The Eagle has the story:

When Mike McKinney received the letter from the president of a prestigious national organization urging him to resist the influence of a conservative think tank, the A&M System chief threw it away, he said.
“It was a thinly veiled threat,” McKinney said of the fall letter from Robert Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities, the 63-member group that Texas A&M University joined in 2001. “With all due respect, he didn’t know what he was talking about.”
The strongly worded letter — which The Eagle had filed an open records request for last week but was first obtained byThe Texas Tribune and posted Monday evening — criticizes the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a group whose ideas have been embraced by the A&M System and its Board of Regents.
Berdahl rebuked the group’s idea to split teaching and research budgets, as well as a program that gives teachers cash awards based on anonymous student evaluations, which was unrolled in the A&M System in fall 2008. He also said an idea by the A&M System to measure the dollar-value of faculty members fails to factor “the quality, creativity, or impact of a faculty member’s work.”

I wrote about A&M’s system for evaluating professors’ contributions to their universities a while back.