Bungled Hiring of Journalism Director Exposes Rift at Texas A&M
“A lot of people think that representation is only important when you’re young, and you’re growing up, on TV and in movies, but I think it’s also extremely important on college campuses,” Ms. May said.
But some other alumni were troubled by the initial selection of Dr. McElroy, a former New York Times editor and longtime journalist and now a professor at the University of Texas, to lead her alma mater’s revived journalism program. Some conservative alumni and students had criticized her for her research on race in media and recent writings in which she described the benefits of having a diverse faculty or newsroom.
Valerie Muñoz, a journalism student at Texas A&M, last month wrote an article for Texas Scorecard, a conservative news website, under the headline “Aggies Hire NY Times ‘Diversity’ Advocate To Head Journalism Program.” Ms. Muñoz highlighted a 2021 interview of Dr. McElroy by WBUR in Boston in which she said that journalism that was perceived as objective often favored a white, male perspective and that journalism was “not about getting two sides of a story or three sides of a story if one side is illegitimate.”
Preston Phillips, the chairman of the university’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter, a conservative student group, said critics were wrong to say that the backlash to her appointment was because of her race. He and other conservatives on campus, he said, were worried about what her writings on diversity and race indicated about her political leanings.
Source: The New York Times
