Texas A&M posts president’s resignation

Backlash around hiring Black journalist, her past work in diversity cited in exit

AUSTIN, Texas — Texas A&M University on Friday announced the resignation of its president in the fallout over a Black journalist who said her celebrated hiring at one of the nation’s largest campuses quickly unraveled because of pushback over her past work promoting diversity.

President Katherine Banks said in a resignation letter that she was retiring immediately because “negative press has become a distraction” at the nearly 70,000-student campus in College Station.

Her departure after two years as president followed weeks of turmoil at Texas A&M, which only last month had welcomed professor Kathleen McElroy with great fanfare to revive the school’s journalism department. McElroy is a former New York Times editor and had overseen the journalism school at the University of Texas at Austin campus.

But McElroy said soon after her hiring — which included a June ceremony with balloons — she learned of emerging pushback because of her past work to improve diversity and inclusion in newsrooms.

Banks’ exit comes as Republican lawmakers across the U.S. are targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs on college campuses. That includes Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill in June that dismantles program offices at public colleges.

The A&M System said in a statement Banks told faculty leaders this week that she took responsibility for the “flawed hiring process.” The statement said “a wave of national publicity” suggested McElroy “was a victim of ‘anti-woke’ hysteria and outside interference in the faculty hiring process.”

McElroy has not responded to an Associated Press request for comment Friday.

She previously told The Texas Tribune that she had been “damaged by this entire process,” and she believed she was “being judged by race, maybe gender. And I don’t think other folks would face the same bars or challenges.”

The Rudder Association, which describes itself as a collection of Texas A&M students, former students, faculty and staff who are “dedicated Aggies committed to preserving and perpetuating the core values and unique spirit of Texas A&M,” also has acknowledged complaining to school administrators about McElroy’s hiring.

“TRA believes that a department head should embrace the egalitarian and merit-based traditions that characterize Texas A&M’s values, rather than the divisive ideology of identity politics,” the group wrote last week.

At a meeting with university faculty on Wednesday, Banks said she was not involved in the changes to McElroy’s contract offer. The faculty then voted to set up a panel to investigate the matter.

According to the university, of its 4,062 faculty members, 2,156, or 53%, are white, and 139, or 3%, are Black. Asians made up 8% of faculty, and Hispanics or Latinos 5%. In fall 2022 student enrollment, 51% of students were white, 23% were Hispanic, 10% were Asian and 3% were Black.

On Monday, Jose Luis Bermudez, interim dean of the Texas A&M College of Arts and Sciences, also announced he would leave that job and return to his faculty position. McElroy said Bermudez had warned her about mounting “hysteria” about diversity, equity and inclusion at Texas A&M and advised her to stay on at Texas.

Banks is the second major university president to resign this week amid turmoil. Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne said Wednesday he would resign Aug. 31, citing an independent review that cleared him of research misconduct but found “serious flaws” in five scientific papers on subjects such as brain development in which he was the principal author.