Board ignored calls for open meetings

Editor's Note: The following is Part 3 in our "Hidden on the Hilltop: SMU's Culture of Secrecy" series, which examines the secretive nature of various operations at SMU.

For the rest of the series: part 1, part 2a, part 2b, part 3

SMU football and the death penalty. Like most students, Grace Barlow believes she knows the story of what happened.

For a few years, rogue boosters secretly funneled money to selected players. The SMU Board of Trustees and administrators chose to turn a blind eye. In 1987, NCAA officials uncovered the problem and unfairly hammered SMU with the ultimate athletic punishment.

"We weren't the only school doing it, but we were the only school to receive the punishment," Barlow, a junior majoring in history and religious studies, said. "SMU was unlucky enough to be chosen by the NCAA to be made an example of."

Barlow's view of what came to be known as the pay-for-play scandal is not unique. The Daily Campus interviewed more than a dozen students. Most gave a similar account.

This version of events, with SMU as the undeserving sacrificial victim, is comforting and widely-accepted. And wrong.

When the scandal made national headlines, SMU trustees addressed it with something unprecedented—transparency. They asked a group of bishops in the United Methodist Church to investigate the scandal. Almost two dozen trustees gave sworn depositions. The board also turned over dozens of boxes of records and minutes of meetings covering several years.

The result was the Bishops' Committee Report on SMU. It is the only in-depth examination of the board available to the public and the most comprehensive investigation of the biggest scandal in SMU history. The report shows the board and scandal depended on secrecy. It also details the central role the board played in the scandal. The bishops found that:

• Prominent trustees—including Edwin L. Cox, the oil tycoon and namesake of SMU's Cox School of Business—had known about the payments since at least 1981.

• When the scandal threatened to go public in 1984, Cox and William P. Clements, Jr.—trustee, oil tycoon, former Texas governor and namesake of SMU's Clements Center for Southwest Studies—told then-President L. Donald Shields to "stay out of it" and "run the university."

• Later, with NCAA investigators closing in, Cox and two other trustees—William L. Hutchison and O. Paul Corley—secretly negotiated a December 1986 deal in which athletic director Bob Hitch and head football coach Bobby Collins would take full responsibility for the payments and, in return, SMU would pay almost $1 million in hush money.

• As part of the cover-up, Hutchison lied to the NCAA in early 1987 about which SMU officials had knowledge of the payments.

Cox, Clements, Hutchison and Corley each gave sworn depositions to the bishops.

The report shows SMU football was less a sacrificial victim than a serial offender of NCAA rules. Between 1958 and 1985, the NCAA imposed penalties on SMU six times for paying football players and other violations.

That last bit of information stunned Barlow. "I did not know that," she said. "I feel like I've been duped."

Jasmine Iglehart, a junior religious studies major, was stunned to learn of the web of secrecy insulating the trustees from responsibility, particularly the hush money. "I am shocked, appalled and outraged," she said.

So was Adriana Martinez, a sophomore majoring in political science, public policy, French and history.

"It's shocking information," she said. "To think that such a lack of transparency permitted this to be done is upsetting and wrong."

The bishops saw the board's obsession with secrecy as a fundamental problem. In their report, they strongly urged trustees to abandon their practice of operating behind closed doors and shielding their decisions from public view. Instead, the bishops recommended the board "adhere to the open meetings policy of the United Methodist Church."

The trustees ignored the recommendation.

In a recent interview, retired Bishop J. Woodrow Hearn, the only surviving bishop who helped prepare the report, said board members never even discussed the call for open meetings.

"It wasn't even brought up," said Bishop Hearn, a trustee from 1984 to 2000.

Virtually every student interviewed by The Daily Campus disagreed with the board's decision.

"It was a huge mistake," said Nick Burns, a sophomore majoring in biology and French. "I don't trust the board's credibility if they won't even discuss the suggestion of making their actions more transparent."

Jake Torres, a junior English and Spanish major, recently was elected SMU student body president for 2010-11. When asked if the SMU board should stop meeting in private and make its records public, Torres said that while he understands certain matters call for confidentiality, the board should be more transparent and make public its records.

"It would certainly hold the board to a higher level of accountability if the public—such as students, faculty, community and media—could see what they're doing," he said. "They'd keep it clean for their own sake as well as ours."

Most current trustees contacted by The Daily Campus declined to be interviewed.

One who did, Linda Pitts Custard, expressed a very different view of confidentiality and the board's handling of the pay-for-play scandal.