Kate McGee of The Texas Tribune reported on an academic mess in Texas that turned into a national scandal. Texas A&M, one of the state’s premier universities recruited veteran journalist Kathleen McElroy to serve as Dean of Journalism at A&M. Dr. McElroy was considered a prize catch after years of experience at the New York Times and her doctorate in journalism. In addition, she is a tenured professor at the University of Texas in Austin and a graduate of Texas A&M.

A&M wooed Dr. McElroy, offered her a position with tenure, and held a celebration when she accepted.

When Texas A&M University announced last month that it had hired a director to revive its journalism school, it included the kind of fanfare usually reserved for college coaches and athletes.

The university set up maroon, silver and white balloons around a table outside its Academic Building for an official signing ceremony. It was there that Kathleen O. McElroy, a respected journalist with a long career, officially accepted the position to run the new program and teach as a tenured professor, pending approval from the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents.

McElroy, a 1981 Texas A&M graduate, was the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism between 2016 and 2022, where she is a tenured professor. Earlier, she spent 20 years in various editing roles at The New York Times until heading to UT-Austin to pursue her doctorate.

But apparently some conservative members of the A&M board objected to Dr. McElroy’s concern for diversity and inclusion, as well as her career at the New York Times, and the offer was whittled down to a position without tenure. Dr. McElroy withdrew her acceptance, and in the ensuing publicity, the president of the multi-campus university resigned.

McGee wrote:

After a week of turmoil over the botched hiring of a Black journalist to revive the Texas A&M University journalism department, M. Katherine Banks has resigned as the university’s president.

Mark A. Welsh III, dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service, will serve as acting president until the Board of Regents can meet to name an interim president. Texas A&M System Chancellor John Sharp has recommended they appoint Welsh as an interim until the board can do a national search for a new president. Banks’ resignation is effective immediately.

In a letter sent to A&M System Chancellor John Sharp Thursday evening, Banks wrote, “The recent challenges regarding Dr. [Kathleen] McElroy have made it clear to me that I must retire immediately. The negative press is a distraction from the wonderful work being done here.”

The fallout over McElroy’s hiring, which has garnered national media attention, marks the culmination of Banks’ two-year tenure, which was often met with pushback from faculty and students who consistently raised concerns with the direction she was taking the university and the way in which her administration was communicating its vision.

During that time, faculty leaders have passed resolutions calling for more involvement in university decisions, and research leaders on campus raised concerns with her administration’s decision-making. She was forced to walk back the decision to abruptly end the print publication of the university’s student newspaper, The Battalion, after students and alumni protested. Her administration also faced pushback from students after the school decided to cut funding and sponsorship of an annual campus drag show, known as Draggieland. Throughout all of that, Sharp has remained supportive of Banks’ leadership.

In response to the news, McElroy told the Tribune in a text message Friday evening: “I’m deeply grateful for the groundswell of support I’ve received, especially from Aggies of all majors, and my former and current students. There’s much more I could say and will say about what has unfolded. But for now, I’ll reserve those statements for a future date.”

The latest fracas on campus that led to Banks’ resignation comes after the university’s faculty senate passed a resolution Wednesday to create a fact-finding committee into the mishandling of the hiring of McElroy. During that meeting, Banks took responsibility for the flawed hiring process but told faculty members that she did not approve changes to an offer letter that led a prospective journalism professor to walk away from negotiations amid conservative backlash to her hiring.

However, Hart Blanton, the head of the university’s department of communications and journalism who was closely involved in McElroy’s recruiting, said in a statement Friday that Banks interfered with the hiring process early on and that race was a factor in university officials’ decision to water down the job offer…

McElroy, an experienced journalism professor currently working at the University of Texas at Austin who previously worked as an editor at The New York Times, turned down an offer to reboot A&M’s journalism program after a fraught negotiation process first reported by The Texas Tribune. What originally was a tenure-track offer was reduced to a five-year position, then to a one-year position from which she could be fired at any time.

“This offer letter … really makes it clear that they don’t want me there,” McElroy said last week about the one-year contract. “But in no shape, form or fashion would I give up a tenured position at UT for a one-year contract that emphasizes that you can be let go at any point.”

Initially, Texas A&M celebrated hiring McElroy with a public signing ceremony to announce her hiring. But in the weeks following, vocal groups from outside the university system expressed issues with her previous employment at The New York Times and her support for diversity in newsrooms. McElroy has said she was told that not everyone was pleased by her joining the faculty. Critics of her hiring focused on her prior work on diversity and inclusion.

McElroy said she was further told by José Luis Bermúdez, then interim dean of Texas A&M’s College of Arts and Sciences, that there was “noise in the [university] system” about her, though he did not give specifics. When she pressed him, she said he told her, “you’re a Black woman who worked at The New York Times.” He told her that in some conservative circles, The New York Times is akin to Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party in Russia that began in the early 1900s.

McElroy said that Bermúdez ultimately told her he could not protect her from university leaders facing pressure to fire her over “DEI hysteria” surrounding her appointment and advised McElroy to stay in her tenured role at UT-Austin.

Earlier this week, Bermúdez announced he would step down from his role as interim dean at the end of the month.