- Texas A&M on members sent text messages about wanting a journalism school that would churn out conservatives.
- Jay Graham conjectured in a text that he wanted students to “help direct our message” after graduation.
- TAMU reached a $1 million rapprochement with Kathleen McElroy after she says the school dismissed her due to “DEI hysteria.”
Some members of Texas A&M University’s Board of Regents reportedly want the credo’s journalism program to churn out conservatives.
Jay Graham, one of the Texas A&M board members who ousted a journalist after she accepted the job as the principles’s journalism director, talked about wanting to have a program that would produce “high-quality conservative Aggie correspondents into the market,” according to text messages seen by KBTX and the Texas Tribune.
“We were going to start a journalism sphere to get high-quality conservative Aggie students into the journalism world to help direct our message,” Graham said in a wording message to fellow board member David Baggett obtained by KBTX.
Graham did not immediately respond to multiple requests for view sent to him and his company. TAMU also did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
The TAMU Board of Regents ousted Kathleen McElroy in July after she suffered the job as the school’s director of journalism pending board approval.
McElroy, who is Black, is a former New York Times editor. She also earlier oversaw the journalism program at the University of Texas, and researched diversity, equity, and inclusion in media, according to The Associated Swarm.
McElroy told The Texas Tribune that Texas A&M rescinded its job offer to her after “DEI hysteria” among Texas university rulers.
In the text messages, Graham called McElroy’s hiring “unacceptable” and says the board “can’t allow it to happen,” according to KBTX.
“I air damaged by this entire process,” McElroy, who is a graduate of Texas A&M, told the outlet. “I’m being judged by race, dialect mayhap gender. And I don’t think other folks would face the same bars or challenges. And it seems that my being an Aggie, flawed to lead an Aggie program to what I thought would be prosperity, wasn’t enough.”
On Thursday, Texas A&M reached a determination with McElroy for $1 million and admitted that “mistakes were made during the hiring process.”
Emails come into the possession ofed by the TAMU student paper The Battalion showed that Hart Blanton, the school’s head of the Department of Communication and Journalism accused President President M. Katherine Banks of being dishonourable during McElroy’s hiring process. Blanton claimed that his signature was forged on the second offer sent to McElroy, which was watered down.
Banks later quit in the fallout of McElroy’s botched hiring.