AU Perspective: We Do Hold the Purse Strings

(First of two parts) - LEE COUNTY - In Alabama, whoever pays for a university governs it - excluding students and taxpayers -- the Charter and faculty be damned. Auburn's trustees fund campaigns like Sen. Arthur Orr (R-Decatur). Orr chairs the Senate committee which determines AU's State appropriations. On June 5 trustees abolished the faculty Senate and the faculty (who control no money) were left without voice. This Perspective follows the money, every dollar shown in a public filing. The next Perspective will illustrate what the money bought through the federal civil rights laws.

Friday Afternoon, June Fifth

The resolution [6-5-26] dissolved "any university senate, university faculty, or faculty governance body, including faculty officers" and revoked every constitution and bylaw beneath them, at Auburn and AUM. A Presidential Academic Advisory Council which "shall not possess legislative, approval, veto, appellate, investigative, or decision-making authority" and "may not issue public statements on behalf of the University" was installed in its place. The new Council advises "at the President's request and direction." Elected faculty can never be more than a third; the election process itself requires the President's approval and the President may remove any member for "conduct inconsistent with the purposes and principles set forth in this policy." The Council is chaired by Provost Vini Nathan, the same provost who this April opened dismissal proceedings against Prof. Michael Stern, the economist a federal jury already compensated for Auburn's retaliation. A companion policy confers upon the Board final authority over courses, curriculum, and syllabi; the packet's sales copy promised students a syllabus repository "accessible to students in advance of any course." The policy itself promises only whatever "appropriate access rules" the Provost decides to set.

Sources explaining the paper trail make the case this 'packet' convicts its own authors. Both governance policies reached the Board through memos from Jaime S. Hammer, AU's unimpressive General Counsel (dated June 4) the day before the vote, addressed to Trustees Jimmy Sanford, Quentin Riggins and Jim Pratt. Each memo opens by recommending the proposal "be included on the agenda at the meeting scheduled for June 5, 2026" - i.e., the June 4 request for a June 5 agenda. Every other item in the 175-page packet carries a memo dated between April 4 and June 3. The packet file's own electronic timestamp shows it was assembled at 8:06 the morning of June 4. The dissolution was the only business at Auburn finished the day before it passed. Hammer's memo even scripted the trustees' narrative, instructing "the Board should reiterate and confirm that any university senate... is hereby dissolved." The two policies sat as the last two items of the last committee, the Executive Committee, the only committee with no faculty representative at the table and the reconvened meeting which voted on everything was allotted fifteen minutes... after a forty-five-minute executive session.

June 5 was the Board's scheduled annual meeting, so the seven-day meeting notice in the Open Meetings Act (Ala. Code § 36-25A-3) appears satisfied. The campus saw the packet for one day, a month after spring semester ended, a week past Auburn's own stated posting deadline. The Act's first premise (§ 36-25A-1) is deliberation toward public decisions occurs in public. Fifteen trustees voted unanimously on a resolution their lawyer finished, scripted and timestamped the previous morning. When and where, exactly, did deliberating take place? The lateness was by design. February stripped faculty personnel protections. April, ambush Stern. June, remove voice... the third move against the faculty in four months.

Pleased to See

Two days after the vote, the senator who writes Auburn's appropriations took a victory lap. The 1819 News [6-7-26] quoted Orr "pleased to see Auburn take these steps toward empowering the board and getting more accountability on their campuses. Auburn appears to be the first to do this, less than two months after the bill passed."

Sen. Arthur Orr (R-Decatur), chair of the Senate education budget committee and Tiger Paw PAC's top career recipient.

Senator Arthur Orr

HB 580 [now Act 2026-432] makes faculty senates advisory, hands boards authority over curriculum and makes tenured faculty easier to fire. Auburn was not required to comply. Auburn and Alabama are constitutionally chartered and their boards spent the spring claiming that status as an exemption. A reporter asked whether Auburn had to comply. Orr's answer was "Well, yes or no," and then he said it plainly.

"We do hold the purse strings."

The statute could not reach a constitutionally chartered board, but the budget reaches anyone. Orr also chairs the Board of Trustees of Athens State University himself, so when he lectures that "the trustees are the final authority," he is describing his own chair. HB 580 ran through his committee, which amended it and he voted with the 27 to 7 majority that passed it, telling colleagues, "We should not be giving jobs for life, regardless of productivity or output." A budget chairman weakening tenure statewide, his campaigns funded by the trustees prosecuting Auburn's proven whistleblower, is sharpening a tool and we have seen who it is designed to harm again.

Buying the Seat

How does one become an Auburn trustee? Not by election. Under the constitutional amendment governing the Board, trustees are chosen by a five-member appointing committee and then confirmed by the State Senate. That committee seats the Board's own President Pro Tempore, a second trustee the Board selects, two members of the Auburn Alumni Association board and the Governor - who also presides over the Board as its ex officio president. Two of those five seats are the Board's own, which by constitutional design makes it the largest voting bloc in its own succession.

Trustee Walt Woltosz. $10,000 to Gov. Ivey [5-3-22], confirmed [3-21-24], $200,000 to Tiger Paw PAC [4-24-25].

Trustee Walt Woltosz

The other three seats answer to money the trustees also supply. Ten of the eleven sitting trustees who fund Tiger Paw PAC have also written checks to Kay Ivey's campaigns, $222,924 in all and the cohort grows to $420,924 once former trustees and Auburn megadonor families are included. Tiger Paw itself sent Ivey another $25,000. The sequence repeats man after man. Walt Woltosz gave Ivey $10,000 [5-3-22], was confirmed to an at-large seat [3-21-24], then wrote Tiger Paw the largest trustee check in its history, $200,000 [4-24-25]. Wayne Smith of Nashville gave Ivey $45,000 in the years before his reconfirmation [2-3-21] and $90,000 career. Jimmy (YellaGrubber) Rane's Great Southern Wood gave Ivey $81,474 and Rane was reconfirmed [3-22-23] to underpay for his accommodations. Jimmy Sanford, the sitting President Pro Tempore, funds both Ivey/Tiger Paw and he personally occupies a seat on the appointing committee. The wealth buys the seat, the seat helps pick the next seat and the Senate confirming them all is paid by the same PAC.

Each sitting trustee's career giving to the governor who appoints the Board and to Tiger Paw PAC. Source: Alabama FCPA filings, 2013-2026; auburn.edu trustee biographies.

The Office on South Hull Street

Trustee Quentin Riggins, Alabama Power senior vice president for governmental affairs and Executive Committee chair.

The PAC files from 423 South Hull Street in Montgomery, the office of Fine Geddie and Associates, AU's longtime contract lobbying firm; co-founded by Bob Geddie, a former State governmental affairs director for Alabama Power. Quentin Riggins, Alabama Power's current senior vice president for governmental affairs, sits on the Auburn Board, chaired the Executive Committee installing February's governance policy and the following one; Riggins was an addressee on Hammer's June 4 memo. The same governmental affairs chair, a generation apart, and the money never changed offices.

This PAC is 'a bespoke Auburn instrument, not a statewide watering hole' according to a faculty source contacted. Twenty-one of its fifty-five funders give to no other committee in Alabama, so for them this single PAC is their entire political footprint and exists to move Auburn-interested money. The funders are the trustees themselves, eleven of the fifteen sitting members. Rane gave $50,000 through Great Southern Wood Preserving. Billy Ainsworth put in $5,000 on April 28 [4-28-26] while HB 580 was clearing the Legislature. Woltosz, Wayne Smith, Jim Pratt, Mike DeMaioribus, Bob Dumas, B.T. Roberts, Sanford, Clark Sahlie and Riggins fill the rest of the trustee column. Former trustees and Auburn megadonors fill in behind them, down to Steven (Crash) Leath, who gave while he was sitting president. Alabama banned PAC-to-PAC transfers in 2010, so the funder list is the origin of the money and most of those names sit, or sat, on the Board that dissolved AU's Senate.

The Calendar Does the Arguing

No legislator has taken more career money from Tiger Paw PAC than Arthur Orr; $50K. I allege no agreement. No filing can prove one. I only lay the calendar down. Earlier this year some educators were hopeful Orr was concerned for educators saying he'd advance pre-filed 'Affordable CoLA' legislation to allow teachers most impacted by inflation [low income recipients] adjustments on the first few thousand of their TRS checks which legislators claimed impossible having to pay the percentage adjustment on bloated payments to 'public servants' like Jay Jacobs who abused the system. As the session came to a close I heard 'Authur Orbán' nomenclature bantered about.

For eight years Orr's checks from this PAC were modest, $20K in all. Then came the HB 580 session. On 1-21-26, as the session opened, the PAC sent $15K to Orr, larger than any check it had ever sent Authur. HB580 cleared his committee on April 7 and passed the floor on April 9, the few righteous legislators on Goat Hill I know didn't even see it coming. On 5-5-26 the PAC sent another $15K to House Ways and Means Education Chair Danny Garrett, where the bill cleared the House. Three days later another $15K is sent to Orr. The two 'public servants' who handled the bill each received checks as large as any the PAC has ever written them, within seventy-two hours of each other, three weeks after passage and four weeks before the Board vote Orr was "pleased to see."

The innocent explanation is an election. There was none. Orr's 2026 Republican primary was cancelled and has only token opposition in a district he carried with 86%. Garrett's was also cancelled in our uncompetitive, highly corrupt State. Neither had a race to fund. The checks came after a vote, not before an election.

And notice who never got paid. Rep. Troy Stubbs (R-Wetumpka) wrote HB 580. Tiger Paw has never sent Stubbs a dime. You do not pay the author of a bill. You pay gatekeepers who broker whether it moves and the PAC's career ledger reads like a directory of gatekeepers, $996,428 spread across 98 committees of both soviet parties, pooling on leadership and budget chairs. Of the six bills which made up Goat Hill's 2024-2026 university-control agenda; CHOOSE Act, HB 580, CHEER Act, university fund reporting bill and education budgets that carry AU's appropriation, Orr and Garrett carried five between them. The sixth (DEI ban) belonged to Sen. Will Barfoot, who took $12,500 from the same PAC. The legislation common to Tiger Paw's payroll is the agenda AU's trustees wanted.

Orr's two largest Tiger Paw checks bracket the bill. Source: Alabama FCPA filings, 2013-2026.

Run the plays a corrupt trustee would run. At the April meeting, seven weeks before the dissolution, Rane himself delivered the governmental affairs report. The Legislature had adjourned and Auburn secured "more than $86 million in new one-time and recurring appropriations" [4-17-26 minutes]. In the five months bracketing the bill's passage, the PAC that trustees fund wrote the two education budget chairs $45,000 in checks. I allege no purchase. Some may be having Felon Hubbard flashbacks. I report two numbers from the public record and invite the reader to do the division. No fund in Auburn's $1.4 billion endowment has ever returned nineteen hundred to one.

The money explains how June 5 happened. Whether any of it was legal is the question I take up next Perspective, under color of state law and 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the same way I chronicled the money here, fact by fact.

John Sophocleus is a retired Ford Motor Company Warranty & Policy Administrator and a retired Auburn University Instructor of Economics. A former Libertarian candidate for Alabama House and Governor, U.S. House District 3 and U.S. Senate candidate, he's also a monthly Alabama Gazette columnist since 2009.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Alabama Gazette staff or publishers.