Behind the Hedges
Big Money and Power Politics
at the University of Georgia
Rich Whitt
NewSouth Books
Montgomery | Louisville
A Note from the Publisher
Richard Whitt, the author of this book, died from a heart attack at his home in Marietta, Georgia, the very day the book’s final edits were completed. He was 64. A native of eastern Kentucky, he had been a journalist for more than thirty-five years. He worked first at several small newspapers, then for more than a decade at the Louisville Courier-Journal, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for his investigation of the causes of a 1977 fire that claimed 165 lives at a northern Kentucky supper club. He finished his newspaper career at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution where he retired in 2006. He was a well-respected investigative reporter on state and local government in Georgia and had a legion of admiring friends and colleagues. He attended the University of Kentucky and was inducted into the school’s Journalism Hall of Fame in 1995. The UK Journalism School has established the Richard Whitt Memorial Fund for Rural Journalists in his honor.
NewSouth Books
105 South Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2009 by Rich Whitt. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN-13: 978-1-58838-206-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-096-7
LCCN: 2008052462
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
For my wife Terri,
without whose support and encouragement
this book would not have been possible.
For Hayes, Emily, and Christen, who are the lights of my life.
Finally, I dedicate this book to truth,
as our creator has given us the wisdom to discern it,
and to the men and women who soldier for truth
in the face of scorn and ridicule and persecution.
Contents
5 - Don Leebern and Vince Dooley
6 - Vince Dooley and Michael Adams
8 - The Deloitte & Touche Audit
10 - The Break with the Foundation
13 - Maybe Not Such Strange Bedfellows
A: The Deloitte & Touche Audit
D: Robert Miller Correspondence
E: Attorney General Baker’s Letter
Little noticed outside the realm of higher education, a sea change has occurred over the past few decades in how America supports its great public institutions of higher learning. As enrollments and programs have steadily increased, so too have budgets, endowments, tuition, and fees. These shifting tides have buffeted the major universities and created stress fractures in the financial underpinnings of some traditional bases of support for higher education. Nowhere are these cracks more apparent than in Athens, Georgia, home of the state’s flagship university.
This book examines the circumstances and aftermath of a highly public family squabble that erupted in 2003 within the usually collegial University of Georgia community. The clash involved a controversial new president, a powerful and eccentric wealthy businessman, a revered and iconic football coach, spineless politicians, other wealthy businessmen, backroom deals, hanky-panky, and a compliant media that proved itself a toothless watchdog over the public interest.
There was also Big Money, Big Football, adultery, and more than a whiff of Big Daddy’s “odor of mendacity.”
What went on at Georgia—and is still unresolved—was unique and highly personal to many of its participants, but the conditions leading up to the events were symptomatic of the pressures facing most big public universities across the country.
Historically, private colleges and universities have depended heavily on student tuition and private support as their major source of revenue, while public institutions have been funded from a combination of state appropriations and student tuition. But in recent years, enrollment pressures and infrastructure costs have skyrocketed, while state funding has remained static or declined. “Even within the public sector with its government funding, revenues from tuition and fees increased 318 percent from 1980 to 1996 while revenues from government appropriations during that time only increased 125 percent. Little evidence exists that this trend will change between now and 2010,” the National Center for Education Statistics presciently observed in a summary on higher education accounting for the online Education Encyclopedia at StateUniversity.com. In fact, by 2008, most major public universities seemed to be receiving less than half of their annual budgets from their respective states’ taxes. The implications for the nation’s public universities are profound.
The University of Georgia, for example, now gets less than a third of its budget from state tax dollars, down from 45 percent just a decade ago. Other states have seen even more dramatic change. The Colorado legislature cut state support for its higher education institutions