UT regents OK admissions leeway

Policy allows campus president to order a student be admitted.

A new policy governing admissions decisions was adopted Thursday by the University of Texas System Board of Regents, with the only no vote coming from the regent who raised questions about admissions practices in the first place.

The 71 vote approved a policy that permits a campus president to order the admission of a “qualified student” who might otherwise be rejected, but only on “very rare” occasions and only in situations of “highest institutional importance.” The polic y, which applies to undergraduate admissions at UTAustin and eight other academic campuses, is effective immediately.

“I believe that this policy is a good policy,” said board Chairman Paul Foster, who, following his frequent custom,

didn’t vote.

Regent Wallace L. Hall Jr., who has long questioned admissions practices at UT-Austin, said he wasn’t satisfied.

“This memorializes bad acts from a hidden admissions program,” Hall said, referring to the way Bill Powers intervened in some admissions cases when he was president of the Austin campus. “We are a public university system and not a private college that is permitted to operate in any manner they see fit.”

The UT System and its Board of Regents have struggled to craft a policy on admissions for a couple of years, in large part as a result of questions Hall raised about favoritism at UT-Austin.

A UT System-commissioned report by Kroll Associates Inc. in February found that Powers sometimes overruled the admissions office to ensure that applicants touted by lawmakers, regents, donors and others were accepted to undergraduate programs despite the applicants’ subpar academic credentials. Kroll’s review found 73 such applicants had enrolled from 2009 to 2014. Powers contends that he always acted in the university’s best interests.

System Chancellor Bill McRaven subsequently appointed a panel of former UT System chancellors and UT-Austin presidents to make policy rec- ommendations. That panel, known as the Blue Ribbon Panel on Admissions, said in May that presidents shouldn’t be walled off from decision-making on undergraduate admissions despite the revelations about Powers.

The previous chancellor, Francisco Cigarroa, had sought to establish a “firewall” to keep anyone, including university administrators, from unduly influencing admissions decisions. Hall, who has argued that the lack of a firewall creates unfairness, said Thursday that Cigarroa should have been included on the panel for it to be truly of blue-ribbon stature.

That prompted McRaven to assert that Hall was “calling into question the integrity of the previous presidents,” to which Hall replied that he stood by his statement.

The regent and the chancellor are at odds in another venue as well. Hall sued McRaven in June in state district court, claiming that he is entitled to see all of the records — emails, interview notes and so on — from the Kroll investigation, including confidential student information that the chancellor wants to withhold. In a separate case, the UT System has sued state Attorney General Ken Paxton in an effort to overturn his ruling that certain records from the investigation must be released to the American-Statesman and other media organizations.

Hall complained that the new admissions poli- cy doesn’t permit regents to learn the details of cases in which campus presidents intervene to admit students.

David Daniel, the system’s deputy chancellor, who led development of the policy, said it requires campus presidents to inform the chancellor of such cases. McRaven said he would let regents know the number of such cases but not confidential student information.

“The policy is very clear,” Daniel said. “No unqualified student may be admitted.”

Daniel said the policy stops short of saying how many students could be admitted through presidential intervention because assigning a number might be seen as granting permission for that many. He said the “very rare” standard should be read as “a very small number and probably zero in some years.”

Daniel said a hypothetical example of a case where intervention might be appropriate would be an application from a grandchild of a major donor, assuming the student attended “a wonderful private” school that doesn’t rank students, thereby depriving the student of automatic admission under a state law that grants the benefit to high-ranking students.

Gregory L. Fenves, who succeeded Powers as UT-Austin president, said the new policy has his full support.