to its 16 universities for the 2024-25 fiscal year, which ended last August.
ICYMI: Regent David Baggett discussed ‘insidious infiltration of DEI’ with Gov. Abbott prior to appointment
Baggett told Abbott his goal was to ‘reestablish TAMU as the nation’s most conservative public university’ when thanking governor for considering his appointment to Board of Regents
Aggie Engineering IN THE NEWS
Building batteries that don’t break in the cold
Battery performance suffers under cold conditions because conventional batteries contain a liquid electrolyte that can freeze, leaving the battery unable to charge or discharge.
Students admit to getting better dorm rooms, meals by ‘gaming’ disability accommodations
Stanford student says ‘if you’re not gaming it, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage’.
Read the conservative op-ed The Battalion refused to publish.
Dear Anonymous Professor:
You are profoundly detached from the real issues affecting us, our families, our country, and the world today.
We are the most depressed, anxious, suicidal, obese, addicted, and indebted generation in American history, and the first to be worse off than our parents. We are forced to take pointless courses, buy outrageously expensive textbooks for information freely available online, and serve as a captive audience in a system where everyone—from publishers, administrators, and banks to professors like you—profits while we drown in debt.
The numbers don’t lie: almost 40% of students drop out, burdened by loans but no degree. Half of those who graduate end up in jobs that never required a degree in the first place. A bachelor’s degree has become a $100,000 high school diploma.
What caused this collapse, you ask?
You and your ideologies did. You are no longer educating us to build, compete, and lead. You are indoctrinating us to deconstruct, resent, and surrender.
In economics, you promote Marx and Keynesian financialization, offshoring, and money printing—policies that make homes unaffordable and force us to work two jobs just to pay bills. You omit Austrian School economists like Mises and Hayek, who defended the free markets that built the unprecedented prosperity we enjoy today. You smear capitalism as “oppressive” while pushing the actually oppressive redistribution schemes that have failed everywhere they’ve been tried.
In psychology, you idolize Alfred Kinsey as the father of the sexual revolution and John Money as the one who coined the word “gender” as separate from sex. Yet you never tell us that Kinsey gathered data from pedophiles who abused babies, and that Money’s theory was founded on his experiments with the Reimer twins, both of whom committed suicide from the trauma.
In literature, you replace Shakespeare, Dickens, and Dante with a racist DEI quota system, choosing books based on race and victimhood instead of merit. The more “marginalized” the author, the less their work is critiqued and the more you celebrate it.
In sociology, you force-feed us feminism, an ideology that teaches women to resent men, motherhood, and family. You glorify Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan but hide the inconvenient truth: that single, childless women are the unhappiest demographic, while married women in Christian households report the highest life and sexual satisfaction.
In history, you teach that slavery was America’s unique sin, ignoring that it was universal until White Christian nations abolished it first. You never mention the 600,000 Americans who died ending it, the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron that liberated 150,000 slaves, or that slavery still thrives in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
In philosophy, you prioritize Marx, Freud, and Foucault—the philosophers of disorder—over Aristotle, Aquinas, and Locke, who built the foundations of virtue, natural law, and liberty. You conveniently leave out that the philosophical purpose of freedom is to do what is good, not to do whatever we want.
In political science, you present the genocidal failures of Marxism, socialism, and communism as “viable alternatives” for academic debate, while downplaying the brilliant, liberty-ensuring architecture of our Constitution. You dismiss foundational mechanisms like the separation of powers and the Electoral College as archaic flaws, and ignore the wisdom of the Federalist Papers, because you are racist toward the White Christian males who authored them.
In the sciences, you deny the biological reality of sex, even though every single one of the 60 trillion cells in the human body is either male or female, and no amount of hormones can change that. Instead of helping people with body image and mental health issues, you promote their permanent and irreversible mutilation to virtue signal.
And we could go on. But the bitter irony is that you stand on the shoulders of the giants who built this country, this state, and this university, using your cushy job to spit on their legacy and the values that have given you everything you enjoy today. You take parents’ life savings and teach their kids to hate them, their faith, and their heritage, causing fights over Thanksgiving dinner.
You aren’t teaching us how to think; you’re teaching us what to think. You turned a marketplace of ideas, where each side is supposed to be heard equally, into an indoctrination camp where only the approved party line is parroted. You created the first generations in world history without love for their God, their family, or their country—and then wonder why they’re miserable.
Meanwhile, China, Russia, and our competitors teach their engineers calculus and physics, not gender studies and wokeness. They laugh at us as they dominate in AI, energy, and manufacturing.
So why are you scared when taxpayers demand a return to excellence? Why fear being recorded? What are you teaching that can’t stand scrutiny? Lobotomies and eugenics were once taught, too. The gender unicorn is just the current pseudoscience.
You’re not scared of politicians. You’re scared of losing your six-figure, taxpayer-funded salary because your indoctrination model is failing. What you’re seeing around you is a call on Texas A&M, the nation’s universities, and the West to become once more the leader of the educational world, as it is the leader of the free world. We need engineers, not ideologues: builders, not critics.
We need more Charlie Kirks, not more Ibram X. Kendis. We are your customers, your bosses, and your product is broken. Don’t gaslight us for demanding a better one.
Justino Russell
Texas A&M Student
P.S. I want to defend the truth, so I’ll sign my name. If you were teaching the truth, why didn’t you sign with yours?