EXCLUSIVE — Faculty at Texas A&M University are looking to restrict the school’s responsiveness to public records requests after an inquiry into its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, claiming the requests are threatening and amount to harassment.
The move comes after the Washington Examiner reported on the TAMU nursing school’s support for DEI ahead of a Jan. 1 deadline to comply with a recently passed state law that blocked DEI initiatives at public institutions of higher education.
The American Accountability Foundation, which filed public information requests to obtain records about the nursing school’s DEI approach, sent a letter to TAMU general counsel Ray Bonilla on Wednesday raising concerns about the school apparently clamping down on its responsiveness to records requests.
“The faculty are attempting to undermine the goals of the [Texas Public Information Act] and ultimately frustrate the public’s ability to oversee the operations of the University,” states the letter from AAF President Tom Jones, obtained by the Washington Examiner. “By chilling the use of the PIA, they are undermining one of the most effective tools journalists and public interest groups have in overseeing government.”
The letter was prompted by a Dec. 11, 2023, meeting of the Faculty Senate in which Dr. Heather Lench, a professor and senior associate vice president for faculty affairs, claimed that public records requests from members of the media and interested groups are avenues to threaten faculty members.
Speaking about the work of the Task Force on Academic Freedom and Faculty Protection, which interim President Mark Welsh insisted on creating, Lench said the group had “developed guidelines for faculty who are threatened or harassed … and it can come through the open records process.”
The task force called public reporting about the actions of the school a threat to “academic freedom.”
“Dr. Lench’s assertion and endorsement of the idea that open records requests can constitute threats or harassment is both inaccurate and unfounded,” Jones wrote in the letter. “A government employee characterizing legally protected activity as arguably criminal activity can only fairly be construed as an effort to discourage records requests and cast their work in a negative light.”
“What seems to be at play here is that faculty members are attempting to shut down oversight and dissent by labeling it as harassment and threats,” the letter said.
The controversy over public records requests appears to come from Washington Examiner reporting on Dr. Arica Brandford, whose employment status at the university is unclear, and on the TAMU School of Nursing’s commitment to DEI.
Following the Faculty Senate meeting last month, Jane Bolin, a senior professor for the TAMU nursing school, did an interview with the Bryan-College Station Eagle that partly focused on the Washington Examiner reporting, and she explained that public scrutiny on one unnamed faculty member resulted in the person leaving the school.
She claimed that the faculty member, who appears to be Brandford, was “targeted … because of the color of her skin and because of some of the things she wrote about.” Exposing the school through public records requests further “caused some grave damage not only to the individual faculty member but to our school,” according to Bolin.
Bolin also claimed in the interview that the documents contained in the public records request included personal information, although the records appeared to have contained publicly available emails. She nonetheless called for the school to “closely monitor them and not immediately provide things that are protected.”
“Academics liked the good ‘ole days when they could push their divisive agenda without public scrutiny or legislative oversight,” Jones told the Washington Examiner. “Those days are passed, and professors like Arica Brandford can and should expect that groups like ours will use tools like public records requests to shine sunlight on their divisive teachings. If they cannot stand up to that public scrutiny, a public university is probably not the place for them.”
It appears that Brandford has left the university, as her online profile with the school has been scrubbed. A review of her now-deleted LinkedIn page also shows an end date for her time at TAMU in December 2023.
“The fact that Dr. Brandford apparently found the public scrutiny of her teaching so intolerable that she had to leave a tenure track position at one of the most prestigious universities in the world may be more of an indication on how out of step her scholarship is with the citizens of Texas than with how we used the Public Information Act,” the letter states.
As the Washington Examiner reported, while Texas’s law blocking DEI initiatives at institutions of higher education went into effect on Jan. 1, some schools legally obligated to comply are rebranding and rehousing the offices to maintain their influence.
Do No Harm, a medical advocacy organization that focuses on exposing racialized practices in the medical field, said shutting down freedom of information would harm the ability of the public to check the policies of taxpayer-funded institutions, as well as to monitor the schools that are creating the next generation of medical professionals.
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“As a respected institution with long-held traditions of excellence, Texas A&M must be among the universities with schools of medicine and nursing that strive to uphold them,” Dr. Laura Morgan, DNH program manager and nurse of 39 years, told the Washington Examiner. “For the patients that will be placing their trust into the graduates of the TAMU School of Nursing, it’s imperative that those nurses are educated in the art and science of patient care and healing — not skewed ideologies that aim to create division and mistrust.”
TAMU did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.