ON THURSDAY WE DECIDE: IS IT OUR COLLEGE, OR JULIET'S?

By Juan Montoya
Just as in the Lord of the Rings, the dark forces are gathering to strike this Thursday and cap a long campaign to wrest the 75-year-old Texas Southmost College community college district and hand it as a tribute to their queen Juliet Garcia who will in turn hand it over to her overlords at the UT System.
That action – the capitulation of the TSC trustees before the dark onslaught of Garcia's minions – will cap a years'-long campaign fraught with guile and fraud that continues unabated as the TSC-UTB media propaganda machine churns unceasingly toward its conquest.
Garcia now counts among her allies a coterie of unlikely bedfellows – from beguiled medical professionals to barrio politiqueras – to achieve her ends.
The pressure upon the majority of the TSC board – Trey Mendez, Rene Torres, Adela Garza, and Kiko Rendon – has come from all quarters. Orchestrated from the Harvard by the Rio Grande Gorgas Hall headquarters and honed in the board rooms of Fred Rusteberg's IBC, it has but one goal: to dispossess the local residents of the college district and dissolve it, and to transfer all its real estate assets, real estate, and bank deposits and present it as a gift to the UT System.
Along the way, the trustees are also asked to emasculate themselves of the policy-making responsibilities the voters entrusted them with by electing them, and place the management of the college and the hybrid institution (TSC-UTB) in the hands of the president, namely one Juliet Garcia.
Just how can Juliet and her forces expect the trustees to abdicate their responsibility to the people who voted for them and for the residents to support her goals?
The plan had been laid year back, when it became apparent that some people in the community were asking questions about the disparity in the so-called "partnership" that relegated the taxing entity (TSC) into a cash cow for the UT System, and left the local population saddled with the debt for years to come.
At the same time, tuition for the college students was upped to university levels and the resulting income differential between community college rates and university rates (about $3.2 million) was magically converted into a trustees "scholarship" fund to be awarded to students chosen by the university.
But Garcia's lieutenants knew it wasn't going to be easy. So they carefully analyzed the situation and came up with a game plan. It had to be presented first, as an urgent measure with a strict timetable, as an improvement that would guide the area's education into the future, and finally, an an ultimatum that, unless followed, would result in catastrophe for the college.
UTB, they said, would continue its "commitment" to provide higher education to the local yokels in spite of their ignorant reluctance to take the medicine. As in the Third World, it became a sort of "white man's burden" for the UT System to uplift the ignorant masses and entice them with the promise of prestige of being part of the UT System.
The "partnership" was hailed as a cutting-edge concept that would allow the university system to bring its cornucopia of knowledge to Brownsville with a minimum of cost to the system. That is, that one of the poorest communities in the nation would end up subsidizing one of the richest oil-and-gas funded educational higher education systems in the worlkd, never mind the nation.
Their own analysts described it best:
"As everyone knows but nobody wants to speak, the partnership was originally conceived and established less for its institutional merits than because it was the best, perhaps the only way to lure the UT System to Brownsville...The time has come for UT System to step up and provide funding analogous to that provided other system components - that is , full funding."
The partnership, fraught with contradictions that are now coming to the fore, was a lame attempt by the UT System to own up to its responsibilities to provide a four-year academic degree granting institution in Brownsville.
Instead, with the connivance of some local leaders and academes, it has created a situation where local people are subsidizing its presence here with an annual property-tax income of $15 million, additional income from the highest tuition and student fee costs of any community college in the entire state, and continues to be excluded from participating in the annual disbursement of the system's Permanent University Fund the UT System other components throughout the state share.
Quoting from their own analysis again:
"The most honorable thing to have happen is for the University of Texas System to at last assume full financial responsibility for UTB-TSC. After all, having a component of the system tax the citizens of the surrounding are, to the tune of some $15 million annually, is a situation unknown elsewhere in the System. It is also a situation that in system terms, is profoundly counter-productive, creating a second-class status for the institution even as it imposes major economic burdens on one of the poorest communities in the nation."
Since the partnership does not allow for construction funds from the state to be awarded to the UT component at UTB, the local residents have shouldered the burden through bond issue and community donations. It's gotten to the point where the demand from the trustees for the UT System to pay back rent totalling up of $15 million has resulted in a vote by the regents to dissolve the partnership.
But wait, before we cry "Woe is me, Woe is me," realize this: this is also part of the script devised to rein in the trustees to do Juliet's bidding.
Back to the UTB game plan:
"There are three ways you can get the someone to do what they do not want to do: You can threaten them, you can trick them, or you can buy them out. Since the first of these is unlikely to yield results, while the second is devious and potentially destructive, the third alternative suggests itself as the appropriate way to proceed."
Now we hear that TSC would lose its accreditation if it goes at it alone.
Guess what? Only the partnership is accredited right now. UTB is not, and neither is TSC.
But the fact of the matter is that UTB would need 200 acres of real estate to gain accreditation, which it does not have and TSC does. So now the bogeyman is being waved in front of our faces predicting grim future and, as the March 15 deadline letter from the chancellor to the trustees states : (Unless the trustees accept our proposal)..."there is a sense of urgency to this transition, and that the community will not endure years of uncertainty about the future of our two institutions."
The dark forces are gathering and have chosen the Feb. 17 meeting at Gorgas Hall to bring the recalcitrant trustees to heel and present their capitulation to Juliet.
Let's support them in numbers and not let it happen. Battle!