Boone Pickens and the Roach Motel
The master of takeovers is caught up in a feud between the president and the faculty of a Panhandle university. It all could have been avoided if only he had read his own book.
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Roach too is unyielding. “Appearances count,” he likes to say. “Every fundraising book says people don’t give to institutions that need it but to institutions they think are doing a first-rate job.” But in trying to appear presidential, Roach ignored his own dictum; to the faculty, he appeared to be consumed with his own grandeur. He was alienating the people whose goodwill would be crucial when the time came to reorganize the school. But to Roach, all the criticism is just proof that his opponents are small-minded nitpickers. “Am I,” he asks, “going to have to talk about mashed potatoes all my life?”
The Court of the Sun King
In the spring of 1986, with the atmosphere at the school already poisonous, Ed Roach revealed his long-awaited strategic plan. It made good on his promise that things would change. The following year, the number of colleges was slashed from 7 to 4. The number of departments was reduced from 23 to 14. Among the victims were the colleges of agriculture and nursing (both down-graded to divisions) and arts and sciences (dismantled) and such departments as anthropology, horticulture, and speech and hearing therapy (all eliminated). The effect was to emphasize the areas most popular with students, especially business and communication.
Most of Roach’s final plan had been suggested, in one form or another, by the faculty. It shouldn’t have been cause for a major controversy. But there was so much distrust between Roach and the faculty that controversy erupted as soon as the plan began to go into effect.
Roach’s critics saw a disturbing pattern: people who had publicly opposed Roach or angered him for any number of reasons found their jobs eliminated in the restructuring of the university. Though tenured faculty were beyond Roach’s reach, deans, part-time professors, and nonacademic employees were not. Faculty members began to see their dispute with Roach as more than a clash of personalities; it was a matter of academic principle. As English professor Richard Moseley puts it, “At a university, freedom of expression is not just a right, it’s a responsibility. If you tell people to shut up, you don’t have a university anymore.”
Roach had no more regard for his opponents than they had for him. He saw them as fifth columnists out to subvert the strategic plan and keep things the way they had always been. “I hear those people say, ‘We were looking forward to change,’” he says. “Baloney. It was a hunker-down mentality.”
Ted Freidell, a former dean of the college of arts and sciences, considers himself among Roach’s first victims. Freidell had been the dean of the college since 1971, and he was a vigorous opponent of its breakup under the strategic plan. When the time came to choose a dean for the new college of education and social science, Freidell wanted the job. He won the unanimous recommendation of the selection committee, but Roach rejected him. The vice president, who has since left the university, told the committee to name someone else, someone the president would find acceptable.
Hunter Ingalls, a part-time professor of art history, also lost his job, after writing a letter to the Amarillo Globe-News criticizing the regents’ unquestioning support of Roach. A Ph.D. from Columbia who married into one of the Panhandle’s wealthiest families, Ingalls was one of the most popular professors on campus; the school paper editorialized for his reinstatement, terming his departure “a little too conveeeenient.”
The list grew longer. It included Winfred Padgett, the painter who had made the injudicious remark about the presidential wine rack; it included student affairs dean Bob Kinney and his deputy; it soon included Steven Mayes, an administrator who supervised the journalism department. Roach’s unhappiness with the coverage he was receiving in the school newspaper was well known. The administration replaced the newspaper’s faculty adviser without consulting Mayes. Mayes refused to sign the employment papers for the new adviser and wrote a letter of complaint to Roach. Mayes resigned from his administrative position at Roach’s request shortly afterward.
The faculty began to think of WTSU as the French court under Louis XIV—a world populated by snitches and fueled by vindictiveness and internal intrigue. Roach listened avidly to those who reported snide remarks and nasty cracks professors made about the boss. No incident was too small to overlook. When Roach learned that psychology professor Tom Cannon had made a joke about the president’s doghouse—a miniature version of the presidential mansion—he told Cannon’s department head of his extreme displeasure. Cannon recalls, “I said something like, ‘If you think the president’s house is nice, you should see his dog’s house.’” When word of Roach’s displeasure reached him, Cannon duly wrote a letter of apology. He was, “To President Roach, everything is a matter of control. You are either for or against, and if you are against, you must be punished.”
The Coup De Grace
As the anger against the president built, another feeling emerged—a feeling of, well, exhilaration. There was excitement in the air, a heady sense that the upheavals that one associated with campuses like Harvard and Columbia and Berkeley had come at last to faraway Canyon.
It was an explosion waiting for a spark, and Roach provided one soon enough. He decreed that deans and department heads would get additional administrative duties as well as salary increases. However, the administration also decided that summer-school classes would be reduced. To the faculty, it was an example of education taking a backseat to administration.
In the fall of 1986 the faculty senate decided to hold a referendum on the change. On the bottom of the ballot was a space for comments. People quickly ran out of paper enumerating their complaints. The president of the senate, an engineering-technology professor named Don Envick, who has since taken a position at a Nebraska college, presented the comments to Roach and urged him to talk to the faculty about their concerns. Roach refused. “He said he didn’t have to respond to anything negative,” Envick recalls. Later, at a meeting with the full senate, Roach repeated his refusal.
That did it. Ed Roach had achieved the impossible: he had radicalized the WTSU faculty. The complaining turned to calls for action. At a gathering at Envick’s house, Roach’s opponents pressed for the strongest move the faculty could take: a no-confidence vote. The vote was taken, and on November 10 the results were announced. Ninety percent of the faculty responded, and 87 percent of them—157 faculty members—voted no confidence in Ed Roach. The school newspaper soon reprinted the anonymous comments that accompanied the ballots. Said one: “He couldn’t have brought more ill will to WT if he had been caught sodomizing the university mascot at the homecoming game.”
The faculty saw the vote as a triumph; the outcome was more overwhelming than anyone had dared imagine. Their censure was now official, and they knew that not even Pickens, who had remained firmly behind Roach all along, could ignore it.
Some members of the faculty believed Roach’s relationship with Pickens was part of the problem at WTSU. A self-professed hero worshiper, Roach has copies of Pickens’ autobiography in nearly every room in his house. His office, just off the living room, is decorated in Late Boone. Framed editorial cartoons of Pickens, autographed to Roach, line the walls, and on the desk, along with books about two of Roach’s other heroes, Truman and Churchill, is the omnipresent Boone. As faculty critics saw it, the way Roach ran the university—from top down, punishing what he regarded as disloyalty, harping on the bottom line, living high on the institution’s money—amounted to an intrusion of corporate values into academic life.
Pickens’ reaction to the no-confidence vote confirmed their worst fears. “The faculty are employees, and employees go to work—that’s it,” Pickens told Amarillo television reporters. “The faculty believes they can never be discharged from the university because they’ve been tenured. Let me tell you, higher education is going to be restructured, just like corporate America.”
Out Of Control
After the no-confidence vote, the administration seemed paralyzed. The university catalog, which explains WTSU’s programs and the course work required to graduate, had to be revised to reflect the strategic plan. The new edition, scheduled to be issued in the spring of 1987, didn’t appear until November. Freshmen had no written source to tell them whether their degree programs were valid.
My Library
