Month: July 2023

Aggie Land has launched a major investigation to determine what really happened with Dr. Kathleen McElroy, the tenured journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin who was recruited to revive the J School at A&M.

An official A&M spokesperson assures us that no stone will be left unturned in the quest to determine who actually hired McElroy, who changed the original offer from a tenure-track position to a year-by-year contract, who told her there was “outside interference” and who finally pulled the plug. A&M’s president, an interim dean and an executive associate dean in the School of Architecture all have resigned so far in the wake of the debacle.

Investigators could save a lot of time if they will take a look at the smoking gun in this mess — McElroy’s on-the-record statement to NPR regarding her philosophy of journalism:

“We can’t just give people a set of facts anymore. 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,” McElroy said. “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.”

 The investigation in College Station shouldn’t take long. We can assume that the first person at A&M who read McElroy’s “smoking gun” statement would take steps to ensure that the hiring did not go forward. Even Aggies wouldn’t hire someone to teach journalism who doesn’t believe in telling both sides of the story.

McElroy is not an anomaly. Most of the Texas and national news reports regarding the McElroy incident failed to report her “smoking gun” statement. For example, Channel 2 in Houston reported that Hart Blanton, head of communications and journalism at A&M,  “acknowledged” that her treatment was based, at least part, on race.

A real journalist would report that Blanton alleged it was based on race. Blanton has no proof race had anything to do with it, because there isn’t any.

McElroy originally went to the Texas Tribune with her story and the intrepid reporters there didn’t include the smoking gun statement either. Instead, they followed McElroy’s guidelines and proclaimed dissenting views as illegitimate. Here’s how they describe the backlash that erupted shortly after the news about McElroy’s hiring at A&M:

…the conservative website Texas Scorecard wrote a piece emphasizing McElroy’s work at UT-Austin and elsewhere regarding diversity, equity and inclusion and her research on race, labeling her a “DEI proponent.” That website is the reporting arm of Empower Texans, a Tea Party-aligned group formed with millions in oil money that holds considerable influence over Texas officials.

Conservative, Tea Party and “millions in oil money.” Clearly those voices would fall into McElroy’s “illegitimate” category. The term “DEI proponent” is the official descriptor now being used for McElroy, making it sound like she is some kind of advocate for minority and marginalized students and voices, but again, there’s no evidence of that.

National news outlets have latched onto the story, portraying it as a clear cut example of racial discrimination in Texas. Virtually no national news story reports what McElroy said, but they all report that she is black,  as if that is what really matters.

The most ironic statement was a blog post by disgraced TV news anchor (and frequent Texas Tribune event star) Dan Rather, who states he’s embarrassed to be a Texan because of what happened to McElroy. Rather, who literally invented the term “fake but accurate” to describe the documents he created to try to frame former President George W. Bush, doesn’t seem to realize that his status as a Texan is an embarrassment to the rest of us.

Texas A&M should never have offered McElroy a job without knowing what she stood for. And once officials learned, they were absolutely correct to withdraw the offer. The only remaining question is why Texas taxpayers are still paying her salary at the University of Texas.

TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester talks with Ryan Gravatt, a pioneering digital strategist who led Texas conservatives into the digital age, regarding what we can expect to see next in the digital communications world of politics and public policy as we edge closer to a presidential campaign year and massive issue battles in Texas from property taxes to parental empowerment.

Ryan is a member of former Texas Governor Rick Perry’s original campaign team and his digital expertise and strategic vision has ensured that the delivery of Texas’ conservative message has always been cutting edge. He launched his firm, Raconteur Media, in 2004, years before the iPhone was released, and he set the bar for website development, social media outreach, email, digital advertising and search engine marketing from the beginning. Ryan is also an award winning expert in developing digital strategies and analytics for audience engagement.

The pair discuss what’s changed in digital communications in the last twenty years – — what conservatives are doing right, what’s going wrong and what’s next.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. She is a political communications and public policy expert who has directed multi-million dollar statewide campaigns in New York, New Jersey and Texas and has been involved in dozens of Texas political campaigns. Campaigns and Elections Magazine has called her a “respected veteran” of hard-fought elections and in 2005, her alma mater, the Graduate School of Political Management, now at George Washington University in Washington D.C., named her “alumni of the year,” for her accomplishments in the field of professional politics. Early in her career Sherry worked as the Communications Director for U.S. Senate candidate Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman ever nominated for Vice President on a major party ticket. She also worked for David Dinkins, the first African-American to be elected Mayor of New York City. In Texas, she served for over a decade as the spokesperson and a strategic advisor to Texans for Lawsuit Reform, the most successful tort reform organization in the nation. She was a member of the original campaign and transition teams of Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and she managed his 2018 re-election campaign. She served for seven years as Senior Advisor to the Lt. Governor.  She is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Sherry is also an award winning journalist who has appeared on numerous national television and radio shows and has published hundreds of pieces of political commentary and policy analysis in newspapers, periodicals and academic journals. She covered politics for the San Antonio Express-News and was the Chief Political Writer for The Trentonian. Sherry has worked as a policy advocate in Washington D.C. and four state capitols – Austin, Albany, Trenton and Salem – advocating on policy issues including lawsuit reform, education reform, immigration reform, health care and criminal justice reform. She has directed corporate advertising campaigns and founded three successful, non-profit organizations including Texas Media Watch, which chronicled liberal bias in the Texas press.

In addition to her Masters from the Graduate School of Political Management, Sherry holds a bachelor’s degree from Oklahoma State University. She is a native Oklahoman who is descended from founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She is a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War and was recently appointed to the State of Texas 1836 Project Advisory Committee. Sherry attends St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in San Antonio and is married to Col. Stephen F. Ramsey, USAF (Ret.) They have nine grandchildren.

Subscribe to Sherry’s 9th & Congress newsletter here.

Shortly after the Texas passage of the strongest DEI bill in the nation, Senate Bill 17, Texas A&M decided to revive its long defunct journalism school by hiring Kathleen McElroy. McElroy is a former New York Times writer and head of the University of Texas Journalism School where she describes her primary skill set on her thumbnail profile as “Diversity & Inclusion and Diversity Training.”

Although news reports indicate there was lots of fanfare surrounding her initial appointment, it’s not clear at this point exactly who hired her. A&M’s Board of Regents doesn’t appear to have been involved.

Judging from the play-by-play report McElroy gave to the Texas Tribune, whoever it was has buyer’s remorse. Her tenured position offer was reduced to a non-tenured position, then to a one-year, at-will contract, which she just rejected. She has announced she will remain at the University of Texas where she is a tenured professor.

McElroy reports that she feels “damaged” by what is described as “DEI hysteria” that has overtaken Texas A&M.

It’s not clear why Texas A&M decided to revive its journalism program after getting along fine without it since 2004. Perhaps it was motivated by the fact that the latest Gallup Poll shows that only 7% of Americans have “a great deal of trust” in the media. That clearly sounds like a problem a bunch of smart Aggies should set about to fix.

Still, it’s hard to see how McElroy is the right person for the job. She likes the journalism most Americans have learned not to trust. She told NPR, “We can’t just give people a set of facts anymore. 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.”

So guess who decides which side of the news story is “illegitimate?”

Her former employers, the New York Times, wrote a short news story about McElroy’s recent issues at A&M, where they decided to “just give people the facts.” They quote a dean who implied the change was motivated by racism, but they also quoted one of her conservative critics, so apparently they did not believe the views of a DEI opponent were “illegitimate.”

It’s also important to note that, although she bills herself as a journalism professor, her comments about “these institutions” closely reflect the stated mission of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education:

“Engaging in ongoing ways to incorporate alternative narratives in the curriculum and provide robust learning opportunities on the history of racism, colonization and conquest on how higher education and other sectors of society have been complicit in maintaining systems of privilege.”

As for the “DEI hysteria” at Texas A&M, when their Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs testified before the Texas House regarding Senate Bill 17, he said there were “pockets of DEI at the university” but the administration was unaware of it.

But A&M’s State of Diversity Report in 2020 insists that “racism, hate speech, safety and belonging issues are evidence of systemic cultural problems that are enduring trends at Texas A&M.”

Whether the “DEI hysterics” are the result of only a few isolated DEI programs or “systemic cultural problems,” it will be hard for anyone to know because McElroy would make sure that only the “legitimate” side of the argument will be reported. Those with “illegitimate” views will be ignored.

Importantly, not one DEI officer who testified against Senate Bill 17 made a case that DEI programs have led to successful academic outcomes for minority and marginalized students. In fact, the data show just the opposite. At Texas A&M, 82% of African Americans reported they felt like they belonged in 2015. By 2020, that percentage had dropped to 55%.

Perhaps that’s because A&M’s multicultural service programs have created racially segregated programs that divide students by identity group, which, among other things, has resulted in racially segregated graduation ceremonies for Asian, African American, Latinx and LGBTQ students.

The journalists who make up the Texas media haven’t reported problems with DEI on any Texas campus, likely because the concerns of critics are viewed as “illegitimate.” Indeed, when McElroy chose to go to the Texas Tribune with her story, she picked a reporter who has described DEI opponents pejoratively as “conservative Texans—from locally elected public school trustees to top state officials—[who] have labeled several books and schools of thought that center the perspectives of people of color as ‘woke’ ideologies that make white children feel guilty for the country’s history of racism.” She didn’t quote any of the critics.

At the same time, without any evidence such as increased minority enrollment, improved grades, graduation rates or job placement, the same reporter writes that: “DEI offices have become a mainstay on college and university campuses across the country for years as schools try to boost faculty diversity and help students from all backgrounds succeed.”

Of course, efforts to help students from all backgrounds succeed on Texas campuses will continue, unimpeded by Senate Bill 17.

Texas A&M may want to reconsider if it really needs a journalism school. Unless it can find someone who believes in reporting all sides of the news, it may want to chalk up the McElroy experience as a bullet dodged and take a pass.

Sherry Sylvester discusses the Supreme Court’s ruling that America’s colleges and universities could no longer use race as a factor in determining who could be admitted with Dr. Richard Johnson, Director of the Booker T. Washington Institute at Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Gov. Greg Abbott signed Texas’ anti-DEI Bill into law on June 14, which should close down so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices on every Texas university campus. But according to Valerie Sansone, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Texas at San Antonio, efforts are already underway to defy the law.

“Conversations of how to push back are being conducted in hushed tones—not in whispers, but not entirely out in the open either,” Sansone said. “We’re not necessarily using our state university emails to communicate about this, Sansone says, “You’ve got to be a little smarter than that.”

Whether or not Ms. Sansone is “a little smarter than that” is an open question, since she chose to share the news of the covert operation with a reporter from Inside Higher Education, a national publication that boosts almost 400,000 subscribers.

Claiming to speak for DEI officers throughout the South, where DEI programs are being scrutinized, Sansone says the fact that so many folks are staying behind despite anti-DEI legislation is a “form of resistance.”

What they are resisting is Texas Senate Bill 17, which states that no program or policy will be allowed on any Texas university campus that “promotes differential treatment or provides special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, color or ethnicity.”

Sansone and her DEI colleagues in “the resistance” are fighting the basic premise of all civil rights legislation and the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution—that there should be no differential treatment in America on the basis of race.

According to the Inside Higher Education news story, “DEI Officers Gear Up for Battle in Red States” the DEI crowd describes their enemy as “[university] board members, lawmakers and the voting public.”

Only Texas and Florida (two of the three largest states in the union) have an outright ban on DEI, but nearly 20 other states are considering taking similar steps.

And the battle isn’t just in red states. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) held a debate in April on whether DEI should be abolished. No consensus was reached before the sellout crowd, but there was general agreement that DEI has gone way “off the track.”

For some DEI leaders, the fight isn’t against all voters, just Republicans. Adrianna Kezar, director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of California, suggests that one way to make DEI harder to target is to “disperse” DEI programs throughout academic institutions rather than centralizing it in a single administrative office. She also says renaming DEI to something like Selective Equity Leadership (SEL) can also throw Republicans off the scent.

Like DEI, Selective Equity Leadership doesn’t really mean anything and it certainly doesn’t describe the ideology that fuels “the resistance.” DEI proponents believe that America and all its institutions are racist reflections of a white supremacist culture. In their view, to see it any other way is clearly racism.

That ideological narrative is also “hush, hush.” Instead, throughout the debate over DEI in Texas and in other states, DEI officers misinformed the public and the press, insisting that shutting down DEI programs will harm minority and marginalized students.

But it would be hard to imagine anything that has been more harmful to minority and marginalized students than DEI.

The University of Michigan has the largest DEI program in the country. Its response to current criticism of DEI is to double down on its ideological strategy, with a new Vice Provost for Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity officer who says that “’race conscious’ programs continue to be the key” to helping minority students. She says “race neutral” programs will fail. After a decade of DEI at Michigan, the largest university in the state, Michigan still has a student population that is less than 4% black even though African Americans make up 14% of the population.

And in what may be a design flaw, it appears that the more DEI programs do, the unhappier marginalized students are. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “over the past several years, the university [Michigan] has hired more diverse faculty and staff, increased the number of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and incorporated diversity-related material across the curriculum, according to a university analysis, but fewer students reported being satisfied with the campus climate in 2021, compared with those surveyed in 2016.”

These findings were similar to data compiled by Texas A&M which found that the percentage of African American students who felt like they belonged at A&M dropped almost 30 points from 2015 to 2020.

Apparently a constant drumbeat that one is living in a college quagmire of white supremacy and patriarchal tyranny is not a morale booster. Neither are daily assurances that one’s setbacks are the result of oppression and unconscious racism.

Urging minorities to view themselves as victims and others as victimizers is not an education, it is activist training. In the end, it ensures that the only kind of job they will be able to get is working in DEI.

Indeed, a quick visit to the website for the NADOHE shows that their primary objective is to create most positions for DEI officers.

Immediately following the passage of Senate Bill 17, Texas A&M called for a comprehensive review of all DEI programs in what appears to be a serious effort to transform that campus. At the same time, a former DEI advocate for the New York Times was hired to run the journalism school. This is how the anti-DEI resistance will work—like whack-a-mole.

Even before the Texas anti-DEI bill passed, DEI officers in Texas were waving it off as inconsequential, promising to shift staffing to different departments, rename programs and decentralize efforts. The transformation of university health systems, where DEI already has a pernicious stranglehold, is a goal for many DEI advocates.

The Texas anti-DEI bill is the strongest in the country. It includes several layers of oversight as well as empowering the Legislature to withdraw funding if any aspect of the legislation is violated. Still, removing the scourge of DEI from Texas campuses will not be easy. The war against DEI has just begun.

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.