Enemies, Emails, Whistle-Blowers: Why Did Texas A&M Fire Its Provost?

Dave McDermand, Bryan College Station Eagle

Karan Watson’s final year as provost of Texas A&M University at College Station was shaping up to be uneventful.

It began, as many leadership transitions do, with an announcement from the president, Michael K. Young. In August 2016, Mr. Young offered ebullient praise for the provost in a message to campus, expressing “extraordinary gratitude” for her “remarkable service” and “transformative” work. At length, he went on to list her career accomplishments in both engineering and academic leadership.

Months later, in May, about 200 people gathered in the campus’s Bethancourt Ballroom to formally say farewell to Ms. Watson. Mr. Young, who had asked Ms. Watson to stay on a few months longer than originally planned, told the crowd of the provost’s efficiency, work ethic, and, above all, her integrity.

But just two months later, on July 18, Ms. Watson learned that the boss who had so effusively praised her in May had now fired her, just weeks before she was scheduled to step down. The reason: An audit had found the appearance of — but no evidence of — misuse of resources relating to a conflict of interest involving Ms. Watson’s wife.

Since 2010, when Ms. Watson was appointed provost, the university paid more than $438,000 to the Center for Change and Conflict Resolution, a company owned by Nancy Watson, the audit found. About $114,000 of that was paid through the offices overseen by Karan Watson.

But Ms. Watson says the audit report — much of which she has characterized as misleading — doesn’t tell the whole story. She believes it was used as pretext to dismiss her, but for what cause? The former provost has suspicions, many of which appear to be at least somewhat bolstered by a cache of emails published in the forums of TexAgs, a website about Texas A&M football.

Among the many emails published on the site is a difference of opinion between Ms. Watson and the chancellor of the Texas A&M system, John Sharp, about the performance of the university’s engineering dean, M. Katherine Banks, who is also a vice chancellor.

And Ms. Watson says she has proof that a critical evaluation that she wrote of Ms. Banks, and its publication on TexAgs, was on Mr. Young’s mind as he prepared to dismiss her. It’s this text message, which she provided to The Chronicle:

Contacted by email, Mr. Sharp said only that the decision to fire Ms. Watson was within the president’s jurisdiction. A representative for Mr. Sharp, Laylan Copelin, the system’s vice chancellor of marketing and communication, sent the following statement:

“Karan Watson is desperately trying to divert attention from the $438,733 paid to her spouse’s company while Karan was provost. The chancellor made it clear to President Young that it was Young’s call and he would support his decision. She also knows the auditor answers to the Board of Regents. Karan Watson has no one to blame but herself.”

Mr. Young would not say whether the audit’s findings had influenced his decision to dismiss Ms. Watson just weeks before she was to step down. She served at his pleasure, he said several times in an interview this week; the decision was his to make.

Ms. Watson said she doesn’t know if her appearance in the TexAgs emails provided ammunition for her dismissal. But she says she’s convinced the results of the audit weren’t enough to fire her so unceremoniously.

“If you believed everything in the audit report — and there are a great number of mistakes and mischaracterizations — but even if you did, you would give somebody a warning and say ‘Fix this. Don’t ever do it,’” Ms. Watson said. “Because it’s not a real conflict of interest; it’s the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

Under the university system’s ethics policy, even an appearance of a conflict of interest is prohibited, and the audit found that Ms. Watson had violated this provision, among other principles, during her time as provost

“It appears that I made somebody mad,” Ms. Watson said. “From the way the president expressed things to me, it was somebody above his level. He would talk about ‘they’ and ‘them.’”

Unidentified ‘Enemies’

The month and a half between Ms. Watson’s going-away party and her termination were turbulent.

In early June, the president informed her of the investigation into the business relationships involving her and her wife. Besides owning the conflict-resolution company, Nancy Watson is also the director for climate-enhancement initiatives in the university’s Office for Diversity, and a clinical associate professor in the department of education administration and human-resource development. The director of the Office for Diversity is an associate provost who reports to the provost.

Mr. Young had received a whistle-blower’s complaint from the Texas attorney general’s office in early May and passed it on to the university’s Office of Internal Audit and general counsel.

At first, Karan Watson said she wasn’t worried. She had notified the university of her relationship with Nancy Watson several times and had recused herself from all business involving her spouse. What more, she thought, could she do?

Then things changed.

“I was encouraged by the president in late June to consider stepping down at the end of the academic year because, ‘They were after me. The enemies were coming out of the woodwork,’” Ms. Watson said. “He didn’t expand on that.”

When asked in an interview who these enemies were, Mr. Young said he had been speaking generally. “Over the course of time in virtually any administrative job, especially at the university, you’re going to end up with people unhappy,” Mr. Young said. “The closer to her resignation, over that period of time, enemies began to rear their head, began to feel emboldened and empowered.”

Around this time, someone on a TexAgs forum published emails sent among senior administrators following a controversy surrounding a professor of philosophy, Tommy Curry. Years-old remarks of Mr. Curry’s, in which he appeared to suggest that white people would have to die, had recently surfaced online, and the emails on TexAgs mostly dealt with how administrators, including Ms. Watson, had wrestled with how to respond to the controversy.

But also included in these emails were documents that had nothing to do with Mr. Curry: two performance reviews for Ms. Banks, the engineering dean and vice chancellor. Because Ms. Banks serves two roles, she receives two reviews. One comes from the provost’s office, the other from the chancellor’s.

Mr. Sharp’s and Ms. Watson’s performance evaluations of Ms. Banks — both of which were released on TexAgs and AggieLeaks, a website which anonymously posts content obtained through open-record requests — differed greatly. Whereas Mr. Sharp gave Ms. Banks excellent markings in every category, Ms. Watson rated her performance as only “acceptable,” citing concerns that she did not collaborate with others and that some saw her as a “bully.”

“Furthermore,” Ms. Watson wrote in the review, “your repeated turning to the system first on items that are clearly within the university’s purview has to stop.”

Wesley Hitt / Getty Images

In an interview, Ms. Watson said Ms. Banks has been an excellent employee but, lately, her role as dean had become too conflated with her role as vice chancellor.

“Processes and procedures in treating all the deans as peers sometimes got a little sideways because we got input from the chancellor on items that he would normally not be involved in,” Ms. Watson said. “I tried to give her that feedback. She didn’t take it very well.”

Also published on TexAgs were emails from Karan Watson to Nancy Watson, asking her to look at the review, and provide advice on how to “get her attention — knowing she will go to Sharp.”

Ms. Banks replied to the former provost’s review on June 6, offering counterpoints to most of what Ms. Watson had said. She said that if it appeared she did not collaborate well with other deans, it was because Ms. Watson could not see all the good work they had accomplished that year.

“The majority of the review,” Ms. Banks wrote in the response, “appears to be based less on documented accomplishments than your perception of circumstances or opinions expressed by others.”

Ms. Banks said in a written statement to The Chronicle that she didn’t think her job review influenced Ms. Watson’s eventual dismissal. “To my knowledge,” Ms. Banks said, “my evaluation had absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Watson’s departure.” Responding to a follow-up email, Ms. Banks said she had nothing further to say on the matter.

At the end of Ms. Banks’s review from the chancellor’s office, beneath the label “Areas Needing Attention,” Mr. Sharp wrote this:

“Provost Watson has hurt you among some faculty. When she’s gone, it should be repaired easily. She demands total obedience. Fortunately, you do not do that, and instead do what is needed for the university.”

Ms. Watson said she doesn’t believe this performance report was the reason she was dismissed, either — but she says it could be a contributing factor.

The Appearance of Misuse

About two weeks after he texted Ms. Watson that enemies were “rising from every quarter,” Mr. Young received the report of the system auditors who investigated the allegations against his provost. Ms. Watson didn’t receive the report until July 16, she said, so when Mr. Young told her on July 15 she would have to resign early or risk termination, she hadn’t yet been given the chance to defend herself against the findings.

Mr. Young said the reason his actions were so urgent was because there was a “need to take action.”

“I said it had to be done very quickly because we need to take action with respect to anything I intended to do soon,” he told The Chronicle.

On Tuesday of last week, before she had finished her rebuttal, Ms. Watson said, the president told her if she didn’t resign by the end of the day, he would have to dismiss her. She sent him a letter around 1:30 p.m. that day, saying she wanted to explain the things the audit got wrong, to defend herself and her reputation.

“I have no intention of resigning as provost of Texas A&M University under these circumstances,” she wrote. “My reputation as provost of Texas A&M has been harmed by the inaccurate and misleading nature of your report and your unilateral action threatening to terminate me as provost.”

And then he fired her.

“She serves at my pleasure, and I’m not going to go into any more detail than that,” Mr. Young said. “I think the audit report speaks for itself.”

The report found no misuse of university resources. It did, however, “identify significant contracting and conflict issues” related to Nancy Watson.

Of the $438,733 paid to Nancy Watson’s center, the provost’s office directly paid only $9,838. Another $105,767, however, was paid by the Office of Diversity, which also reports to the provost. (In her letter to Mr. Young, Karan Watson said the payments from the diversity office were made before Nancy Watson’s employment in that office.)

The report said auditors had found no evidence of Karan Watson’s having asked university officials to hire her spouse’s center or of her attempting to influence the hiring process. But the appearance of a conflict of interest, the report said, was evident. On Nancy Watson’s university profile page, she included a link to the center. The auditors said this gave the false impression that the center was affiliated with the university.

The authors of the audit report offered two suggestions, neither of which recommended that Karan Watson be removed from position. That choice was Mr. Young’s.

“The provost serves at my pleasure. The decision to remove her was mine and mine alone,” Mr. Young said. “I think if you talk to the chancellor — I don’t know if he would talk to you — he was crystal clear that the decision was ‘mine and mine alone.’ In those exact words.”