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 Editorials | Opinions | September 2007 
Tyrannosaurus Academicus - Part 6
 Dr. Mark B. Ryan - PVNN
Plunder. The third theory takes note of the connections between the university and the private business interests of the Patronato. Those interests include computer sales, insurance, and construction. The Patronato has frequently been accused of siphoning funds from university to support its businesses. It is said that the university has spent great quantities on hard- and software purchased from the family operations, without genuinely improving computer services.
Indeed, newly introduced computer programs have sometimes failed miserably, creating, for example, chaos in registrations for the spring of 2007. The head of the university's computer services, who oversees the operation and presumably authorizes the expenditures, has been, in fact, a member of the Jenkins family. All insurance contracts of the university, including the mandatory health insurance of full-time employees and the automobile insurance that professors and administrators receive as part of their compensation, pass through another member of the family, as agent.
Construction projects, such as the expensive remodeling of the Hacienda for offices of the Rectoría, the renovation of houses for favored administrators, and an expensive additional automobile entrance to the University, have also been handled by family-linked businesses, and significant projects have been assigned without competitive bidding. Other large-scale construction operations outside of the university, such as a major hotel now underway, require state approval-which gives the state government, and through that, the rector himself, leverage over the Patronato's management of the university. Such apparent conflicts of interest, of course, would not pass legal muster in the United States.
Questions have been raised, too, about evasion of taxes through university purchases of material that ultimately are for family businesses. The rumored appointment of the head of computer services as the new chief financial officer of the university, if executed, will only fuel such speculations. In this theory, the "restructuring" of administrative positions will serve to foment as well as obscure these questionable business relationships.
It may well be that each of these motives is involved, with profitability of more interest to the Patronato, politicization to the rector, and those two concerns merging in the Patronato's larger business interests. In any case, the current situation of the UDLA highlights the wisdom of the fundamental requirement of SACS: a university should not be under the control of a group in which minority interests alien to academic purposes can hold sway. The structure of the Patronato, its control by a single family, has enabled the politicization and threatens the dismantling of a noble academic enterprise.
With the consent of the Patronato, Pedro Angel Palou has imposed the ethos, attitudes, and practices of a particularly crude political culture on the Universidad de las Américas. At a time when Mexico has been struggling, often valiantly, toward further democratization, transparency and social responsibility in governing processes at all levels of society, he has reverted to the discredited, strong-arm, dinosaurio tactics of an earlier era. In the process, he has shattered the community that has sustained the University's academic operations, destroying the sense of identity and purpose that once was its lifeblood. Faculty, administrators, students, employees and alumni have seen their university decline from a place of participatory governance, and free and open expression, into an authoritarian milieu of repression and fear.
They have seen a culture of personal loyalties - a primitive "personalismo" - eradicate collaborative and institutional procedures. They have suffered, or witnessed their friends suffer, shameful humiliations after years of loyalty, offending the most basic sense of decency. They now find that the work of decades-to create a first-rate, secular, private and cosmopolitan university for Mexico, and a bridge among American nations-is unraveling. Such can be the effects of misguided governance in the vulnerable world of academic life.
Dr. Mark Ryan has recently resigned as Dean of the Colleges and Titular IV Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Universidad de las Américas, Puebla. Prior to joining the UDLA faculty in 1997, he was for more than 20 years Dean of Jonathan Edwards College and a teacher of American Studies and History at Yale University.
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