In his nine years as president of the University of Texas at Austin, William C. Powers Jr. has forged a reputation among his supporters as a stalwart defender of academic principles, protecting the flagship campus from legislative interference.
But a report released on Thursday complicates that narrative.
Behind closed doors, Mr. Powers dutifully carried out the will of the Texas political class, according to an independent investigation of admissions practices on the flagship campus. At the behest of lawmakers, donors, and members of the University of Texas system’s board, the president frequently intervened on behalf of well-connected applicants, sometimes overruling the university’s admissions staff to ensure a “must have” student got a seat, the report found.
A previous internal investigation concluded that applicants with political ties had fared better than others, but the 104-page document released on Thursday provides far more detail about a system used to isolate those prospective students for special review and Mr. Powers’s personal involvement in it. The report was compiled by Kroll Associates, an independent consulting firm.
Perhaps most damning are charges that Mr. Powers and his chief of staff were not forthcoming when first questioned about the admissions system and a contention that staff members had destroyed evidence of their secret deliberations concerning the president’s favored applicants.
Mr. Powers has had a rocky presidency, which is scheduled to end in June. Francisco G. Cigarroa, who recently stepped down as the university system’s chancellor, gave the president an ultimatum last summer to resign or be fired. But Mr. Powers has significant political power in the state, and that helped him to secure a deal that allowed him to leave on his own terms.
‘Sludge’ Brought to Light
The president has been particularly effective at defining himself as a man at war with political interference in Texas, and the revelations in the admissions report could chip away at the core of his brand.
Beginning in 2008, Mr. Powers pushed back against a conservative think tank’s proposal to run the state’s universities more like businesses. The “seven breakthrough solutions,” which were implicitly endorsed by the governor at the time, Rick Perry, a Republican, would have de-emphasized research and treated students as customers.
By taking on that political fight with gusto, Mr. Powers was cheered as a defender of the professoriate, fending off the state’s conservative legislative wing. But the admissions report shows a far-more-complex picture of a university chief, who publicly criticized the politicization of academe while privately accepting that “relational factors” had to be considered when an applicant had a lawmaker’s backing.
Kroll’s investigators found no evidence of a “quid pro quo” between lawmakers and the president. Mr. Powers acknowledged to investigators, however, that he gave special attention to letters from legislators because they could have a “major impact on the university,” the report states.
Calvin C. Jillson, a political-science professor at Southern Methodist University, said that most faculty members accept that Mr. Powers’s job is, in part, to “keep the barbarians at bay” so that the university can accomplish its goals. That means giving politicians some of what they want, he said.
“His supporters would see one of his strengths as deftly managing that stream of sludge that has to flow through the university,” Mr. Jillson said.
But no one really wants to see the sludge, and the report shines a light on it.
“Specific examples of students admitted, who seem to have marginal credentials, those individual cases will be a cause of revulsion,” Mr. Jillson said. “And that will reflect on Powers.”
The report could be read as a vindication of Wallace L. Hall Jr., a member of the Texas Board of Regents who has been particularly eager to see the admissions issue investigated. Mr. Hall has been accused of conducting a “witch hunt” to embarrass Mr. Powers, and a legislative committee has censured the regent for his behavior.
Speaking with reporters on Thursday, Mr. Powers said the report was “thorough and accurate and fair.” He described its findings as little more than an exploration of how admissions works “at virtually every selective university in America.”
Yet the university appears to have gone to considerable lengths to keep the process hidden. When representatives of the president’s office and admissions met to discuss the applicants, they ensured there would be no paper trail, the report states.
“At one meeting, the administrative assistants tried not keeping any notes, but this proved difficult, so they took notes and later shredded them,” the report says. “One administrative assistant usually brought to these meetings a stack of index cards that were subsequently destroyed.”
A Trap for Presidents
Louis L. Hirsh, a former director of admissions at the University of Delaware, said he did not think presidential influence in admissions was “unique.” But he said he was surprised, years after a high-profile admissions scandal at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, that any president would risk getting heavily involved in the process.
“We need to hold off until we hear his side of the story, but I’m amazed that any president would fall into this kind of trap,” said Mr. Hirsh, a member of the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s Admissions Practices Committee.
Investigators did not find evidence that class seats had been saved for special applicants, but rather that enrollment had been expanded to accommodate them.
The president’s office, the report says, had influence over the admissions process in both the undergraduate program and the law school, both of which have highly competitive admissions.
There is no indication that the report will hasten Mr. Powers’s departure from the presidency. Adm. William H. McRaven, the system’s new chancellor, told reporters on Thursday that “disciplinary action” was not on the table either.
“I’ve read the report a half-dozen times in totality, and I found no willful misconduct, no criminal activity on the part of any of the folks at the University of Texas at Austin, and have told the Board of Regents that I intend to take no disciplinary action,” he said.
“Can we do things better? You bet,” he continued. “Should we have been more transparent? Absolutely. Are we going to get this fixed? No doubt about it.”
Mr. Powers pushed back against the report’s suggestion that he had not been forthcoming, saying he had been “truthful and not evasive” in his dealings with investigators.
Investigators took a different view.
“Although President Powers and his chief of staff appear to have answered the specific questions asked of them with technical precision, it appears that by their material omissions they misled the inquiry,” the report states. “At minimum, each failed to speak with the candor and forthrightness expected of people in their respective positions of trust and leadership.”
Mark P. Jones, a professor of political science at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, said that the president’s staunchest supporters would probably read the report as evidence of Mr. Powers’s reasonable efforts to put Austin in a politically favorable position.
That said, he added, the findings “remove some of the luster from Powers’s shining star.”
Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.
Katherine Mangan, reporting from Austin, Tex., and Eric Hoover, reporting from Washington, contributed to this article.
