“Aggie Snake Pit” From the Editorial Board of the Dallas Morning News (June 16, 2009)

Disarray in the administration of Texas A&M does not befit the great university that loyal Aggies typically rise to defend.

It’s impossible for many of them to defend A&M today.

President Elsa Murano’s resignation under duress drips with embarrassing irony. She was boosted into the job over three outsider candidates who, unlike her, made a search committee’s finalist list as sitting university presidents. Now, 17 months later, Murano has been squeezed out by the regime of chancellor and regents who handpicked her from her job as agriculture dean.

A&M’s board and Chancellor Mike McKinney apparently didn’t know what they were getting when they promoted her and didn’t know what to do with her afterward. This is not to indict Murano’s short tenure. This simply addresses the leadership breakdown that stewards of a legacy institution are expected to avoid.

One sub-theme is perceived string-pulling from Gov. Rick Perry, Texas’ most prominent A&M alum. Key administrators have strong ties to the governor, most notably McKinney, a former Perry chief of staff. Murano had complained of being surprised by developments within her purview. If true, that would represent meddling that no chief executive ought to tolerate.

Other moves by top administrators bordered on underhanded. McKinney mused to the Bryan-College Station Eagle recently that perhaps A&M didn’t need a president. Perhaps, he said, the job could be combined with his duties of overseeing a system of 11 universities.

The ostensible reason was saving money, though some on campus said they were unaware of a fiscal crisis that would call for such drastic action. The effect was to undermine the university president at a time she was smarting from emergence of her written job review. The Eagle obtained and published McKinney’s hand-written evaluation of Murano. It has the look of a paper that a professor graded on his way to class, with scribbles in the margins and crossed-out remarks.

Even if McKinney hit the mark with the low grades he gave her, the process deserved an effort respectful of the office.

As for Murano’s performance, her first months on the job merited her inclusion among finalists for the annual Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year feature for 2008. Accomplishments included a new program for tuition-free education to students with family income below a certain threshold.

Murano’s tenure was rocky at times, including charges of dishonestly during her clumsy hiring, unhiring and rehiring of a vice president – a former Perry classmate – whose candidacy had not been vetted by campus stakeholder groups.

But Murano’s bosses have taken personnel clumsiness to new heights, shortchanging the university mightily at a time it aims to measure up to its ambitious Vision 2020 plan. The job of A&M president must now look like a snake pit to top talent capable of leading a university of distinction.

Editor’s Note from the Texas Civil Rights Review: Sources have been quoted to the effect that a new President for Texas A&M at College Station will be named within six months’ time. But keeping that deadline is not the most important thing to the institution. What is more important is an autonomous and dignified international search that is clearly anchored from within the community at the College Station campus–a search that is spot free from even the appearance of willful shenanigans in high places.–gm

Essential documents for the Sunday resignation of the first Woman and the first Hispanic President of Texas A&M University at College Station.–gm

OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT

Statement from Texas A&M President Elsa A. Murano

“The events of recent weeks have been very taxing for the entire Aggie family. The faculty, students and staff have demonstrated incredible loyalty to this institution, upholding our Aggie values during these exceedingly trying times. I am truly grateful for the countless expressions of support that I have received from our faculty, staff, current and former students, and friends of Texas A&M. I cannot adequately express how much I have appreciated your many letters, phone calls, emails, and especially your prayers. They have been truly uplifting and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

“My husband Peter and I fell in love with Texas A&M the moment we set foot in Aggieland back in 1995. This deep and abiding passion for what the university represents, and for the people of the Aggie family, reinforces my duty to do what is best for Texas A&M. For this reason, I will be resigning as President of our beloved university, effective tomorrow, June 15, 2009, to return to the faculty, subject to approval by the Board of Regents.

“Our university is strong and I know that we will weather this storm. I sincerely hope and pray that we will intensify our efforts to protect and enhance Texas A&M’s reputation. I trust that the important issues raised in recent weeks will be addressed in the Aggie way – with integrity, selfless service and indomitable spirit. God bless you all, and gig ’em!”

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Statement regarding resignation of Dr. Elsa A. Murano

June 14, 2009

COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Dr. Elsa A. Murano today announced her resignation as president of Texas A&M University. Dr. Murano’s resignation and the plans for her transition back into the faculty will be addressed by the board at its meeting scheduled for tomorrow, June 15.

“Dr. Murano has served the university with distinction over the course of her career” said Morris E. Foster, chairman of The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents. “I want to thank her for her service and commitment to the betterment of the university, its faculty and its students.”

Dr. Murano has served as president of Texas A&M University since January 2008. Plans for her succession will be taken up by the board in the near future.

“We look forward to having Dr. Murano rejoin our faculty and continue her nationally recognized work in food science,” said Michael D. McKinney, M.D., chancellor of the A&M System.

About the A&M System

The A&M System is one of the largest systems of higher education in the nation, with a budget of $3.04 billion. Through a statewide network of 11 universities, seven state agencies and a comprehensive health science center, the A&M System educates more than 109,000 students and makes more than 15 million additional educational contacts through service and outreach programs each year. Externally funded research brings in almost $676 million every year and helps drive the state’s economy.

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Evaluation documents posted at KBTX-TV website [pdf format]

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Profile of Darryl Kent Carter, Attorney for Murano

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The Board of Regents of The Texas A&M University System: Morris E. Foster, Chairman; James P. Wilson, Vice Chairman;
Phil Adams, Richard A. Box, Lupe Fraga, Bill Jones, Jim Schwertner, Gene Stallings, Ida Clement Steen; Hunter Bollman, Student Regent.

Discussions Regarding Concept of Merging Certain Functions of the Flagship Institution into the A&M System Offices

Dr. Elsa A. Murano
President, Texas A&M University

May 27, 2009

To Texas A&M Faculty, Staff and Students:

I have been contacted by numerous faculty, staff and administrators, former students and friends of Texas A&M University throughout the day regarding the concept of merging certain functions of the flagship institution into the A&M System Offices as one approach in realizing cost efficiencies. While we are all concerned about the pressures of the current economic situation, I know that we are simultaneously mindful not to sacrifice academic quality, or our national reputation.

Since yesterday, I have continued to receive a diversity of perspectives from the campus community on this concept. I plan to provide these to the Regents and the Chancellor very soon. On issues of this magnitude, we all agree that an open dialogue is critical. Please know that I value your input greatly, and I appreciate all that you do to make Texas A&M one of the premier public universities in the country.

Sincerely,

Dr. Elsa A. Murano

President

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President Murano’s Biography

Dr. Elsa A. Murano is the 23rd President of Texas A&M University. Taking
office on Jan. 3, 2008, at age 49, she is the first woman and first
Hispanic-American to lead the oldest public institution of higher
learning in Texas—now one of the largest teaching and research
universities in the nation.

Dr. Murano worked her way up the academic ranks-teaching and
research-and into administration from an unconventional beginning. At
the age of 2, her family departed from Havana, Cuba, when Fidel Castro
came into power. After living in several Latin American countries, she
and her family settled in Miami when she was 14 years old. At that time,
she only knew Spanish, a language in which she is still fluent, but
quickly mastered English and launched an educational career that carried
her through the doctoral ranks.

In 2002, Hispanic Business Magazine recognized Dr. Murano as one of the
nation’s “100 Most Influential Hispanics.”

“Someday in the future, if I write a book, it will be called Only in
America, because this great country has provided me so many
opportunities, including the great honor of serving as President of
Texas A&M University,” she is often quoted as saying.

Her association with the university dates back to 1995, when she joined
the Texas A&M faculty as an Associate Professor in the Department of
Animal Science and Associate Director of the Center for Food Safety
within the Institute for Food Science and Engineering. Dr. Murano was
named Director of the Center in 1997 and served in that position until
2001. Also, she rose to the rank of Professor and was named holder of
the Sadie Hatfield Professorship in Agriculture.

Dr. Murano interrupted her Texas A&M service in 2001 when President
George W. Bush asked her to serve as Under Secretary for Food Safety for
the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making her the highest-ranking food
safety official in the U.S. government. In leading the USDA Food Safety
and Inspection Service, she was responsible for an agency with a budget
of approximately $1 billion and about 10,000 employees, with the mission
of working to improve public health through the application of science
in policy decisions.

As undersecretary for food safety at the Department of Agriculture, Dr. Murano presided over the
first case of mad cow disease in the United States.

She returned to Aggieland in January 2005 as Vice Chancellor and Dean of
Agriculture and Life Sciences, joint positions in which she served until
being appointed President of Texas A&M. As Vice C
hancellor and former
Director of Texas AgriLife Research (formerly the Texas Agricultural
Experiment Station), she led a transformation of agricultural programs
and four state agencies within The Texas A&M University System to the
benefit of students, peers and the agricultural community represented in
254 counties across Texas.

While serving as Dean, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
experienced significant growth in enrollment and enhancement of its
teaching, research and service endeavors. In conjunction with her
deanship, Dr. Murano chaired a blue-ribbon task force to study ways for
enhancing the undergraduate experience at the University, which has
ultimately become known as “The Murano Report.”

A noted expert on food safety, Dr. Murano was principal investigator or
co-principal investigator in research projects totaling more than $8.7
million during her professorial career, initially at Iowa State
University and continuing at Texas A&M. She has been widely published,
as author or co-author of seven books, book chapters or monographs, and
scores of scholarly papers, abstracts and related materials.

Her car is a 2004 Ford Thunderbird—maroon, of course!

Dr. Murano began her professorial career in 1990 as an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Preventative
Medicine at Iowa State, the position she held prior to joining the Texas
A&M faculty. She received a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences
from Florida International University, and earned both a master’s degree
in anaerobic microbiology and a doctorate in food science and technology
from Virginia Tech.

She is married to Dr. Peter S. Murano, Associate Professor of Nutrition
and Food Science and Director of Texas A&M’s Institute for Obesity
Research and Program Development.

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Office of the President

Vice Presidents & Executive Staff

Dr. Jeffrey S. Vitter

Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics

Dr. H. Russell Cross

Executive Vice President for Operations

Ambassador Eric Bost (Ret.)

Vice President for Global Initiatives

Mr. Bill Byrne

Director of Athletics

Dr. Pierce E. Cantrell, Jr.

Vice President and Associate Provost for Information Technology

Mr. Jason D. Cook

Vice President for Marketing & Communications

Dr. R. Bowen Loftin

Vice President and CEO, Texas A&M at Galveston (TAMUG)

Dr. Theresa Maldonado

Interim Vice President for Research

Mr. Michael G. O’Quinn

Vice President for Institutional and Federal Affairs

Mr. Terry A. Pankratz

Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer

Mr. Chuck Sippial

Vice President for Facilities

Mr. R. C. Slocum

Special Advisor to the President

Ms. Courtney K. Trolinger

Vice President for Governmental Affairs

Dr. Robert Walker

Senior Executive for Development

Dr. Karan Watson

Interim Vice President and Associate Provost for Diversity

LtGen Joseph F. Weber, (USMC) Ret.

Vice President for Student Affairs

Mr. Chad E. Wootton

Vice President for University Advancement

Ms. Mary Pletzer

Executive Personal Assistant to the President

By Pedro Ruiz

Protest at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center was on June 20, 2009. We marched through the town of Taylor, Texas, to the detention center. The march started at about 1:10 p.m. as we arrived to the detention center at about 1:35 p.m. We had about 175 people in attendance at the demonstration. The platform of speakers and musicians was from 1:40 p.m. to about 3:50 p.m. People started to leave about 4:30 p.m. at the end, in which we took this picture.

There is a yellow line that you are not supposed to cross, as I had approached the van earlier in which they threatened to arrest me for wanting to take a picture of the facility owned by Corrections Corporation of America.

Free the Children! Shut Hutto Down! Picture of Antonio Diaz of the Texas Indigenous Council and Pedro Ruiz.

Marching to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center through the detention center’s backyard.
Marching for the first time over the downtown bridge in Taylor, Texas. Free the Children-Shut Hutto Down sign.

The Beyond Point in which only authorized people are allowed beyond this marker at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center. Antonio, Pedro, and Chuck.

People demonstrating their freedom of speech in front of the entrance to the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, completely blocking the entrance from any vehicles entering the detention center.

For more information on the movement to Free the Children, please visit the website www.tdonhutto.blogspot.com or see Tlazocamati – Ollin Quetzalcoatl 21 at myspace.

Also, please read the article I was in exposing Lulac’s connection to Corrections Corporation of America.

By Nick Braune

Although there has been a flood of articles commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School tragedy, lamenting the violence of youth, maybe a little different perspective might be permissible too.

I was living in South Dakota at the time, where I was a minor presence in the legislature as a lobbyist on peace and justice issues. I watched the legislature closely for three years, and I watched them solemnly “upping” (toughening) the sentences for this and that offense, always “sending a message” that evil actions would not be tolerated. The Clinton years were very punitive: they killed a half million Iraqis through sanctions and made our prisons swell like sores.

It was a particularly harsh decade for children. Hillary and Bill, who believed it takes a village to raise children, were advocating school uniforms early in the 1990s but basically settled for prison uniforms. The “trying youth as adults” fad was intense throughout the decade. I wrote a one-act play — it was performed in a few places — about a kid in South Dakota who received a “life in prison with no parole” sentence for a crime he did as a 14-year-old.

It’s a true story. The boy, Paul Jensen, trying to impress an adventuresome 18-year-old who was sleeping with Paul’s mother, became totally confused about what it meant to be grown-up, shot a cab driver on orders from the 18-year-old father figure, and is in prison today, where, I suppose, he will stay forever. The prosecutors and the press called him a “predator,” and the trial was a slam dunk. He did wrong, and everyone wanted to “send a message” to other youth not to do wrong.

There are only five countries in the world which give the sentence “life in prison with no parole” to children. According to a Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International joint report in 2005, Barbados allows that sentence, but the report did not state how many were in prison there with the sentence. Tanzania had one person in prison under that sentence. South Africa had four. Israel had seven, and the United States had 2,200 people in prison for life with no parole who had committed the crime before turning 18. (This sentence, which Alexander Cockburn calls the “living death” sentence, incidentally violates the international conventions on the rights of children, which the U.S. has refused to sign.)

Also in those Clinton years we saw a cancerous growth of “boot camps” being set up around the country, “tough love” centers, where the children were humiliated, screamed at, and tortured to make them better. When I lived in South Dakota, a 14-year-old girl, Gina Score, who had shoplifted some petty items, was trapped in a boot camp (to modify her behaior) and was killed. An interesting book on boot camps, although it only scratches the surface, is American Gulag: Secret P.O.W. Camps for Teens, by Alexia Parks.

In my opinion, Columbine is the symbol not of youth violence but rather of a very cruel decade toward children: Paul Jensen in prison for life without parole, shoplifter Gina Score in a grave, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dead because of sanctions, the children burned to death by the Clintons in Waco, children sentenced to execution, children dead in Columbine. If any readers would like to examine two interesting sociology books studying our negative and exaggerated attitudes toward youth in the 1990s, I suggest Mike Males’ wonderful studies, Framing Youth and Scapegoat Generation — I love those book titles. (Available from Common Courage Press.)

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The following related piece, “The Criminal Justice System and Kids: One Dad’s Story,” appeared in my column in the Mid-Valley Town Crier, April 12, 2009 — N.B.

While chit-chatting with everyone this week about April being the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, I learned that Randy Jarvis (a Sociology and Criminal Justice faculty member at South Texas College) has a perspective much like mine — but with a special personal side. I asked for an interview.

Braune: As you know, I am miffed that America began locking up more and more youth starting in the 1990s, and I think the fad about “trying youth as adults” has been disastrous. The media began labeling children as “dangerous,” as “predators,” as “lacking in consciences,” and then after Columbine, we began turning high schools into little jails. Youth could not be trusted. If I understand correctly, your son was hit by a false accusation right after Columbine. Please, fill us in.

Jarvis: Two days after the Columbine incident, my son (at Burlington High School in Iowa) had some lead shot in his book bag. I had purchased a smelting pot for making fishing weights, and he was transporting the shot to his grandmother’s house where the smelter was located. Another student in his class saw the lead shot and asked what it was, and my son told him. The other student made a comment to my son that this could be used to make a bomb and my son replied “I guess you could.” The student immediately told a teacher about “bomb-making materials” in the book bag.

The school police officer was immediately notified [there is more about school police later] and my son was arrested, charged as an adult, and taken to jail.

Braune: The press and prosecutors went bananas?

Jarvis: Oh yes, the news media, hyped by Columbine, plastered his school picture in the newspaper and on all four local channels and the next morning were present at my son’s arraignment. I had money ready to bail him out. But this was not to happen — the local prosecutor grandstanded, claiming my son was a danger to society and should be held without bond. The judge, reacting to the cameras, agreed and increased the bond to one million dollars.

I retained a good attorney who immediately asked for a psychological evaluation to determine if my son was a danger, giving us some time for the hype to calm down, so he was sent to a state mental institution for evaluation. After a month, the psychiatrist determined that my son was no danger to anyone and should be returned to the judicial system.

Because we got a different judge from a month earlier, I thought the nightmare was over. But this was not the case. In the court hearing, the school police officer showed up with a document, electronically signed by the vice-principal, showing that my son had been expelled from school. According to this document, a copy had been sent to his mother, the guidance counselor, the principal, the police officer, and me. But the document was dated the same day as our court appearance.

Then the chief jailer/police officer was placed on the stand, who even claimed that my son was convicted of drug crimes in Henderson County, Illinois, clear evidence that my son was a danger to the community. Our attorney asked for a recess until that afternoon to substantiate the claims. I rushed to Henderson County Court House and obtained an affidavit showing my son had never had any criminal history in the County. Our attorney went to the school and ascertained that the school did not even know about the expulsion notice and in fact the only copy that existed was the one presented in court.

Braune: Had the school police officer lied?

Jarvis: Apparently, it was discovered that he produced the document on the Vice-Principal’s computer early that morning without their knowledge. After we proved this, the judge admonished the two officers and the Assistant District Attorney and sent my son to the Juvenile Court where he belonged in the first place, releasing him to his mother and me. Soon my son was acquitted of the charges, but his reputation was damaged — with his name plastered all over the news beca
us
e he had been charged as an adult.

Braune: After the dust settled, did you receive an apology from the police, the school, the prosecutors, press, etc?

Jarvis: No one apologized for anything. After civil litigation the school finally privately apologized, but only because they wanted the litigation to end and refused to apologize publically.

Braune: I think your kid was lucky to have you in his corner.

Jarvis: He was very fortunate that I could get the ten thousand dollars needed for the attorney’s fee. Otherwise, my son would probably have received a court appointed attorney and probably would have been convicted as an adult, sentenced to ten to twenty years.