Nearly 40 years after a young “yell leader” named Rick Perry fired up sports fans at Texas A&M University, his voice is reverberating across all of the state’s public universities. Texas’ longest-serving governor, who is favored to win a third four-year term in November, has not been known to watch from the sidelines as his chosen regents govern their institutions.
Mr. Perry, a Republican who came to office in 2000, when then-Gov. George W. Bush was elected president, has promoted his conservative ideology through a policy agenda that emphasizes transparency and accountability and treats colleges like businesses whose customers are students.
It’s an ideology reflected in an Austin-based think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is led by one of his former policy directors, Brooke L. Rollins, and supported by some of his biggest campaign contributors.
Together, the governor and the foundation have promoted a business-oriented philosophy that permeates the state’s six college systems’ boards of regents, because all of Texas’ regents are appointed by the governor. After nearly a decade in office, Mr. Perry has appointed every regent now serving.
That has made it easier for him to press his priorities on campuses and has given him allies who, according to his critics, have stacked the colleges’ leadership ranks with administrators who espouse Mr. Perry’s business-oriented philosophy.
The chancellor of the 11-campus Texas A&M system, Michael D. McKinney, was the governor’s chief of staff. In 2008, a popular vice president for student affairs on the system’s flagship campus was removed—a decision some say was influenced by the governor—and replaced with Mr. Perry’s college classmate, Joseph F. Weber, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant general.
Many people embrace the higher-education-as-business model at a time when college costs are escalating and Texas faces a budget shortfall of up to $20-billion in the next biennium.
But the notion has rankled faculty members throughout the state and created tensions between academic leaders and system administrators.
Backlash at Alma Mater
Nowhere is that tension more evident than at the governor’s alma mater, Texas A&M, where system leaders just generated a report that lists faculty members’ pay and benefits, and puts those figures up against the number of students they teach and how much money they bring in through research.
It is the kind of cost-benefit report that both Mr. Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation had promoting as a way to make sure students and their parents are getting their money’s worth.
But it has prompted a backlash from faculty members, who say it gives a misleading, incomplete, and inaccurate picture of what they do.
“There is an arrogant assumption by people on the right that we need a business model in higher education,” says Chester S.L. Dunning, a tenured professor of history on the flagship campus, at College Station. “I deeply resent the governor and his team assuming that their agenda is the agenda of all citizens. They see faculty as problem children who have to be whipped into shape.”
Among other recent changes Mr. Dunning objects to are teaching awards, of $2,500 to $10,000, that are based on end-of-semester student evaluations. He received one but says the money would have been better spent retaining A&M lecturers who are being laid off.
“Customer satisfaction is what I’m told I’m supposed to aim for in the classroom,” he says. “I like getting good reviews, but there’s more to good teaching than that. We’ve become a laughingstock with these ludicrous models that have no place in academia.”
Many of the changes taking place at Texas A&M and on other campuses in the state closely mirror the recommendations the governor made early last year in a document, titled “Higher Education Reforms,” that was circulated among the campuses. The proposals included requiring colleges to post faculty members’ salaries and benefits, the number of students they teach, the results of teaching evaluations, and the number of A’s and B’s they give out. It also called for teaching awards based solely on student evaluations.
Mr. Perry’s opponent in this fall’s election, Bill White, a Democrat and a former mayor of Houston, has accused the governor of micromanaging the state’s universities and meddling in Texas A&M’s internal matters. Mr. White’s own higher-education platform focuses on proposals to lower college costs, including plans to encourage the use of more online and open-source materials and to offer students tuition breaks in exchange for public-service commitments after graduation.
Mr. Perry’s opponent in the Republican primary in March, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, had also attacked the governor’s record on higher education. She accused him of “cronyism” in appointing regents whose loyalties were to him and not to the institutions.
Letting Students Judge
Mr. Perry declined to talk with The Chronicle, and his staff members did not respond to questions about the allegation that he micromanages higher education. They did offer a few general statements about the importance of accountability, “so our institutions can become more transparent in their efforts, provide students with a superior learning environment, and most importantly, give Texas students the chance to compete in the global marketplace.”
The governor’s former policy director, Ms. Rollins, says Mr. Perry is undeterred by faculty leaders’ criticism. “His priority has been in making Texas a leader in reform by emphasizing transparency and putting students back into the driver’s seat,” she says. “Faculty should welcome the opportunity to make their case, and there’s no better way than through full transparency.”
Ms. Rollins’s public-policy think tank has lobbied for many of the same policies the governor has pushed through, including a state law, effective this fall, requiring public universities to post syllabi online with detailed information about classroom assignments, as well as faculty members’ curricula vitae, student evaluations, and department budgets. The information can’t be more than three clicks away from the college’s home page.
Some administrators as well as some faculty members objected to the cost of complying with the new law and the requirement that the information be sent to the governor and key state lawmakers every other year.
Two years ago, Mr. Perry convened a meeting of regents from throughout the state in a forum co-sponsored by the public-policy foundation. Among the seven “breakthrough solutions” to improving higher education the foundation proposed, there was one suggesting that each system evaluate professors by a formula that would “divide the total employment cost for each teacher by the number of students taught, and force rank from highest cost per student to lowest cost per student taught.”
Mr. Perry urged regents to adopt the recommendations. “I’m not saying these are a dictate to you. One size does not fit all,” he was quoted as telling them. But, he added, “the time is right for these types of reforms to go forward.”
The evaluation that was later conducted by Texas A&M appeared to be loosely based on that idea.
“The effort that A&M is going through is all about transparency,” says Bill Peacock, vice president for research at the Austin-based think tank. “It’s an effort to let people see what’s going on in the classroom, or not going on in the classroom.”
Mr. Peacock worked as a midlevel administrator for Mr. Perry when the future governor was serving as the state’s agriculture commissioner. A poster on Mr. Peacock’s wall shows Mr. Perry in chaps, cowboy hat, and lasso, with a handwritten note thanking Mr. Peacock for his “loyal support.”
The foundation also supports handing out faculty bonuses based on student evaluations, as Texas A&M now does.
Critics of such awards say that they end up rewarding professors who liberally dispense A’s, and that students aren’t always the best judges of teaching quality.
Mr. Peacock disagrees: “We have seen lots of studies and research that shows that’s not the case. In fact, the customers of the professors, the students in the classes, are quite capable of judging whether they are receiving a quality education, irrespective of their grades,” he says.
“I think there’s a misconception about how unpopular these reforms are,” he adds, blaming the public outcry on a “small but vocal minority of the faculty who seem to think that they are the only ones who know how to run a university.”
‘All About Politics’
Critics say the opposition reaches further than that. Jon L. Hagler, a Texas A&M alumnus, major donor, and co-chairman of Vision 2020, the university’s plan to rise to the top tier of public universities in 10 years, says the new faculty balance sheet is not about accountability.
“The initiative is all about politics in Texas,” he says. “It continues a trend of ill-advised and naïve efforts by political appointees to recast Texas universities in a more business- and profitlike posture.”
Mr. Hagler, once one of the university’s most powerful supporters, is now one of the system leadership’s harshest critics. Making Texas A&M more productive and cost-effective is a worthy goal, he says, “but the political appointees don’t understand education, they don’t understand leadership, and they don’t understand quality and productivity.
“Perhaps even worse, they don’t know they don’t understand,” he says. “That’s a problem.”
The governor, according to his critics, demands loyalty from his higher-education appointees.
Two former regents at Texas Tech University reported that they had been pressured to resign because they had supported Ms. Hutchison in the gubernatorial primary. One of them, Mark Griffin, told reporters that Mr. Perry’s chief of staff asked him to resign last August, after the regent introduced the senator at a rally in Lubbock.
The other regent, Windy Sitton, told reporters that, in 2008, she received a call from the chairman of the Board of Regents, who told her Mr. Perry was upset because her name had appeared on a list of Ms. Hutchison’s supporters. Ms. Sitton, who stayed for the final two months of her term, did not return calls last week seeking comment. Mr. Griffin says he has nothing to add to the news reports published at the time.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Perry denies that anyone from the governor’s staff pressured either of those regents to resign.
Meanwhile, a report released in April by Texans for Public Justice, a liberal government-watchdog group, found that Mr. Perry had received campaign donations from 63 percent of the regents he has appointed to public-university governing boards during his 10 years in office. He collected $6.1-million from 97 of the 155 regents who are not students, with an average campaign contribution of $39,251.
Although University of Texas regents are among those who have contributed generously to the governor’s campaigns, Mr. Perry has been less successful in influencing them than he has those at other institutions.
In 2008 the regents selected as chancellor Francisco G. Cigarroa, who was president of the system’s Health Science Center at San Antonio.
Mr. Perry had voiced his support for the other top contender, John Montford, a former state senator and a former chancellor of Texas Tech. Three regents told reporters that the governor had contacted them and urged them to vote for Mr. Montford, a respected former legislator and lobbyist.
In selecting a rising star in Texas higher education instead of a longtime politician and friend of the governor, the board may have been seeking to avoid the kinds of political conflicts that have wracked other universities in the state during the Perry administration. Three presidents had been pressured to resign in recent years after clashes with their chancellors, all of whom are former lawmakers and Republicans.
Last year Elsa A. Muranoresigned as president of Texas A&M’s main campus, after less than two years in office, following a bitter dispute with the chancellor, Dr. McKinney.
In February, Gretchen M. Bataille, president of the University of North Texas’ main campus, in Denton, also abruptly stepped down after clashing with that system’s chancellor, Lee F. Jackson.
And in 2008, Jon S. Whitmore resigned as president of Texas Tech after an apparent fallout with the system’s chancellor, Kent R. Hance.
The state’s looming fiscal crisis is likely to exacerbate tensions between Perry-appointed boards and academic leaders looking to protect their turf if the governor wins another term. (Some recent polls show the race tightening, with Mr. Perry leading by about six percentage points.)
Ms. Rollins, the governor’s former policy director, says the state’s most famous former yell leader doesn’t back down when the cheers turn to jeers. “He’s not afraid to jump into difficult issues,” she says, “and upset a certain constituency when he believes something is right.”
