New faculty hires are typically matters reserved for deans, department chairs, and a few others. Of course, when tenure is a factor, the process becomes a little more involved. A tenure committee makes recommendations. Trustees or regents review them and usually give the final yay or nay.
But a newly released cache of documents demonstrates how much the recruitment of Kathleen O. McElroy to revive Texas A&M University’s journalism program deviated from the norm.
According to the documents — some included in a university investigation published Thursday, and some provided in response to a Chronicle public-records request — McElroy’s hiring process was thrust into disarray by people who normally have little to no role in such matters.
Her case is the latest in a trend worrying many faculty across the country, of politicians and other external actors taking an outsize interest — and, in some cases, directly meddling — in the work they do. McElroy’s case, which also raised allegations of racial and gender discrimination, escalated to the point that it sank the university’s president.
McElroy, a prominent Black journalist, had spent years at The New York Times and then held a tenured post leading the University of Texas at Austin’s journalism school.
Her background might recall a similar situation: Two summers ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones — also a woman, also Black, and also a New York Times journalist — found her hiring at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill derailed by conservative opposition. Hannah-Jones rejected Chapel Hill’s delayed offer of tenure and went to Howard University instead. McElroy ended up steering clear of the campus that once courted her, too.
Here are four key moments that reveal the many players who sought to have their say in her hiring at Texas A&M.
The Early Hopes — and Warning Signs
On the morning of May 11, José Luis Bermúdez, the now-former interim dean of Texas A&M’s College of Arts and Sciences, sent a budget request to N.K. Anand, vice president for faculty affairs. Bermúdez had a vision for re-establishing and expanding Texas A&M’s journalism program, and he had a star new recruit to lead the way: McElroy.
Once she was officially hired, Bermúdez wrote in the email, “we will have an instant and spectacular splash.”
A splash is one way to describe it. Almost immediately, fears of outside reactions emerged.
The same evening, Bermúdez had dinner with M. Katherine Banks, the now-former president, text messages show.
In a text to Hart Blanton, the head of the journalism department, Bermúdez said he and Banks decided at the dinner to delay McElroy’s hiring until after the Texas Legislature’s 2023 regular session adjourned in late May.
“Bottom line is the NYT connection is poor optics during this particular legislative session,” Bermúdez wrote. He declined to comment for this story.
As is often the case when courting star faculty, A&M had heavily recruited McElroy for several months. A search committee strongly recommended her as a candidate in April. By the time Banks decided to hit pause on McElroy’s hiring, a lot of people thought her new job was a done deal.
In texts to Bermúdez, Blanton said that department heads across the campus had already congratulated him about recruiting McElroy. So had the dean of UT-Austin’s journalism school.
“I think the train has left the station,” Blanton told Susan Ballabina, the chief external-affairs officer and senior vice president for academic and strategic collaborations, in a May 12 text.
Blanton did not respond to a request for comment. Banks could not be reached for comment.
A ‘Pretend’ News Site’s Story
Throughout the beginning of the summer, Texas A&M delayed the last steps of the hiring process, and McElroy was getting frustrated, documents show.
On June 13, there was a public signing ceremony to share the news. At that point, everyone seemed to be on board: Banks and other higher-ups all signed off on bringing McElroy to campus for a tenured job, pending board approval. In an email the day after the ceremony, the college’s social-media coordinator called it one of the “most positively received stories” in his time in the marketing department.
Things changed two days after the event.
An article written by a Texas A&M student and published on the Texas Scorecard, a conservative website, described McElroy as a supporter of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. That same day, Texas’ governor had signed a new law banning DEI offices at the state’s public colleges. Members of the A&M system’s Board of Regents started raising alarm bells, documents show.
On June 16, Bermúdez texted Blanton asking about “the author of that stupid article.”
“It’s a pretend news site. I don’t know,” Blanton answered.
Half an hour later, Blanton told Bermúdez he’d just spoken to McElroy. She’d seen the article, but didn’t seem concerned about the “storm to come,” he said.
“I’m not clear if that’s because of her resolve or because she underestimates the storm,” he wrote.
The Regents React — and Intervene
Arguably, the storm had already arrived. On June 16, Jay Graham, a member of the Board of Regents, texted Banks and John Sharp, chancellor of the Texas A&M system.
He said he’d seen the news about McElroy’s hiring and hoped it wasn’t true. “But since it is not April Fools’ Day, I assume it is,” he wrote.
“I thought the purpose of us starting a journalism department was to get high-quality Aggie journalist [sic] with conservative values into the market,” he wrote. “This won’t happen with someone like this leading the department.”
Michael V. Hernandez, another regent, put it bluntly in an email to Banks and Sharp a few days later: “Granting tenure to somebody with this background is going to be a difficult sell for many on the BOR.” Hernandez wrote that he saw the selection of McElroy, who had built her career in New York City and Austin, Tex., as “exactly the opposite of what we had in mind for someone in that position.”
On June 22, Blanton and Bermúdez were texting about the board’s focus on McElroy. Bermúdez mentioned a different faculty-job candidate, a white man. If he was hired, “nobody cares,” Bermúdez said. “The board will be about as interested as they are in the synchronized swimming team.”
He added, “Kathleen comes here, and everybody takes note.”
On July 8, Bermúdez sent Blanton a past op-ed that McElroy had written. Blanton texted back: “She should probably anticipate that everything she said about race might be read back to her at the board meeting.”
Vickie Spillers, the executive director of the board, did not respond to a request for comment.
Conservative Groups Played a Key Role
As it turns out, McElroy wasn’t just a tough sell for the board. Two outside alumni groups — the Sul Ross Group and the Rudder Association, both of which have many conservative members — were “gunning for her” too, Bermúdez said in a July 8 text to Blanton.
“They have no power of course,” he wrote. “But people who do have power listen to them.”
One of those people appeared to be Banks. In a text to the dean that same day, she said the two groups were “lining up to make a big deal about it.”
“Expect more press and awful emails,” she told Bermúdez.
The Rudder Association was formed in the summer of 2020 after protesters called for the university to remove a statue of a Confederate general from campus, according to The Battalion, Texas A&M’s campus newspaper. The Sul Ross Group, which didn’t respond to a request for comment on Friday, was named after the general, Lawrence Sullivan Ross.
Matt Poling, the president of the Rudder Association, told The Chronicle on Friday that his group had been doing its own research into McElroy’s statements before the Texas Scorecard article was published on June 15.
“We expressed our concerns about the misalignment, given Dr. McElroy’s stated views on viewpoint discrimination and racial essentialism in journalism, and that was the extent of our involvement,” he said.
Any hopes of salvaging the deal fell apart by the second weekend in July. After her contract was diluted, McElroy would stay in her job at UT-Austin, she told The Texas Tribune.
A few days after the news dropped, the Rudder Association released a statement taking issue with comments from some faculty members, who were accusing the group of inappropriately interfering in their hiring processes.
Regents and elected officials, the Rudder statement said, should not be viewed as examples of outside influence. Neither should taxpayers, tuition-payers, or donors, it said.
A former Rudder president, Joe Bourgeois, sent an email on July 15 to Spillers, the regents’ executive director. Bourgeois said he supported the regents’ questioning of McElroy’s background. “Despite some of the faculty claiming that only they have a say,” Bourgeois wrote, “the citizens of the state of Texas have the ultimate say and we support you as our representatives on the board.”
Megan Zahneis contributed reporting.
