Tarrant County College candidate is waging a diversity war his side already won | Opinion
I love “30 Rock’s” endlessly durable, quotable skewering of cultural war nonsense. Like when Jack Donaghy, Alec Baldwin’s Bush-era business tycoon efficiently takes down the naive, insufferable idealism of his coworker by imagining her to be the type of aimless and pampered child who has to “go to the common room and talk about apartheid.”
Donaghy’s jab is perfect, it distills the naive idealistic blue blooded liberal that many people find insufferable, as well as the easy mark American colleges have become culture war ammunition.
Whatever you make of this kind of person — personally, I’m rooting for those kids to develop a praxis for all the big thoughts in their heads — Tarrant County College is not that school. The six campus (one online) community college is intentionally cheaper than the average institution, is majority minority, and even receives money as a Hispanic Serving Institution for its large concentration of Latino students. Most TCC students can’t fool around with theoretical debates about apartheid. TCC students have jobs. Many of them have kids.
Tarrant Republican leader Cary Cheshire running for Tarrant college board
Cary Cheshire’s campaign describes an unrecognizable school than the one we know. The Tarrant County Republican Party vice chairman, podcaster and activist perhaps most famous for mocking Gov. Greg Abbott’s spinal cord injury, Cheshire describes himself on his website as “a strong conservative fighter who is going to eliminate DEI.” He told me he fears “there are a good number of students who do not feel comfortable sharing their views on campus because of its obvious Leftist bias.”
Leftist bias? Eliminate DEI? Cheshire is, at best, late. In 2024, Texas enacted SB-17, an anti-diversity equity and inclusion law that predated President Donald Trump’s full frontal assault. TCC has been particularly zealous in its efforts to comply, canceling its annual Abranzando al Exito, a Hispanic heritage month event. On the other hand, Cheshire’s candidacy might be right on time — winning the Place 7 election on Saturday could further fuel and fortify its recent precedent of punishing diversity, wherever its found.
Last summer, trustee Laura Forkner Pritchett, an elected board trustee who promised on her campaign website to end Critical Race Theory and DEI, published a ranty Facebook post about cracking down on an unnamed “rogue staff” caught performing, in her words, “mandatory DEI training.” Though Pritchett is the most vocally anti-diversity and nakedly partisan member of the current board, Cheshire joining her and Shannon Wood could create a solid three-person bloc of trustees leading the purge.
One staffer who has already felt the purge was Dr. Sha-Shonda Porter, a respected faculty member with decades of experience in higher education, who was placed on administrative leave Aug. 20 for uploading an older training module that she says was from an earlier version.
Compliance with Texas law banning DEI on college campuses
Porter insists that this was a clerical error. “Our staff inadvertently launched the original version, which included diversity, rather than the updated version,” which she said she had worked closely with TCC’s legal counsel to create in compliance with the new state law. Once Porter and her team were aware that the old version of the presentation had been uploaded, she said they pulled the training down and replaced it with the newest iteration, blessedly free from evidently illegal language about diversity.
Nonetheless, Porter’s response and explanation weren’t enough to save her job. By Aug. 29 — nine days into her administrative leave and five days after Pritchett’s post — officials notified her that they would not renew her contract, Porter said.
One former TCC faculty source, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because she fears retaliation, said that the school’s current leadership, emboldened by the state’s anti-DEI law, has left a chilling effect on other faculty. “When I go looking for stuff about things that are happening, I’m like, ‘Is that real?’,” she told me. “I’m getting more off of some Facebook posts.”
The school wouldn’t confirm Porter’s version of events. We then tried, via requests under the state’s open records law, to corroborate her assertions by obtaining correspondence between Porter and relevant faculty members regarding the development of SB 17-compliant employee training. TCC informed us that obtaining their records would cost the Star-Telegram $6,000. (We filed an objection with Attorney General Ken Paxton over the exorbitant price of these documents, arguing that these documents should be available to the public at a fair price.)
If Porter’s claims are true, “wokeness,” as anti-diversity critics use it to slur and demean, isn’t the problem at TCC. Academic freedom isn’t reining back the Cheshires; it’s punishing the Porters.
The draconian DEI law left a chilling effect on the school, exacerbated by the school’s aggressive enforcement. On one hand, not every Texas school is canceling cultural heritage celebrations and firing faculty over clerical errors. But I say the purpose of a system is what it does. SB 17, as written, is loose and vague enough about diversity that crusaders like Cheshire have plenty of room to play.
Board member Kenneth Barr, who is leaving the seat, shared why he was disturbed about Cheshire’s chances. The former Fort Worth mayor said that “public posturing to any particular partisan group” — as Cheshire and Pritchett are doing — “is negatively impacting the board’s work.”
“The college has bent over backward to make sure that we’re not violating the law,” Barr said, pointing to the persistent efforts of Chancellor Elva LeBlanc to remain compliant in the face of a rule that Barr told me he personally disagreed with. “[Cheshire] is making issues, creating issues. He’s trying to talk about radical campus activists and lack of conservative financial oversight and things like that.”
According to Barr, Cheshire’s claims are an “implication that we have all kinds of activism and lawlessness on campuses. And that’s not the case. And his purpose in saying these things is to change the focus of what the board is doing.”
Instead, we could see a board fostering a community college environment where faculty and staff quietly disappear from campuses they used to serve, scoring points in culture war battles spoofed ages ago instead of helping the students in greatest need of a come-up.
This story was originally published May 2, 2025 at 11:23 AM with the headline "Tarrant County College candidate is waging a diversity war his side already won | Opinion."
