Ten months before Chancellor Mike McKinney unexpectedly announced he was retiring, the father of the author of the "seven breakthrough solutions" wrote that those ideas would be implemented "with ... or without" the A&M System chief, according to an email obtained Friday by The Eagle.
"I think it is time to give Mike a deadline and meet with him either every two weeks or once a month to get a progress report," wrote Jakie Sandefer, the father of Jeff Sandefer, a major donor to Gov. Rick Perry who penned the ideas advocated by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank. "He needs to be told that these things are going to get done either with him or without him."
Media reports indicate that anonymous sources who have had conversations with McKinney said they were told the chancellor was asked to step down because he wasn't making satisfactory headway on implementing Sandefer's "solutions."
The email bolsters that theory. It was sent to Phil Adams, a Bryan businessman, member of the A&M System Board of Regents, member of the board of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and major Perry contributor.
Board of Regents Chairman Richard Box and McKinney could not be reached for this story. Jakie Sandefer also did not respond to a message.
Judith Zaffirini, a Laredo Democrat who chairs the Senate Higher Education Committee, said Jakie Sandefer's communication to Adams suggests that a private group is exerting influence over public institutions without public scrutiny.
"This email, along with others, confirms that Jeff Sandefer and his father and the Texas Public Policy Foundation are attempting to run higher education in the state, and they have a foothold at Texas A&M," said Zaffirini.
Zaffirini, co-chair of the new Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Higher Education Governance, Excellence and Transparency, said Sandefer's ideas should be considered just like others' ideas, but the process should unfold with open debate.
"No one group should be able to have so much influence," she said.
In the email dated July 23, Sandefer recounted to Adams a meeting he had with McKinney the day before.
"When I told him that the cost of an education had gone up 800%, he said everything had gone up, like I am an idiot," Jakie Sandefer's email began.
Jakie Sandefer also was upset about McKinney's version of the "Academic Financial Data Analysis," the spreadsheet that assigned a red and black number to faculty members to assess their bottom-line financial value.
The initial reform simply called for dividing the faculty members' salary by the number of students taught. McKinney, according to conversations with several faculty members who were in on the discussions, argued for the inclusion of more information to present a fuller picture about faculty productivity.
"He flat out said he was not going to figure the cost per student taught and that is the number one thing in Reform #1," Jakie Sandefer wrote, "and it is also the main reason for him putting his [financial data analysis] together."
He wrote he was reminded of a meeting in Austin in which McKinney "rambled and said nothing." He wrote, "It was after this meeting that Jeff and I were walking down the hall and he said this whole deal was a waste of his time."
"There are more regents interested in this than I thought -- [Jim] Schwertner, [Gene] Stallings and several others," he wrote. "The problem is that they get told a bunch of excuses, just like we do, why these things can't be done."
The seven "solutions" are a series of ideas, ranging from the financial data analysis and cash-for-evaluations program to larger ideas such as splitting teaching and research budgets in an attempt at more transparency.
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