AUSTIN — Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader whose "Hail Trump" chant at a recent conference in Washington, D.C., drew Nazi salutes from the crowd, has been invited to speak at Texas A&M University next month.

The university did not invite Spencer, a former Dallas resident and president of the alt-right National Policy Institute, but it cannot stop his appearance, school officials said Wednesday. Student newspaper The Battalion wrote that Spencer was extended the invitation by Preston Wiginton, an Aggie who dropped out in 2007 to go to Russia.

"Private citizens are permitted to reserve space available to the public as we are a public university as is the case here," Texas A&M Senior Vice President Amy Smith said in a written statement. "Public groups must cover all rental expenses so that state resources are not burdened."

But Smith said that "Texas A&M University — including faculty, staff, students and/or student groups — did not invite this speaker to our campus nor do we endorse his rhetoric in any way. In fact, our leadership finds his views as expressed to date in direct conflict with our core values."

Spencer supports establishing a white ethno-state devoid of people of color or anyone else without a common European heritage and culture, Dallas Morning News reporter Caleb Downs wrote in a recent profile.

He insists he's not a white supremacist, which he said implies a desire for whites to rule over nonwhites, but said at the D.C. event that whites could and must claim ownership over the future path of the United States.

"America was, until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us," Spencer said at the national conference his organization hosted in D.C. last week.

He added: "To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward. And we recognize the central lie of American race relations. We don't exploit other groups. We don't gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around."

Spencer's calls of "Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!" were met by Nazi salutes from the crowd.

Wiginton told The Battalion: "If we want to have a white state or a white community or a white homeland, we should be able to have that. We respect that for all people. If we look at the NAACP, black people have the right to have that. Why can't white people have a WAACP?"