Partnership Affairs: The Fall of a Community University

A Study of Educational Innovation, Leadership, and Politics

The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College (UTB/TSC), on the Mexican border at the tip of South Texas, was an innovative partnership between a university and a community college. Yet just two decades after its establishment, this much-heralded “community university” fell to ruin in a paroxysm of suspicion, acrimony, and divisiveness.

The reason for its collapse seemed obvious: a power struggle between a president disinclined to share power with her elected board of trustees, and a board that stubbornly insisted she do so. But as this book makes clear, that is only part of the story, only the proximate cause. The ultimate cause of the community university’s demise was the inherently unstable nature of the partnership itself.

Partnership Affairs is the inside account of UTB/TSC’s fall, a remarkable tale of innovation and change, of organizational management and mismanagement, of the limits and pitfalls of leadership, all of it powered by high-octane Texas politics.

David E. Pearson, an Army veteran, graduated magna cum laude with honors in sociology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University and was a postdoctoral fellow in international security studies at The Ohio State University. For thirteen years he worked at UTB/TSC as professor of sociology, as host of the radio show Society Under Fire, as academic senate president, and as vice president for partnership affairs. Departing Brownsville, he served as dean of San Diego State University's Imperial Valley Campus, another border institution, where he is now emeritus professor. He is the author of three previous books, as well as numerous articles in the scholarly, scientific, and popular presses.