As reported by Kevin D. Williamson of National Review:
Why do state universities have boards of trustees?
* TO WATCH OVER THE ADMINISTRATION... THE
"MANAGEMENT."
In Texas, where the rather grandiose flagship university
system styles its trustees “regents,” the governor appoints representatives to
the universities’ governing boards in order to ensure that state resources are
being stewarded responsibly.
Governor Rick Perry has been more aggressive than most in
seeking to reform his state’s higher-education system, from innovations such as
his $10,000 degree challenge to such old-fashioned bugaboos as efficiency and
institutional honesty. One of the regents he appointed, Dallas businessman
Wallace Hall, pursued the latter energetically, and what he helped to uncover
was disturbing.
* VERY DISTURBING!
The dean of the law school resigned after it was revealed
that he had received a $500,000 “forgivable loan” from the law-school
foundation, without the university administration’s having been made aware of
the extra compensation. And in a development sure to put a grimace on the face
of any student or parent who has ever waited with anticipation to hear from a
first-choice college or graduate school, Mr. Hall uncovered the fact that
members of the Texas legislature were seeking and receiving favorable treatment
for family members and political allies in admissions to the university’s
prestigious law school.
Given the nature of these scandals — the improper use of
political power — it was natural enough that impeachments and criminal
investigations followed. What is unnatural — and inexplicable, and
indefensible, and shameful — is the fact that it is Wallace Hall who is facing
impeachment and possible charges.
* WHAT...?!?!
Mr. Hall, as noted, was appointed by Governor Perry, and
there is no overestimating the depth or intensity of the Texas higher-education
establishment’s hatred for Rick Perry. (He himself seems rather fond of his
alma mater, Texas A&M.) Perry’s dryland-farmer populism is not calculated
to please deans of diversity or professors of grievance, but academia’s Perry
hatred is more financial than cultural. The idea that a college degree, even a
specialized one, could be delivered for $10,000 is anathema to the
higher-education establishment, which views ever-soaring tuition as its own
collective welfare entitlement.
Texas’s ducal university presidents and (ye gods, but the
titles!) chancellors are accustomed to doing as they please and to enjoying
salaries and perks that would be the envy of many chief executives in the
private sector — not only the medieval holdover of tenure, but such postmodern
benefits as a comfy professorship for one’s spouse.
(*NOD*)
The last thing they want is some trustee — some nobody
appointed by the duly elected governor of the state to manage the resources of
the people who fund the universities — poking his nose in what they consider
their business rather than the state’s business.
(Mr. Hall, a successful investor and oil-and-gas
entrepreneur, is not an aspiring academic or politician, and he has little or
nothing to gain from annoying the university’s administration — other than the
satisfaction of doing the job that it is his duty to do.)
The case against Mr. Hall consists mainly of adjectives:
“vindictive,” “bullying,” “blustery,” “myopic,” “mean-spirited,” “intense,”
“malignant.”
The broad claim against him is that in the course of uncovering
plain wrongdoing by university officials and Texas politicians of both parties,
he used investigative techniques that amounted to harassment.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Setting aside the question of whether people engaged in
wrongdoing on the state’s dime should or should not be harassed — for the
record, the latter seems preferable to me — the case against Mr. Hall is mainly
that he asked for a great deal of information and that he was insufficiently
deferential to the refined sensibilities of the august ladies and gentlemen whose
proprietary treatment of the University of Texas is in question.
Mr. Hall is also accused of violating academic
confidentiality rules, and it is here that the storyteller enters the plot as a
minor character. I cannot avoid discussing my own small role in the case
inasmuch as my name appears a dozen times in grand inquisitor Rusty Hardin’s
vindictive, blustery, bullying, mean-spirited, vindictive report on the case,
and the report distorts my National Review Online reporting on the subject. For
example, Mr. Hardin writes: "That same day, Williamson posted a second
on-line article about the e-mails in which he states “it was suggested to me
that one of the legislators [Rep. Jim Pitts] leading the impeachment push was
one of the same legislators who had sought preferential treatment for their
children in admissions to the University of Texas law school.”
The name of Mr. Pitts in brackets suggests exactly the
opposite of what happened. In this, Mr. Hardin’s report is false and should be
immediately corrected.
As my reporting made clear, it was suggested to me by a
critic of the university that the push to impeach Mr. Hall was an attempt to
prevent the disclosure of the identity of those Texas legislators who were
seeking preferential treatment for family and friends in admission to the
university and its law school.
Nobody suggested that the smoking gun I was in search of
was to be found upon the hip of Representative Pitts.
My thinking at the time went roughly thus: “Surely none
of these legislators is stupid enough to be, at the same time, one of the
people who had leaned on the law school on behalf of their kids and one of the
people with their own names prominent in the Hall witch-hunt.”
I had assumed there would be a degree or two of
separation, but why not start with the prominent players? Being a hard-boiled
reporter type, I went through the exhaustive process of looking up the online
biographies of anti-Hall legislators and then googling their kids to see if any
were enrolled in, or were recent graduates of, the university or its law
school. After seven or eight minutes of grueling research apparently beyond the
abilities of the utterly supine, groveling, risible Austin media, I had a few
leads, and called the office of Representative Pitts, the chairman of the house
ways and means committee of the Texas state house, who did most of the rest of
the work for me, throwing a tantrum when I asked if he had sought special
treatment for his son but not denying that he had.
(Almost immediately afterward, he announced that he would
not be seeking reelection.)
I had underestimated the average Texas Republican’s
capacity for stupidity. Mr. Hardin et al. still seem to believe that my source
was Mr. Hall or one of his attorneys, when it was Google and Representative
Pitts.
On the subject of capacity estimates, one of the
interesting details of the case is the fact that the law school expressly
spelled out the reasons it could not admit Representative Pitts’s son, Ryan, and
it suggested two possibly remedies — retaking the LSAT or enrolling for a year
in a different law school and there proving his mettle — but young Ryan Pitts
was nonetheless admitted with neither of those conditions having been
satisfied.
It was a disserve to all involved: Coming out of a law
school with a 95% first-time passage rate on the state bar, he failed the exam
repeatedly — Pitts and two other political scions had at last count taken the
exam ten times among the three of them — another example of an
affirmative-action case undone by having been promoted over his capacities.
In addition to facing impeachment — a prospect the
American Council of Trustees and Alumni describes as an example of “expensive
witch hunts designed to discourage public servants from asking tough questions
in pursuit of the public interest” – Mr.
Hall also faces possible criminal prosecution by the so-called Public Integrity
Unit, a detail within the Travis County district attorney’s office charged with
investigating official wrongdoing.
(Those of you who have followed politics with any
interest will recognize the woefully misnamed Public Integrity Unit as the
former fiefdom of one Ronnie Earle, the Travis County prosecutor who engaged in
outrageous grand-jury shopping in order to indict Tom DeLay — on charges of
breaking a law that had not yet been passed at the time he was accused of
having violated it — and succeeded in ending Mr. DeLay’s political career
before having his case laughed out of court by a disdainful judge. Mr. Earle
had tried the same thing before with Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, with less
success.)
* YEP...
The out-of-control prosecutorial unit has recently turned
its political wrath on — surprise — Rick Perry.
Unhappy with the unit’s leadership — its publicly drunk,
rage-filled, weeping, puppy-concerned, locked-in-restraints,
pretty-much-bonkers leadership — Governor Perry vetoed the unit’s funding, and
his office made it known that it would not be restored while current leadership
was in place. Specifically, Governor Perry’s office wanted the ouster of the
boss, Rosemary Lehmberg. Democrats say that Governor Perry wanted her scalp
because she’s a Democrat and investigating his allies; the Perry camp maintains
that the proximate cause was Ms. Lehmberg’s arrest on drunk-driving charges and
her hilarious “Do You Know Who I Am?” performance, which was, conveniently,
caught on video.
(It was not the Travis County district attorney office’s
only DWI arrest of late, either.)
In a legal theory worthy of the time-traveling Ronnie
Earle, Texas Democrats have filed a complaint that Governor Perry’s insistence
that he’d keep vetoing the Public Integrity Unit’s funding as long as its
embarrassing leadership was in place constituted an offer of bribery, i.e., that
his apparent willingness to see the detail’s state funding restored after a
change of leadership amounted to an illegal payoff. A special prosecutor is to
consider the question. If the complaint against Governor Perry has any merit,
then every legislative deal ever made in the history of the republic is an act
of corruption.
And that’s where Texas is right now: A regent exposes
wrongdoing at the University of Texas and in the legislature, and the regent
gets impeached, possibly prosecuted. The chief prosecutor for a “Public
Integrity Unit” gets hauled in on drunk-driving charges, throws a fit, makes
threats — and Rick Perry is in trouble for demanding her ouster.
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