In a 15-minute press conference yesterday responding to an investigative report on sketchy back-door admissions practices, UT-Austin President Bill Powers said he was only doing what his predecessors did, that everybody at other universities does it, that everybody knows about it and that his main accuser, UT Regent Wallace Hall,…
We’ve heard endless talk in the last 10 years about the official admissions policies of public universities and whether those policies deprive certain applicants of a fair shot. But that’s all been based on the publicly acknowledged admissions policies of those schools. What about the secret off-the-books admissions system?…
A TRE is a way for the school district to get out from under the Texas Legislature and its Tea-Party-inspired animus against public education
So sad. Pathetic. Last Friday the bullet train people announced their two preferred sites for a station in Dallas, and none of the elected southern Dallas leadership seems even to have noticed that they just got screwed. See also: Sites Selected for Potential Dallas-to-Houston Bullet Train Station In fact, southern…
Of course the people opposed to school reform in Dallas hope to find scandals that will take down the reform superintendent, Mike Miles. But that takes a good scandal. For starters we need to see secret mansions paid for with cash, an office that looks like a whorehouse, fat guys…
Yesterday morning I had this weird stereophonic experience — reading Eric Nicholson’s piece on Unfair Park about the orthodox synagogue versus the homeowners group in Far North Dallas, while also watching and listening to President Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on TV. See also: Liberty Institute…
Yesterday, mayoral candidate Marcos Ronquillo came out with his own take on a topic we discussed Monday — the number of political contributors who have given Mayor Mike Rawlings way more than the $5,000 limit per candidate per campaign. See also: Well-Heeled Donors Flood Mayor Rawlings with Money. Hey, Know…
We’ll say this much about Henderson Avenue Country Club: They’re not bashful. The new venue in the Knox-Henderson neighborhood opened just last month, but they’ve already bestowed themselves with the tag of “Best Honky Tonk and BBQ Bar in Texas.” Yeah, right. That’s stepping into some shoes that are almost…
Last weekend we saw Stagger Lee, the Will Power and Justin Ellington musical doing its world premiere at the Dallas Theater Center. All the way through it I was thinking about John Wiley Price. Elaine Liner has reviewed it for us already, and it wouldn’t occur to me anyway to…
A few weeks ago, there was actually a decent song playing on country radio during my drive for the first time in what might have been years. I didn’t recognize the track, but I quickly pulled up Shazam on my phone in the middle of traffic to save it for…
The Dallas school board is scheduled to take up the case of the Instant Messages from Hell today — the matter of a recently resigned personnel director who penned irreverent and even profane messages to colleagues and did so on a computer system owned and operated by the school system…
Over the past six weeks, Leon Bridges has been at the center of one of the biggest stories in Dallas music in recent memory. On Christmas Day, it was announced that the 25-year-old R&B singer from Fort Worth had been signed to Columbia Records. It was a huge accomplishment. But…
Why is Mayor Mike Rawlings so strong for the Trinity toll road? Several months ago he made sort of a show of thinking about it. Then he announced his support. But was there ever any doubt? As we move closer to the May elections, the focus of those elections is…
If Sarah Palin is the canary in the coal mine, Texas is the bats.
In this town, if you say you don’t think we should build a highway practically on top of the Trinity River through downtown, the people who want to build a highway on top of the river through downtown always say, “Well, what’s your idea instead?” As if that’s the perfect…
Great story in The Dallas Morning News yesterday by Brandon Formby revealing that the toll road agency in our area has been sitting on $1.7 million worth of traffic studies for the one they want to build along the Trinity River through downtown. The North Texas Tollway Authority just won…
Once in a while a really brilliant idea pops up in a relatively obscure place, a diamond in the coal mine. The particular coal mine I have in mind is the letters to the editor section of The Dallas Morning News (why not just put your idea in a bottle…
Last week right after the Texas attorney general released an investigative report on the University of Texas Law School, we talked a little bit about it here on Unfair Park. Reflecting my own journalistic and literary values, I went for the really lurid stuff first, like the former law school…
Comebacks are a bitch. More often than not, they’re a plain bad idea. But when we kept hearing, throughout the summer and fall of last year, that the organizers of 35 Denton were planning to bring back the festival after its one-year hiatus in 2014, we couldn’t help getting excited…
We have this basic impasse in Dallas where the public schools are concerned. The deal struck by the white and black leaderships 12 years ago was supposed to be that elected black leadership would get to run the school system and hand out the jobs and so on, and the…
This item is in answer to a comment on Unfair Park yesterday that I thought deserved a more detailed response than I could provide in the comments section. Let’s see if I can use more words to make things even worse. This week I have a story in the paper…
The legal event called criminal indictment is a familiar theme in the news of any given day: It’s the step where a grand jury formally accuses a person of a crime and thereby launches the process that will lead either to a trial or a plea of guilty in some…
