Texas A&M President M. Katherine Banks has resigned in the wake of a recent, public controversy over the bungled hiring of Black journalist Kathleen McElroy. The process had led to questions about whether the university had engaged in viewpoint discrimination and allowed external political influences to disrupt the appointment.
According to a letter that Banks sent to Chancellor John Sharp on Thursday, her resignation is immediate. “The recent challenges regarding Dr. McElroy have made it clear to me that I must retire immediately. The negative press is a distraction from the wonderful work being done here,” she wrote.
Today, Sharp announced that Mark A. Welsh III, currently Dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at A&M, will serve as acting president of the university.
Banks’ announcement came after the Texas A&M Faculty Senate passed a resolution Wednesday to create a committee to investigate the mishandling of the hiring of Dr. McElroy, a University of Texas professor, a former New York Times journalist and a graduate of Texas A&M University.
Last month, the university publicly announced it was hiring McElroy to revive its journalism program, but the offer unraveled when the job offer was changed from a position with the possibility of tenure to a one-year professor of practice appointment, with the option to renew the appointment. In the end, McElroy elected to stay at the University of Texas, where she holds tenure.
According to reports in The Texas Tribune, McElroy believed her appointment had been caught up in “DEI hysteria.” “I feel damaged by this entire process,” she’s quoted as saying. “I’m being judged by race, maybe gender. And I don’t think other folks would face the same bars or challenges. And it seems that my being an Aggie, wanting to lead an Aggie program to what I thought would be prosperity, wasn’t enough.”
At the Faculty Senate meeting yesterday, President Banks denied that she knew about the changes in the job offer, but she also shouldered the responsibility for the obviously flawed hiring process, which had garnered widespread publicity, suggesting, as the university’s new release indicated, that “McElroy, who has done research on diversity and inclusion, was a victim of ‘anti-woke’ hysteria and outside interference in the faculty hiring process.”
Banks was appointed as the 26th President of Texas A&M University two years ago. Prior to assuming the presidency, she was Vice Chancellor of Engineering and National Laboratories for the Texas A&M University System, Dean of the College of Engineering, Director of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, and held an endowed professorship.
Her presidential tenure had been marred by several previous disputes with faculty and students alike. Faculty had complained that she left them out of major decisions and expressed “serious concerns” about her leadership, administrative competence, and communications with the campus.
Banks’ resignation is the second abrupt resignation by a president of a prominent U.S. university this week. On Wednesday, Marc Tessier-Lavigne announced that he would resign as president of Stanford University, after a lengthy investigation of his scientific research found substantial flaws in several studies he authored over a number of years.
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