Texas A&M University President Katherine Banks is resigning amid the fallout from the recent failed woke hiring of former New York Times editor and DEI proponent Kathleen McElroy.
“The recent challenges regarding Dr. McElroy have made it clear to me that I must retire immediately,” Banks wrote in her Thursday resignation letter, according to a report by Texas Tribune. “The negative press is a distraction from the wonderful work being done here.”
Professor Kathleen McElroy (Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, University of Texas at Austin/Flickr)
Banks’ resignation is effective immediately. Meanwhile, Mark A. Welsh III, dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service, is reportedly serving as acting president of the university.
Banks was often met with pushback over the direction she was taking the university. The fallout over McElroy’s hiring, which garnered national media attention, was simply the culmination of Banks’ two-year tenure at Texas A&M.
As Breitbart News reported last week, McElroy was appointed to be the head of the journalism program at Texas A&M, but later had her contract reduced from five years to one year, after her woke history came to light. McElroy ended up deciding not to take the position at all in a win against DEI insanity.
When Banks was first arrived at Texas A&M, she reportedly immediately hired a consulting group to review the school’s organizational structure and recommend changes. In December 2021, Banks announced 41 recommendations that were implemented throughout her first year.
Some of the changes involved restructuring the university’s libraries so that they no longer housed tenured faculty, forcing tenured librarians to switch to another academic department in order to keep their tenure or else they would lose it entirely. Additionally, new hires were not eligible for tenure moving forward.
Banks also reportedly approved a restructuring of the Qatar campus, a branch of Texas A&M in the Middle East that offers engineering undergraduate and graduate degrees.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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