Leroy N. Soetoro
2023-08-08 15:45:08 UTC
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/08/04/texas-am-mcelroy-texts/
Two years ago during M. Katherine Banks first six months as the president
of Texas A&M University, she announced a major academic reorganization of
the flagship campus to help it become an internationally recognized top-
tier institution. Her plans included dozens of structural changes meant to
streamline and better organize the largest public university in the state.
But text messages released by the Texas A&M University System this week
revealed another largely unspoken focus among system leaders that might
have also been at play as the school reorganized.
Kathy [Banks] told us multiple times the reason we were going to combine
[the colleges of] arts and sciences together was to control the liberal
nature that those professors brought to campus, regent Jay Graham wrote
to regent David Baggett in June as they were discussing the universitys
plans to hire journalism professor and former New York Times editor
Kathleen O. McElroy. [W]e were going to start a journalism department to
get high-quality conservative Aggie students into the journalism world to
help direct our message. This wont happen with this type of hire!
Those messages were released as part of an internal investigation
conducted to review the failed attempt to hire McElroy, which has rattled
the Aggie community in recent weeks amid concerns over how political
considerations impact A&Ms operations and academic freedom.
The messages show that many board members, who are gubernatorial
appointees, had concerns with McElroys perceived left-leaning
credentials, including that she taught at the University of Texas at
Austin and previously worked at the New York Times. At least some of them
displayed a desire to promote conservative causes at the flagship campus
and a blatant resistance to recruiting someone who they believed would
work counter to those goals.
While it is wonderful for a successful Aggie to want to come back to
Texas A&M to be a tenured professor and build something this important
from scratch, we must look at her résumé and her statements made an
opinion pieces and public interviews, regent Mike Hernandez wrote to
former president Banks and Chancellor John Sharp, expressing
disappointment that the board learned of the hire after it had been
announced.
The New York Times is one of the leading main stream media sources in our
country. It is common knowledge that they are biased and progressive
leaning. The same exact thing can be said about the university of Texas,
he continued.
Those perspectives are consistent with Texas conservatives recent
attempts to counteract what they view as a liberal agenda within Texas
public universities.
People on the right think that the left controls education and they've
been trying to wrestle that control away, said Jennifer Mercieca, a
communications professor at Texas A&M who focuses on the intersection of
democracy and communication. Unfortunately, our journalism program got
caught in the middle of that.
In Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has largely led that crusade within the
states public universities. A few years ago, he was part of initial
discussions with UT-Austin leaders and donors to create a conservative-
leaning think tank that would bring intellectual diversity to the
school. This year, he championed legislation that eliminates diversity,
equity and inclusion offices on college campuses, offices that are largely
viewed by conservatives as pushing left-leaning ideologies onto students.
Patrick also tried to eliminate tenure for faculty, a longstanding tenet
meant to bolster academic freedom on campuses.
People have had it with the intolerance of any ideas but progressive,
DEI, propaganda-ish kinds of ideas on campus, said Sherry Sylvester, a
former aide for Patrick who now works as a public policy fellow at the
conservative-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation and was an ardent
supporter of the legislation to eliminate DEI programs this past session.
That is a big effort, a big movement.
The impact of that movement was on display in the records Texas A&M
released this week surrounding the failed effort to recruit McElroy.
Soon after making an initial offer to McElroy, Banks communicated that she
wanted to push the announcement until after the most recent legislative
session ended. At the time, university leaders, including those at Texas
A&M, were negotiating with lawmakers over the DEI legislation, as well as
state funding for public universities.
Bottom line is that the NYT connection is poor optics during this
particular legislative session, Jose Bermúdez, interim dean of the
college of arts and science, said to Hart Blanton, chair of the
communications and journalism department, via text message on May 11.
Meanwhile, regents expressed disdain for media and academics they saw as
liberal leaning. While regents approve tenure, it is typically unusual for
them to get involved in university-level hires. The Texas A&M regents
oversee 11 public universities and eight state agencies that employ more
than 26,000 faculty across the state.
Higher education experts say that education has long been characterized as
political. Recent efforts in places like Texas, North Carolina and Florida
have picked up partially due to how well the Republican base responds to
the accusations.
The notion of woke ideology, and how it supposedly has done all this
damage to things has just risen as a political talking point, said Holden
Thorp, former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and a current professor at George Washington University. It's easy
to say the universities are the places that you want to attack this,
citing that the argument has increasingly shown to poll well among
conservatives.
According to the internal report A&M released Thursday, Banks received
calls from six to seven regents after Texas Scorecard, a conservative
website, wrote an article about McElroy that painted her as a DEI
proponent for her prior research to improve diversity in newsrooms. Board
member Sam Torn emailed a quote from the article to Board Chair Bill
Mahomes stating he wanted an explanation before he could approve McElroys
tenure.
The internal report revealed that Banks was heavily involved in behind-
the-scenes discussions to walk back the original offer given to McElroy,
contradicting Banks previous public statements that she had no knowledge
of changes to the offer. Banks resigned two weeks before her text messages
were made public.
The internal report showed that regents also raised questions about
whether they could approve tenure for McElroy, even though she already had
been selected through the universitys standard hiring process.
Granting tenure to somebody with this background is going to be a
difficult sell for many on the [board of regents], Hernandez said in an
email to Banks and Sharp. My sincere hope is that you both will figure
out a way to completely put the brakes on this, so we all can discuss this
further. If its truly too far down the road for you all to agree to that,
the board majority can decide how to proceed and take the heat for the
final call.
Thorp said the regents meddling in the universitys hiring process
overstepped their role.
When they approve tenure, what they're doing is saying that they have
confidence in the administration to carry out the process that they said,
Thorp said. The role of the board is to rule against it, if for some
reason they think the process wasn't followed. Well, in this case, the
process wasn't followed, not because of the content or anything, but
because [Banks] didn't put the case forward because of politics.
Some of the regents also took issue with what they perceived as McElroys
bias toward conservative viewpoints.
We cant just give people a set of facts anymore, McElroy said in an
interview on the public radio program "Here & Now in 2021. I think we
know that and we have to tell our students that. This is not about getting
two sides of a story or three sides of a story, if one side is
illegitimate. I think now you cannot cover education, you cannot cover
criminal justice, you cant cover all of these institutions without
recognizing how all these institutions were built.
Sylvester with TPPF pointed to that quote as the reason she was against
McElroys hiring for the journalism program. She declined to comment on
the regents text messages but said her organization wants to see more
free inquiry within higher education.
No one is looking for a conservative ideology to drive higher ed, she
said. But taxpayers and conservative leaders no longer want to underwrite
a left wing divisive ideology that permeates so much of the curriculum.
Thorp said as the politicization of higher education increases and
decisions are made based on politics over policy and procedure, it makes
universities ungovernable.
I'm certainly not defending Kathy Banks and her dishonest actions in
this, but part of the reason why she resorted to that, probably, is that
she didn't have many other choices, said Thorp, referring to her role in
watering down McElroys job offer. Every time you have to do something
you're facing this intractable situation where you're either going to get
the campus against you or get the board against you. And that's how not
functional organizations work.
Mercieca at Texas A&M said the internal report revealed how McElroys
hiring was a victim of intervention that creates distrust within what are
supposed to be democratic processes within universities.
What we learned yesterday is that all of those institutional processes
and procedures can be overruled by fiat, by powerful others, she said.
It's not democratic.
Disclosure: Texas A&M University, Texas Public Policy Foundation, New York
Times, Texas A&M University System and University of Texas at Austin 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.
--
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.
Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem. It has none.
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.
Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.
Two years ago during M. Katherine Banks first six months as the president
of Texas A&M University, she announced a major academic reorganization of
the flagship campus to help it become an internationally recognized top-
tier institution. Her plans included dozens of structural changes meant to
streamline and better organize the largest public university in the state.
But text messages released by the Texas A&M University System this week
revealed another largely unspoken focus among system leaders that might
have also been at play as the school reorganized.
Kathy [Banks] told us multiple times the reason we were going to combine
[the colleges of] arts and sciences together was to control the liberal
nature that those professors brought to campus, regent Jay Graham wrote
to regent David Baggett in June as they were discussing the universitys
plans to hire journalism professor and former New York Times editor
Kathleen O. McElroy. [W]e were going to start a journalism department to
get high-quality conservative Aggie students into the journalism world to
help direct our message. This wont happen with this type of hire!
Those messages were released as part of an internal investigation
conducted to review the failed attempt to hire McElroy, which has rattled
the Aggie community in recent weeks amid concerns over how political
considerations impact A&Ms operations and academic freedom.
The messages show that many board members, who are gubernatorial
appointees, had concerns with McElroys perceived left-leaning
credentials, including that she taught at the University of Texas at
Austin and previously worked at the New York Times. At least some of them
displayed a desire to promote conservative causes at the flagship campus
and a blatant resistance to recruiting someone who they believed would
work counter to those goals.
While it is wonderful for a successful Aggie to want to come back to
Texas A&M to be a tenured professor and build something this important
from scratch, we must look at her résumé and her statements made an
opinion pieces and public interviews, regent Mike Hernandez wrote to
former president Banks and Chancellor John Sharp, expressing
disappointment that the board learned of the hire after it had been
announced.
The New York Times is one of the leading main stream media sources in our
country. It is common knowledge that they are biased and progressive
leaning. The same exact thing can be said about the university of Texas,
he continued.
Those perspectives are consistent with Texas conservatives recent
attempts to counteract what they view as a liberal agenda within Texas
public universities.
People on the right think that the left controls education and they've
been trying to wrestle that control away, said Jennifer Mercieca, a
communications professor at Texas A&M who focuses on the intersection of
democracy and communication. Unfortunately, our journalism program got
caught in the middle of that.
In Texas, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has largely led that crusade within the
states public universities. A few years ago, he was part of initial
discussions with UT-Austin leaders and donors to create a conservative-
leaning think tank that would bring intellectual diversity to the
school. This year, he championed legislation that eliminates diversity,
equity and inclusion offices on college campuses, offices that are largely
viewed by conservatives as pushing left-leaning ideologies onto students.
Patrick also tried to eliminate tenure for faculty, a longstanding tenet
meant to bolster academic freedom on campuses.
People have had it with the intolerance of any ideas but progressive,
DEI, propaganda-ish kinds of ideas on campus, said Sherry Sylvester, a
former aide for Patrick who now works as a public policy fellow at the
conservative-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation and was an ardent
supporter of the legislation to eliminate DEI programs this past session.
That is a big effort, a big movement.
The impact of that movement was on display in the records Texas A&M
released this week surrounding the failed effort to recruit McElroy.
Soon after making an initial offer to McElroy, Banks communicated that she
wanted to push the announcement until after the most recent legislative
session ended. At the time, university leaders, including those at Texas
A&M, were negotiating with lawmakers over the DEI legislation, as well as
state funding for public universities.
Bottom line is that the NYT connection is poor optics during this
particular legislative session, Jose Bermúdez, interim dean of the
college of arts and science, said to Hart Blanton, chair of the
communications and journalism department, via text message on May 11.
Meanwhile, regents expressed disdain for media and academics they saw as
liberal leaning. While regents approve tenure, it is typically unusual for
them to get involved in university-level hires. The Texas A&M regents
oversee 11 public universities and eight state agencies that employ more
than 26,000 faculty across the state.
Higher education experts say that education has long been characterized as
political. Recent efforts in places like Texas, North Carolina and Florida
have picked up partially due to how well the Republican base responds to
the accusations.
The notion of woke ideology, and how it supposedly has done all this
damage to things has just risen as a political talking point, said Holden
Thorp, former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and a current professor at George Washington University. It's easy
to say the universities are the places that you want to attack this,
citing that the argument has increasingly shown to poll well among
conservatives.
According to the internal report A&M released Thursday, Banks received
calls from six to seven regents after Texas Scorecard, a conservative
website, wrote an article about McElroy that painted her as a DEI
proponent for her prior research to improve diversity in newsrooms. Board
member Sam Torn emailed a quote from the article to Board Chair Bill
Mahomes stating he wanted an explanation before he could approve McElroys
tenure.
The internal report revealed that Banks was heavily involved in behind-
the-scenes discussions to walk back the original offer given to McElroy,
contradicting Banks previous public statements that she had no knowledge
of changes to the offer. Banks resigned two weeks before her text messages
were made public.
The internal report showed that regents also raised questions about
whether they could approve tenure for McElroy, even though she already had
been selected through the universitys standard hiring process.
Granting tenure to somebody with this background is going to be a
difficult sell for many on the [board of regents], Hernandez said in an
email to Banks and Sharp. My sincere hope is that you both will figure
out a way to completely put the brakes on this, so we all can discuss this
further. If its truly too far down the road for you all to agree to that,
the board majority can decide how to proceed and take the heat for the
final call.
Thorp said the regents meddling in the universitys hiring process
overstepped their role.
When they approve tenure, what they're doing is saying that they have
confidence in the administration to carry out the process that they said,
Thorp said. The role of the board is to rule against it, if for some
reason they think the process wasn't followed. Well, in this case, the
process wasn't followed, not because of the content or anything, but
because [Banks] didn't put the case forward because of politics.
Some of the regents also took issue with what they perceived as McElroys
bias toward conservative viewpoints.
We cant just give people a set of facts anymore, McElroy said in an
interview on the public radio program "Here & Now in 2021. I think we
know that and we have to tell our students that. This is not about getting
two sides of a story or three sides of a story, if one side is
illegitimate. I think now you cannot cover education, you cannot cover
criminal justice, you cant cover all of these institutions without
recognizing how all these institutions were built.
Sylvester with TPPF pointed to that quote as the reason she was against
McElroys hiring for the journalism program. She declined to comment on
the regents text messages but said her organization wants to see more
free inquiry within higher education.
No one is looking for a conservative ideology to drive higher ed, she
said. But taxpayers and conservative leaders no longer want to underwrite
a left wing divisive ideology that permeates so much of the curriculum.
Thorp said as the politicization of higher education increases and
decisions are made based on politics over policy and procedure, it makes
universities ungovernable.
I'm certainly not defending Kathy Banks and her dishonest actions in
this, but part of the reason why she resorted to that, probably, is that
she didn't have many other choices, said Thorp, referring to her role in
watering down McElroys job offer. Every time you have to do something
you're facing this intractable situation where you're either going to get
the campus against you or get the board against you. And that's how not
functional organizations work.
Mercieca at Texas A&M said the internal report revealed how McElroys
hiring was a victim of intervention that creates distrust within what are
supposed to be democratic processes within universities.
What we learned yesterday is that all of those institutional processes
and procedures can be overruled by fiat, by powerful others, she said.
It's not democratic.
Disclosure: Texas A&M University, Texas Public Policy Foundation, New York
Times, Texas A&M University System and University of Texas at Austin 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.
--
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.
Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem. It has none.
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.
Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.