, The Battalion
The notification was one of a million.
She let it sit for a moment before grabbing the phone and bringing it to her face, expecting nothing more than a question from her co-worker or a response from the student she was helping. But the email — sent from Texas A&M’s Office of Open Records — was unusual: Under the state’s Public Information Act, she was being asked for copies of her syllabi and all emails she had sent containing the words “DEI” and “transgender.”
The professor’s main confusion came from the requestor, however. It was a name she had never seen before. Who would be interested in what was ultimately a few benign emails?
Her case wasn’t unique among faculty and staff. Representatives of Texas Scorecard, a right-wing website that publishes articles about state and local politics, submitted more than 100 open records requests to Texas A&M and the System from 2022-24.
“Virtually every article they publish is not fully factual, sometimes not even close to factual,” President Mark A. Welsh III told The Battalion in a sit-down interview in November 2024. “They have never printed a retraction when we provided them the facts.”
Scorecard’s posts, however, spread like wildfire.
Read the full story at thebatt.com.
