Claim: Five students at the University of Texas lost their scholarships for kneeling during the American national anthem.
Fact: The claim is false and has been debunked multiple times before.
On 23 December 2024, Threads user @amos.0954 posted (archive) a visual depicting women athletes kneeling in a stadium, alongside the following caption:
“5 students who knelt during the national anthem at the University of Texas have lost their scholarships for kneeling during the national anthem and the US flag. Full detail👇👇”
The caption also includes a link via Cuttly, a URL shortener, to a website that the service said was “problematic” and consequently removed.
The text in the visual — which has over 10,600 likes, close to 100 reposts, and more than 150 shares — reads, “REPORT ALL STUDENTS WHO KNELT DURING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM WERE ROUNDED UP AND REMOVED FROM SCHOLARSHIPS.”
Kneeling during the American national anthem started as a movement by Black athletes, specifically the National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016, before becoming a nationwide controversy and leading to backlash from conservatives. The player decided to do it “to protest racial injustice and police brutality in the United States”, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
The issue was so divisive that US Soccer banned the practice in 2017 — it was later repealed in 2020 — and schools took or threatened action against students who knelt or attempted to.
Soch Fact Check found no evidence of the University of Texas making such a decision. Had there been such an announcement, it would have been widely reported by reputable international media outlets.
There’s nothing about such a decision on the university’s website either.
In an August 2024 article, Reuters Fact Check quoted University of Texas Associate Athletics Director of Communications John Bianco as saying in an email, “There’s no truth to this rumor.”
The same month, USA Today and PolitiFact also debunked the same claim, with the latter noting that the post had also emerged back in 2023 and was traced back to a satirical website (archive).
In its 2023 fact-check, USA Today quoted Bianco as denying the claim. About the satirical website, it wrote, “That story is clearly labeled as satire. The author’s bio states that he is ‘known for his satirical writing’, while a disclaimer on the website states that stories bearing a satire label ‘are often entirely made up’.”
Snopes also debunked the claim in 2023.
Moreover, the picture accompanying the claim is unrelated to the University of Texas as it shows Lady Volunteers — a basketball team that represents the University of Tennessee — kneeling during the American national anthem at a game on 8 January 2021, just days after the US Capitol riots, according to multiple media reports.
Soch Fact Check found the claim here on Threads and here and here on Facebook.
Conclusion: The claim is false, as confirmed by a university spokesperson. It has also been debunked multiple times before.
Background image in cover photo: Brandon Mowinkel
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