ulterior tactics for Texas higher education
Music: Girl in a Coma: Exits & All The Rest (2011)
A friend is helping to stage a "teach-in" to raise awareness and protest the larger corporatization of higher education at her employer (another flagship state university). She asked for links to blogs, stories, and articles about the topic. I responded that Texas is a staging ground for the national culture war over higher education, and that all one needed to do is type the term "Texas" into the search boxes on higher ed online outlets (I had in mind the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed). Of course, I typed too soon, because insofar as this chosen battlefield of the culture war is now recognized in the news media, I could have simply said "type Texas into any newspaper's search box." Which I did just moments ago for The Texas Tribune.
It appears the latest tactic by those who would transform the University of Texas at Austin into the University of Texas at Phoenix is a regency vote to audit an audit. As this story reports, some years ago the law school foundation (independent of the university) was busted for giving some law professors forgivable loans. The regency called for an audit and asked the dean of the law school to step down for having received a half-million dollar forgivable loan. This is dirty business, to be sure, and I assure you part of an entrenched "good ol' boy" culture here in Austin. No surprise, and it seems to me the call for an audit then and departure of the dean over this scandal was the right thing to do. The result of the audit, not surprisingly, was condemnation and the conclusion the loans were "not appropriate"; the foundation restructured its compensation carrot structures.
Two days ago, however, the regency voted (on a split vote---not good) to review the audit, to the tune of $500,000 dollars. They want another person to review the scandal to make sure the inappropriateness is properly documented. This move, of course, led to speculation about the motive: it's really about tying embattled UT President Bill Powers to the compensation scheme. As I've written about time and time again, the regency has been wanting to replace Powers with a more business-friendly puppet for some years, something which has even self-branded conservative Texas politicians upset. The political triangulation of UT-as-hokey-puck was no doubt fueled by the recession, but now the battle over higher education is in full play.
Insofar as one wishes to predict how the doping infiltrates the sport of higher education, take heed of the UT system's regency's strategy: audit, call for more efficiency, audit, call for more accountability, audit the audits, and so forth until you force leaders to resign (like our Provost just did), and then keep up the meddling until public hearings are called for by politicians who are worried, then audit again. This strategy is really effective as a public sport; then, in private, do the really mean and nasty stuff.