2011 Football guide inside Independent Student Newspaper for the University of Texas at San Antonio
August 30, 2011
Volume 46
Down, set, hut! First football game to be played on Sept. 3
Burk Frey / The Paisano
news@paisano-online.com
vs. Northeastern State 9/3
File Photo
vs. McMurry 9/10
Chris Johnson, starting tailback, is one of the players expected to produce early for the young Roadrunners team.
news@paisano-online.com The day of the first game seemed far away; then it got closer and closer. Now there are just days separating the Roadrunners from their first game, and the clock in the football office continues to click down toward the first game in the history of the Roadrunner program. “It has been a fun process; it has been a scary process as I look and it gets closer to the third,” Head Football Coach Larry Coker said. “It has been a great process.” The process began with UTSA students taking a chance on the future
Tenured professor fired for accessing porn; sues for job Allison Tinn
Upcoming Games:
Stephen Whitaker
Issue 2
by twice voting on a raise in tuition to fund a football program. “That’s one of the reasons I came here, if the students didn’t want it then there is no reason for me to be here, but they wanted the program,” Coker said. “Now we have to give them a good program.” As the days got closer, Coker built a staff of coaches with varying experience and a team of players big and small that would take the field against Northeastern State in the first game. “I feel great about the players but how good we do I don’t know that; we will find out: That’s why we need to play,” Coker said. “But we have good coaches, I’d take these coaches any-
@ Southern Utah 9/17 vs. Bacone 9/24 @ Sam Houston 10/1 where.” The coaches were hired and the players recruited knowing that the first game would be in the Alamodome. For a startup, the Alamodome represents a chance for the program to get started without having to worry about the trials of building the playing facilities. “I haven’t been in any nicer than this. As far as stadiums are concerned I think this is a great football venue; there isn’t a bad seat in here,” Coker said. “What we have to do is make this a home field advantage, we have to do good things so the fans get behind us, if we do that, it is going to be a great place to play.”
Former tenured economics professor Ronald Ayers is suing the university to regain his position, claiming that university officials violated his “constitutional right to free speech.” Ayers, who taught at UTSA for close to three decades, had never received a complaint against him. But in 2006 investigations began when a graduate student reported overhearing “sexual noises” coming from Ayers’ office. A year later, in 2007, after extensive investigations and committee meetings, Ayers was fired. Ayers was found to have been viewing pornography and was accused of accessing child pornography, but no evidence relating to child pornography was found on his computer. Initially, Ayers denied viewing pornography, but after being shown computer records proving his viewing of the sites, he said the incidents may have “happened after a long work day.” Eventually, he claimed the viewing was for “academic research.” At the time of Ayers’ termination, viewing “sexually explicit” web pages was not technically against university policy. The reasoning behind the firing was based on Ayers “allegedly excessively using his school computer for private purposes,” Ayers’ attorney, Glen Levy, said. After the investigation began, it
was not long before Ayers claimed to have felt “threatened” about the security of his job, saying that he was told he would be fired if he did not seek medical help and, if he was found with child pornography, he would be “taken away in handcuffs.” Ayers sought the medical help, but he was still terminated. UTSA attorneys and university spokesperson David Gabler declined to discuss the case due to the ongoing lawsuit. Ayers appealed to a faculty tribunal, which found he had poor judgment but should not have been fired. Nevertheless, Ayers was terminated on grounds of accessing “sexually explicit” materials, and the university appealed the tribunal’s decision to the UT Board of Regents, who ruled in favor of the university. Levy noted, “People don’t seem to understand that his peers, every single tenured professor, recommended that he not be fired.” The San Antonio Express News reported that Ayers claimed the university released a series of e-mails to Ayers and a professor at Palo Alto College. The e-mail discussions between the two professors included talk about young women in Ayers’ classes describing one student as having “huge chest puppies” and being “the beautiful, dumb, full-figured nude model.”
See AYERS, Page 4
See FOOTBALL, Page 9
File Photo
Education compromised for financial benefit President Ricardo Romo serves on nearly two dozen boards including the appointment by the White House to the Advisory Commission on Hispanic Education.
Obama appoints Romo to commission Allison Tinn
news@paisano-online.com The Hispanic population is the largest and fastest-growing minority group in the United States. However, only 12 percent of adult Hispanics have a bachelor’s degree, and only three percent have completed a graduate or professional degree program. President Barack Obama has implemented a 16-member White House Advisory Commission on Hispanic
Education to help increase those numbers; one of those seat holders is UTSA’s President Dr. Ricardo Romo. Earlier this year, Romo traveled to Washington, D.C. for the commission’s inaugural meeting and swearing in. “There are tremendous challenges and opportunities right now in the area of education throughout the whole country in every field, for everybody,” Romo said. “The one area that we seem to just not have made a lot of progress in the past decade has been for Hispanics.” See ROMO, Page 4
Brianna Johnson
news@paisano-online.com In his State of the State address, Texas Governor Rick Perry puzzled his audience as he called on higher education institutions to create a $10,000 undergraduate degree to ease the financial burden on Texas families and students. This idea of a $10,000 degree is a challenge, Perry acknowledges, but he believes it can be done. “It is time for a bold, Texas-style solution to this challenge; the brightest minds in our universities can devise,” Perry said in his address to the State. Perry suggests that universities implement more “web-based instruction, innovative teaching techniques and aggressive efficiency measures” in order to reach the goal of a $10,000 degree, which includes the cost of textbooks as well. Perry claims the option of a more affordable college degree will serve as incentive for Texas students to enroll in and, more importantly, graduate from
college. According to The Project on Student Debt, 58 percent of college students who graduate from a public, four-year institution in Texas accumulate about $20,015 in debt. At UTSA, 64 percent of students graduate with roughly $23,000 in student loans. This heavy financial burden, according to the project, causes students to delay graduation dates. Thus, graduating from college becomes a goal that, each year, becomes more out of reach to students due to financial barriers. The project also reports the main reason low-income, at-risk high school seniors choose not to enroll in college—to avoid accumulating debt. Urban school counselors report that the students’ “fear of debt strongly affects college choices.” Thus, Perry calls for a drastic cut— to $10,000—in the cost of higher education. Nonetheless, several congressmen, educators and college students are concerned with Perry’s proposal and conclude it is simply impossible. Call-
ing Perry an “all hat but no cattle” type, Texas Congressman Lloyd Doggett brings an important issue to the surface: “In the most recent budget Governor Perry signed, more than $2 billion in higher education funding was either cut or not allocated, and 43,000 fewer students will receive state aid.” Thus, he questions how Perry expects universities to offer a degree at such a reduced value when, Doggett says, “he also proposes deep cuts in higher education funding.” Professors also agree that the $10,000 degree is an idea that is far-stretched. Jeanne Reesman, literature professor, strongly feels that this idea is an unrealistic one: “I do not think a $10,000 bachelor’s degree is possible in Texas or anywhere else, no matter who imagines it is,” Reesman said. All you have to do is look at the incredibly hard work by UTSA administrators to get our budget up enough with the state so that UTSA does not have to charge everything to the students.” See EDUCATION, Page 3