A Tale of Two Presidencies | Texas A&M Caught Up In Culture Wars

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I just have a question because I'm not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching. This is a covertly recorded video, captured in a classroom at Texas A&M, in August of 2025. It's from a children's literature course, which specialized in childhood exploration of identity. That promote gender ideology, and this also very much goes against not only myself, but a lot of people's religious beliefs. The person recording was offended by the coursework and had decided to confront the professor.

The next day, the same student met with A&M President Mark Welsh, Welsh had been president for just under two years at the time, and was a breath of fresh air for the school after years of turmoil. But only a week after this video was made public, the campus was shocked to learn Welsh had been forced to resign. I'm Ian Mont, this week on campus files, a tale of two presidencies, Texas A&M caught up in cultural wars. If you're not from Texas, you may not appreciate how big a deal Texas A&M is. Originally founded in 1876, it ascents grown into a massive multi-campus university system.

It was originally an agricultural and mechanical school, which gave it the A&M acronyms known by. Today, A&M students and alumni are called Aggies. A&M's flagship campus and college station has the largest student population in the United States.

“I think one of the unique parts about being a student journalist here is that A&M just can't seem to stay out of the headlines.”

It seems like every year, every few months, this is major events on campus, where something one way or another blows up. This story in itself has been in the making, I think, for the past two years. This is Nico Cottridge. When we spoke, Nico was a senior journalism student at Texas A&M. He had previously been the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper and was selected for a reporting fellowship at the Texas Tribune,

where he would report on Welsh's Oster with colleagues. Let's start by going back to 2023, and the resignation of a different A&M president, Kathy Banks. Now, as it is the government's toy right now, after weeks of turmoil, the president of Texas A&M is quit resigned. Banks resigned from A&M's presidency after two years marked by controversy. She had introduced a massive but unpopular reorganization, which lost the trust and support of most A&M's more than 4,000 faculty members.

And then things got worse when she was caught up in the botched hiring of a faculty member to run A&M's revived journalism program. Banks had picked Kathleen Mackleroy, a popular choice on campus, but Mackleroy is a black woman, who previously spoke about improving diversity in the newsroom. But A&M's conservative leadership were already trying to crack down on so-called woke ideology on campus and found this unacceptable.

Mackleroy's job offer was watered down to the point where she declined the job, which Dr. Banks was ultimately blamed for.

So, after a bumpy couple of years, a new president was needed to study the ship.

“The job of the president is interesting because I am the least important person on this campus.”

I honestly believe that. For many retired general Mark Welch, the third was the obvious choice. My job is to enable everybody else to be important. People should think about our unbelievable faculty, about our totally committed and dedicated staff, about students who are going to go no kidding change our state in our world. That's who people ought to be.

The first few weeks to months of his tenure and the way in which he was communicating with such ease and clarity.

It became very clear to me like, oh, of course, this is why you would bring someone in like this. This is Kate McGee. Kate is a reporter at the Texas Tribune covering higher education.

Kate's reporting partner Niko had seen the ramifications of President Banks's short tenure. One of the things Welch did as soon as he stepped in was essentially oververse much of what Kathy Banks had done during her tenure. And she found a lot of criticism for a few things. She sideline faculty and a lot of decisions.

“And I think the faculty voice that Texas A&M is something that's very, you know, it's particularly important.”

It's probably every institution, but A&M, you know, there's 4,000 faculty here. And it's very difficult to make such major decisions as she was making without including that voice in the process in a sense. Welch also made communication and an open door policy central to his presidency right from the outset.

He was known to take meetings with basically anyone who contacted him.

That was something Kathy Banks was very well known to not have done well. That was one of the major reasons. If not the major reason, he would be so well liked. But Welch's popularity went beyond being a good communicator. Here's Kate. Welch, when he came in as interim president, was a known quantity on campus.

He had been dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service, which is a pretty renowned school on campus for seven years. He was known as being like a nonpartisan consensus builder.

“And those were the kinds of qualities he brought to the presidency.”

Before he came to A&M, he was a four-star general in the Air Force.

A&M is for people who are not familiar with the school is steeped in military tradition.

Texas A&M is home to the largest Cadet Corps in the United States, with more than half of its 60,000 undergrad participating. The history of the Cadet Corps stretches all the way back to the founding of the university. Cadets receive military and leadership training and often take jobs in the military upon graduation. For many years, membership in the Cadet Corps was mandatory. It's not anymore, but the heritage persists, as does an emphasis on tradition.

And Mark Welch was a retired four-star general. President Obama appointed him to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking military leadership in the country, responsible for advising the president and the secretary of defense. I really don't know anybody else on campus who could probably have stepped in to those shoes at the time. I had more people tell me if Welch was president of the university five ten years ago,

he probably would have been a decade long president. But shockingly, it was these military credentials, which he was so revered for,

that ultimately planted the seeds for his dramatic ouster, just two short years later.

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Listen to cautionary tales, wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever felt like you were living just a bee or bee-plus life? It's so dangerous to live that more dangerous than a bee minus or a sea-plus life, because when you're living a bee or bee-plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough?

Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You.

“People think okay, and A-plus life is not available to me,”

but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You, wherever you get your podcasts. Texas has 25-plus public universities that are all organized into university systems with a chancellor and a board of regions at the top.

That's Texas Tribune reporter Kate McGee. They typically hire the big names that you hear at a university, the chancellor, the university presidents, and the football coaches. Their state statute that kind of spells out what the board is supposed to do and what their roles are.

And one of their roles is that they are supposed to, even though they are appointed by the governor, their job is to almost defend the university to make sure that they can act independently.

Being an office for that long meant he had appointed every region at every public university in Texas.

“And one of the major kind of criticisms or concerns that we heard throughout reporting this story”

is that the board of regents see their role as serving the governor. That's who they are supposed to be serving rather than doing what might be best for the university. And this new slate of regents appeared to be especially vulnerable to chatter online. When Kathy Banks resigned as A&M's president, Mark Welch was appointed as interim president and was seen as a shoe in for the permanent job.

But parts of his background were fodder for the online chatter the new regents were so keyed into. In Texas there is a political website called Texas Scorecard that has largely received a lot of funding from large Republican mega donors who live in the state and scorecard,

particularly homed in on Welch from the get go.

Immediately Welch was hit with attacks for being appointed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff by President Obama, even though the military is an apolitical organization.

“Texas Scorecard also quoted times when Welch spoke about the importance of improving diversity in the military.”

Those comments in particular raised a lot of red flags for some of the regents. In emails from the time one regent shared a Texas Scorecard link saying, "We really need to vet this guy." From what I've heard along with this and other articles, I have many questions. Texas Governor Greg Abbott also expressed concern over Welch. The two met in Austin Abbott peppered Welch with questions, but he wasn't satisfied with Welch's answers,

and wanted someone more willing to act on conservative politics. But Welch had already made a good impression during his interim presidency. Because Welch was seen as such a steady hand on campus, the regents still went with him after all of that. Because of what they saw him be able to do in terms of coming the waters back in college station. President Welch, we congratulate you today on your investiture as President of Texas A&M University.

Whereas more gross believes that leadership is a gift.

“It's given by those who follow, but you have to be more of the evidence.”

Well Welch managed to get the campus back on track. He also inherited a number of political hot potatoes, including one involving the A&M Corps of Cadets. Here's Texas Tribune reporting fellow, Nico. One of the cadets over at Texas A&M had, by this point, come out as a transgender woman, and Texas A&M wasn't allowing her to use kind of female vestiums with her gender identity.

The cadet had come out as transgender long before Welch became president. The university had also already worked out an arrangement with the cadet, where they would ensure she would have access to a gender neutral bathroom by her senior year. But then, the Biden administration proposed a change to Title IX. The rules preventing sex-based discrimination and higher ed.

The new rules would require colleges to provide equal access to transgender students. By this point, she was kind of threatening to report the university to the Biden administration to the education department for violating her kind of civil rights. According to reporting, at this point, she only had access to one staff bathroom in the entire Cadet core facility. Anytime she needed to use the bathroom, she had to travel all the way to that specific bathroom.

And with a campus as big as A&M, something as simple as using the bathroom became a huge obstacle, which only she had to deal with, which is exactly what Title IX is designed to prevent. As seen as Welch stepped in as president, he had immediately inherited this issue. This began long before he stepped in as president.

That kind of culminated in this one December 2022 meeting that we were able to ping down at the quite a bit of reporting. President for the meeting was the Board of Regents, President Welch, and the commentant of the Cadet core. And they came to this kind of agreement where rather than build gender-neutral restrooms across the core, they would build four gender-neutral restrooms, one in four of the cores, twelve dooms. And that agreement very much went through.

To this day, there are four gender-neutral restrooms that takes us to see them. With the Regents sign off, the plan went ahead.

It would cost about three million dollars, but it wasn't solely for this student.

A&M was also using this as a pilot program for future dorms. The way it was explained to us, too, was not only to accommodate this individual student, but to accommodate all students, not just transgender students, but any student who maybe wanted more privacy in their bathroom usage. But obviously, they got politicized.

This one very conservative alumni organization called BeWetter Association.

“They were founded back in 2020 to protect this one statue on campus.”

And it was a statue of a person who was one of the first presidents of the university, but also a Confederate general. And so in 2024, when they heard of this kind of happening to constructions undergoing, this emitted quite a few open records for quests to the university got a lot of records about the restrooms.

And from there, they wrote this kind of large editorial alleging that texting and I would spend $72 million building gender-neutral restrooms all across the core of Cadets.

And that blew up immediately. The $72 million figure and much of their editorial was entirely bogus, but it was shocking, so it spread like wildfire. It's very difficult to properly portray how much a lot of the more conservative alumni of the university were not particularly fans of that, especially those in the core and many core alumni as one note are, you know, lawmakers, many other, a few other regions were in the core. After the post went live, Welsh and the regions were inundated with angry calls and messages.

One alum wrote, quote, "This is the kind of crap that makes me despise the university that I used to love." "All of that hate, all of that criticism that came from that came to Welsh."

“And I think that's one of the defining muggers of his presidency.”

This kind of swirling misinformation around so much of what he did around all of these decisions, being miscarriage and maybe one way or another. To make matters worse, Welsh was also dealing with backlash over the common dawn. The man in charge of the core of Cadets. In addition to being involved in the bathroom renovations, the common dawn had also tried to crack down on hazing.

And had apparently promoted too many female leaders in the core, according to critics. And Welsh was holding firm to say, "No, I'm working with him, we're trying to figure this out.

He's making progress, I've given him the feedback, but in August of 2024, he ended up finally telling the common dawn that he had to go and fired him

because the board had a meeting took a vote internally and said, "We want this guy gone." This moment is emblematic of what appears to be a major change in the board of regions. Rather than taking an impartial long view, regions were instead responding to momentary political whim and insisting Welsh do the same. They felt that they needed to get involved in that Welsh wasn't taking a strong enough stand

to lead the university in the way that they wanted. This wasn't the only time the region's felt Welsh had failed to act politically enough. He was also targeted by nearly weekly posts from Texas scorecard, about courses touching on LGBTQ topics and a number of other real or fabricated scandals. At this point, life at A&M was a tale of two presidencies.

On one side, Welsh had made major in roads on campus and had become a beloved figure amongst students and faculty. But on the other side, his relationship with the starkly conservative regions, who, by all appearances, cared more about public opinion, was deeply afraid. Something which became clear when Kate and Nico reviewed emails between Welsh and the regions.

“I think seeing, especially the back and forth in writing, to me, signaled just how afraid the communication was,”

especially knowing that Welsh was the kind of person who was known on campus to meet with anyone. And it's the Texas scorecard posts about LGBTQ course content.

One region wrote to Welsh, "When does our administration's obsession with student sexual preference and lifestyle finally stop?

Why do we allow the administration to continue to promote these liberal agendas?" In another exchange, after A&M's baseball coach left, the same region wrote, "We'd better not lose our baseball coach." Welsh responded, "Okay, let's be straight. He's gone. We didn't lose him. He left." Not sure what you're expecting here, or what you hope to accomplish with threats. The region fired back, "You're in way over your head."

If these kinds of things are being exchanged in email, to me that said that they weren't meeting in person and having any kind of like frank conversations to build consensus or to come to some kind of mutual understanding that there was clearly two sides. After years of building tension, one small incident in a classroom was enough for the relationship to finally snap. And that brings us back to the video you heard at the top of this episode. I just have a question because I'm not entirely sure this is legal to be teaching.

It was the first time I've seen the straw in school, and then I was shocked.

“"No, not this straw, it's my taste base."”

"Are you all right?" "Yes, exactly." "This straw is like a straw, which is easy to understand." "The idea of the idea of a job or a job." "It's like a straw."

"It's like a straw." "With this straw." "It starts back in July." "In the second semester of Texas A&M." "That's Nico."

"He's describing the incident which ultimately killed Walsh's time as President of A&M."

"The professor who was in the list of the core was teaching a semester's worth of children's literature." Her version of the course included a section focused on representation of LGBTQ identities in children's literature. A time when young people begin to understand their own identity. "How do we properly represent maybe more marginalized communities in children's literature and how do we portray these communities properly?" It was in this course that a student recorded herself confronting the professor.

Following the confrontation, Professor McCool asked the student to leave, so she could continue with her lecture.

“I think the day after that that student met one-on-one with President Walsh.”

So in that conversation they had, the student was asking President Walsh to fire the professor for essentially quote-unquote breaking the law. In that one-on-one conversation with Walsh, it was also recorded by that same student. "What do you expect the student to do, fire?" "Yes, absolutely because it goes in there." "Well, that's not it."

You can hear in the video that Walsh walks at the idea of firing the professor. She had not violated any laws and had taught that course successfully many times before. But that context is missing when these videos are posted by Texas State Representative Brian Harrison, who had already been attacking Walsh for months. "It's almost a university on a siege by the time like this video went live.

It was very much just seeming like they would not stop until they got this kind of scalp. There was state lawmakers calling, you know, or Walsh's resignation. And you know, by this point, Brian Harrison had probably called for his resignation at least like a hundred times in many different contexts. But, you know, by this point, it was extending to other state lawmakers. "Well, she was forced to respond to public pressure by firing the professor and demoting two of her supervisors.

In spite of the fact, she had not violated any laws or campus rules. Professor McCool has since sued the school over her termination." Right after these videos got released, the records coming into the regions were, "This guy needs to be fired, this guy needs to go." And then the second that there was a rumor that they were actually going to get rid of him,

a new wave of people started chiming in with their support for Walsh to say,

"You cannot let this guy go. He has been incredible for our university.

This would be a huge mistake." Former President Bush's own son weighed in defending Walsh, and urging the university not to get caught up in sensationalized cultural conflicts. But the effort to save Walsh had one major obstacle. The board chair told us that he spoke to the governor,

and that the governor said was time for a change, which, no matter how much autonomy he might have given to the board to make a decision,

“I think anyone could understand that the person who appoints you to your job,”

their word carries a lot of weight. Within days of the video going live, Regents had been calling around, looking for a placement for Walsh. Walsh only learned about this when one potential candidate called him after getting a soft offer. While that candidate turned down the offer,

after a week the Regents had found their replacement. Walsh was finally given an ultimatum, resign or be fired. There was nothing Bush could do by that point. So by that Thursday, he would announce his resignation. Less than an hour ago, Mark Walsh became the former Texas A&M University president.

Walsh resigned from the job and left campus a final time as its leader. The day Walsh resigned, Nico happened to be reporting on a board of Regents meeting. At the end of the meeting, Nico had a chance to interview the chair of the board. As we're interviewing him, it was announced via this big email blast that the Welsh had announced his resignation. When Nico saw this news, he had a question for the chair of the board.

I think the exact thing I asked him was, "Well, what are you looking for in a university president that Welsh couldn't bring to the table?"

kind of stepped in and with the talking point and everything.

Online, the news was cheered.

“The rudder association posted a letter celebrating his departure.”

The Texas representative who posted the classroom video tweeted in all caps, "We did it." The Texas A&M president is out.

Tommy Williams, a conservative Texas politician with almost no higher ed experience, was picked as interim president.

And the A&M has triggered a wave of changes across the state. We've seen this year cracking down on schools that they think are indoctrinating students with liberal ideologies.

“And I think there's going to have profound change, but I think we live in such a politicized society that I think there are as many people who see that as like the crumbling of civilization as there are people who celebrate it.”

While Welsh's aster was celebrated online, the news was a shock on a campus that had grown to respect and admire him.

He announced his resignation on a Thursday. The next day, Friday would be his final day.

I think there's a lot of kind of perception a lot of the time at a lot of universities that maybe students don't know who the president is or are connected to the topic of the ministry it is. Doing Welsh's presidency, that was not the perception whatsoever, based off my experience both as a student journalist and as a regular student. Within hours of Welsh announcing his resignation, plans were made for students, staff and faculty together outside his office. To see him off on his final day. That afternoon, hundreds showed up.

“I'm outside the administration building on campus where President Mark Walsh got a send off from hundreds of Aggies just hours before his time as president ended at 5 p.m.”

He shows up for us. He embodies the Aggie Corps values. Even though he's not an Aggie himself, he definitely is the true example of what an Aggie should be. And at the same office, students were crying. And students were giving him hugs and everything. And people had on such your notice written up these large signs and everything, praising him. And hundreds and hundreds of people had come out. The student body president was one of the first people where on the steps never before at least, you know, in my experience, what I've seen in what I've researched as a president had such a send off like this.

It was very shocking and very surprising. And I'm not sure if there's ever going to be anything like that in the near future. [Music] If you've got a story idea, we would love to hear about it. Send us an email at [email protected]. And if you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite podcast app, see you never miss an episode. While you're there, leave us a review and a five star rating. Campusfiles is an Odyssey original podcast hosted by Margo Gray and Ian Mont. Our executive producers are Leah Reece Dennis and Lloyd Lockridge. Campusfiles is produced by Ian Mont and Margo Gray.

Sound design and engineering by Andy Jaskowitz and Zach Clark. Legal support by Laura Burman and Melissa Jean. Original music by Davy Sumner. Special thanks to more occurin, Josephina Francis, Gallery Shuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchison Rose, Sean Cherry, Kirk Courtney and Lauren Viera. Some crimes are so shocking, they don't just make headlines, they forever change our society. I'm Katie Rang host of America's most infamous crimes. Each week, I take on one of the most notorious criminal cases. Each case unfolds across multiple episodes, release every Tuesday through Thursday.

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