TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIOTAPE-RECORDED MEETING OF AUBURN UNIVERSITY CHAPTER OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (AAUP) -- THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2003, 202 THACH HALL, AUBURN UNIVERSITY, AUBURN, ALABAMA

INTRODUCTION OF ANDY HORSNBY, VICE-PRESIDENT OF AUBURN ALUMNI ASSOCIATION, AND MR. HORNSBY’S REMARKS CONCERNING FAILURE OF THE ALABAMA SENATE CONFIRMATIONS COMMITTEE TO CONFIRM THREE NEW TRUSTEES TO THE AU BOARD OF TRUSTEES, DUE TO LACK OF QUORUM, ON THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2003.

(Gary Mullen, President, Auburn Chapter, AAUP): Two people who have really taken the lead in pushing for reform and for new individuals on the Board of Trustees have been Andy Hornsby and Ted Little. I did extend an invitation to Ted Little as senator of our district to join us today. Circumstances related to his schedule and other reasons, he was not able to be here. But Andy Hornsby, who many of you know as the vice president of the Auburn Alumni Association – he is a member of the board of trustee selection committee, and has been in on the ground floor of the alumni’s efforts to try to bring about constitutional changes and procedures for selecting board members. I’ve asked Mr. Hornsby if he would take a few minutes – and we will move right into that – to at least give you some of his thoughts and observations on what particularly has happened as it relates to confirmations on Sept. 25. He will take 10 or 15 minutes to do that, and then we will move to the resolution itself and hopefully we go ahead with a vote on that. And Andy has agreed to stay with us as long … but not as long as maybe this will last. But will stay for more interactive discussions, other perspectives and, so forth, and where things might go from here. He is not apologetic, and I told him not to be. He said he would have to come casual because he was coming directly from the farm. I assured him that he would not be out of place among our faculty. With no further introduction, Andy would you like to make some remarks?

(Andy Hornsby): Thank you Gary. I do appreciate you letting me come directly from the farm that was part of the conditions for my appearance here. We were working on our quail habitat this week. That’s very important to me, not as important as Auburn University, but I didn’t feel like driving back to Montgomery and changing clothes. I want to thank you all for the terrific job you do. I am a product of this institution, probably, well, long before any of you thought about teaching here, but I go back and harken back to what I learned in this building and other buildings [Thach Hall] on this campus. Any success I had in my life has been because of what people like you did for me, and I appreciate you. I was noting just the other day, Frances McCloud taught me business and professional writing here in the early to mid 60s. She was pretty tough and I despised her at that time. I had it twice. I later on used what I learned from Mrs. McCloud. Her son is a member of this organization who retired back to Auburn from West Virginia University. I started to invite him today. He needs to be plugged in to you – if retirees are entitled to be in your organization. I still harken back to what she taught me many, many times. You know we don’t appreciate you until we get out and use what you impart to your students. I do thank you for the fine job. I have a niece here now. My son is a graduate here, and I have many friends who have children here.

I have been active in what I consider he struggle for several years. I got involved in what I thought was a very simple process – let’s change the way we select our trustees at Auburn University. More akin to what they do at our sister institution up the road in Tuscaloosa. Some many years ago, their wise people such as Wynton Blount and others at the University of Alabama said let’s take some of the politics, at least, out of the trustee selection process. That made a lot of sense to me. Made sense to others. We had a couple of nasty fights, as you may recall, back in the 90s, when Fob James was governor, over an appointment or two. So I got involved in that and saw some things happening and sort of stayed into it. Was asked to be considered for the alumni board and then got heavily involved. I was one of the five board members at Homecoming 2000 when there was an attempt to vote us out and bring in proxies for a hand-picked slate of alumni board members – which I thought was strange. I didn’t know anybody on the existing board. We had an astronaut, Dr. Jan Davis. We had a famed orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Ed Dyas, who was a runner-up for the Heisman Trophy. We had a wizard of financial advice, ???? McDaniel I thought pretty good people. Nick Davis, owns Taco Bells all over Florida. All of a sudden there was this effort made to remove this slate and go with a new slate. I won’t dwell on that, but since that time I have been engaged. I’m going to stay engaged. I will not quit. I will stay with this until it is done. I think it is time for new blood on this board of trustees. I’ve said that publicly and continue to say that. I push for that reason.

I will cut to the chase and go to the events of Sept. 25. I think that was Thursday, and it was the next to the last day of the legislative session. I had really thought we would get this done during the special session. I was disappointed the governor didn’t put this in his call, so to speak. But very frankly, Gov. Riley had a lot more important things to deal with in the state budget, so I sort of understand that. He did have a couple of his staff who worked very closely on this effort, and I appreciate that. But Sen. Barron, during both of his interviews, answered questions from my colleague Owen Brown –“ Will you, as you are not a selectee of this committee, impede the approval through the Senate process?” He said, “I assure you I will not. That would be mean spirited if I did that.” If I remember his exact words. And I accepted that. I started to follow up with a question. Anybody that knows Alabama politics knows that it’s very simple; if we got those nominees through, Sen. Barron would have allowed it to happen. If they did not go through, Sen. Barron would have stopped it. It’s that simple. I should have made sure in that room full of people with the press there – the press are here today – but I missed the opportunity to ask that question. But I still though that maybe we were going to work this out. Sen. McClain, E.B. of Birmingham, had, it has been widely reported, a choice for Pardon and Parole Board; he very much wanted that person selected and had outstanding qualifications. The governor has submitted another name. The confirmation committee met real hurriedly a few days prior to Sept. 25, rejected the governor’s choice. The name Sen. McClain wanted was resubmitted. I thought having Sen. McClain’s choice with our nominees, there were other state board of education members and others, it was an important time to have a confirmation committee meeting.

I thought it was going to get done. I was optimistic it would. However, on Wednesday, we ran into the first problem, of course, getting it, quote, “out of the basket.” That’s not a complicated process. It is just a simple referral process to the appropriate committee. And Sen. Barron did say that he just didn’t have time to get to that. Everybody knows that it takes nothing more than a nod to get that sent to the committee. And so if you don’t get “out of the basket” in a special session like that with limited days and to the committee by the third or fourth legislative day, your chances of seeing the conference committee process completed was very, very dim. The longer we waited I thought. So we started putting the pressure on to get it out of the basket, get it out of the basket, and finally it was referred out of the basket just a few days prior that Sept. 25 date. I thought well, we still do have time because the session was dragging on longer that some thought it would, and we still had a few days to work with. So I was feeling pretty good. But on Wednesday afternoon I got a call from a high-placed source with the administration who told me there was good news and bad news. The good news is that Sen. ???? has called a Senate confirmation committee meeting for, and I believe it was 10 a.m. the

following morning—it could have been 9:00. The bad news is though it won’t be a quorum there. And I thought that was strange, but I thought – we gotta work to get a quorum. So I made some phone calls and sent out some e-mails and said please again work on members of the confirmation committee and make sure they attend this meeting. We heard one of our great supporters, Senator ?????, from Jasper, Alabama, his wife had had a baby. He left, going back home Wednesday afternoon. I said, Oh my God, we’ve got to have him back, and sure enough he was back there the next morning, on time. He was back there the next morning on time. And I appreciate Senator Lee (?) doing that. I got a few people to go down there. We had a poor turnout because it was such a late notice. We stayed about 24 to 48 hours behind the power curve all during that special session. We wouldn’t know what was going to happen. We could not marshal any support to come there because we didn’t know when meetings were going to be held. So it was a pretty tough time. I’m not sure that wasn’t somewhat by design. I got there about 9 a.m. the next morning and immediately started working to try to see how many senators would be there because we needed seven. We knew we had about four or five for sure, and we needed to pick up two or three more. I still thought it would happen. They were all at a breakfast meeting, a 7:30 breakfast meeting together. The first time I guess I became really alarmed – at precisely five minutes to 10 I came around the corner and met Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley. Lucy and I know each other. And she said, “Andy you can go home.” And I said, “No, what do you mean?” She said, “It was all worked out last night. There will not be a quorum here.” I said, “Lucy, we have got to do everything we can.” She said, “I’m telling you there will not be a quorum. I wish I could tell you better news.” I said, “Can you help us?” She said, “I will do anything I can, but there’s simply not going to be a quorum at your meeting.”

I was chagrined by that and I was making my way to Sen. Pat Lindsey’s office. Sen. Lindsey is a Democrat and has been a very strong supporter of Sen. Barron. He is an ATIP-supported senator, and we gave him $10,000 – our organization. [To the AAUP members present] Some of you are members of ATIP. I ran into Sen. Gerald Dial who has been very strongly in support of us. He didn’t say you can go home. He said, “You’re not going to have a quorum. You won’t have it.” That’s two people within the course of five minutes that told me it was all pretty much orchestrated. I saw Sen. Barron, but didn’t have a chance to talk to him. I did get Sen. Little and ask him to come. I saw a couple of other senators who I didn’t’ get to. There were other people there. That was primarily the only business occurring in the halls of the Senate that morning. The session didn’t start until either 11 or 1 o’clock later that day, so there wasn’t any more business going on. Virtually everybody hovered around in that building, that room on the fourth floor, busy on the confirmation issues. I saw some other lobbyists there. I still held out hope that maybe miraculously some people would appear. We got in the room, and we had five of the seven needed. And Sen. Lindsey opened the door and kinda slowly looked in. I don’t think he was taking a head count, but he might have been, and took a seat, asked for a roll call. Sen. Lindsey called the meeting to order, called the roll, and adjourned for lack of a quorum. I was deeply disappointed. Especially disappointed at Sen. Hinton Mitchem who is another ATIP-supported senator we gave $10,000 to. He has been asked to return his $10,000. Don’t hold your breath. Sen. Harri Ann Means from the Wiregrass, I think she calls Slocomb home; she is a Republican and had been with the governor’s coalition. She had a Chamber of Commerce called meeting and she had to be there, for jobs in the Wiregrass. I don’t know, maybe it was important, but I think we’ll have her there next time. People from Auburn have spoken loud and clear down there and will continue to speak so.

So when asked if Sen. Barron had anything to do with this – I don’t know. I know what I was told. I was told by reliable sources that it was set up the night before. I know Sen. Barron’s allies didn’t appear. I only can draw a conclusion that it was somewhat orchestrated. I don’t know that, and he said its not. [Question from Renee Middleton, AAUP member] You don’t think if he wanted them to be there they would have been there? Does he carry that much influence … [inaudible phrase]? Absolutely. Ordinarily, the confirmations committee meeting – they had not met but that one brief time during that entire special session, and there were some important confirmations needed, including Sen. McClain’s. So they adjourned, and some of our supporters said they were going to try to lock the Senate down and start filibustering til we could get another confirmations committee meeting held. Sen. McClain had a sudden attack of gout and headed back to Birmingham, I was told. So we had to give up.

We’ll come back again Feb. 6, and, if we do our job between now and Feb. 6, it should be fairly easy. We should have every senator saying we want to dispose of this Auburn matter now and get it over so we can get on with business. So Gary, I know we are short on time. But that’s what I saw happen. Again, I’ve known Sen. Barron for many years. I used to be on the Commission for the Alabama Department of Human Resources, I served two terms, he was a great supporter of mine and my department, had a lot of respect for him; he is a very shrewd politician. I learned politics from him, what little I know about it. I do believe that if Sen. Barron had wanted this to come out of confirmations committee, we would have had a quorum and gotten it done. I believe that the fact that we didn’t have a quorum, those allies of Sen. Barron chose to stay away because of that issue. Thank you.