An “awful person,” “completely self-serving,” and a “terrible journalist too.”
That’s how the top brass at Texas A&M University at College Station described Kathleen O. McElroy last month in text messages released by the university on Thursday.
The botched hiring this summer of McElroy, a prominent Black journalist formerly of The New York Times, who had hopes of revitalizing the university’s journalism program, has mired the campus in controversy, leading to a wave of administrative turnover and sharp rebukes about the situation from its own faculty. The university released the bombshell results of an internal investigation on Thursday, the same day it also reached a $1-million settlement with McElroy, who has remained a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
The texts appear to be between M. Katherine Banks, the now-former president who resigned on July 21 over the fiasco, and José Luis Bermúdez, the now-former interim dean of Texas A&M’s College of Arts and Sciences. They start in mid-June and continue through July.
They offer a remarkable behind-the-scenes look at the frank back-and-forth between two key players in the saga. They also undercut Banks’s recent assertions that she was not deeply involved in the hiring process, and that she wasn’t actively trying to dissuade McElroy from fighting for a tenured position.
If you get this done, you get a bonus.
McElroy was initially offered one, but as her hiring came under intense criticism over what she referred to as “DEI hysteria,” officials altered the offer to a five-year contract without tenure, which the journalist agreed to, according to the Texas Tribune. Later, they changed it again, the Tribune first reported, to a one-year contract to teach and a three-year contract to lead the journalism program. McElroy rejected the last offer.
The texts reveal another twist: that Banks offered Bermúdez financial incentives to persuade McElroy to commit to a non-tenure-track position.
“Fingers crossed that you can get it done,” she wrote, adding, “If you get this done, you get a bonus.” The then-president added a smiley-face emoji.
When the hiring went south, they didn’t hold back in their criticism of McElroy.
“I think we dodged a bullet,” Banks wrote on July 11. “She is a awful person to go to the press before us.” Banks was referencing The Texas Tribune, which first reported McElroy’s decision to forgo Texas A&M’s offer and stay in the tenured position she holds at UT-Austin.
“Thanks,” Bermúdez texted back. “A terrible journalist too. Completely self-serving.”
Perhaps the most ironic exchange came toward the start of the discussions. After getting McElroy to agree to the five-year untenured job, Bermúdez apparently cautioned Banks. Their new hire, he said, had one big fear about switching campuses.
“Her nightmare would be getting into some train wreck like the one at UNC,” he wrote.
Read the rest of the texts below:
Megan Zahneis contributed to this report.
