Undeterred by accusations that they are engaging in “witch hunt after witch hunt” against a popular president, members of the University of Texas Board of Regents voted last month to authorize a fourth inquiry into a law-school foundation that began a controversial incentive program while the flagship’s president, William C. Powers Jr., was law dean.
The board voted 4 to 3 to commission an external review of the independently run University of Texas Law School Foundation and its relationship with the university. Critics say the move is a pretext for digging up information to justify firing Mr. Powers.
Tensions escalated as 18 state senators sent the regents a letter last week calling the inquiry a waste of taxpayer money. “This duplicative review, which targets the University of Texas at Austin for the obvious purpose of attempting to discredit its president, will be the fourth review of this matter,” the letter stated. If the regents insist on pursuing another review, they should use the state attorney general’s office at no cost, the senators said.
Mr. Powers, who has clashed with the board on issues including faculty productivity and the proper balance of teaching and research, has been in the regents’ cross hairs for at least two years, lawmakers say. Several members have argued that professors spend too much time on research and not enough in the classroom; the president has countered that both are important at a top-tier research university. Mr. Powers has chafed at the regents’ characterization of a university as a business that should serve students as its customers, and regents have grown impatient with a four-year graduation rate that has barely budged above 50 percent.
Mr. Powers’s defenders in the Texas Legislature have accused the regents, all of whom were appointed by Gov. Rick Perry, of micromanaging matters at the flagship campus of more than 50,000 students.
Much of the scrutiny from the nine-member board has been initiated by a bloc of four regents who are influenced by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative Austin research center whose higher-education proposals have earned praise from Governor Perry and provoked controversy among educators.
In recent months the regents instructed university administrators to refrain from deleting e-mails and questioned the organization of the flagship’s fund-raising staff. One regent has collected voluminous data on individual faculty members’ workloads and student evaluations.
Wallace L. Hall Jr., a regent whose flood of open-records requests has hauled in 40 boxes of documents, denied that he was out to get Mr. Powers.
“This is not easy,” Mr. Hall said after a meeting last month of a legislative oversight committee set up to examine how the regents are governing the university. He added that the only reason for digging deeper was to ensure the integrity of the university and to maintain public trust. “To suggest otherwise or to insinuate there’s something else going on is misplaced,” he said.
And in a response to the senators who criticized the investigation, Eugene Powell, chairman of the Board of Regents, said the board wouldn’t move ahead with the investigation until members had discussed the matter with the attorney general.
In 2011, Mr. Powers asked Lawrence G. Sager, dean of the law school, to resign after word got out that the dean had received a $500,000 forgivable loan from the law-school foundation. The program, offered to the law faculty as a recruitment and retention incentive, started while Mr. Powers was dean, but the president said he was unaware of the loan extended to Mr. Sager. Mr. Powers said he asked the dean to leave because the ensuing controversy had deepened divisions within the law school and made it difficult for Mr. Sager to lead.
This past November, Barry D. Burgdorf, then the system’s vice chancellor and general counsel, concluded in a report that the loan program was “not appropriate” and should be discontinued. The state attorney general reviewed the report and concurred, and the program was ended.
The regents apparently weren’t satisfied, and last month Mr. Burgdorf resigned, effective April 30.
Sources familiar with the investigation say the regents forced him out because they felt his report had gone too easy on Mr. Powers, who they believe knew about the loan to Mr. Sager. “After three reviews, you have to ask yourself what they’re after and whether they’re going to keep going until they get the smoking gun they’re looking for,” Kirk Watson, a Democrat and vice chair of Texas’ Senate Committee on Higher Education, said in an interview last week.
The regents’ Audit, Compliance, and Management Review Committee recommended the additional inquiry at a specially called meeting last month. It will supplement a continuing probe by university-system auditors.
The cost of an investigation hasn’t been determined, but one regent, basing his comments on the cost of a similar review, said the system had spent enough already.
“In my mind, President Powers alerted us to a problem,” said the regent, Steve Hicks. “We investigated it. We fixed it. It’s been blessed by the attorney general. I just can’t imagine we should spend $500,000 of taxpayer money to try to beat this dead horse.”
The only justification for another investigation is “to lay some blame at the feet of Bill Powers,” Mr. Hicks said. “I just don’t trust the intention of where this process is going.”
In a statement released by the board, Mr. Hall said that some of the documents the audit committee reviewed “are so informative and so surprising that we are convinced the board must direct a further look into these issues.”
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Mr. Powers denied withholding information.
He pointed out that the general counsel, the attorney general, and now the audit committee have all examined the matter. “We have cooperated and been forthcoming with information at every stage,” he said.
Concerns about micromanaging by the regents led to the creation, in 2011, of the House-Senate oversight panel on higher education. During a meeting of that panel last month, Rep. Jim Pitts, a Waxahachie Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, accused regents of conducting “witch hunt after witch hunt to try to remove one of our best presidents.”
Widespread speculation in May 2012 that the board was planning to fire Mr. Powers prompted an outpouring of support for him on social media and in the halls of the Legislature.
This past February, Kel Seliger, chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee, filed legislation aimed at reining in the regents. The Amarillo Republican’s bill, which would require ethics training for new appointees before they could vote on personnel or budget matters, also calls on regents to respect the rights of campuses to manage their own affairs.
Leaders of the flagship’s undergraduate and graduate students, as well as alumni, urged passage of the bill during a standing-room-only hearing last week.
Michael Morton, a senior at the Austin campus and president of the university’s Senate of College Councils, said that by engaging in “petty, political, and personal battles,” the regents have hurt faculty recruiting and damaged morale on campus.
Sen. Judith Zaffirini, a longtime higher-education chair and member of the oversight committee, asked the flagship’s top graduate-students’ representative what would happen if the regents were to fire Mr. Powers. “There would be a mass exodus,” Michael Redding, president of the Graduate Student Assembly, said.
Board members declined to comment on the bill, but Charles Miller, chairman from 2001 to 2004, said in an interview that limiting the regents’ ability to carry out their fiduciary duties to the university would be a mistake. “The board should demand the ability to follow their best judgments without the constant carping” from lawmakers and other critics, he said. If anyone is guilty of micromanaging, he believes, it is the Legislature, adding that the board has done a good job pushing for greater productivity measures and blended learning in the face of a “well-orchestrated PR campaign against the regents.”
The Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education—a group that includes former Texas regents, presidents, and concerned alumni—released a statement last month accusing regents of having a vendetta against Mr. Powers, undermining the university’s leaders, and creating a culture of distrust and micromanagement.
