AusChron blog: And Then There Were Two
![[ man at mic holding up sheet of paper]](/sites/default/files/_MG_0438_joe_sherfy_web.jpg)
Austin-based CPA Joe Sherfy expresses incredulity at the poor quality of the financial figures provided by UT.
In the Austin Chronicle blog article “And Then There Were Two”, Richard Whittaker reviews yesterday’s open forum held by University of Texas at Austin Vice President of Student Affairs, Juan González.
“The Cactus Cafe lives on,” UT’s Vice President for Student Affairs Juan González told the crowd at Tuesday’s public forum on the future of the Cactus Cafe. “What does that mean?” replied a member of that crowd.
Comments
DOES A KUT TAKEOVER MEAN THE CURRENT CACTUS STAFF WOULD BE EJECTED IN AUGUST? It's time to clarify what will happen to the current Cactus staff under the KUT plan. It sounds nice at a glance and I think KUT has its heart in the right place, but the reality is it would mean the current Cactus staff would lose their jobs in August. That is NOT saving the Cactus. Staff currently consists of 10 current UT students plus three people who have been there for over 20 years and comprise the creative conscience of the Cactus.(Chris, Susan, Griff). These are the people that made the cafe something we wanted to save in the first place. Besides, how does taking away 10 student jobs promote student participation at the venue?? Why can't KUT work WITH the current staff to promote shows and funding without actually taking over and removing the people who ARE the fundamental character of the Cactus?
The people who run the Cactus are the heart and soul of the place. You cannot save the Cactus by ripping out its very heart.
UT VP for Student Affairs Juan Gonzalez has pledged to present his overall "analysis" to the Texas Union Board of Directors on April 30.
Let us all hope that that BoD meeting does not follow the example of the February 26 meeting, in which administration created a rigid format far from the Texas Union's mandate in the Handbook of Operating Procedures:
"For the promotion of genuine democracy, for the cultivation of a more intelligent interest in and deeper affection for The University of Texas at Austin."
The following is the comment I appended to Dr. Gonzalez's prominent support for the KUT takeover plan, in the form of trumpeting a letter from lone student Andrew Nash.
--Tom Horn
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Dr. Gonzalez,
I echo Mr. Nash on one point and one point only: Thank you for calling the open forum and thank you for listening.
I hope you will consider all viewpoints and not just those which administration finds palatable. I also hope that the presence of no fewer than three armed and uniformed UT Police officers kept someone in his or her comfort zone and did not cause undue expense.
Since that forum occurred, it has not escaped anyone's notice that once again, in posting Mr. Nash's letter so prominently, you have highlighted a plan (this one the ill-conceived and amorphous last-minute plan to have KUT take over the Cactus, which would entail eliminating the seasoned professional management of the Cactus, rather than moving proactively to afford that management full administration support and proceed to involve students more closely under that successful framework), thereby lending your official support to that plan. This seems like yet another naked effort on the part of administration to purport that changing the Cactus began as a student initiative.
It is common knowledge that several of the students who spoke in favor of the KUT plan (without any apparent knowledge of the details of that plan) are all enrolled in a course taught by a professor surnamed Cameron. Such a group hardly comprises a representative sampling of the student body.
The student who rose to state that "99% of students" want to kill the Cactus did so without any supporting data. Of course he had the right to say that (just as you have the right to claim that the Texas Union is "student-run," sir), but as I have stated elsewhere, the last time I recall anyone claiming a 99% mandate was when Saddam Hussein certified his own re-election results.
Please heed what graduate student John Dark said, when he rose to remind you that undergraduates are *not* by any means the only students at UT. When last I checked, UT still had the largest graduate enrollment of any university in this country, public or private. Your portfolio as VP for Student Affairs (and that of Dean of Students Soncia Reagins-Lilly) includes responsibility and accountability to all students.
Please recall also that Hayley Gillespie (who tried to query you regarding substance as opposed to generalities, and who asked whether the "spreadsheet" on the Cactus ledger was the same one she had seen previously--which indeed it was) and I were not the only ones who recognized that document as full of numbers but lacking in meaning; CPA Joe Sherfy also pointedly questioned its validity.
And as reported previously in the Austin Chronicle: "CPA Chris Yost called the Union's analysis 'purely a budgeting exercise. This is not about the Cactus Cafe losing money. It's "How are we going to fund this merit pay pool?"'"
To refresh my own memory, last night I reviewed the documents obtained by the Texas Observer under the Freedom of Information Act, which reveal that all this brouhaha began in a secret plan conceived on Andy Smith's desk to protect a 2% merit-raise pool at the Texas Union (and again I wonder exactly how such a pool is divided at the Texas Union, seeing as how Mr. Smith's salary has more than doubled since 1997). As you know, all of Mr. Smith's preliminary responses to you concern achieving that 2% merit-raise pool; no mention of any benefit to or initiative from any students came into that secret dialog until David Ochsner began concocting the press release.
Sir, is it not high time to admit (as the paper trail establishes) that proponents of the Smith agenda (or any clone of that agenda entailing doing away with the Cactus's proven professional management) only included lip service to student needs and wishes as a public-relations afterthought?
Have you ever seen "University, Inc"? I urge you to view that documentary and note it well.
Or did you catch the article in the Friday April 23 Daily Texan in which former Texas Union film program manager Steve Bearden recounts his insider perspective on "University, Inc."?
Based on the unmistakable parallels between the events in that film and the present fiasco, is it not also high time to admit that the Texas Union is hardly "run by students?"
Many of us await the "analysis" you have pledged to submit to the Texas Union Board on April 30. This may be our last mutual opportunity to avoid the iceberg. You stand at the helm.
As I said on April 21, sir, if anyone tries to ram things through on April 30 in the mode of the February 26 BoD meeting, the little problem Andy Smith has created will not go away; as Mr. Smith predicted, people have indeed "noticed." I predict that should any further bureaucratic sleight of hand occur, we may all come to look back on what has happened since January as the good old days. It could get very messy. Right now Cactus supporters are wary, alarmed, concerned for the preservation of a cultural treasure, disappointed with the administration response, yet hopeful that we may all build on the Cactus as we know it--of course, with enhanced student involvement, for the sake of student development and the “student learning outcomes” central to your educational philosophy.
People are not yet absolutely furious. No one wants to see it, but the harder anybody tries to spin or paper over this entire affair to keep the lid on, the more spectacularly that lid may come off.
In closing, please allow me to quote from the University's Handbook of Operating Procedures (which of course has already been ignored by administration, in that the first order of business on February 26 should have been consideration of the Smith agenda presented in January in Executive Session) regarding the purpose and operation of the Texas Union:
"For the promotion of genuine democracy, for the cultivation of a more intelligent interest in and deeper affection for The University of Texas at Austin."
See you April 30!
Everybody who commented at Juan Gonzalez's "open forum" yesterday (April 21, 2010) had three minutes to speak. Since Dr. Gonzalez used part of most speakers' allotted three minutes himself, I asked him not to do that with me, and he kindly complied.
180 seconds is barely enough for a good sound bite--certainly inadequate to broach a complex topic, let alone initiate a dialog. Dr. Gonzalez honored his commitment to listening during the session; for that he deserves credit.
I hope that the opinion stated by a former Texas Union employee who went through the shredder under the Smith regime but nonetheless emerged clean (he is now retired and therefore beyond further insult or injury from Mr. Smith) that "A decision has already been made and all the rest is just window dressing" proves overly cynical.
However, by now it seems doubtful that UT administration will supply substantive answers to any of the scores of questions raised about who pulled the levers behind the curtain back in December (and more importantly, whether anything aside from utter hubris drove the Smith agenda); instead, we are left to fill in the blanks with the assistance of internal documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Although it hardly required the acumen of a CPA to discern that the "official" Chock Full O' Figures "spreadsheet" distributed on April 21 (the one carefully crafted with negative numbers along the bottom) is so non-specific as to be essentially meaningless, I appreciate the analysis offered by a CPA who attended and commented on the glaring lack of comprehensive relevant data in that document, which fails miserably to tell the *whole* truth.
Did anyone keep an audio or video recording of the entire session? I ask because frankly, I find that most "official" UT accounts tend to characterize University administrators as far more eloquent, far more reasonable and far more open to new ideas than they seem in real time. Moreover, those presenting objections to or criticism of the University are likely to find themselves written off as hotheads.
I find myself implicitly characterized as such a hothead. In the official minutes of the Texas Union Board of Directors' meeting for February 26, I am the unnamed attendee who "stood and interrupted the meeting with shouting." Guilty as charged: I raised the vehement objection that contrary to the rules pertaining to the Texas Union and its Board of Directors in UT's Handbook of Operating Procedures, the February 26 meeting was not conducted in the spirit of "genuine democracy." Read the minutes from that meeting (downloadable at http://www.utexas.edu/txunion/cdc/peeps/board/2?section=about) to draw your own conclusions in this regard.
As I warned Dr. Gonzalez on April 21, should anybody try to bang a gavel and ram through the Smith agenda (or a clone) come April 30 a la the February 26 BoD meeting, the current public relations disaster embroiling UT may swell to catastrophic proportions. Putting it baldly: If Administration doesn't learn to demonstrate some progressive, responsive flexibility, if they think there has been a bit of fuss over this already (or, as Andy Smith expressed it in a mind-boggling understatement, his agenda has been "noticed"). . . well, they ain't seen *nothin'* yet.
I also wonder whether a reviewable electronic recording of the April 21 "open forum" exists because I was struck by the similarity in tone and content of several undergraduates who expressed enthusiasm for the plan whereby KUT would assume control of the Cactus; most of those students sat together, and they sounded almost as if they had been coached. After the session I heard from a source I consider reliable (someone who stuck it out all the way through what Juan Gonzalez called the Thursday-morning "Cactus Conversations," and who on April 21 publicly expressed her continued frustration with Dr. Gonzalez's lack of clarification in response to many questions) that all those students are presently enrolled in a class taught by a UT professor who has an interest in seeing KUT take over the Cactus. If that is true, I would suggest that those few students by no means comprise a representative sampling of UT students; likewise, the undergraduate who stood and made the blanket statement that "99% of UT students don't care about the Cactus" offered no supporting data. (The last time I recall someone claiming a 99% majority was when Saddam Hussein announced the results of his own presidential election.)
As one commenter expressed succinctly: KUT can run a radio station (I will not venture an opinion as to how *well* they do so). But KUT has never run a club.
As I told Dr. Gonzalez (who said near the top of his opening remarks that the Texas Union is a "student-run Union"): Given the thorny intrigue revealed via the Freedom of Information Act and the striking parallels between the present situation and that documented in the film "University, Inc." (which deals in large part with the shutdown of the Union's campus-wide film program and the privatization of the food outlets in the Union under the Andy Smith regime, despite vociferous public outcry--especially from the students), I don't see how anyone could make the assertion that the Texas Union is "student-run" with a straight face.
As I also told Dr. Gonzalez, no reasonable person would argue in concept with an objective of increased student involvement at the Cactus, and I am absolutely positive that the current established, successful and well-seasoned management of the Cactus would not only welcome but foster greater student involvement in ways that someone outside the music business cannot imagine. But to use the pretext of "greater student involvement" to sweep away the present management of the Cactus would be a foolhardy and obstinate error.
And as I attempted to state before the time-keeper began chiding me to surrender the microphone:
To illustrate how twisted and self-serving a laudable concept may become at the Texas Union under the Smith regime: Remember that the Smith Cactus agenda originated with Mr. Smith's intent to protect a 2% merit-raise pool (all mention of "by and for the students" entered the secret interchange only in concocting the press release). Surely no one would argue that those who work the hardest and do the best should get the best raises. That's what a "merit raise" is. Ignoring for the moment the reality that a 2% "raise" does not even keep pace with inflation, does a funding pool sufficient for across-the-board raises of 2% for everyone on the Union staff mean everybody gets a 2% raise? Opening the books suggests otherwise in a big way. Who allocates the individual raises from a merit pool at the Texas Union? Does Mr. Smith slice that pie? Is that how his salary has more than doubled (to over $138,000) since 1997?
More questions: Since David Puntch is now Director of the Texas Union and Crystal King is Director-in-Waiting for the new Student Activity Center. . .what is Mr. Smith's continued role? Is he not (in British parlance) effectively "redundant?" Given his history of blithely igniting firestorms, what positive contribution does he make to the Texas Union, to the University of Texas or to the student body (all of them, graduate and undergraduate alike)? Is this furtive and inveterate schemer a suitably charming figurehead or effective leader?
By way of a question, here is the hallmark of the Smith regime: Will someone please explain why the Texas Union requires a 1 to 4.25 ratio of those at the level of Assistant Director or higher* to other full-time staff? Is the place perhaps precariously top-heavy and painfully in need of rejuvenation through fresh, uncalcified management?
Does one sure-fire method to save the Union upwards of $138,000 per year spring to mind?
--Tom Horn
*check the number of employees & their salary distribution at
http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee-salaries/th...
or
http://www.collegiatetimes.com/databases/salaries/university-of-texas-at...