The University of Incarnate Word (UIW) board leadership faces a defining moment Monday afternoon when trustees convene to confront the crisis precipitated by longtime President Lou Agnese Jr.
It’s never easy coming to terms when a powerful, long-term leader loses his way and becomes a major liability. That is exactly what has happened at UIW: Agnese, the legendary architect of the modern Catholic university, has now become a threat to the university’s reputation and future.
No one can deny that Agnese has been a remarkable builder of UIW.
At age 33, Agnese became UIW’s eighth president in 1986 at a time of decreasing enrollment and demographic challenges. His marketing efforts helped grow the university from 1,296 students in 1985 to 10,984 in 2015, making it the third-largest private university in Texas, according to the university website. During his tenure, UIW opened campuses in China, Mexico, and Germany, created a Division I athletics program, and added doctoral programs in pharmacy, optometry, physical therapy, nursing practice, and business administration. The university will also be opening a School of Osteopathic Medicine in 2017.
What’s equally notable is his management style: Agnese didn’t manage as much as he ruled, silencing campus critics, surrounding himself with administrators who knew better than to challenge him, even taking on the sisters whose order founded the university and are the nominal proprietors. When the official president’s residence, an off-campus Terrell Hills home, was deemed subject to local taxation, Agnese sold it and had a new presidential residence built atop a UIW parking garage. A penthouse with balconies on all four compass points, its Brackenridge Park view reminds visitors of Central Park West in New York.
Agnese was a visionary who had big ambitions, saw them to fruition and, along the way, reaped the personal benefits, becoming the longest-serving university president in Texas, if not the nation. When he took a long sabbatical a few years ago the university supposedly paid for his round-the-world luxury cruise. Even if that is not true, it speaks to the power of perception about his prerogatives.
We are now witnessing what happens when a too-powerful autocrat becomes the victim of his own hubris, and finally is called to account for his indefensible behavior. It is, in the classic sense of the word, tragedy.
While trustees must feel like a black cloud now hovers over everything good that has been done during the Agnese era, the university’s current crisis in leadership offers an important teaching moment. Trustees can agree to do what is best for the university and limit further damage to UIW’s reputation by setting it on a healing path. That means bringing Agnese’s long career to a close.
It also means being honest and transparent. This is not the time to couch decisions in legalese and press releases written by consultants. Trustees should not obscure the fact that they are acting in response to Agnese’s racist and denigrating remarks and his episodes of failed leadership.
Agnese might be on medical leave, but unless trustees can demonstrate a confirmed medical condition that explains Agnese’s aberrant behavior, it will be more prudent to demonstrate there are consequences for inappropriate behavior, especially if one holds a trusted leadership position.
The board leadership, led by Chairman Charles Lutz, should send an unequivocal signal to the university community and to San Antonio at large: everyone, regardless of rank or power, must live up to Incarnate Word’s defining values. No exceptions.
What are those values? Here is an excerpt from the UIW Mission Statement:
“The University of the Incarnate Word is a Catholic institution that welcomes to its community persons of diverse backgrounds, in the belief that their respectful interaction advances the discovery of truth, mutual understanding, self-realization, and the common good.
The University of the Incarnate Word is committed to educational excellence in a context of faith in Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of God. Thus, through a liberal education the university cultivates the development of the whole person and values of life-long learning. To that end, faculty and students support each other in the search for and communication of truth, thoughtful innovation, care of the environment, community service, and social justice.”
Here is a one-sentence excerpt from the message from UIW President Dr. Lou Agnese Jr., also posted on the university’s website:
“We welcome people of diverse backgrounds in the belief that their respectful interaction advances the discovery of truth, mutual understanding, self-realization and the common good in our increasingly complex society.”
There is nothing in the recent public conduct of Agnese that shows respect for the university’s mission or his own pledge. He has been uniformly disrespectful in his public comments to faculty members and to students of color enrolled there.
After the news broke of his uncontrolled racial and political outbursts while acting in his official role as university president, Agnese lashed out at Lutz and the board, threatening them with a lawsuit and accusing them of ruining his reputation.
It was Agnese who has inflicted the damage on his reputation, not Lutz or others. He should take responsibility for his words and actions rather than resort to bullying behavior. It is Agnese’s obsession with absolute control that caused someone, somewhere along the line, to call Incarnate Word “Lou U,” and it wasn’t meant as a compliment.
The last time the UIW trustees faced a moment of truth, they failed to challenge Agnese or dig deeply for an honest version of events rather than accepting the “facts” as they were misrepresented to them by Agnese and other members of his administration.
I am writing, of course, about the December 2013 fatal shooting of honors student Cameron Redus by a campus police officer in an off-campus traffic stop that spun out of control. It could serve as a textbook case of bad policing and decision-making, made worse by equally bad decisions by Agnese and university leaders in the wake of the killing.
Agnese blamed the media, specifically the Rivard Report for our sustained coverage. Several board trustees, who probably had not even read our coverage, echoed Agnese’s attacks out in the community. Even some of the nuns approached me at public events to demand we stop publishing stories about Redus.
University employees stopped taking our calls and responding to emails, ceased to share press releases, and with a few exceptions, were not available for interviews on other stories unrelated to the Redus shooting. Last week, university employees even resisted, for some time, providing us with a list of current board members, which you will not find on the UIW website.
Agnese has built an A-list board of trustees. Why hide that from the public? We do not believe university staff suddenly decided to block our efforts to report on the university. We believe they were intimidated and ordered to do so. Last week when one of our reporters spoke with students on campus, he was asked: Can we be expelled for expressing our views or opinions?
The Redus family’s wrongful death civil lawsuit against UIW is still pending. What objective observers know and what will eventually come out is that Agnese placed his brother Michael on the UIW payroll as director of public safety.
What the Agneses do not want to admit is that the university brought on a bad cop when it hired Christopher Carter. The poorly trained recruit had stumbled his way through a decade of failed law enforcement employment, bouncing from one job to the next, rarely lasting a full year anywhere. He should have never been hired.
Even before the Redus shooting, Carter was a known problem to university officials for his middle-of-the-night entry into a sleeping co-ed’s dorm room and his extended stay there while supposedly investigating her illegally parked vehicle. The university failed to act on the family’s formal complaint other than to informally advise the co-ed to avoid Carter. It was widely known in university circles that Carter was a misfit licensed to carry a gun.
The Redus case was a terrible tragedy. Imagine your own unarmed son or daughter being gunned down for driving under the influence as he or she pulled into their residence within yards of the front door. Imagine the fatal shot entering your child’s body from the back.
The university could have brought the tragic Redus case to a close with an institutional act of contrition and a settlement two years ago. Instead, Agnese has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of university funds defending the indefensible. Redus’ parents are some of the most spiritual, selfless people I have ever met. Any money they receive would inevitably be spent on creating something good to ease the pain of something so bad.
This time, if the board chooses to bring the Agnese era to a close, it also should agree it’s time for reconciliation with the Redus family. It’s time to acknowledge that a poorly vetted hire led to a much darker tragedy.
Closure in the Redus case offers its own teaching moment for the board and for a university community in serious need of spiritual renewal. That teaching moment would serve as an example of humility, of penance, of the sacrament of confession, and then, with reconciliation, the power of forgiveness.
To renew the spirit of the Incarnate Word community built under Agnese’s leadership, the board will have to acknowledge it is now time for a new generation of leadership.
Top image: University of Incarnate Word President Dr. Louis Agnese Jr. Photo by Scott Ball.
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Thank you for your coverage of the Redus homicide. You left out the part about Carter doing it while on a snack break off campus. What’s sad is he probably took his cue about being a bully from how Agnese acted day to day. Its good to remember going into November.
I questioned the wisdom of Agnese going on sabbatical just as the fundraising effort began for the Fox Tech land. That effort fell short. The new medical school ultimately went elsewhere.
Agnese made some comments about his donors coming around because they knew the “road to Heaven went through him.” I’m paraphrasing a bit but I thought those comments were a touch arrogant.
Lou’s life story could be turned into a very good movie. It has all the elements. Son of a Brooklyn fruit peddler, a once shy, chubby kid with a severe stuttering problem, he reinvents himself at a sleepy school in south Texas. His fast-talking, crude, carnival barker street talk intimates the unsuspecting locals. Dr. Agnese’s chutzpah even makes the San Antonio power elite take notice.
At first, he sees a lot of himself in the struggling, hard-working students he comes to serve. He does some very good things, yes, including building programs and providing opportunities for many low-income students.
To speed up change, though, he increasingly relies on gimmicky, flashy marketing, akin to late-night infomercials and coerced testimonials to promote his empire. In this sense, Lou is ahead of his time as he understands early on that universities are best run on “a business model”: a top-down approach with an emphasis on unquestioned loyalty to the boss, corporate conformity, growth numbers, and bottom-line profit. He bullies critics. Dissent is not tolerated, records are kept secret, and scandal is denied.
Over time, though, vanity, greed, self-deception, and paranoia take over. By the end, Lou has no one in his inner circle to check his out-of-control ego. The story ends with Lou, alone and disheveled, talking to himself inside his luxurious penthouse overlooking San Antonio’s skyline. He mutters bits of Italian he remembers from childhood.
sounds more like a mafia boss than a private catholic school president….oh wait…i repeat myself.
Very well said. Thank you for your thoughtful, insightful coverage.
Another thank you for your detailed coverage and for keeping the Redus case in public conversation. You are so accurate about the amazing Redus family and the loss of respect many of us have had for the IW leaders in their pitiful response to this tragedy.
1st, I agree, 30 + years at the helm, you can lose site of the target. Lou needs to retire into a position of President Emeritus.
I have 2 grandchildren at UIW, so I do have concerns, I do keep watch, I do have skin in the game.
As for the shooting, having visited the subject with the grandkids, 1 in his senior year, the other a freshman, I do hear the difference in the security measures now in place. Thank you UIW for learning from this tragic incident. Compliancy leads to tragedy; Tragedy leads to improvement.
Robert, I like you, but your writing style here puts you into the Haters Club. You clearly wanted to get even for being informationally delayed.
There was a time that such Leadership transitions were handled discreetly, all sides saved face, there was no public bad stabbing, no media bites with variations of available information, no one knows who to believe.
I’m not saying sweep it under the rug, but perhaps writing in efforts, not to insight unconstructive rhetoric is what is needed now. OH! That’s called Leadership. Robert, don’t lose site of the target.
Lou did a great job. Let’s not forget that.
I obviously disagree with your “Hater Club” conclusion. We readily acknowledge Dr. Agnese’s long list of accomplishments. If we had wanted to make a public issue out of UIW’s unprofessional handling of our media relations we could have done so anytime over the last 2-3 years. We only disclose it now to offer another example of how every aspect of UIW is controlled tightly and inappropriately by the president’s office. –RR
Thank you for writing this. I was always so proud to say I was a UIW grad. I was part of their marketing efforts in the late ’90s, appearing on billboards across the city. I shared my experiences with the school, and even inspired two people to attend with my testimonials.
Then Cameron Redus died and I have never felt the same way again. I felt betrayed by the school I loved. The school’s reaction to this horrible event went against everything they supposedly stood for. This attitude came directly from the top and it truly sickened me. I hope someday the Redus family gets some kind of justice. Perhaps Agnese leaving will be a start.
Bob,
Thank you for your comments about the Redus family. Your very first observations on Cameron’s case almost 3 years ago and the questions you raised were spot on then and continue to be pertinate today. UIW should listen to your insight and wisdom.
The name of Jesus is not honored as long as the Redus family continues to suffer this great injustice.
Excellently said. I will say, as a UIW alumna, I haven’t the slightest bit of pride in my alma mater. When I became a reporter for the Logos, I covered the Cameron Redus story. After writing an article about one of the on-campus rallies we held for which UIW administrators refused to comment, I experienced that same intimidation myself. Administrators began to ask about me and whether I was related to a family member who was a tenured faculty member. They asked the head of the paper why we’d published such “an awful story;” why we weren’t “standing behind UIW.” Not only did they have no problem insulting my work as a student, and a product of their educational institution, but they had no problem dragging an innocent victim’s name through the dirt. They rejected the Catholic morals the university was built on to support a man that they feared. I will not forget that. So as a journalism student, and a student who was directly impacted, I sincerely appreciate your coverage of the tragedy that we’ve witnessed UIW become.
Bob – well done taking a position of integrity here. I think you are looking a bit too narrowly when you say that Agnese’s actions over the years illustrate that “UIW is controlled tightly and inappropriately by the president’s office.” Right – but it also illustrates how completely unaccountable and unconstrained private universities’ leadership are to do almost anything they may like.
While the Rivard Report’s spotlight, and pressure from donors, students, faculty, and alumni might have some effect, ultimately these “stakeholders” are greatly neutered (as shown by the intimidation of students who would speak to the press, and of the student press as described in the comments). Boards and officers of public and private companies owe a fiduciary duty to shareholders; leaders of Texas’s public universities are (for better or worse) accountable to our political leaders and thus (in some sense) the public.
But no one has standing to enforce any sort of “fiduciary duty” on the leaders of private universities to do the right thing – except, in theory, the Attorney General, who would probably only intervene in the most extreme cases of corruption and malfeasance – well short of what we see here. While I hope that UIW will do the right thing here (and appears on a trajectory to do so), the decision belongs entirely with the Board, and there is surprisingly little anyone beyond that tight circle can do to provide accountability.
It’s time for UIW to make it right for the Redus family, for me, and numerous others too. Please don’t give up on this story. It’s bigger than Agnese.
Phenomenal article! Thank you for saying what needs to be said. Our family will be forever grateful for your love and public support. Thank you for being a voice of truth and justice, especially in a time when our nation so desperately needs reconciliation. This is so much bigger than UIW.
Great article. I couldn’t agree more with you about how far Agnese and his power stretch. I am a UIW graduate of 2010, and my wife was one of the unlucky graduates of Dec. 2011. That was the ceremony that was held on the football field during a cold mid-40 degree rain storm. We sat in the stands soaked and cold (while other family members – including our son – were forced to stay home and not risk becoming ill from the terrible conditions) and watched my wife shiver in her cap and gown, waiting to finally cross the stage after all her hard work. To add insult to injury, Lou Agnese and other prestigious people had the luxury of sitting on the covered stage with heaters beneath each of their seats. And the cherry on top was having Agnese speak and present his father with an honorary degree, all the while we shivered in the cold rain. People all around us were booing Agnese as he spoke. I have several stories of this man’s pompous demeanor, but this one took the cake. I regret to this day spending thousands upon thousands of dollars at Lou U and would do it all differently if given the chance. It’s time for Lou to go, and for the Redus family to finally get the closure they deserve.
Great writeup. Good to keep the Redus conversation going, as well. Don’t ever let up on them over that one.
The thing that kills me about this story is everyone’s all “oh, Agnese is having an episode or something, he’s totally not like this.” Yeah, no. He’s been like this all along. He just didn’t think it was okay to come right out and say it until now.
Since we basically have a nod-of-the-head white supremacist and out-and-out racist running for President (who, unsurprisingly, Agnese supports), all these closet racists think it’s a-okay to let their true colors shine and their freak flags fly–because hey, if the President can do it, it must be societally acceptable now, right.
That’s kind of a silver lining, in some ways. Now we’re realizing just how many people are racist in this country, because they’ve clearly been dying to brag about it for *years*.
Robert Rivard, once again you have spoken with great clarity and grit! We humbly thank you for the kind words expressed towards our family. We appreciate RR keeping Cameron’s tragedy in the spotlight until justice is granted!
Mr. Rivard,
My name is Alex Serna and I am a proud UIW Alumni and former student leader having earned my BA in 08 & MA in 10 from UIW. Thank you so much for your brave and very accurate article on the board of trustees and their defining moment for Dr. Agnese! You spoke volumes of truth!!! As a former student leader who was very informed about what went on behind closed doors, you’re right about the atmosphere of fear, the silencing of critics, and the threats of losing your job if you spoke out. You have no idea how many people I shared this with and how many privately agreed to what you stated. I am apart of a group of extended friends numbering a 100 who refuse to associate with the alumni association until Dr. Agnese is gone. I am thankful you did not let Cameron Redus memory die. That incident has tainted UIW for three years now…..
Thank you again so much for your powerful and accurate reporting.
You have my deepest & utmost respect,
Regards,
Alexis “Alex” Serna
Fantastic article. Thank you, RR, for not being afraid to speak the truth.
It sounds to me like you are have some personal issue with Mr. Agnese. I have heard nothing negative about the Mr. Agnese (aside from this article and all the Redus non-sense) in local media.
It seems your issue with the President stems from your refusal to understand that Redus, more than likely, would be alive today had HE made better choices.
And this story is now national news (at least in the academic world). While the story does not mention RR, I think it’s clear that if not for RR’s persistence and advocacy, these stories would have been swept under the rug long ago. Thank you RR for maintaining high standards of community journalism. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/08/29/presidents-medical-leave-raises-questions-tenure-length-and-health
I think the school would rather public opinion tilt towards, ‘anything wrong was all Agnese,’ than put an apology on paper. I’m not convinced his removal would’ve changed the way the school responded. It definitely provides a good, ‘well that wasn’t us,’ for a couple of years.
Agnese’s comments were inappropriate but they didn’t symbolize a growing systemic problem the school was facing with diversity. Without knowing the inner workings and wether or not it was recommended, wouldn’t an apology been enough?