William C. Powers Jr.’s fortunes as president of the University of Texas at Austin seemed to shift quickly this week, when the system’s chancellor announced that the imperiled leader would be granted another 11 months at the helm of the flagship campus. But the Lazarus act, which allows Mr. Powers to leave office on his own terms, was actually years in the making.
The president will resign, effective June 2, 2015. That will allow for the sort of “graceful” exit that he had sought last week, when Francisco G. Cigarroa, the system’s chancellor, gave the president an ultimatum: resign by July 4, effective October 31, or be fired. The agreement this week put a fittingly messy coda on a years-long power struggle between an aggressive cadre of board members who wanted the president out and a steely campus chief with powerful connections.
It was those connections that surely bore down on the chancellor as he mulled over six agonizing days whether to grant Mr. Powers a stay of execution. In that time, lawmakers, donors, alumni, faculty members, students, and the head of the nation’s most prominent group of research universities all decried what came to be called the “July 4 coup.”
“We had a lot of support,” Mr. Powers said in an interview after Wednesday’s agreement. “I think that had a big influence.”
The roots of Mr. Powers’s untidy success story go back as far as 2008, when public higher education became the biggest political news in the famously politicized state of Texas.
At that time, Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, implicitly endorsed a conservative think tank’s prescription for the sector, which critics described as wasteful, expensive, and out of touch. The “seven breakthrough solutions” would change all of that, advocates argued, by treating students more like customers and ensuring that professors were as devoted to teaching as they were to doing research into often-esoteric topics.
Mr. Powers looked across that political landscape and drew one conclusion: The think tank’s proposals would weaken an elite research university, and he needed friends as powerful as Mr. Perry’s to stop them.
The president went straight to the University Development Board, a collection of wealthy and politically connected Texans, many of whom had given money to the governor’s campaigns. Mr. Powers’s message was simple, one of his advisers recalled: “We’re in trouble, and I need your help.”
“It really destabilized the governor’s political base,” said the adviser, who asked to remain anonymous so he could speak candidly amid a leadership crisis. “Many of those same people were people the governor needed.”
‘The Savior at the Gate’
The meeting with the development board helped give birth, in 2011, to the Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, a group of more than 400 former regents, chancellors, and presidents, along with Democratic and Republican politicians, professors, and others. The coalition’s members formed a bulwark against attacks on Mr. Powers, whom they came to view as a pure defender of education in a sleazy morass of political theater. The president, even his critics acknowledge, exploited that narrative to great effect.
Charles Miller, a former chairman of the Texas system’s Board of Regents, said Mr. Powers’s supporters continued to raise the specter of the “seven breakthrough solutions” because doing so fed into the president’s mythic status as a worthy adversary of the governor.
“It’s used to make Powers look like the savior at the gate,” Mr. Miller said.
Turmoil in Texas
The Texas Coalition has mounted an aggressive public-relations campaign, criticizing regents’ proposals for low-cost degrees and often coming to the defense of Mr. Powers, who has advocated for tuition increases at Austin. Central to the coalition’s effort is Burson-Marsteller, a marketing firm where Karen P. Hughes, an influential former adviser to President George W. Bush, is a worldwide vice chairwoman.
Some regents have painted the coalition as a well-financed smear squad. W. Eugene Powell, a member and former chairman of the Board of Regents, once complained to Texas Monthly that “someone is paying a professional PR firm between $200,000 and $300,000 a year to attack us.”
Coalition officials said those numbers were exaggerated, but the group’s budget and details about individual donors remain a mystery. As an unincorporated nonprofit association in Texas, the coalition does not have to file financial-disclosure forms.
Ego Factor
If Mr. Powers’s defenders were truly just crafting his image as a tough guy on a serious mission, the president brought with him some natural gifts to assist in the effort. For a defender of the professoriate, Bill Powers does not look much like the stereotype of a geeky, out-of-touch academic. He often eschews starched shirts and neckties for mock turtlenecks, looking just as comfortable on the sidelines of Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium as he does in a Faculty Council meeting. His raspy voice is more reminiscent of Mr. Eastwood than Mr. Chips.
The president’s backers often use words like “principled” to describe him. But words like “arrogant” also get attached to Mr. Powers. This is, after all, a man who was asked to resign but who effectively told his boss, “I will go when I’m ready.”
Shannon H. Ratliff, a former member and vice chairman of the Board of Regents, said a healthy dose of self-confidence comes with the job of flagship president.
“I don’t think somebody who runs an institution like that who doesn’t have any ego is going to do very well,” said Mr. Ratliff, a member of the Texas Coalition.
Others are less charitable.
“There is an elitism and an arrogance, too,” said Mr. Miller, the former regent and a close confidant of the chancellor. “I can’t understand why, over the whole term Powers has been president, he consistently disregarded and was hostile to his board, including people who were likely friends.”
Dr. Cigarroa, a pediatric transplant surgeon, has offered few specifics about how his relationship with Mr. Powers had become “strained to the point of becoming fractured,” as the chancellor said on Monday in a written statement.
But last summer the chancellor referred to Mr. Powers as “essentially insubordinate,” according to a regent’s notes of a closed-door meeting that were made public by Watchdog.org.
In an interview this week, Mr. Powers said he did not know what had compelled the chancellor to say that there had been a breakdown of trust between the two of them.
“That’s something I can’t speculate on,” Mr. Powers said.
The chancellor declined several interview requests.
Pressed on what recent event could have prompted the chancellor to seek his resignation, Mr. Powers said, “We talked in general terms. He represents an entire system; I represent a campus. Historically there are always differences of opinion about resources. His view was we were not dealing with them the right way.”
Tough Road Ahead
By any objective measure, the way forward for Mr. Powers, the campus he represents, and the Texas system appears rocky. Dr. Cigarroa, who announced in February that he would resign as chancellor once a successor was named, has asked for an external investigation of admissions practices at Austin. Lawmakers have been accused of trying to influence the admissions process for well-connected applicants, often sending recommendation letters directly to Mr. Powers.
A previous internal review of admissions on the flagship campus found no evidence of systemic favoritism but concluded that applicants with powerful backing were admitted at higher rates than those without.
A source familiar with the renewed inquiry, who asked for anonymity to discuss an investigation in progress, said it had come about after several people with “personal knowledge” of the admissions program had brought forward new information to the chancellor. What they told him, the source said, contradicted the conclusions of the previous review, which found that no overt pressure had been put on admissions officials.
A ‘Witch Hunt’
No one has been more vocal about the admissions issue than Wallace L. Hall Jr., a regent who has flooded the flagship campus with public-records requests in search of evidence of wrongdoing. Mr. Hall’s unabated pursuit of documents has been described by some as a “witch hunt,” and the regent could face impeachment and even criminal charges on the grounds that he has abused his power.
Meanwhile, a controversy that dates to Mr. Powers’s days as dean of the law school in Austin still hovers in the background. An investigation of the law school’s foundation, which provided forgivable loans to administrators and faculty members, has been referred to the state attorney general’s office. The investigation, a spokeswoman said last week, is “ongoing.”
Alex M. Cranberg, a Texas regent, said that many legitimate and unanswered questions remained before the board, and that Mr. Powers’s status did not change that.
“We have a great deal of work to do to more fully understand, with an open-minded spirit of inquiry, what has happened at UT and to make necessary reforms,” he said in an email. “I am hopeful that we shall do that.”
Mr. Cranberg, who has sought records on faculty workloads, among other things, is described in some quarters as an opponent of Mr. Powers. But he cautioned against looking at recent events in terms of which side had come out ahead.
“This should not be about any individual or group ‘winning,’ " he wrote. “It should be about trust and about improving the university, or it will be the loser.”
On that solitary point, the regent and Mr. Powers seem to agree.
“We need to get beyond this,” the president said.
“I’ve known the chancellor for a long time,” he added. “I have high regard for him, and we’ll work together going forward.”
