Friday, November 13, 2009

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ALIVE AND WELL: TIME PICKS GARCIA


By Juan Montoya
Mmm, let's see if we've got this right.

If you are the president of a hybrid university-community college (UTB-TSC) and you:

1. Engineered the overthrow of the former college president so you could be named president,

2. Built a new $12.5 million library in such a way that there is room on the shelves to handle only one-third of the books that were available to students in the old library. In other words, two-thirds of the books will be missing.The new building – to be paid with part of a $68 million local taxpayer bond issue – will only be able to hold 100,000 of the university’s total collection of 300,000 books. As a result of this brilliant management, students will have to wait until books are available to them to study,

3. Presided over a massive "gross academic fraud" involving stolen tests and answers by students and staff. A police investigation found student employees and regular staff used their positions to steal test answers and sell them to students,

4. Rode shotgun over the formation of the so-called "partnership" between the University of Texas University System and the Texas Junior Southmost College District where the resources of one of the most poverty-ridden areas of the country subsidized massive construction projects under the name of the UT system,

5. Agreed as part of the conditions to that "partnership" that poor little UTB-TSC would refrain from asking for money from the state's Permanent University Fund (gas and oil) in return for the prestige of placing UTB plaques on local taxpayer funded structures;

TIME Magazine will name you – Juliet V. Garcia – one of the Ten Best College Presidents of 2009.
Garcia, the first female Hispanic president of a college or university in the U.S., shares the distinction alongside Mary Sue Coleman, of the University of Michigan, and Gordon Gee, the president of Ohio State University, among others.

Does anybody really think that UTB-TSC ranks alongside these two institutions?

It is rumored that the Vatican is also looking at the canonization of Garcia and has at least one witness who testified she saw the college president walking across the Ft. Brown Resaca late at night as the fog descended on the institution.

However, St. Juliet might have to wait her turn. Apparently, the Church has its share of female Latina saints already on board.

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