Editor’s Note: The following is Part 3 in our “Hidden on the Hilltop: SMU’s Culture of Secrecy” series, which examines the secretive nature of various operations at SMU.

For the rest of the series: part 1, part 2a, part 2b, part 3

SMU football and the death penalty. Like most students, Grace Barlow believes she knows the story of what happened.

For a few years, rogue boosters secretly funneled money to selected players. The SMU Board of Trustees and administrators chose to turn a blind eye. In 1987, NCAA officials uncovered the problem and unfairly hammered SMU with the ultimate athletic punishment.

“We weren’t the only school doing it, but we were the only school to receive the punishment,” Barlow, a junior majoring in history and religious studies, said. “SMU was unlucky enough to be chosen by the NCAA to be made an example of.”

Barlow’s view of what came to be known as the pay-for-play scandal is not unique. The Daily Campus interviewed more than a dozen students. Most gave a similar account.

This version of events, with SMU as the undeserving sacrificial victim, is comforting and widely-accepted. And wrong.

When the scandal made national headlines, SMU trustees addressed it with something unprecedented—transparency. They asked a group of bishops in the United Methodist Church to investigate the scandal. Almost two dozen trustees gave sworn depositions. The board also turned over dozens of boxes of records and minutes of meetings covering several years.

The result was the Bishops’ Committee Report on SMU. It is the only in-depth examination of the board available to the public and the most comprehensive investigation of the biggest scandal in SMU history. The report shows the board and scandal depended on secrecy. It also details the central role the board played in the scandal. The bishops found that:

• Prominent trustees—including Edwin L. Cox, the oil tycoon and namesake of SMU’s Cox School of Business—had known about the payments since at least 1981.

• When the scandal threatened to go public in 1984, Cox and William P. Clements, Jr.—trustee, oil tycoon, former Texas governor and namesake of SMU’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies—told then-President L. Donald Shields to “stay out of it” and “run the university.”

• Later, with NCAA investigators closing in, Cox and two other trustees—William L. Hutchison and O. Paul Corley—secretly negotiated a December 1986 deal in which athletic director Bob Hitch and head football coach Bobby Collins would take full responsibility for the payments and, in return, SMU would pay almost $1 million in hush money.

• As part of the cover-up, Hutchison lied to the NCAA in early 1987 about which SMU officials had knowledge of the payments.

Cox, Clements, Hutchison and Corley each gave sworn depositions to the bishops.

The report shows SMU football was less a sacrificial victim than a serial offender of NCAA rules. Between 1958 and 1985, the NCAA imposed penalties on SMU six times for paying football players and other violations.

That last bit of information stunned Barlow. “I did not know that,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been duped.”

Jasmine Iglehart, a junior religious studies major, was stunned to learn of the web of secrecy insulating the trustees from responsibility, particularly the hush money. “I am shocked, appalled and outraged,” she said.

So was Adriana Martinez, a sophomore majoring in political science, public policy, French and history.

“It’s shocking information,” she said. “To think that such a lack of transparency permitted this to be done is upsetting and wrong.”

The bishops saw the board’s obsession with secrecy as a fundamental problem. In their report, they strongly urged trustees to abandon their practice of operating behind closed doors and shielding their decisions from public view. Instead, the bishops recommended the board “adhere to the open meetings policy of the United Methodist Church.”

The trustees ignored the recommendation.

In a recent interview, retired Bishop J. Woodrow Hearn, the only surviving bishop who helped prepare the report, said board members never even discussed the call for open meetings.

“It wasn’t even brought up,” said Bishop Hearn, a trustee from 1984 to 2000.

Virtually every student interviewed by The Daily Campus disagreed with the board’s decision.

“It was a huge mistake,” said Nick Burns, a sophomore majoring in biology and French. “I don’t trust the board’s credibility if they won’t even discuss the suggestion of making their actions more transparent.”

Jake Torres, a junior English and Spanish major, recently was elected SMU student body president for 2010-11. When asked if the SMU board should stop meeting in private and make its records public, Torres said that while he understands certain matters call for confidentiality, the board should be more transparent and make public its records.

“It would certainly hold the board to a higher level of accountability if the public—such as students, faculty, community and media—could see what they’re doing,” he said. “They’d keep it clean for their own sake as well as ours.”

Most current trustees contacted by The Daily Campus declined to be interviewed.

One who did, Linda Pitts Custard, expressed a very different view of confidentiality and the board’s handling of the pay-for-play scandal.

“That scandal that went down with the football team,” said Custard, a trustee since 2000, “that is proof there is accountability.”

Chelsea Stephens, a junior French and psychology major, doesn’t buy Custard’s argument.

“If they were paying up to $1 million in hush money, they were not taking any accountability for their actions,” she said. “And I don’t know if they’ve taken accountability for their actions since then.”

March 6, 1983 was not a good day for SMU football.

A letter had arrived from the NCAA. It detailed more than 80 allegations of rule and violations in the program. They included up-front offers of cash to players to sign with SMU, new cars and regular cash payments once the players arrived on campus.

According to the bishops’ report, Cox, Clements and Shields responded as they had previously—they hired outside attorneys and told them to fight the NCAA at every step.

The report said the “attorneys’ role as communicated by Clements, Cox and Shields was not to find the truth but to find a defense.”

In a matter of months, SMU’s own investigation revealed a secret fund with $400,000 in annual contributions from more than 60 donors.

The next step was up to Shields and SMU’s two most powerful officials—Cox, who had chaired the board of trustees since 1976, and Clements, who chaired the board of governors, a select group of 21 trustees who effectively governed the university. They acted quickly.

“Clements, Cox and Shields did not stop the payments,” the report states. “They stopped the investigation.”

They could not stop outside investigators. In May 1985, the NCAA imposed unprecedented penalties on SMU football after documenting 38 violations of its rules. Punishments meted out: No football scholarships in 1986-87. Only 15 scholarships in 1987-88. Three years probation. No television appearances for a year.

Advantageously, the NCAA continued to buy SMU’s story that out-of-control boosters, not the university, were responsible for paying players.

In June 1985, NCAA member schools approved the so-called “death penalty” punishment for repeat offenders. SMU was one of six schools to vote against it.

That did not deter Clements. He told Hitch to keep paying players. On Nov. 4, 1986, Clements was elected governor. Eight days later, everything came crashing down.

That evening, WFAA Channel 8 broadcast a one-hour documentary on David Stanley, a former SMU football player. Stanley said he was paid $25,000 to sign with SMU, $10,000 in drug treatment expenses and $750 per month until he quit school in December 1985.

Stanley said SMU was continuing to pay other players and identified Henry Lee Parker, Hitch’s recruiting coordinator, as the “paymaster.”

Over the next several days, Clements, Cox, Hutchison and Corley contrived a plan designed to protect the trustees by placing the blame on athletic department officials. They would say no one else knew what was going on—including the board of trustees—and would refuse to identify boosters, coaches or players. It was, the report states, “a strategy of containment and cover-up.”

Money was just as important as containment. Hitch, Collins and Parker would resign and take the blame for the scandal if SMU would pay them for the remaining years in their employment contracts­—246,442 for Hitch, $556,272 for Collins and $60,299 for Parker.

Total bill for their cooperation: $863,013 or, in 2009 dollars, $1.6 million. Cox, Hutchison and Corley agreed.

Hitch met with NCAA officials and said he would cooperate only if they agreed to his non-negotiable conditions: Absolute confidentiality for Hitch. No names. No more interviews. Reluctantly, the NCAA agreed.

SMU drew up a statement of facts for the NCAA that placed sole blame for the continued payments on “certain key Athletic Department staff members.” According to the bishops’ report, Hutchison “signed the stipulated statement knowing it to be false.”

On Feb. 25, 1987, the NCAA announced it had imposed the maximum penalty on SMU football, canceling the 1987 season. At a press conference six days later, Clements announced he and other trustees had approved the continuation of payments after the NCAA put SMU on probation in 1985.

In their report, the bishops said Clements made the announcement for political self-interest, giving him “the opportunity to get out in front of the story and break it on his own terms. He did just that, and Hutchison, Corley, Cox and the other members of the Board of Governors were left to pick up the pieces and explain their actions.”

Exactly who would explain their actions was an open question.

The day after Clements’ press conference, the board of governors held a special meeting chaired by Hutchison. According to the bishops’ report, every member “denied any knowledge of or participation in” the pay-for-play scandal.

Those denials likely sounded hollow to Robert Folsom, a developer, former Dallas mayor and member of the board of governors for a decade. At an August 1985 meeting, Folsom had chastised fellow board members for being shocked by the pay-for-play revelations.

According to the minutes, “Mr. Folsom said anyone would be very naïve and sanctimonious if [they] didn’t know that something was going on.”

According to the bishops, “Folsom was right. The evidence was everywhere. It was abundant and it was longstanding. But the Board of Governors’ members were content to win football games and look the other way.”

The four bishops responsible for the report also were members of the board of trustees.

They did not let themselves off the hook. Their report concluded that the entire SMU Board of Trustees abdicated their leadership by failing to “demand information and accountability from those who acted for SMU.”

In the wake of the pay-for-play scandal, SMU enacted several reforms. It abolished the board of governors. It reduced the size of the board of trustees. The bishops applauded those changes and called for more.

The trustees ignored most of these recommendations.

The bishops urged the trustees to diversify their membership so that it would “reflect racial, ethnic and sexual inclusiveness.” The Daily Campus recently reported that three of every four current trustees are male and almost nine in 10 are white.

The bishops said the university “should foster an atmosphere of openness and free inquiry, not an atmosphere of secrecy and confidentiality.”

However, an online search of SMU’s libraries reveals that the last time an item about the SMU Board of Trustees was made public was June 19, 1987, the date the bishops’ report was released.

The bishops called for open meetings. Instead, the trustees continue to meet behind closed doors and all records remain confidential.

Grant Lewis says it was a mistake for the trustees to ignore this recommendation. But he’s not shocked. “That does not surprise me one bit,” said Lewis, a senior finance major and former fraternity president.

Lewis said that in the wake of the pay-for-play scandal, it was “not the time to dismiss any suggestions.” He added, “I don’t think they operate any differently now, either.”

Sophomore Martinez said the trustees’ continued unwillingness to share information casts an old complaint—that SMU students are apathetic—in a new light.

“I wonder if the students are really apathetic or if this perceived attitude is just the result of not having enough information to light the fire,” she said. “There shouldn’t be a limit on information which has the ability to inspire passion and to desire change.”