UNITY GIVES WAY TO AMBITION ON NEW TSC BOARD ; WIGHTMAN SICCED ON ADELA

"I'm gonna kick the stuffin' out of you," Brer Rabbit said and pounced on the Tar Baby with both feet. They sank deep into the Tar Baby. Brer Rabbit was so furious he head-butted the cute little creature until he was completely covered with tar and unable to move."

Folk Tale Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby
By Juan Montoya
Once upon a time there were four Texas Southmost College trustees who decided they had enough of their college district – situated in the poorest community in the United States – subsidizing the wealthiest university system in the country.
So, instead of continuing a 20-year-old abusive relationship, they decided to end the partnership between the University of Texas System and the TSC community college district. Over the span of more than 20 years beginning in 1991, it is estimated that the college transferred about $1 billion to Juliet Garcia's UT- Brownsville. Additionally, the college district shouldered a staggering bond debt estimated at close to $100 million to fund construction at the shared campus.
With an impending non-amicable separation imminent, UTB President Garcia drafted an urgent plan to have the assets of the 85-year-old community college transferred to UTB and dissolve the college. The UT System would keep some $200 million in assets and TSC district taxpayers would keep the outstanding bond debt. When that was paid off, the community college district would disappear.
Dissatisfied with the proposal, an academic product with graduation rates of 17 percent over a six-year period, and the highest cost of tuition and fees in the state assessed district students, the four trustees – Kiko Rendon, Adela Garza, Trey Mendez and Rene Torres – voted to separate TSC from UTB.
Friends of the UT System say UTB acted first to dissolve the marriage. Friends of  TSC say the college did. Such are divorces.
Once UTB supporters – power elites and those with a stake in the UT System – got wind of the separation, they started a concerted campaign to deride, discredit and in the words of a UTB cleric "financially and spiritually" destroy the four. Credit dried up for their businesses, they suffered social ostracism, malicious gossip was circulated, and their reputations were dragged through the mud.
One trustee – Mendez – even had the former personal confessor of Queen Julieta storm his doors with a mob of students who then publicly called for his personal destruction.
The adversity only made the four more determined to save the college. Behind the scenes they had the support of the likes of the Yturrias, most of the federal judiciary, and many past political leaders and activists. But discretion being the better part of valor, they could only support their stand privately lest they, too, become targets of the enraged mob.
They formed a united front. They had to. If they didn't stick together, they would be attacked separately.
They weathered the storm. After it was clear that the community supported the idea of both a free-standing community college and an self-financed, free-standing university, previous foes came around.
None other than IBC President Fred Rusteberg – a longstanding Julieta Garcia benefactor and ally – finally conceded that perhaps having both a community college and a university was perhaps a good idea.
As the university and college "partnership" separation became fact, both went about trying to acquire the necessary accreditation to continue their separate – but collaborative – ways.
TSC hired Lily Tercero to be its president from the Alamo Community College System in San Antonio and guide them to accreditation. UTB retained Garcia and set about to transform its presence in deep South Texas into a sustainable institution.
Tercero was hired mostly to guide TSC to accreditation. The Texas Legislature, in allowing the separation of the institutions, gave them both until July 2015 to get it. UTB, the parent institution, would cooperate with TSC for the benefit of both.
But something happened on the way to the circus. TSC's application was dependent on data that should have been collected by Garcia's UTB, since it had operational control for all those years. Tercero should have made sure it was. But it wasn't, and now we learn that instead of TSC getting its accreditation in 2014, it may be bumping against the July 2015 deadline imposed by the legislature.
Whose fault is it?
Some say Garcia and UTB sabotaged the application by withholding the data necessary to achieve the goal. Others say that Tercero failed miserably in not making sure that the information was there before submitting the application with insufficient data, no matter whose fault it was. After all, Tercero, personable as she may be, is just another employee of the college. If she can't perform, she goes. You play the game, you take your chances. That's life in the Big Leagues.
Both she and Garcia failed the community and both failed the students.
In the middle of this, someone – he doesn't say who – recruited the vicious blogger Robert Wightman to blame Adela Garza for "trying to destroy TSC," forgetting that she was one of the four trustees who saved the college from destruction in the first place.
Where was Wightman when the mobs were hanging the four trustees in effigy? Where was Wightman when a renegade priest was threatening Mendez with spiritual and professional destruction? Where was Wightman when Adela and others traveled to Austin to disabuse the Texas House committees on higher education that – State Rep. Rene Oliveira and Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr.'s testimony notwithstanding – the people of this community did not want to lose their community college?
Wightman was too busy advocating a gay lifestyle and nude beaches on Boca Chica Beach. He was too busy successfully claiming a 100 percent medical disability to avoid paying $45,000 loaned to him by the people of the United States so he could become a lawyer, only to be disbarred later for his  misbehavior. He was too busy claiming 100 percent military service-related disability to shirk paying property taxes on his $109,000 home. He fought mightily to prevent the Cameron County Appraisal District revealing the basis on which they awarded him the 100 percent property tax exemption, even if the request was merely for his VA claim number and the disability rating, not the specifics of his alleged medical condition.
(To see more of this misanthrope's deeds, click on the link http://thewightmanfile.blogspot.com/)
Wightman, who at most served a year and a half of peace-time military service until he was discharged for psychiatric reasons, is now the voice of those trustees on the TSC board whose political and economic ambitions have made them forget that they once stood at the barricades with their brave colleagues and battled those who would destroy this community's 85-year investment in their junior college.

No one believes that hordes of veterans will come to his defense. No one believes that he is now the defender of our community college against someone who walked the walk, and not like him, just mouthed the talk. Yet does he, and whoever recruited him, think he can smear Garza to his heart's content with no consequences? Would we she not have lifted a finger and allowed the college to be swallowed by the UT System? How quick we forget.
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?," asks the Good Book. "Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?"