The University of Texas system has spent the past two years airing plenty of dirty laundry, and that is thanks in large part to Wallace L. Hall Jr.
Mr. Hall, who was appointed to the Texas Board of Regents in 2011, has made it his mission to look into the dark corners of the university, focusing much of his attention on the flagship campus in Austin, where Mr. Hall has questioned spending and admissions decisions. With the gusto of a muckraking reporter, the Texas businessman has spent hours and hours sifting through boxes of university documents, searching for evidence of sweetheart deals or even coverups.
Mr. Hall may sound like just the sort of highly engaged board member that colleges need right now, when trustees are often criticized for failing to spot crises in the making. But Mr. Hall’s critics describe the regent as a conservative ideologue whose only real goal is to embarrass and fire William C. Powers Jr., president of the University of Texas at Austin. To his detractors, Mr. Hall’s investigations are little more than witch hunts that distract the board from its important oversight role.
A recent report to a state legislative committee agreed that Mr. Hall had overstepped some lines. In fact, his actions—including the issuance of “unreasonable and burdensome requests for records"—could be grounds for impeachment, said the report, made public this month, which was written by a special counsel to the Texas House Select Committee on Transparency in State Agency Operations.
The regent could also face criminal charges for disclosing private student information, which was included in records he obtained.
Mr. Hall’s unconventional tactics as a regent raise important questions for college boards: Where is the line between effective oversight of an institution and outright harassment or micromanagement? As trustees are pressed to be more aggressive in seeking out information, how far can they go without overstepping their bounds?
Shannon H. Ratliff, a former vice chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents, says he is convinced that Mr. Hall’s investigations amount to fishing expeditions with no real strategic purpose. Beginning in 2012, for example, Mr. Hall made a series of requests for copies of all of the records requests the Austin campus received and all of the responses it provided.
“I don’t see anything he’s doing as having a constructive impetus,” Mr. Ratliff says.
Regents are responsible for overseeing nine universities and six health institutions, but Mr. Hall has focused like a laser on the flagship.
“The obsessive attention that Wallace Hall is giving UT-Austin is like nothing I have ever seen,” says Mr. Ratliff, a lawyer based in Austin.
Records Requests
During Mr. Hall’s tenure, the Austin campus has emerged as a key battleground in a statewide debate over whether professors place too much emphasis on research at the expense of teaching. That debate was largely set into motion by Jeff Sandefer, an influential Texas oilman, whom Mr. Hall listed as a reference on his application to the Board of Regents.
Mr. Hall is often perceived to be carrying out Mr. Sandefer’s agenda, which has the support of Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, who appointed Mr. Hall to the board.
Mr. Powers, the flagship campus’s president, has pushed back hard against Mr. Sandefer’s proposals, which include tying faculty pay to student evaluations. In his 2011 State of the University Address, the president cast the battle in the bleakest and grandest of terms.
“To paraphrase Lincoln, we are a house divided about our fundamental mission and character,” he said. “The University of Texas can survive a robust debate among people with very different views about how we operate, but it won’t survive as one of the world’s great research and teaching universities—let alone become the best public university in America—if we remain divided about our fundamental mission and character, about our very soul. And we won’t move forward unless we’re all candid about this.
“That, I’m sorry to say, is the current state of our university.”
Mr. Hall has focused his investigations directly on Mr. Powers, whom he has described as untrustworthy. Mr. Hall has filed records requests, for example, for all of Mr. Powers’s personal and business travel expenses for the length of his eight-year presidency.
Last fall, when Mr. Hall had not received the travel expenses from Mr. Powers in a timely fashion, the regent aired his frustrations in an email to a system official.
“Virtually zero accountability with this gentleman,” Mr. Hall wrote in October. “What is your plan?”
Mr. Hall, who declined to speak with The Chronicle on the record, said in a regents meeting last year that combing through records requests submitted by others could reveal “significant issues of concern” to the board. A review of those records piqued Mr. Hall’s interest in a controversial compensation program in Austin’s law school, where Mr. Powers was dean before becoming president.
Lawrence G. Sager, the law school’s former dean, received a $500,000 forgivable loan through the program. He resigned in 2011 amid controversy over the money.
Mr. Hall has also requested copies of all of Mr. Powers’s email exchanges with lawmakers. The regent says he has concerns that members of the Legislature have used their influence to secure admission into the university for friends and relatives.
In all, Mr. Hall has requested some 800,000 pages of documents, a university official estimated in legislative testimony. Mr. Hall has vehemently disputed that estimate, pegging the number at somewhere below 100,000.
Terrence J. MacTaggart, a consultant for the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, says it is simply impractical for trustees to scan the contents of hundreds or thousands of records requests with the goal of spotting something amiss.
“They are duplicating what the auditor and the security force and the legal counsel do,” says Mr. MacTaggart, who twice served as chancellor of the University of Maine system. “It seems like a misplaced priority when a board member is doing that job.”
If trustees are concerned about wrongdoing, they are better served by helping to develop strong whistle-blower policies or improving universitywide risk assessment, Mr. MacTaggart says.
“It’s a more systematic approach, rather than having an individual board member think they are going to ferret this out, particularly at a school the size of the University of Texas,” he says.
Penn State Looms
Mr. Hall’s supporters usually have a ready answer for critics of his aggressive style: Consider what happened at Pennsylvania State University. An independent investigation of the child-sex-abuse scandal there laid significant blame at the feet of trustees, who failed to ask tough questions that may have exposed the problem years earlier.
Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, says the Penn State scandal proves that college boards need more members like Mr. Hall, not fewer.
“The problem we see is not trustees asking too many questions,” she says. “The problem we see is trustees not asking enough questions.”
If trustees do not raise these issues, she argues, “we end up risking the situation like we saw at Penn State, where the administration was far more interested in looking good than investigating serious criminal activity.”
In the wake of the abuse scandal, Penn State’s alumni elected to the board Anthony P. Lubrano, founder of a wealth-management firm in Pennsylvania. From the start, Mr. Lubrano has challenged what he describes as the “old guard” on the board, who he says believe that “new members should be seen and not heard.” He has ignored that advice, pressing university officials to provide him with detailed information about athletics spending, among other areas. He says there has been pushback.
“They were reluctant to share that information, because they thought it would lead to micromanaging,” Mr. Lubrano says. “Micromanaging would be me telling you where to buy your pencils.”
Mr. Lubrano says he has an obligation to “independently verify” information that he receives, “as opposed to the mind-set of the sheep, who say we should not challenge or question because some would view that as micromanaging.”
Matter of Tone
Much of the criticism leveled at Mr. Hall concerns his tone, and the special counsel’s report shows flashes of abrasiveness from the regent, who is described as “intense and vindictive.”
Last summer Mr. Hall was frustrated that Mr. Powers had not been fired; the system’s chancellor feared that doing so would have an “adverse” affect on the university, according to a regent’s notes from a closed meeting that were published this month. Mr. Hall complained that the board was being “held hostage by terrorists,” the counsel’s report states. Any outcry over Mr. Powers’s termination, Mr. Hall said, would last no more than “two weeks.” (In an email contained in the report’s exhibits, Mr. Hall uses the word “captors” rather than “terrorists.”)
Mr. Hall has focused intently on “ruining” Mr. Powers, the report states, but other university officials have been caught in the crossfire as well. Francisco G. Cigarroa, chancellor of the Texas system, is among those whom Mr. Hall has tried to “disparage,” the board’s chairman said in an email to the chancellor.
Dr. Cigarroa, a pediatric surgeon, actually shared Mr. Hall’s concerns that Austin’s president was “essentially insubordinate,” recent reports indicate, but the chancellor believed that firing Mr. Powers would create more problems. Dr. Cigarroa’s continued support of Mr. Powers opened a rift between the chancellor and Mr. Hall, who aired his frustrations in emails.
“As you know, I share your distrust of Austin’s leadership,” Mr. Hall wrote to Dr. Cigarroa on January 29. “With that said, how do you justify and defend his behavior?”
Less than two weeks after that email, Dr. Cigarroa announced his intention to resign and take a position as head of pediatric-transplant surgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio.
“Though Cigarroa never cited his working relationship with Hall as a basis for leaving,” the report states, “one would be hard pressed to fault a person in Cigarroa’s position for growing weary of Hall’s bullying attitude.”
For Mr. Hall, the occasional rough-and-tumble exchange appears to come with the job. Speaking to his fellow regents at a meeting last year, he said the difficult work of college governance sometimes gets messy.
“It would be wonderful if cheering for our institutions was the sum total of what I think our responsibility is, but it’s not,” he said. “Some things that we have to do are not pleasant, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t do them.”
