GARCIA BEMOANS HER DOWNFALL AS UTB PRESIDENT

"Once upon a time you dressed so fine,
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you ?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall,"
You thought they were all a’kiddin' you..."
Like a Rolling Stone, by Bob Dylan
By Juan Montoya
For the better part of two decades – more than 20 years, in fact – University of Texas at Brownsville President Julieta Garcia was the undisputed queen of the Harvard by the Rio Grande.
She wheeled and dealed with the combined assets of the Texas Southmost College-UTB "partnership" as she pleased. She made sure her sycophants and supporters got the plum jobs, doled herself out a fine salary and increases while the university was pinching pennies and indebted the community college district taxpayers into the next decade with bond issues to construct palatial edifices on the campus.Who can forget how she gave herself a $30,000 raise with a transfer of that amount for the English Department to her salary slot to augment her salary to more than $340,000 while requiring the departments to implement cuts.
And how about the issuance of the $68 million construction bond issue after voters rejected her first call for $123 million bond issue only to find out after the cash was spent that by shifting this here and moving this there she actually ended up spending the original $123 million voters be damned?
Meanwhile, their kids were paying the highest tuition and user-fee rates in the entire state. But it didn't affect her then, did it?
Now we hear her lamentations that she is relegated to an office that has no "large windows with a beautiful view" that was meant to be a sleep lab when the bucks were flying fast and furious?
"This is our home now," Garcia told a reporter for the local daily and one could almost see her in sackcloth and ashes gnashing her teeth in despair.
It is probably a comedown for Queen Julieta to find herself in such a predicament. She is now having to sell her South Padre Island condominium and settle for living in the former president's house on Jacaranda Street in the Rio Viejo section of Brownsville. Even that home was made available for her from her masters in Austin who had pliant State Rep. Rene Oliveira pass a special measure in the legislature authorizing the sale of it to her. Her buddy IBC President Fred Rusteberg loaned her the money she needed to close the deal.
When UTB was cut off from the TSC trough, the gravy stopped and she felt as if "we were holding up the facade of a university," she said.
Now she is hoping that the UT System Regents will appoint her as the president of the Brownsville component of the UT-Rio Grande Valley, the newest name given the Community University, University of the Americas, or one of the many PR inventions that the "partnership" generated to sell it to the media and masses.
She still laments the fact that TSC and UTB separated.
"To say Thank God the separation happened, you just can't. There were too many people that have been affected by it. "
It's funny now that she is on the receiving end of the cutbacks that Julieta now feels the effects of actions that she started years ago when her eyes just got too greedy and she wanted to do away with the community college and transfer all of its assets to the UT System. And, for the first time in decades, a majority of the TSC trustees told her plain and simply "No."
Now she's is a windowless office hoping the UT System will pick to be the UT-RGV-Brownsville president or onsite director, quite a comedown from queen.

"Aw, how does it feel ?
To be on your own ?
With no direction home ?
Like a complete unknown ?
Like a rolling stone ?