JULIET'S GREED IN BLACK AND WHITE: THE RAPE OF THE INNOCENT

By Juan Montoya

There is never a shortage of Doubting Thomases around town who will question whether it's the sun that comes up in the morning or whether we're making it up.
The post we ran on TSC-UTB President Juliet Garcia elicited such a response from a commenter so we decided to make the page from the university's budget where the transfer of funds to Juliet's salary is listed available to our readers. [click on image]
Rather than print the entire document, we printed Page G-38 where her salary is listed and also notes the funds where the transfers to her salary come from.
As you can see, Garcia's salary jumped from $321,665 to 361,411, a hefty $38,726 raise (or 12 percent) at a time when the state's educational budget is being slashed in Austin. In fact, Garcia will be in the state capital to address this very issue and tell our political representatives in the legislature how to trim our budget.
Will she volunteer to give back her raise?
If you read the page carefully, you will see that Garcia's salary includes transfers from the TSC budget, including a nice portion from the English Department.
It's bad enough that local students are paying the highest tuition and student fees in the state and that half of them leave the university after their freshman year and that only about 16 to 17 percent graduate after six years here.
Then, on top of that, as the state considers further raising the tuition costs and slashing grants for needy students, their president (who we are sure feels our pain) give herself a fat little raise while wringing her hands and wailing at the legislature about cutting educational funds.
The raise, by the way, was tucked away in the UTB budget and the TSC trustees only saw the innocuous transfers when they were asked to approve their budget. We're sure that if they had known the Garcia raise was in the offing, they would never have approved the increase.
She probably feels that she deserves the increase after she failed at the heavy lifting required to ram the new and improved partnership agreement between UTB and TSC. Under that agreement, local trustees would have little or no say in the management of the university. As it is, Garcia is doing as she wishes. Now she wants the trustees to give the UT System everything it owns (except, of course, its debt) and allow her to have unbridled power.
No, hell no.