like being on the board of GM and wanting to go pick out paint colors for the line of Corvettes,” he said. 

But not everyone I spoke with held that view. Charles Miller told me a regent has “the absolute right” to demand information and conduct investigations into the activities of UT administrators. “Hall was only doing what any good regent is supposed to do, which is to make sure our most prestigious university is being run openly and honestly. Just because no one else wants to do it is no reason to punish him.”

Compared with the other regents, Hall did seem curiously consumed with UT’s operations. In 2013 he called the agent for Nick Saban, Alabama’s head football coach, to ask about his interest in Mack Brown’s job. And he seemed particularly focused on getting rid of Powers, at one point emailing Cigarroa: “How do you justify and defend his behavior?”

It is no secret that Cigarroa, a pediatric surgeon and professor at the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio who was named chancellor in 2009, barely gets along with Powers. He has said that Powers becomes “defensive” and, at times, “insubordinate.” In the fall of 2013, Cigarroa had Powers come to his office to discuss Hall’s allegations about the admissions process, and according to knowledgeable sources, the exchange turned testy when Cigarroa asked how Pitts’s son had gotten into UT law school. Powers fired back that Cigarroa’s own daughter had received the same consideration when she was admitted into the program. Cigarroa was livid. His daughter was a Harvard graduate who had top grades and a high LSAT score. He stood up and reportedly stepped toward Powers, as if he were going to punch him. The meeting quickly ended.

Cigarroa told the regents that his and Powers’s working relationship was becoming untenable and that he would be stepping down as chancellor. (Cigarroa, who has said he will leave after the board hires his replacement, would not comment for this story.) Nevertheless, saying he had no interest in creating more controversy, Cigarroa recommended that Powers be asked to come up with his own timeline to announce his retirement. 

Hall was beside himself, telling other regents that Powers, whom he called a “prevaricator,” didn’t deserve “a face-saving exit.” Meanwhile, Powers let it be known that he would retire when he wanted to.  

Hall stayed on the attack. He asked the oth er regents to approve the hiring of an outside investigator to look into the matter of the law school foundation’s forgivable loans. (The majority of the regents voted no.) He also asked UT to provide him with all records of Powers’s privately donated travel, claiming that Powers had been accepting free travel from UT boosters who also did work for the university—a clear conflict. (UT System officials said that some travel was proper.) Hall then said he wanted to investigate UT’s awarding a million-dollar-plus contract to a consulting company without the regents’ approval. (According to system officials, the contracts didn’t need such approval.)

Hall did gain some momentum with his admissions allegations. The UT System Office of General Counsel opened a formal inquiry into UT’s admissions process, and although it found no evidence of “systemic” favoritism for students whom lawmakers had recommended to Powers, it did find that such students definitely had higher acceptance rates than the general student population. After reading the report, which was released in May, Cigarroa told the regents that a “firewall needs to be constructed around the admissions committee preventing anyone directly or indirectly from influencing admissions decisions.”

And that seemed to be that—until a month later, when Cigarroa did an about-face and ordered outside lawyers to conduct an independent investigation into UT’s admissions process. Two weeks later, in what Austin American-Statesman reporter Ralph K. M. Haurwitz described as “higher education fireworks on the Fourth of July,” Cigarroa called Powers to his office and told him he wanted his resignation right then and there. 

Cigarroa later released a statement saying he had asked for Powers’s resignation due to “a breakdown of communication, collegiality, trust, and a willingness to work together for the good of the university.” But a well-placed source in the UT System said the real reason Cigarroa turned on Powers was because an individual with “intimate knowledge of UT’s admissions program” met with Cigarroa after the Office of General Counsel’s report was released. This individual said the lawyers in the Office of General Counsel had been misled by Powers and his deputies when they told the lawyers that they didn’t intervene in admissions. According to this individual, they sometimes went so far as to order officials in the admissions office to accept particular students—a charge that, if true, could explain Cigarroa’s decision to ask for Powers’s resignation. 

The question now is if Powers’s allies in the Legislature are still hungry for payback. Texas law gives state legislators broad discretion to decide whether an official is fit to stay in office. They can impeach someone for committing “acts of misconduct, malfeasance, or misfeasance,” for acting “with incompetency,” or even for failing to act “in the best interest” of the institution he or she is responsible for governing.

When the Transparency Committee finishes writing its articles of impeachment against Hall, they will be sent to the full House for consideration, and if the House votes in favor of impeachment, Hall will be forced to sit through a full-blown trial in front of the members of the Senate, who will ultimately decide his fate. For months rumors have been flying about what could happen next. Lawmakers might rule that when he originally filled out his application to become a regent, he didn’t include all the lawsuits he had been involved in. (The problem with that argument is that plenty of other state officials, including other UT regents, didn’t include all their lawsuits either.) Or they might rule that he illegally possessed confidential student information during his investigation of UT’s admissions practices. (The problem