In the latest example of backlash against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives, the president of Texas A&M University, one of the country’s largest universities, has resigned immediately following a clash over the attempted hiring of a former New York Times senior editor to lead its journalism school. 

The now-departed A&M president, M. Katherine Banks, submitted her letter of resignation to the university’s chancellor late Thursday, writing that “the recent challenges regarding” the hiring of the former Times editor “have made it clear to me that I must retire immediately. The negative press is a distraction from the wonderful work being done here.”

Just a day before Ms. Banks’s resignation, the faculty senate passed a resolution to create a fact-finding committee into the mishandling of the shifting job offers made to Kathleen McElroy, a tenured professor of journalism at the University of Texas. 

Ms. McElroy, who is Black, previously served as the director of the journalism program at the University of Texas at Austin between 2018 and 2022 after a long career at the New York Times, which ended in 2011. Ms. McElroy, a Texas A&M alumna, or “Aggie,” was set to become the director of A&M’s journalism program before a wave of backlash from alumni and the board of regents. 

Opponents to Ms. McElroy’s appointment objected to her long history of supporting “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs, which will soon be banned at Texas’s public universities. A conservative publication detailed at length Ms. McElroy’s lengthy career as a proponent of DEI initiatives, including her support for “equity-based hiring practices” and distributing “anti-racism” resources. She had also advocated in an op-ed for the Daily Texan that the University of Texas needed to be more welcoming to people who are not “cisgender straight white men.” 

Furthermore, in a 2021 interview with National Public Radio, Ms. McElroy said it is no longer appropriate for journalists just to objectively report on multiple viewpoints in a given story. Her comments reflected one side of a debate that roiled the country’s left-leaning journalism establishment during the Trump administration over whether journalists should be expected to remain objective or if they had a moral obligation to set aside objectivity and use their powerful platforms to denounce President Trump.

“We can’t just give people a set of facts anymore,” she told NPR. “I think we know that and we have to tell our students that. 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.”

One conservative alumni group, the Rudder Association, filed a complaint about Ms. McElroy’s appointment shortly after it was announced. The group, which was founded in 2020, describes itself as “dedicated Aggies committed to preserving and perpetuating the core values and unique spirit of Texas A&M.”

“We all have a stake in the success of this initiative,” the president of the Rudder Association, Matthew Poling, said in a July 15 statement denying accusations that his group was engaged in an “outside influence” campaign to target Ms. McElroy. “Our collective aim should be to foster a journalism department that prepares its students to uphold the principles of journalistic integrity and contribute positively to their profession and our society.”

Speaking with the Times, Mr. Poling, who graduated from A&M in 1990, said Ms. McElroy “wasn’t a good fit” to be the new journalism director due to her advocacy for DEI initiatives. “I think identity politics have done a lot of damage to our country, and the manifestation of that on campus — the DEI ideology — has done damage to our culture at A&M,” he continued.

Neither Mr. Poling nor the Rudder Association immediately responded to requests for comment. 

Ms. McElroy was originally offered the tenured position of director at the journalism program. Shortly after the Rudder Association’s objections arose, Ms. McElroy’s contract offer was watered down to a five-year, nontenured position, which would have allowed her to avoid confirmation by the conservative-leaning board of regents, which must approve all tenure appointments.

According to the Times, the acting dean of liberal arts, José Luis Bermúdez, told Ms. McElroy that her appointment “stirred up a hornet’s nest” from some anti-DEI regents and alumni. That administrator also told Ms. McElroy that those individuals “could make him fire” her and “that the president and the chancellor — no one can stop that from happening.”

Once it became clear that alumni and regents would revolt against even the five-year contract, the university offered Ms. McElroy a one-year, nontenured position that would have permitted her to be dismissed “at will.” Ms. McElroy declined that offer, deciding to remain in her tenured job at Austin. 

Just last month, Governor Abbott signed into law a measure that bans DEI offices at public universities. 

The saga of Ms. McElroy’s botched hiring mirrors one that played out in 2021 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, when the journalism school attempted to hire another Black New York Times journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the Times’s controversial 1619 Project, which sought to reframe American history through the lens of slavery and race relations. 

Following an uproar among conservative UNC alumni over whether to offer her tenure, followed by a counterpunch from UNC’s liberal faculty, Ms. Hannah-Jones was eventually offered a tenured position but declined it and took a job instead at Howard University, the historically Black institution.