Reporting on the Rio Grande

By Juan Montoya

The TSC board just recently transferred more than $50 million to Juliet Garcia’s UTB as part of their “partnership” agreement. If you average that transfer for the past 20 years at, say, $40 million per year, it means that the oil-and-gas rich statewide system has been the recipient of more than $800 million in local resources taken from the poorest of the poor to subsidize it being here.

Only after the former TSC boards and the likes of Stet Rep. Rene Oliveira and Texas Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. agreed to this supine position for local taxpayers would UT deign to come down to the mouth of the Rio Grande and provide the education opportunities for the most underserved people in the state.
Over the last 20 years these two – along with former boards – have held down the victim while the aggressor has his way with her while they cheered on. Hook ‘em Horns, indeed.

If you take into account the bond indebtedness that our district’s residents have incurred to subsidize the UT System, it easily totals more than $1 billion that the system has raked in from our poor little community.

Garcia and her cohorts will celebrate the chronic abuse of our residents.

But what is there to celebrate?
Is it the 17 percent graduation rate over six years that placed TSC-UTB so far down the rankings that a survey of colleges and universities from across the nation that it declined to rank it even among the lowest of the low?

Or perhaps it was the less than 50 percent freshman retention rate that we can gloat about. Or maybe we can shout to the winds that even though the UT System has milked the local residents for more than $1 billion of their scant resources, its tuition rates and user fees are the highest in the state, if not the county, effectively placing the illusion of a higher education beyond the reach of most local students. Tantalus had it better. At least he hadn’t paid for the food and water that was held just out of his reach.

Let’s face it. Our local schools have not been preparing our students to enter the fine life of higher education. What was happening was that these students entered UTB-TSC, were diverted to remedial classes, spent their Pell Grants and other student loans, and left a few years later saddled with debt and nothing to show for it. Many were penalized after failing and were prevented from entering either TSC or UTB. They not only were not prepared to join the workforce, but also had a huge debt they had to repay.

How long could this charade continue?
No, there’s got to be a better reason to celebrate.
Might it not be the $336,000 salary that Juliet Garcia has awarded herself with the help of the yearly transfers from little TSC? Or perhaps it is the salary of Alan Artibise, Juliet’s head of the Office of the Provost Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs who nets some of this loot when he draws his $230,000 salary, as does Michael Putegnat, at the Office of VPAA Director and his own creation, the Institute for Public Service, drawing a cool $102,665.

Another Garcia henchman, Wayne Moore, ostensibly a professor in English, also cries all the way to the bank on his measly $108,742.

Peter Gawenda, with the Office of the Provost Special Assistant to the Provost for Bachelor Completion Programs charges the public only $118,000 for his invaluable services.
United Brownsville’s darling Irvine Downing, at the Office of VPED&CS vice president for Economic Development and Community Service nets $121,150, a mite more than he made as a banker in the private sector.

In fact, the UT System, which recently announced a huge increase in profits from oil and gas leases managed by the Permanent University Fund from which neither UTB nor UT-Pan Am receive any funds as do the other 13 UT System and A & M campuses, continues to renege on paying TSC some $10 million in back rent.
The four trustees who defended the district from these gang of facilitators – Rene Torres, Adela Garza, Trey Mendez and Kiko Rendon – endured public abuse, threats and marches led by a renegade priest, and banishment from the society of the exalted local power elite.

They are well on the road to heal our district from the abusive relationship it had been subjected to for the past two decades. We have a new president and are getting about to lower tuition rates and lighten the loads on our local taxpayers.
These are positive steps that can only benefit our residents. After 2015, UT System will no longer have a cash cow in the TSC district.

Then we can let the celebration begin.