Last June, Arica Brandford received an unexpected message: a pair of public-records requests for her syllabi and emails dating back to January 1, 2022.
She didn’t recognize the requester — a man named Thomas Jones — and didn’t know why he was asking for emails containing these words: Asian, Caucasian, White, lynchings, racist, or racism. Jones, as she would eventually learn, is the leader of the American Accountability Foundation, an advocacy group that, in its own words, “deploys aggressive research and investigations to advance conservative messaging.”
To Brandford, the only tenure-track Black faculty member at Texas A&M University’s School of Nursing, the request felt targeted, both because of her identity and the subject of her research — implicit bias and racism in nursing. But she wanted to fulfill the request and move on. So that’s what she did.
Nearly five months later, Brandford’s emails would appear in an article by the Washington Examiner, which took aim at how Texas A&M’s nursing school “required commitment to diversity and inclusion” in its hiring processes. Laura Morgan of Do No Harm, an advocacy group that lobbies against identity politics in health care, told the Examiner that Brandford was an example of a “pro-DEI foot soldier” and that, based on her previous advocacy work, Texas A&M should never have hired her.
The episode and its subsequent fallout — which has been vaguely alluded to in faculty meetings on the College Station campus but has not been widely reported — came on the heels of a scandalous summer at Texas A&M. Administrators had derailed the hiring of Kathleen O. McElroy, a Black journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in response to conservative critics who denounced her as a proponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As conservative opponents of DEI efforts intensify and expand their battle against the work and the people who do it, administrators and faculty members are increasingly being caught in the crossfire. In their responses, colleges have struggled to contend with anti-DEI legislation and political pressure as faculty members call on them to defend longstanding practices — and professors.
This account of the incident involving Brandford, which is based on her first public comments on the subject and a review of more than 1,200 pages of public records, sheds light on the methods of the activists, organizations, and media outlets that have been mounting anti-DEI campaigns.
Brandford’s experience also illustrates how many faculty members, especially those of color, feel as the attacks on DEI have escalated. Until recently, expressing elements of their core identity and advocating for diversity programs were widely accepted — if not encouraged — throughout higher education. Now, they feel abandoned, unsure what could trigger a political bombshell and, if it blows up, whether their institutions are willing to defend them.
In Brandford’s case, she felt her only option was to leave.
“I was used as a pawn in a game that we’re seeing play out nationwide,” Brandford said. “Through this experience, I realized there were certain people that did not want me here, or there were those that, in a sense, wanted me to stay in my place. So why stay somewhere that you’re not wanted?”
When Brandford arrived on Texas A&M’s campus in June 2022, she knew the institution’s history and reputation. It’s one of Texas’ two flagships, but its student diversity lags far behind the state’s; while more than 13 percent of Texas’ population is Black, just 2 percent of the College Station campus’s enrollment is, according to federal Census and Education Department data. Still, she says, she came in with no “preconceived thoughts.”
She and her family moved there from Kentucky. She had been a nurse for over 20 years, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing, from Purdue University and the University of Cincinnati, respectively, as well as a law degree from Texas Southern University.
This problem was much bigger than me. In fact, it really wasn’t about me. It was about what I stood for. It was about the color of my skin.
A few years after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky, she decided to return to higher education to pursue her research on disparities that influence patients’ and caregivers’ health, like how depression, occupational stress, and race-based discrimination affect the nursing work force.
At College Station, she saw an opportunity to begin her tenure-track career and focus her research on cancer. “I came in much like any other new faculty member,” Brandford recalled. “I was told to ignore the university politics, keep my head down, and work. And that’s exactly what I did.”
Then, Black History Month came up. Someone in the nursing school asked if she’d be on a planning committee for the 2023 commemoration, to which Brandford enthusiastically agreed. She never heard back — until the school sent out an email about the holiday, which included a recognition of Harriet Tubman as a nurse, a nod to two campuswide events hosted by the DEI office, and a notice about a forthcoming virtual activity that would showcase Black nurses.
It struck Brandford as inadequate compared with other cultural-heritage programming previously organized by the school, and she felt compelled to say something. She worried about what message the programming sent to the two dozen Black students in the school.
“I feel unseen, unheard, and overlooked as a Black employee/faculty member within the school of nursing,” she wrote in an email to school leaders on February 9, 2023, encouraging them to “fully invest resources” to support the month.
“Submitted respectfully,” she wrote, “and with the intent to effect change.”
On November 1, the Washington Examiner published its article, “Texas A&M nursing school required ‘commitment to diversity and inclusion’ for faculty hires.” The opening paragraphs focus on the school’s handbook and its guidelines for faculty searches, which were based on the National Science Foundation’s Advance program and lay out how committees might weigh candidates’ level of commitment to DEI. (By the time the Examiner published its article, the university had discontinued using the document associated with the program.)
It quotes Morgan, of Do No Harm, who said the guidance is exactly why the state needed Senate Bill 17, Texas legislation that had been signed into law that summer and that bans DEI offices, diversity statements, and mandatory training focusing on various identities. The guide, she said, showed that Texas A&M was “racing against the clock to firmly entrench pro-DEI foot soldiers into the faculty” before the law took effect on January 1, 2024.
The article then takes a turn, observing that some faculty members still seemed to be focused on DEI issues despite the pending ban. “One such member is assistant professor Arica Brandford,” the article continues, who has “a history of advocating DEI initiatives.”
That’s when Brandford’s emails make an appearance.
According to the Examiner, a “Feb. 9 conversation with another faculty member showed [Brandford] planning a ‘Black history month’ theme of ‘B[l]ack resistance’ in health care, while a Feb. 10 email to a redacted recipient showed her getting angry that the Texas A&M nursing school had waited too long to plan a proper Black history month,” the Examiner wrote.
The Examiner story does not mention that “Black resistance” was the national theme for the month in 2023, as determined by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History; every president since the mid-1970s has issued a proclamation endorsing the association’s chosen theme.
“It is disappointing that the Texas A&M School of Nursing would hire a professor with the ideological beliefs that Arica Brandford has demonstrated she holds,” Morgan told the Examiner. “It appears that they pursued hiring practices that undermine quality applicants who do not subscribe to concepts that place individuals into groups of ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressors.’”
The emails didn’t seem divisive to those who received them, according to documents obtained by The Chronicle.
Sharon L. Dormire, an associate dean in the nursing school who was Brandford’s supervisor, thanked Brandford for her initial Black History Month email, and for the trust the professor demonstrated by sharing her views. “I so value our honest conversations,” Dormire wrote. “That is a priceless gift.”
“In working to open everyone’s eyes, do you have any ideas I can carry forward to focus on the Black History month theme of Black Resistance?” Dormire continued. “Do you know anyone from Prairie View [a historically Black university 50 miles south] who might be a provoking speaker, for example?”
Brandford recommended some speakers, noting that many would likely be already booked for the month. She also suggested several resources about the origin of the national theme for the month.
“Your ideas help a great deal. Keep them coming if more arise!” Dormire followed up. In a later message, she wrote: “It strikes me as sad that only you and I are having this conversation. Neither of us were part of the team planning events. I believe we can change the dialogue.”
The following day, in a separate email addressed to Dormire and Susan M. McLennon, who was interim dean of the nursing school, Brandford suggested more ideas, such as identifying nurses who had fought for equality, defining what the national theme of “Black resistance” means in the context of the history of racism in nursing, or giving a presentation on how microaggressions affect patient outcomes for Black women. She wrote that the school should “continually be activating change and implementing a multicultural advocacy process.”
“Honestly, the SON [School of Nursing] needs to take a step back, reflect, and do a true need analysis to address the problem not just treat the symptoms,” Brandford wrote in an email. “Black History Month should not be an afterthought.”
It didn’t feel wrong for her to say something at the time, she told The Chronicle. And she stands by what she said. But she questions why the encouragement from Dormire, who is white, didn’t make it into the Examiner’s story.
“They didn’t want to involve anyone of a different race,” she said. “They wanted to center it on me and to look like I was the one that was taking this radical thought and bringing it to the university.”
It’s unclear the precise path that Brandford’s records took after the request was fulfilled. A machinery went into gear — surfacing, amplifying, and repeatedly drawing attention to Brandford and her track record as part of a broader effort against diversity, equity, and inclusion work.
It all started with the two public-records requests in June from Thomas Jones, of the American Accountability Foundation. Before the Examiner’s November 1 story, Brandford had received no other information requests. The Chronicle requested and reviewed all records requests submitted to Texas A&M between June and late December 2023. No inquiries in that time frame appear under the Washington Examiner’s name.
Yet there is substantial overlap between the documents Jones received and what the Examiner published. The Chronicle requested the documents that Texas A&M provided to Jones, which amounted to over 1,200 pages and included Brandford’s email exchanges on Black History Month, as well as the employee handbook on faculty-hiring processes.
It appears that they pursued hiring practices that undermine quality applicants who do not subscribe to concepts that place individuals into groups of ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressors.’
How Jones discovered Brandford and what led him to request her records isn’t apparent. Jones did not respond to questions from The Chronicle about why he sought Brandford’s records and whether he shared the results of his requests with the Examiner. The newspaper did not answer The Chronicle’s question about where the records came from, but said in a statement, “The Washington Examiner has no comment other than that it stands by its reporting and its published story.”
It wasn’t the first Examiner article to mention Brandford.
In July 2023, the newspaper published two stories, both written by its reporter Breccan F. Thies, about an implicit-bias training mandated by the Kentucky Board of Nursing, which Brandford helped create when she was treasurer of the Kentucky Nurses Association. In October, Thies wrote another story, again nodding to Brandford, about how the Kentucky Nurses Association had scrapped the training following the newspaper’s initial report.
In the November 1 story — which was also by Thies and featured Brandford more prominently through her emails — Morgan told the Examiner that Brandford’s work for the Kentucky Nurses Association should have been a “huge red flag” for Texas A&M. “Its hiring practices clouded its judgment,” the story continues, attributing the sentiment to Morgan.
“They basically inferred and stated that I lacked merit,” Brandford told The Chronicle, “that I was a diversity hire implanted to go out and indoctrinate future nursing students.”
The trio of stories mentioning Brandford’s work are among dozens of Examiner articles since the beginning of 2023 that rely in ways both small and large on Do No Harm and its efforts.
Founded in 2022, Do No Harm is a nonprofit organization that “seeks to highlight and counteract divisive trends in medicine,” including “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” Since the legislative movement against DEI in higher education gained traction in January 2023, Morgan has been quoted in 17 Washington Examiner stories, according to a Chronicle analysis. Some, like the ones about the Kentucky Nurses Association, home in on implicit-bias training, while about a dozen other stories that quote Morgan focus on diversity training and programs in medical schools or facilities operated by universities. All of the stories on other universities either use documents obtained by Do No Harm that were provided to the Examiner or are based on reports and complaints created by the organization.
Do No Harm did not respond to The Chronicle’s emailed questions about how it learned about Brandford but did say in a statement that the organization has “been exceptionally successful in protecting medical education and clinical practice from identity politics.”
“Medical schools across the country must focus on what matters most — the ability to heal the injured and cure the sick,” Do No Harm wrote. “Anything else puts patients of all backgrounds at risk in their most vulnerable moments.”
Professors like Arica Brandford can and should expect that groups like ours will use tools like public-records requests to shine sunlight on their divisive teachings.
The idea that faculty members are indoctrinating students, Brandford said, is “false and ridiculous.” She views such attacks as politically and racially motivated. She said she was a “convenient target.”
“This problem was much bigger than me,” she told The Chronicle. “In fact, it really wasn’t about me. It was about what I stood for. It was about the color of my skin. … It had nothing to do with work or the excellence in teaching, research, and service that I provided.”
While she views records requests as “just part of your position” as a member of a public institution, Brandford said what worries her is the use of records as “political weapons” to attack people with diverse views.
“The thing that’s alarming is they can take in one small piece of information, put it out of context, and create a wave of attacks against your research and you as a person,” she said. “Who can survive in such a hostile environment?”
Even more than the story itself, Brandford was upset with how the school responded to it.
Months after she fulfilled the public-records requests, Brandford received an email from the Washington Examiner on October 31, asking for comment on the school’s hiring guidelines and her emails about Black History Month. Why, she wondered, didn’t anyone in the administration give her a heads up?
The nursing school also received a request for comment from the Examiner, though the school told The Chronicle that the Examiner’s inquiry to them focused solely on the DEI hiring practices and the handbook without mention of Brandford. Both requests came from the same Examiner reporter and asked about DEI topics.
Brandford contacted the nursing school’s marketing director, Tim Gerszewski, about the request, and they talked about her next move. She decided not to personally respond to the request for comment, and the nursing school provided its own statement.
The first statement, which the school provided prior to the story’s publication, said that “Texas A&M University and the School of Nursing are committed to fostering a welcoming environment for faculty to teach and train our future nurses and nurse leaders” and that its hiring practices complied with state and federal law.
After publication, the school sent a follow-up statement emphasizing that the hiring guidance referenced in the story was a part of the Advance program, which it noted was originally funded by the National Science Foundation and used by over 100 higher-education and STEM-related institutions. The school also said the program was discontinued at Texas A&M before the state’s anti-DEI law took effect. (Shortly after The Chronicle asked the Examiner for comment, the outlet added nearly all of Texas A&M’s second statement to its article, saying in an editor’s note that its reporter had missed the university’s email and was “happy to correct the record.”)
What Brandford wanted more than anything was a public statement of support from the school that defended her credentials and work, especially after the school saw what the Examiner had written. Instead, the tepidness of its response felt like a betrayal. For the Examiner to “make that inference and to say those things about me, and for the school to not provide any kind of rebuttal, not to stand for me in any kind of way, was disappointing. It was sad,” Brandford told The Chronicle. “I felt extremely let down.”
In a statement to The Chronicle, the university said Leann Horsley, dean of the nursing school, sent multiple messages to Brandford offering her support and spaces to talk, including an email the day after the article came out in which Horsley asked to meet with Brandford and provided other individuals, such as an ombuds officer and a faculty-affairs representative, whom she could contact. “Dr. Brandford did not take the dean up on discussing the matter,” the university told The Chronicle.
Brandford said the interactions she had with leaders weren’t enough to resolve her concerns about their lack of public support. She also started to wonder if members of the administration were chiefly concerned with avoiding further publicity. For example, Dormire, the associate dean with whom she had corresponded about Black History Month, reached out to Brandford via a text message the day the story came out. “Oh my,” Dormire’s first message read. “Am I reading this right that we should have NOT hired you because you are an advocate?” She continued in another message: “Do we need to discuss protections for you?”
A few hours later, Dormire texted that she had done some “fact finding,” and she invited Brandford to discuss the matter over Signal, a secure messaging platform. In another instance after a faculty member shared an open letter calling on the school to defend Brandford, an associate dean wrote that Horsley, the dean, had instructed employees to “minimize” emails and records about the matter.
“They did not care that my character and integrity were attacked,” Brandford told The Chronicle. “Their goal was to preserve their image.”
Gerszewski, the marketing director, told The Chronicle that Dormire had hoped to establish a line of communication with Brandford after receiving no response to her first few messages, but now recognizes the request to move to Signal was “admittedly an oversight in judgment” that Dormire regrets. Gerszewski added that Horsley’s guidance was not about communications related to the Examiner story specifically.
“The aftermath of the story highlighted that many faculty and staff in the School of Nursing had varying levels of understanding of open-records laws in Texas,” Gerszewski wrote. “To address this, Dr. Horsley felt it was appropriate to remind all faculty and staff that, as state employees, their email was subject to all Texas open-record laws.”
The day the Examiner story came out, Jones submitted another request for Brandford’s emails, dating back to June 2, 2023. The next day, more requests seemingly related to Brandford came in for the documents of six other nursing-school leaders and faculty members, asking for messages with such terms as media response, open records request, harassment, and Black employee(s).
Feeling that such requests would just keep arriving and that the institution had shown that it didn’t value her enough to stand up for her, Brandford turned in her resignation. The news was announced publicly in December, and her last day was in early January.
In a statement to The Chronicle about Brandford’s departure, Horsley said Brandford was “unequivocally qualified” to be a faculty member at Texas A&M. “She was well-regarded as a respected nurse, educator, researcher, and scholar during her time at the School of Nursing,” Horsley said. “While we regret she is no longer with our school, we are grateful for her contributions and wish her well in her endeavors.”
Brandford wasn’t comfortable sharing her next steps with The Chronicle, fearing that those who targeted her at Texas A&M will continue to do so.
While Brandford had initially hoped to leave College Station quietly, the ripple effects of her experience continued to make waves.
The campus was already reeling from the botched hiring of Kathleen McElroy, which made national headlines leading up to the resignation of President M. Katherine Banks, after her role in the affair became public. Then details emerged of system officials’ role in the sanctioning of Joy Alonzo, a non-tenure-track professor at Texas A&M who was placed on paid leave following a complaint from the office of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. The daughter of Texas’ land commissioner had lodged the complaint against Alonzo for allegedly criticizing the Republican official during a guest lecture.
The back-to-back incidents left faculty members questioning the institution’s commitment to academic freedom and stoked fears that the university would no longer be able to recruit and retain high-quality talent. Those concerns led Mark A. Welsh III, who was the interim president, to charge a task force with developing new university policies to protect academic freedom. (Welsh has since been named Texas A&M’s permanent president.)
At a Faculty Senate meeting on December 11, Heather Lench, a senior associate vice president for academic affairs, shared the academic freedom task force’s recommendations, including “guidelines for faculty who are threatened or harassed.” Such threats, Lench said, could come in a variety of ways, including via the media or open-records requests.
Jane L. Bolin, a senior regents professor who was one of Brandford’s mentors and colleagues in the nursing school, said during the meeting that a young faculty member in the nursing school had been “targeted” by outside groups “simply because of the color of her skin” and her area of academic research.
Bolin praised Lench and others for creating new procedures, adding that it was important to “closely monitor” records requests and “not immediately provide things that are protected,” which she described as items like grant and research proposals. She also called on the group to “protect young faculty.”
“Sadly, in the case of this young faculty member,” Bolin said, “it was too late.”
Bolin’s journey as a nurse with a law background who joined academe with an interest in researching health disparities is remarkably similar to Brandford’s trajectory. Their shared interests and commonalities initially drew Bolin to recruit Brandford as her replacement back in June 2022. The major difference in Bolin’s mind: She and most of the other nursing-school faculty and staff involved in the work are white. That’s what leads her to believe race was a factor in Jones’s records request.
“Dr. Brandford and I write about the same things. I never got one. And a lot of my colleagues at the School of Public Health never got one,” Bolin told The Chronicle. “Why was she targeted as a brand-new African American faculty member? It’s just appalling.”
A local newspaper, The Bryan-College Station Eagle, wrote about the Faculty Senate meeting, which prompted an email from Donald L. Parsons, who has a reputation on campus as a vocal alumnus. Records obtained by The Chronicle illustrate his engagement, too.
Parsons’s records requests include an administrator’s communications surrounding the McElroy scandal, a presentation about DEI at the Bush School of Government and Public Service when Welsh was still a dean there, and a report of all faculty with the “specific number” of Black faculty members at the institution for each semester from 2000 to 2022. He wrote in an email to Board of Regents members that he took issue with McElroy’s “self-described advocacy for diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which he called “a distorted theory that has no place at Texas A&M University.” (Parsons did not answer The Chronicle’s request for comment.)
In his email to Brandford, some reporters at the Eagle, and other faculty members who spoke at the meeting, Parsons wrote that “faculty at A&M seem to believe that ‘academic freedom’ means tenured professors can say anything they want on any subject, and not be held accountable. Especially by the press!”
“What the senior associate vice president for faculty affairs should be telling young faculty members is that FOIA is alive and well,” Parsons continues, “so if you don’t want to be quoted in the Eagle or the Washington Examiner keep your mouth shut.”
While Brandford had already submitted her resignation and resolved to move on with her life, the email from Parsons stirred something in her — a strong sense that she needed to speak up about what had happened to her at Texas A&M.
That day she said as much to nursing-school leadership. She wrote in an email that she’d “been quiet on this matter, to give the School of Nursing a chance to respond” to events following the November 1 article.
This problem will not just go away. Who will be next? What will be next? What will you do differently the next time this happens?
“However, the [School of Nursing] has been completely silent,” Brandford wrote to the school. “This problem will not just go away. Who will be next? What will be next? What will you do differently the next time this happens?”
Jones, who had requested Brandford’s records, was not pleased with the Faculty Senate meeting, either. He sent a letter to the university’s general counsel about it.
Jones wrote that Lench’s note about records being used to harass faculty was “both inaccurate and unfounded,” adding that her comments can “only fairly be construed as an effort to discourage records requests.” In response to Jones’s letter, Ray Bonilla, general counsel for the Texas A&M system, affirmed the institution’s commitment to fulfilling public-records requests. “I do not believe your concerns are warranted,” Bonilla wrote, “and do not think your characterizations of the meeting and report are accurate.”
Jones also dismissed Bolin’s assertion that the American Accountability Foundation had targeted Brandford for her race, calling it “inaccurate, unfounded, unacceptable, and beneath someone holding tenure at Texas A&M University.” He described the organization’s records requests into Brandford as “routine fact finding” on “the subject matter that she purported to be an expert on.”
“The fact that Dr. Bradford [sic] apparently found the public scrutiny of her teaching so intolerable that she had to leave a tenure track position at one of the most prestigious universities in the world may be more of an indication on how out of step her scholarship is with the citizens of Texas than with how we used the Public Information Act,” Jones wrote.
His letter made its way into the pages of the Washington Examiner, which touted it as an “exclusive,” reporting in January that Texas A&M University looked to “clamp down on public-records requests after DEI inquiry.”
“Professors like Arica Brandford can and should expect that groups like ours will use tools like public-records requests to shine sunlight on their divisive teachings,” Jones told the Examiner. “If they cannot stand up to that public scrutiny, a public university is probably not the place for them.”
In Brandford’s view, what happened to her is just one part of the growing anti-DEI movement. Staff and faculty of color, particularly those who are Black, have always been and are continually put in situations such as these in higher education, she said.
Brandford knows she’s not the first one to have been targeted.
She fears she won’t be the last.