Hearing to revive UT entry concerns
Students who were unqualified admitted after influential letters
Top University of Texas at Austin leaders in recent years admitted unqualified students after receiving letters from high-profile alumni and influential lawmakers who wrote recommendation letters on their behalf.
Former UT President Bill Powers was among the administrators who flagged students’ applications for further review after receiving the letters, according to a 2015 investigation, which led that summer to changes to the admissions practices at the state’s flagship university.
These past practices, which took place between 2009 and 2014, are resurfacing Wednesday because the Texas Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case that will decide if UT regent Wallace Hall Jr. can view unredacted documents that led to the investigators’ findings and the revised admissions protocols. Hall, a Dallas businessman whose contentious time as regent is set to expire next month, sued Chancellor William McRaven in 2015 to access the information.
An external report found that 73 student applicants with low SAT scores and grade point averages were admitted to UT during that time, some after letters from influential alumni, former regents and politicians. The letter writers included Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, San Antonio billionaire automobile dealer Red McCombs whose name is on UT’s business school, professional golfer and UT alum Ben Crenshaw, former U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and former State Sen. Rodney Ellis, a Houston Democrat who is now a Harris County commissioner.
AG supports Hall’s case
Investigators did not find evidence of a quidpro-quo exchange for admissions decisions. Straus, re-elected Tuesday as Texas House speaker on the first day of the state legislative session, told Powers in a March 2011 letter that he did not expect UT to alter policies for political reasons. Ellis told the Houston Chronicle in an email he is “occasionally” still asked to write recommendation letters for constituents or friends, but he has “always known that University of Texas officials are the ones best qualified to make admissions decisions.”
The report, however, did find that some of the recommendation letters gave students a greater chance at admission that could not be explained by other factors in their applications. In some cases, Powers made sure the students were granted admission.
Hall contends that UT should not have records in its possession related to institutional wrongdoing “that no responsible official has reviewed,” his lawyer Joseph Knight said last week.
The Texas high court said in late December that it would take Hall’s case and that oral arguments would occur before Hall’s term as regent is expected to end.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton supported Hall’s case in a brief filed in November, saying that “a regent’s access to University records must be absolute.” In 2014, Hall was censured as a regent and nearly impeached for allegedly abusing his power with intensive records requests that cost taxpayers around $1 million.
Lower courts have sided with the chancellor. Attorneys for McRaven, who with the board of regents’ approval has given Hall redacted documents, cite student privacy in court documents when they say the university has released all it can. The regents, they said, can place reasonable limits on any individual regent’s request for documents.
UT spokeswoman Jenny LaCoste-Caputo said the university is “confident the Court will give this case careful consideration and come to a reasoned result.”
Over the past decade, an influx of college applications and lower state funding allocations have put university administrators across the country in a tough position when lawmakers and influential alumni send recommendation letters, said Nathan Harris, a faculty member at the University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education and Human Development who has studied admissions scandals.
Letters banned
“University administrators, particularly senior administrators, are under a great deal of stress,” Harris said. “You have a perfect storm of wanting to protect the resource base of the university and needing to be sensitive to political interests, plus an influx of individuals who are applying, making things more competitive.”
Regents voted to change admissions policies in August 2015, banning top administrators from forwarding letters that did not include substantive information. The new policy also urged admissions officers to ignore a letter writer’s status when evaluating materials.
UT presidents can still admit certain students of their choosing under “situations of highest institutional importance,” but the new policy says that this should take place rarely, and only if the applicant is qualified but wouldn’t be otherwise admitted through the normal process.