Texas A&M confirmed Thursday that it will pay a $1 million settlement to Kathleen McElroy, a black journalism professor who had her job offer from the university downgraded amid concerns over her DEI work and her ties to the “biased and progressive leaning” New York Times.
McElroy has studied news media and race and described her area of expertise as “diversity and inclusion” in a professional bio. She claimed her job offer at Texas A&M, which is also her alma mater, was derailed by “DEI hysteria” prompted in part by a new state law banning DEI offices, programs, and training at publicly funded universities beginning in January.
While McElroy was initially offered a tenured position, her offer was later reduced down to a one-year teaching contract and a three-year offer to serve as the director of the journalism program.
Critics voiced concern about her activism and style of journalism; in 2021, she told NPR, “We can’t just give people a set of facts anymore.”
“I think we know that and we have to tell our students that,” she added. “This is not about getting two sides of a story or three sides of a story, if one side is illegitimate. I think now you cannot cover education, you cannot cover criminal justice, you can’t cover all of these institutions without recognizing how all these institutions were built.”
She also served on the Council for Racial and Ethnic Equity and Diversity (CREED) at UT-Austin. The group advocates for equity-based hiring practices and offers so-called anti-racism resources, according to its website.
McElroy also previously wrote an op-ed for UT Austin’s newspaper, The Daily Texan, in which she called for implementing diversity measures, including tracking faculty demographics to ensure that the university would be more welcome to individuals who are not “cisgender straight White men.”
She said that while UT Austin was largely inclusive, “every faculty member and staff member of color is an ad hoc Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officer at UT because our numbers are so small. I have been attending seminars and reading articles about attracting faculty of color because we all have to identify, hire and nurture faculty of color as we have done for privileged groups.”
McElroy was advised by José Luis Bermúdez, the former interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, to remain in her tenured post at the University of Texas in Austin because he could not protect her if outside forces pushed for her ouster. McElroy ultimately chose to stay at UT-Austin.
McElroy’s lawyer and the university issued a joint statement on Thursday announcing the settlement.
The university offered McElroy and apology and said “mistakes were made” during the hiring process.
“Texas A&M University remains in my heart despite the events of the past month,” McElroy said in a statement. “I will never forget that Aggies – students, faculty members, former students and staff – voiced support for me from many sectors. I hope the resolution of my matter will reinforce A&M’s allegiance to excellence in higher education and its commitment to academic freedom and journalism.”
Texas A&M University President M. Katherine Banks abruptly retired last month at the height of the controversy. While Banks claimed she was not aware the school had changed its offer to McElroy, a new internal report reveals Banks and other high-level officials in the school system were involved in discussions about how to handle the job offer amid backlash.
McElroy’s decision to stay at UT Austin came weeks after Texas A&M had already held a public signing ceremony to announce her hiring to run the school’s journalism department.
Amid scrutiny after the job offer fell apart, Banks told the Faculty Senate she was unaware of the changes that had been made to the original offer and that she was “embarrassed that we are in a situation where we have an offer that was released without the proper approvals.”
“However, it’s important to note that we honored that letter, we honored all of the letters, because it was of no fault to the candidate, who was very, very qualified, that our administrative structure broke down,” she said.
Hart Blanton, the communications and journalism department head who was involved in efforts to recruit McElroy, refuted Banks’s suggestion that she was not involved, instead claiming that Banks interfered in the hiring process.
“To the contrary, President Banks injected herself into the process atypically and early on,” Blanton said, adding that he was surprised to see his signatures on the offer letters as he did not approve them.
The university says in the report that the later offer letters included Blanton’s signature because of the use of an “automated electronic signature feature of the document.”
The report includes text messages between regents Jay Graham and David Bagget that suggest system board members wanted the new journalism program to “get high-quality Aggie journalist[s] with conservative values into the market.”
“Kathy [Banks] told us multiple times the reason we were going to combine arts and sciences together was to control the liberal nature that those professors brought to campus,” Graham wrote. “This won’t happen with this kind of hire.”
According to the report, regent Mike Hernandez wrote in an email to Banks and Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp that “granting tenure to somebody with this background is going to be a difficult sell for many on the [board of regents].” He encouraged them to “put the brakes on this, so we can all discuss this further.”
“While it is wonderful for a successful Aggie to want to come back to Texas A&M to be a tenured professor and build something this important from scratch, we must look at her résumé and her statements made an[d] opinion pieces and public interviews,” Hernandez wrote. “The New York Times is one of the leading main stream media sources in our country. It is common knowledge that they are biased and progressive leaning. The same exact thing can be said about the university of Texas. Yet that is Dr. McElroy’s résumé in a nutshell.”