In January, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller declared “war on DEI,” directing his agency to stop working with businesses that embrace policies that give advantages to people based on “race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.”
He condemned the Biden Administration for allowing “unfair” diversity, equity, and inclusion policies “to infect all aspects of our federal government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, and institutions of higher education,” Miller said in a press release.
But in May 2023, he wrote a letter to leaders of the University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Texas at Austin emphasizing a student’s ethnicity and socioeconomic status as he urged the schools to reconsider her enrollment.
[Former Sid Miller allies told police the ag commissioner feared the DEA, told a friend to get rid of marijuana]
He said the student was a “biracial Latina,” whose father had “retreated” to Argentina a decade ago, leaving her mother to raise the student and her brother by herself. The student, he said, had been accepted but missed the enrollment deadline earlier that month. She did not have a computer, and did not know to look for the acceptance letter online, Miller wrote.
The commissioner, who is serving his third term leading the state’s agriculture agency, said in his letter he was using the “full weight of my office” to implore the school officials to admit the student.
“To do so would honor your mission to ensure underserved minorities have access to the same education as those from wealthy and elite educated families,” Miller wrote in a letter obtained through a public records request. “Based on her circumstances, to deny her the offered admission by eliminating her based on a technicality would be completely contrary to that proclaimed mission.”
The Texas Tribune confirmed the student is the daughter of one of Miller’s political associates, Lisa Pittman, an Austin lawyer who specializes in cannabis law and calls herself the “First Lady of Texas Cannabis Law” on social media and in news articles. Miller appointed Pittman to the agency's Industrial Hemp Advisory Council in 2020, just after the Texas Legislature legalized growing and selling industrial hemp in 2019.
In 2020, she was hired by a Texas law firm as a cannabis business law specialist. Miller was quoted in the firm’s announcement praising the hire.
“Lisa was one of the first people that I approached to become a member of my Industrial Hemp Council, and she sure has been worth her weight in Gold,” Miller said in the release, which has been removed from their website but is accessible via Internet archives. “I depend on Lisa’s expert guidance and practical experience to help the TDA formulate the rules and regulations that will govern the hemp industry in Texas as we prepare the State to lead the nation in hemp production like we do with so many other agricultural commodities.”
In his letter to the universities, Miller said the student had been accepted to UT-Austin through a program where students can attend another University of Texas System school for one year before transferring to the flagship, if they maintain certain academic criteria during their freshman year. The student hadn’t realized she had been accepted and missed the May 1 enrollment deadline for students to accept an admissions offer and pay an enrollment deposit, Miller wrote. He said the student was told she could still enroll in the program, but would need to start at the University of Texas at Tyler. Yet she preferred to attend UTSA to study art and psychology, and to be closer to home for health reasons.
“I understand you may consider your class ‘full,’ but one more who is exceptionally deserving can't hurt,” Miller wrote. “I am respectfully writing this letter with the full weight of my office — that is how important this special case is, and I urge you to reconsider your position on her.”
[State Ag employees told police they were wary of Sid Miller’s political consultant. Now he’s the agency’s chief of staff.]
Miller said the family’s lack of experience with the inner workings of higher education contributed to her missing the deadline, adding that her high school mishandled her college applications. Her mother was the only member of her family who had graduated from college, he said.
“Unfortunately, it is students like [this student] that fall through the cracks and often end up receiving the least support,” Miller wrote. “But you can change that.”
In 2022, Pittman, the student’s mother, started her own boutique law firm focused on cannabis law and policy, and is a non-resident fellow in drug policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston. Pittman graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1997 and graduated from the University of Houston School of Law in 2001. She attended the Kinkaid School in Houston from 1985 to 1992, according to her LinkedIn.
The Tribune confirmed the student graduated from Westlake High School in West Austin in 2023.
The Tribune is not naming the student because it is unclear if she was aware that the letter was sent on her behalf. She did not respond to requests for comment.
UTSA confirmed she enrolled in the summer of 2023 through Spring 2024, but declined further comment on her situation. UT-Austin said they had no records showing the student enrolled. UT-Austin allows admitted students to appeal to reinstate their admission offer if it was previously declined. It’s unclear if the student filed for an appeal.
Pittman declined to comment. Miller did not respond to requests for comment or to a list of written questions.
Miller is running for reelection as Texas’s Agriculture Commissioner, which regulates the farming industry and provides support services to farmers in the state with the largest number of farms in the country and the number one producer of beef and cotton.
Miller sent the letter to the universities during the apex of the 2023 legislative session, when Texas lawmakers debated a bill to ban diversity, equity and inclusion policies and offices in the state’s public universities and colleges. The legislation was passed, making Texas the second state in the country to prohibit public universities from spending money on programs, offices, or employees that provided support and resources for specific underrepresented groups.
Miller has consistently railed against DEI programs and policies since conservatives began to raise concerns with the programs on college campuses in early 2023.
He has posted messages on social media that say “DEI = Didn’t Earn It,” and the DEI agenda is “un-American.”
Earlier this summer, Miller celebrated online when President Donald Trump issued an executive order demanding universities provide more transparency about their admissions processes. The declaration came two years after the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited universities across the country from considering a student’s race or ethnicity in the admissions process.
“YUGE!” he wrote. “The Supreme Court said no discrimination, but colleges are dodging the law to keep the DEI, racist admissions, and the woke mind virus alive. No more!”
Miller is not the first elected official in Texas to write letters to university leaders on behalf of students looking to attend. An outside investigation commissioned by the university system into admissions practices at UT-Austin in 2014 revealed a consistent pattern of lawmakers and other powerful elected officials often writing letters of recommendation for students who had applied.
The outside report found dozens of instances where current and former lawmakers wrote letters of recommendation to help students with powerful connections get admitted to the selective flagship university.
Disclosure: Rice University, University of Texas System, University of Texas at Austin and University of Texas at San Antonio have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
