The university said M. Katherine Banks would retire “immediately” after political pushback over the effort to appoint Kathleen McElroy to lead its journalism program.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/ZDPZF
Can’t believe something like this happened at a big public university
Ms. McElroy ultimately turned down the one-year contract, she said, and the episode became a full-blown crisis for Texas A&M after The Texas Tribune first reported on the conflict. Ms. McElroy described a series of conversations in which the Arts and Sciences dean told her that there was political pushback to her appointment.
“I said, ‘What’s wrong?’” Ms. McElroy recalled of her conversation with the dean, José Luis Bermúdez. “He said, ‘You’re a Black woman who was at The New York Times and, to these folks, that’s like working for Pravda.’” Ms. McElroy, who left The Times in 2011, did not immediately return a call seeking comment on Friday.
It’s shocking and appalling, but conservatives attacking professors and college administrators giving into them as once great institutions implode is where we’re at right now. From a prior article about this story linked at the bottom of OP,
In 2021, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, was denied a tenured position at the University of North Carolina (“tHe nAtIoN’S FiRsT PuBlIc uNiVeRsItY”), after the university’s board of trustees refused to approve her appointment. Conservatives had taken issue with her involvement in The Times’s 1619 Project, which re-examined slavery in the United States.
I had an opportunity to once attend a lecture by Nikole Hannah-Jones. Amazing experience. She was not shy about addressing problems of whiteness in academia and I can only assume it’s for that reason and that reason alone that she would be denied a position at a university.
Am I missing something, or is the president resigning over having hired someone who are for LGBTQ+ and other minority rights? Is that what people are outraged over? How conservative is the university board that this was ever considered an issue?
Well, it’s Texas, so…
But yeah, that seems accurate. Even though she was primarily a regular journalist who also worked on race stories.
