Part of the scheme, the homeowners say, was to put students in university-owned units as blockbusters--tenants whose obnoxious behavior would tend to make other people want to move. In July 2000, an SMU leasing administrator testified under oath that SMU students living in a unit owned by the university had displayed on their balcony the reeking, bloody skin of a slaughtered lamb, a satanic mask and paintings stained with blood. A police report described these as "items usually used in devil worship."
The defendants claimed the president and trustees of the university knowingly and deliberately set about to amass the 75 percent controlling ownership in the complex, move in students and force the remaining residents, 80 percent of whom were elderly, to sell against their will, while stating publicly and explicitly that they had no such plan.
Fredo
SMU wants to build a George W. Bush theme park on land it hornswoggled from elderly condominium dwellers.
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Bennett was especially adamant in the assurances he offered University Gardens residents that there was no plan to take over the complex. Maybe that's why it's hard to get him on the phone about it now.
In a sworn deposition in July 2000, SMU President Gerald Turner said there was no overall strategy driving SMU's purchase of condo units and no plan to use the place for student housing. He said he did not remember any discussion of the 75 percent rule at a 1998 board meeting.
Later the defendants asked the court to sanction the university for failing to produce certain documents. When those documents subsequently were produced, they included a number of letters, statements to bankers and other communications that proved SMU had intended to move students into the complex from the beginning.
The defendants called Turner back for a second deposition. This time Turner was forced to make admissions at odds with his own earlier sworn testimony.
A lawyer asked him: "When you left the meeting of the board of trustees in December 1998, did you personally believe that SMU could be in a position to force elderly residents at University Gardens who did not want to move from their homes?"
Turner said, "We knew we could require the final 25 percent to sell their homes to us regardless of what their demographics might be."
To a second question, Turner said, "Yes, I believe that the 75--the action possible at 75 percent ownership--was explained to the board."
In their arguments against SMU, the owners' lawyers were able to show repeatedly that SMU--in spite of its religious ties and vaunted ethical standards--carried out a clever, ruthless scheme to drive out all the homeowners at University Gardens, including many elderly residents who had known no other home for decades, some of whom had no family to help them and were too old to manage by themselves. And knowing this was the plan, no one in the administration or on the board ever expressed a single moral or ethical qualm.
Present at the 1998 board meeting where staff informed trustees of their 75 percent strategy was board member Cary M. Maguire, chair and president of Maguire Oil, who endowed SMU's Maguire Chair in oil and gas management, as well as the Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility at SMU. The SMU staff person who presented the 75 percent strategy to the board testified later under oath that no trustee at the meeting, including Maguire, raised a question about the ethics of forcing elderly people out of their homes against their will.
SMU President Turner was also present at that meeting. A lawyer asked him later in a deposition if during the 1998 meeting he or any other trustee had remembered verse 17, chapter 20 of the book of Exodus in the Bible: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house."
Turner said: "It was never discussed in that, because as we have discussed before, there is always an argument on decisions that have ethical implications to them. And the question is, is it ethical for the institution, for SMU not to try to look for the betterment of its future? Is it ethical to not be responsible toward opportunities that the university will need in the future? And so the ethics of how one proceeds in a situation is always within the boundaries and the end points of view in terms of what is ethical."
Why am I thinking here of Karl Marx and "the ends justify the means?"
I'm not saying SMU broke the law. But I am saying the way SMU took this land was ethically filthy. And I wonder why now on this ugly foundation we should want to see a monument to George W. Bush.
More than in any other modern regional city in the country, the reputation of Dallas has been shaped by presidential history. And not well. It's incredible to me that right now, as we talk about bringing this memorial to Bush here, The Dallas Morning News is beating the drum again to have the memorial to the assassination of John F. Kennedy torn down.
Don't we need to think this through--all of it? Perhaps there is almost no one left at The Dallas Morning News who remembers that some respected national figures in the late 1960s believed the Morning News and its owners were culpable in the Kennedy assassination. I remember. I still get chills when I recall the words of William Manchester in his 1967 book, The Death of a President: He wrote about Dealey Plaza and its memorial statue of Morning News founder George Bannerman Dealey.
