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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The budget was a mess too. Instead of coming out at the beginning of the school year, in August, it was not ready until October. Department heads received multiple versions of the budget and didn’t know what to work from. One of Roach’s selling points for the strategic plan was that it would save nearly $1 million, which would go largely into faculty salaries. But the raises never materialized. Roach says legislative budget cuts were the reason. Adding to Roach’s embarrassment, the administration bungled the awarding of scholarships given by the Amarillo Advertising Federation; the ad club retrieved the money from university control and now administers the scholarship program itself. One thing Roach did take care of was his own salary. In 1986 he negotiated a $10,000 raise, paid for by private funds, bringing his salary to $90,000.
Roach and Pickens like to boast that Roach has been a successful fundraiser for the school. After all, that’s what a lot of the perks were about—creating a look of success that would attract donors. But when pressed, Roach and Pickens admit that almost all the money is from one source: Boone Pickens. “Boone has given most of the money, in the neighborhood of two and a half million,” Roach says, adding, “these are tough times.”
At times it seemed that just about the only action being taken at WTSU was the Boonification of the university. The Bea and Boone Pickens Distinguished Lecture Series, paid for by the Amarillo Credit Association, has brought in three speakers: megatrender John Naisbitt, television evangelist Robert Schuller, and rejected Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. (It did not escape the notice of Roach’s faculty critics that in the same week Schuller was speaking at WTSU, Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Edward Albee gave an address at Amarillo’s community college.) To acknowledge Mrs. Pickens’ contributions to the arts, West Texas State now has a Beatrice Carr Pickens chair in music. Pickens and Mesa Limited Partnership have also given jointly $1.5 million to the business school. In thanks for that generosity, the regents took Roach’s suggestion that they honor their chairman by naming the school the T. Boone Pickens College of Business.
The war between the faculty and Ed Roach reached a new level of intensity in September 1987. An anonymously written broadside appeared in school mailboxes and classrooms. Titled The Rest of the Prairie (the campus newspaper is called The Prairie), it featured a cartoon called “Ty Koone Country” and an editorial policy that Ed Roach should depart WTSU. An open letter to Roach concluded, “You are the problem, Ed. You are also the solution. Get the hint?” Roach and Pickens were convinced that the paper was not a manifestation of the mood of the campus but actually tied in to the Amarillo conspiracy against Pickens.
The hostility between the faculty and Roach was out of control. Soon it escalated again. In February of this year an anonymous group calling itself SAFE at WTSU (Students, Alumni, and Faculty for Education at West Texas State University) took out an ad in the Globe-News calling for Roach’s resignation on the grounds that he had committed “atrocities.” The following Sunday Roach’s supporters ran a reply written by a Mesa employee. The ad was signed by 387 people; the name-gathering effort was coordinated out of the Mesa offices.
The counterattack was not over. A few days later the university president took the extreme step of taking his own faculty to court. The suit, brought on behalf of Roach and his wife, accused ten John Does responsible for The Rest of the Prairie and the SAFE ad of libel and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Roach demanded that his anonymous critics be forced to reveal their identities. A private investigator from Houston was hired to see what he could turn up about Roach’s opponents. To Roach’s supporters, the lawsuit was a sign that his critics had gone too far; to his critics, it was a sign that Roach had gone too far.
On February 24 he went even further. Roach issued a remarkable press release about recently fired football coach Bill Kelly that showed just how bizarre the atmosphere at WTSU had become. Kelly had been fired over “philosophical differences” after he told the Canyon newspaper that he might look for another job because of constraints on out-of-state recruiting. After being fired, he hired an attorney to fight for his reinstatement (the case has since been settled).
The press release was not about Kelly’s dismissal, however. It was about the death of WTSU football player Curtis Johnson, who had collapsed and died during a workout the previous year. After an autopsy, no fault was assigned to the coaching staff for the death. But Roach’s press release said that new information had come to light. An assistant coach had revealed that Kelly withheld information from investigators. The release went on to say that as Johnson lay collapsed on the ground, Kelly had gone over and yelled at him, nearly causing a race riot by Johnson’s fellow black players. Here is exactly what the university president’s press release said Kelly had yelled: “Get your lazy, fat ass off the ground you pussy motherf—er.”
No sooner was the release handed out than the assistant coach it quoted came forward to say that his remarks had been distorted. A few weeks later the Randall County district attorney issued a statement clearing Kelly of responsibility in Curtis Johnson’s death. The DA also says that the press release left the university vulnerable to the possibility of a wrongful-death suit from Johnson’s family. The incident was Roach at his worst—as spiteful, vindictive, and harmful to the university as his critics had always claimed.
“Fighting A Shadow”
On the same day that he issued his press release Ed Roach found out who was behind the underground paper. Gary Byrd, the president of the faculty senate and a professor of psychology, called a special meeting of the faculty, and he and Spanish professor Mary Gill announced that they were the editors of The Rest of the Prairie. The faculty responded with a standing ovation and shouts of bravo. Colleagues organized a legal-defense fund for the pair.
But there was to be no trial. The next month Roach deflated the faculty’s sense of moral righteousness by dropping his lawsuit. Even his friends, he says, didn’t fully understand the issues. “It looked like the big ol’ president was beating up on the little ol’ faculty,” Roach says.
“I’m not sorry I brought it,” he continues. “I felt so frustrated fighting a shadow.” In his official statement Roach sounded like Pickens when he included among his opponents “individuals who are not connected in any way with WTSU but were using the controversy to further their own political ends.”
Back in Amarillo, some serious damage assessment was going on at Mesa headquarters. Pickens was spending an inordinate amount of time consumed with WTSU. At a special meeting of the board of regents on April 8, Pickens unveiled a plan he hoped would end the turmoil at last: A panel of impartial observers would hear any claims the faculty had to make of violations of academic freedom.
Roach and the regents are strict constructionists on the question of academic freedom, seeing it as a matter of being able to teach without interference. Roach said he welcomed the panel. “I’m tired of this,” he said at the time. “Every act of decision I make, people say, ‘Hey, that’s a violation of academic freedom.’ Removing a chairman of a department is not a violation of academic freedom.”
By the time the three-member panel of academics from outside WTSU arrived, however, the scope of the inquiry had been broadened to include violations of freedom of expression. During the first week of May the panel heard from more than one hundred employees—from maintenance workers and deans to Pickens himself—about the state of West Texas State. The panel was to make a report on its findings for the regents; meeting on May 19.
Whatever the panel says and whatever the regents do as result, the toll already taken has been great. WTSU has gotten more publicity under the administration of Ed Roach than at any time in its history, almost all of it bad. Paranoia is so pervasive that neither the administration nor the faculty can make a move without the other side becoming suspicious. And Boone Pickens, one of the shrewdest dealmakers in the country, has found himself caught up in an academic quagmire.
How did Boone Pickens let it happen? He ought to recognize what’s going on at WTSU; all he has to do is read his own book (plenty of copies are close at hand). In it he derides the egomania of corporate executives, whose biggest interest is the “four P’s: pay, perks, power, and prestige.” He denounces Gulf Oil for hiring a private detective to tail him. “Hiring detectives, unfortunately, is a common practice by many big corporations,” Pickens writes. “It’s partly arrogance and partly a total disregard for fair play and the rights of others.” And he counsels that a good leader listens to what his subordinates have to say, and that means bad news as well as good. “When people disagree with me, they do it openly, respectfully, but directly in front of the others. You’ve got to remove any fear of disagreeing with the CEO.” Pickens may not have looked through a copy of Boone recently, but maybe it’s time Ed Roach did.
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