BY JENNIFER RUTH

Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a DEI committee?

At the University of Texas–Austin, Professor Kathleen McElroy served on the Council for Racial and Ethnic Equity and Diversity. She also wrote an op-ed for the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, entitled “The Importance of Faculty Diversity Is More than Just a Numbers Game.” McElroy is a veteran journalist, with two decades of experience at the New York Times covering obituaries, sports, and other topics before she left to get a PhD and then join UT–Austin’s journalism program, soon serving a term as its director. So when Texas A&M announced that they were recruiting McElroy to relaunch their long-dormant journalism program, they did so with understandable fanfare. Scoring a highly respected academic who even happens to be an alum of the school in question is cause for a public signing ceremony with a bouquet of balloons. But this is Texas and McElroy is a Black woman who believes broadly in the value of diversity. These factors do not undermine her fitness to run a journalism program, of course, and some might even believe they enhance her fitness, but these factors were, nonetheless, apparently enough to tank the appointment. Last week, news broke that Texas A&M’s offer, originally with tenure and then five years without it, had somehow turned into a one-year “at will” contract that nobody tenured at UT–Austin and in their right mind would accept (she didn’t).

What happened?

Texas is neck-deep in culture wars. The state has seen some of the most hysterical school-board drama in the country. Originally organized to oppose masks and vaccines, activist parents, often funded by outside groups, are banning books and forcing superintendents to resign. They strive to remake public schools in their own white, Christian image–or, as is often speculated, they strive to sabotage them in order to shift support to state-funded vouchers for private schools. Higher education is both a direct target and a casualty of these culture wars that claim to champion “parental rights” while simultaneously criminalizing parents of trans-children and depriving women of reproductive choices.

Highly gerrymandered and Republican dominated, Texas is subject to minority rule and beholden to leaders with monumental egos like Dan Patrick, the MAGA-loving Lieutenant Governor who rose from the ranks of talk radio and the Tea Party to champion bathroom bills and call professors “looney Marxists.” Patrick was behind two of the bills targeting higher education introduced in the last legislative session that are central to understanding what happened last week at Texas A&M: SB 17 banning diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and officers and SB 18 banning tenure at public colleges and universities. Both bills passed into law by the end of the regular legislative session in May, though the latter was modified.

Enough voices persuaded enough people in state office that abolishing tenure wholesale would erode the prestige of Texas’s Tier One universities so tenure was preserved in a diminished state, but the bill abolishing all DEI officers and programs succeeded. SB 17 passed with language specifying that it was not supposed to impact the study of race in academic programs. But isn’t that what it did in McElroy’s case? The line from SB 17 to McElroy’s botched hire is indirect but traceable. After Texas A&M held its public signing ceremony with McElroy, the same conservative groups that supported SB 17 and SB 18 began attacking the hire. Texas Scorecard, a media outlet with the tagline “Real News for Real Texans” that is funded in part by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation and whose current “trending topics” are listed as “Sexualizing Kids,” “Border Invasion,” and “Public Schools,” ran an article entitled “Aggies Hire NYT ‘Diversity’ Advocate to Head Journalism Program“. The slippage from serving on a DEI committee and writing in favor of diversity to being construed as a DEI hire is clear here. This was certainly the interpretation of the editorial board at the Houston Chronicle, which ran this op-ed, facetiously entitled “Read all about it! Aggies in retreat from anti-woke zealots.” “A gaggle of wealthy and powerful far-right ideologues . . . ,” the board wrote, “which include a Tea Party-affiliated group known as Empower Texans, objected to the hiring of a distinguished journalism educator who happens to be African American. Kathleen McElroy, was a proponent of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), the argument seemed to go, and therefore unworthy of taking on the challenge of reviving A&M’s once respected journalism program, nearly defunct since 2004.”

That she is a Black woman who supports DEI is apparently all the evidence the culture warriors needed to scuttle her hire. McElroy herself appears to have come to much the same conclusion: “I’m being judged by race, maybe gender. And I don’t think other folks would face the same bars or challenges,” she said, according to the Texas Tribune. One disappointed Texas A&M alum, writing in The Houston Chronicle, called for a “prompt accounting”: “If this action,” he wrote in reference to the insulting one-year offer, “is the result of political pressure, who specifically applied such pressure?” “Does anyone else hear a McCarthy-ish echo?” he asked. “Don’t we all know where such hysteria led us before?” (“I suspect that all college and university professors recognize this as McCarthyism reincarnated,” Eric Smaw wrote here, back in October 2021, calling critical race theory “the new Black scare.”)

Faculty and students refuse to be cowed by this new McCarthyism. They vociferously protested SB 17 and SB 18 and faculty at Texas A&M are taking a stand here as well. The Faculty Senate at Texas A&M is stepping up to demand answers. “We believe we share the common goal of preserving Texas A&M University as a premier institution with an outstanding reputation,” Tracy Hammond, speaking for the Senate’s executive committee, wrote in a letter to Texas A&M president M. Katherine Banks and Chancellor John Sharp. “But for that to happen, there must be an acknowledgement that outside influence is detrimental to that goal and efforts must be taken to preclude that from recurring.”

Shannon Van Zandt, an executive associate dean in A&M’s architecture program, has resigned over the incident. “When the news broke last week of the clear interference of politics in the hiring and tenure processes of the Head of the new Department of Journalism, my confidence in the integrity of these processes and my ability to ensure it was lost,” Van Zandt wrote. “I no longer feel that I can assure faculty going through the tenure and promotion process that the process will be done fairly and without interference from political forces.” In the same Texas Tribune article in which Van Zandt is quoted, the chair of the state’s Legislative Black Caucus and NAACP chapter Ron Reynolds (D-Missouri City) said that the incident demonstrates “how outspoken anti-DEI sentiments can discriminatorily infringe professional hiring procedures under the guise of meritocracy.”

UPDATE: On July 21, Insider Higher Ed reported that the Texas A&M President Katherine Banks has stepped down, citing the McElroy situation.

Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor for Academe Blog and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom and co-editor, with Ellen Schrecker and Valerie Johnson, of The Right to Learn: Resisting the Right-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, forthcoming from Beacon Press.