WALL STREET JOURNAL editors yesterday gave University of Texas regent Wallace Hall's side of his conflicts with the the UT administration. I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have a citizen's concern about both interests at stake here: on one side, academic freedom; on the other, appropriate political oversight of a public university.
Reporters and editors at the Houston Chronicle present Mr. Hall as a bully, a yahoo, a . . .
. . . bozo, a know-nothing, a bourgeois enemy of higher education.
The WSJ took the trouble to find out why Mr. Hall does what he does, and it turns out his motives are, arguably at least, serious and sobering.
What do you do if you're hired to provide accountability at a public university and your effort lands you in the district attorney's office facing possible criminal charges? That's the fate of Wallace Hall, a regent at the University of Texas who asked uncomfortable questions about lawmakers getting special favors at the state-funded school and has become a political target.
. . . .
The story started in 2011 shortly after Governor Rick Perry appointed Mr. Hall, a Dallas businessman, to the Board of Regents. At UT the regents are responsible for university governance and have a fiduciary duty to taxpayers. Mr. Hall was learning his responsibilities when he came across information showing that some professors received forgiveable loans from a law school foundation fund not affiliated with the school.
The payments from the foundation struck Mr. Hall as problematic because they were off the books and created potential inequities in compensation not subject to transparency and oversight -- issues that can quickly become fodder for lawsuits for, say, gender discrimination. But when he sought documents to investigate, he says he faced resistance from University President Bill Powers's staff.
(Editorial, "Political Revenge in Texas," wsj.com, May 12, 2014)
If Mr. Wallace is, indeed, the one who blew up the law school foundation slush fund, he deserves praise, not condemnation. In days gone by, that's the kind of thing newspapers might well have been expected to do.
Now, however, mainstream newspapers, including the Chronicle, have largely lost interest in afflicting the comfortable (other than the abstractly comfortable (the one percent) and comfortable white men named Koch).
But the most comfortable today are members of the self-anointed elite that claims the right and power to spend our money and tell us what to do. See, e.g., Barack Hussein Obama. Most editors and reporters fancy themselves members of this noble tribe.
The editorial tells more about what Mr. Hall has attempted to do and about the explosive blowback by the left and the UT establishment. According to the editorial, Mr. Wallace's critics are prone to the kind of exaggeration about Mr. Wallace's motives and actions that got Chicken Little in such trouble when applied to the sky.
May the side with better facts and arguments win.
Meanwhile, Chronicle editors and reporters, how about giving us both sides of this story?
For a change.
It's called reporting. Try it.
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