Austin News

Emory University in Atlanta is delighted that its new president this fall will be current University of Texas (UT) at Austin President Greg Fenves, but at least one prominent UT alum is just as delighted to see Fenves go.

“His tenure at UT has been an unmitigated disaster,” Mark Pulliam, a 1980 graduate of the UT School of Law and national commentator, told Austin News in an email. “Fenves has ceaselessly promoted an agenda of political correctness, identity politics, so-called ‘diversity’ (consisting of racial and ethnic quotas and separatism), and restrictions on free speech. Under his misguided leadership, UT lurched to the left, leaving a trail of lawsuits, negative publicity and diminished academic standing.”

Fenves, 63, is leaving UT after 12 years, the last five as president. He is scheduled to start at Emory on Aug. 1.

University of Texas

In 2015, Fenves succeeded Bill Powers who was mired in allegations of instituting a secretive lower set of admission standards for well-connected students. When Fenves failed to reform the admissions policy, former UT regent Wallace Hall quipped: “I guess our tagline is ‘What starts here stays the same,’ a rendition of the school’s official slogan, ‘What starts here changes the world.”

There are plenty of additional instances of bad decisions by Fenves, according to Pulliam, who has written extensively about the soon-to-be former president’s tenure at the prestigious university. Fenves’ last day is June 30.

In an October 2018 posting on his blog, "Misrule of Law," Pulliam wrote about the “radical plan of University of Texas President Greg Fenves to turn UT-Austin into a burnt orange knockoff of his alma mater, UC Berkeley.”

“I have exposed how, under Fenves’ administration, UT has assaulted campus free speech, denied due process in Title IX proceedings, removed history from the UT campus, fought to preserve racial preferences in admissions, unleashed a social justice curriculum that infects every academic department, turned the UT School of Law into a social justice academy, overseen the establishment of a bloated ‘diversity’ bureaucracy that accomplishes little but fueling perpetual grievances, and, more than a half-century after UT was integrated, reinstituted racial separatism at UT’s flagship,” Pulliam wrote

But the topper, Pulliam wrote at the time, was Fenves’s institution of a faculty recruitment diversity initiative “that will make it very difficult to recruit and hire excellent academic talent, and will almost certainly lead to gender, ethnic, and racial hiring quotas at UT.”

In 2018 an internal UT audit found that Fenves and his wife violated school policy by flying first class or business class multiple times without approval, the Texas Tribune reported.

“A case can be made that he had the worst record of any campus administrator in recent years, aside possibly from Evergreen State,” Pulliam said. “He needed to go.”

Fenves annual salary at Texas is $945,000 per year. His Emory salary was unavailable.

The total student population, graduate and undergraduate, at Emory was 15,451 in fall 2019. The total student population at Texas in fall 2018 was 51,382.