TSU regents can Slade

The Texas Southern University regents voted Monday to fire President Priscilla Slade on grounds that she spent nearly $650,000 in the past seven years on expenses not allowed under her contract. The regents had planned to meet May 5 to decide what to do about Slade, but the meeting was moved to yesterday after Slade defied the board's instructions and started her own carefully controlled media campaign.

The board's investigation into Slade's spending, conducted by Bracewell & Giuliani, found that Slade violated TSU and state purchasing rules, including "long-accepted principles prohibiting the use of public money for private gain." During her seven years as president, Slade spent nearly $650,000 of university money that wasn't allowed under her contract, including thousands of dollars for maid service, church donations, Christmas presents, Pilates classes and furniture for her $1 million-plus Memorial Park-area home.

The Bracewell report discussed two of the earliest questionable expenses, $86,467 in home furnishings and $138,159 in landscaping for Slade's home. The firm found that former CFO Quintin Wiggins signed two checks on the same day to Noel Furniture, one for $23,504 and one for $22,819, though TSU's limit for competitive bidding is $25,000. Wiggins denied dividing the payment into two parts to get around the rule, the report said — we suppose the checks just wrote themselves that way. The report also found that Wiggins created a $175,000 furniture budget for Slade from a funding source usually used for capital construction projects on the campus and credited the purchase to his office rather than Slade's. As for the landscaping charge, Slade said she accidentally sent the bill to the university, which accidentally paid it, but the report says Wiggins told TSU staff members that the university was going to take care of the bill. Oops!

Slade has said her spending was necessary to promote TSU, which has suffered from financial mismanagement before. Since Slade took over in 1999, the school's enrollment has nearly doubled and millions of dollars in donations have rolled in, but faculty salaries still lag behind the national average and TSU's graduation rate is in the basement. It looks like Slade isn't going down without a fight: She's entitled to a public hearing to appeal her dismissal, and she told a group of supporters yesterday that she will "stand up" for herself. If, that is, she can bring herself to get up off her $17,000 couch.