Regardless of whether or not UT System Chancellor Mark Yudof moves to California to head the state's 10-school university system (a search committee for the UC Board of Regents formally recommended him Thursday), it's high time to take a closer look at the web Yudof has woven at UT since his 2002 appointment.
Yudof is the vice chairman for policy on the UTIMCO board. He is a major supporter of ties with Israel and a generous contributor to UT Hillel, which funds the White Rose Society, the student activist group on campus that works to raise genocide awareness, including Holocaust remembrance and ending peril in Darfur.
If you follow Yudof through these various activities, things get sticky somewhere between Texas and Sudan. UTIMCO has a handful of investments in Sudanese companies, and despite pleas from White Rose Society members for UTIMCO to divest, it has refused time and time again. In the form of a letter to the UT Board of Regents, UTIMCO CEO Bruce Zimmerman tried to justify UT's holdings in Sudan at a regents meeting last October, during which White Rose members presented a petition with more than 1,000 signatures calling for divestment.
"The primary issue here is whether social and political situations should factor into our investment policy ... It's not about Sudan; it's about every issue in the world that every interest group in the world might want to try to bring pressure to bear through influencing investment policies," he wrote in the letter.
In short, Yudof is both the friend and foe of the main activist group on campus devoted to the Sudanese cause, and so long as the rich and powerful remain rich and powerful (Yudof, for example, makes close to $800,000 a year), activists will face biting the hands that feed them. And in White Rose's case, handing out 10,000 roses on the West Mall is a pricey act of awareness.
Seeing good grassroots organizations - even those with widespread support - fail in actually making a global impact is no new story. Activism costs money, and those who have it indirectly decide what the good causes are.
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