Katie Rogers no longer holds her position as executive director at Alamo Trust after pressure from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who called for her resignation.
Executive Director Katie Rogers no longer holds her position overseeing the Alamo Trust, the Express-News reports.
Her sudden departure comes after Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called for her resignation because he didn’t like an opinion she expressed in an excerpt from her college dissertation.
The Express-News reports that journalists attempting to reach Rogers on Friday morning were met with a voicemail stating that she’s “no longer with” the Alamo Trust. The nonprofit that oversees the historic site has yet to issue a statement on Rogers’ employment status.
In a letter to the Board of Trustees calling for her resignation, Patrick called views presented in Rogers’ dissertation “incompatible with the telling of the history of the battle of the Alamo.”
“I will continue to defend the Alamo today against a rewrite of history,” Patrick wrote in the letter.
Rogers wrote her dissertation while earning a doctorate in education from the University of Southern California in 2023. The part in the dissertation that apparently triggered Patrick’s response argued that teachers — not politicians — should decide what to teach in the classroom.
“Philosophically, I do not believe it is the role of politicians to determine what professional educators can or should teach in the classroom,” Rogers wrote. “Instead, teachers should be afforded the autonomy to make those decisions based on their own expertise as well as the needs of their students.”
Rogers served the Alamo Trust’s executive director since March 2021. During that time, she’s spearheaded the $550 million reimagining of the historic battleground.
Former Mayor Ron Nirenberg called Patrick’s letter demanding her resignation “really dumb” in a Thursday social media post.
“Kate Rogers was the right leader at the right time to bring stable, fact-focused leadership to the difficult and important work of the Alamo redevelopment project,” Nirenberg said. “Don’t let any extremist Republican lecture you about ‘cancel culture’ ever again.”
Current San Antonio mayor Gina Ortiz Jones also criticized the pressure campaign that led to Rogers’ departure in a statement released Friday.
“The Alamo Trust was well-served by Dr. Rogers for many years, and this is a huge loss for our state,” Jones said. “The courage to tell the varied experiences of those at the Alamo—not pandering to certain people—should drive how we help the next generation learn about this historic site.”
In his own Friday statement, County Judge Peter Sakai also spoke out about Patrick’s pressure for Rogers to step down, likening the move to erasing Japanese internment camp history.
“This is gross political interference,” Sakai said. “The next thing you know, they will be denying Japanese internment. We need to get politics out of our teaching of history. Period.”
Rogers’ departure comes after heated online discourse over a social media post from the official Alamo account honoring Indigenous Peoples Day, which Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, another Republican officeholder, blasted as “woke.”
The Alamo’s post, which has since been taken down, also teased an Indigenous gallery slated to open at the site’s visitor center in 2027.
The dissertation, shared by the Express-News, appears to predict that Rogers might encounter political blowback in her role overseeing the historical site.
“Perhaps the biggest dilemma for me as a researcher and the actual ‘instrument’ in this qualitative study had to do with my own political views and my current environment,” the manuscript reads.
The manuscript, shared by the Express-News, discussed the difficulty of balancing state leaders’ hands-on involvement and interest in honoring the “defenders” of the historic site with near-opposite views held at the local level by Indigenous and Mexican-American community leaders.
“Personally, I would love to see the Alamo become a beacon for historical reconciliation and a place that brings people together versus tearing them apart, but politically that may not be possible at this time,” Rogers’ dissertation continued in an almost prescient fashion.
“For all of these reasons, I had to be very careful with my study and its implications as it could have negative consequences for the $300 million Alamo Plan as well as my job.”
Subscribe to SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
Related Stories
‘Woke has no place at the Alamo,’ Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham said.
Culture warrior Patrick wants her gone because her dissertation argued that teachers, not politicians, should decide what’s taught in schools.
No, it’s not in the basement. (We checked.)