In the middle of the night on November 11, 2011, Jenn Shapland, a 24-year-old graduate student in the English department at the University of Texas at Austin, received an email from her professor.

It’s a day that ends in y, and that means conservative activists in Texas are trying to ban universities from considering race and ethnicity as part of the college admissions process.

Students and administrators at the University of Texas in Austin are condemning a number of racist posters aimed at Chinese students that popped up on campus.