Supporters of University of Texas President Bill Powers have for months worked mightily to deny or to marginalize evidence lawmakers were pulling strings to get unqualified students admitted to the university.
A new trove of public records demonstrates that many of Powers’ most vocal defenders — key alumni association members, an education coalition, politicians and witnesses involved in a series of impeachment hearings — have been involved in subverting university’s admissions process.
The records also show the Texas Exes alumni association and the Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education were, in effect, two more arms of Powers’ public relations team.
The emails were first obtained but not published by Tony McDonald, legal counsel for the conservative advocacy nonprofit Empower Texans.
On Jan. 31, 2013, Leslie Cedar, CEO of the Texas Exes, wrote to Tom Gilligan, dean of the McCombs School of Business, suggesting Gilligan admit a student who had been rejected in exchange for a $25,000 donation, according to one of the emails.
The applicant’s father, apparently, “hasn’t done much giving but was about to cut you a 25k check,” Cedar wrote. The original request came from Richard Leshin, former president of the Texas Exes, who is close to Powers and to South Texas power brokers Carlos Zaffirini and his wife, state Sen. Judith Zaffirini.
Earlier this year, Leshin, a Corpus Christi lawyer, wrote an op-ed in the San Antonio Express-News denouncing as “outlandish propaganda” reports that the university was admitting sub-par students because of political influence.
Gilligan got back to Cedar and Leshin within a half-hour, offering a deal in which the applicant “will be admitted into McCombs upon completing several of the prerequisites (e.g. Calculus, Statistics, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics) with good grades (around a 3.5 GPA). Will that work?”
Gilligan declined to comment.
Leshin is a founding member of the Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, a group of Longhorn insiders established to maintain the status quo at UT. Members of the coalition and the alumni association have been quoted in dozens of news articles, creating the appearance of broad support for Powers.
Far from being independent voices, the email records find the coalition and the alumni association often looped in on message coordination emails from Powers’ PR staff.