Greg Fenves' reasonably less crappy first year....

"But the path of the just is like the shining sun,
That shines ever brighter unto the perfect day."
Proverbs 4:18

Last Friday marked Greg Fenves' one-year anniversary as UT-Austin President.  Perhaps it's just that he replaced the awful Bill Powers, but we've been pleasantly surprised a few times since he took over.  Maybe we have Stockholm syndrome, but moving from an actively terrible UT President to a relatively nondescript one strikes us as progress.

Consider the following:

• The Confederate Statues -- Fenves' decision to move the statues to a museum stuck the right balance between whatever modest historical value those statues might have (mostly as a cautionary example) and declining to condone the horrific Woodrow Wilson era racism that inspired them in the first place.

• Firing Steve Patterson -- Do we even need to explain this one?!?

• Campus Carry -- UT-Austin's campus carry policy isn't great, but it could have been a lot worse.  To his credit, Fenves refused to cave to the vulgar anti-Second Amendment protests last fall (which, we have no doubt, Bill Powers would have done).  It's also worth pointing out that he's light years better than McRaven on this topic.

• Alcohol sales at Football games -- Fenves finally ended that particularly asinine prohibition.

• The Ami Pedazhur incident -- Last fall, an anti-Semitic lynch mob attempted to intimidate an Israeli professor; to it's credit, the Fenves administration stood by the professor.

• The Offensive Coordinator situation -- Fenves unintentionally undercut Charlie Strong's search for a new offensive coordinator last fall.  To his credit, Fenves quickly cleaned up his own mess where Bill Powers would have pridefully dug in his heels.  The early returns look promising.

• Salary -- In pretty much the most un-UT move of all time, Fenves (unlike McRaven) left money on the table when he was negotiating his compensation package with the Board of Regents.

That's not to say Fenves is perfect.  The admissions process remains, at best, a work in progress while Fenves went along with the tuition hike.   Still, to go from one of the worst university Presidents in the country to a relatively dull one who occasionally makes the right decision strikes this website as progress; it's the difference between an "F-" and a "C."

Bottom Line: Our assessment last fall, "The Greg Fenves era might not be marked by great reform, but it could be a time when we stop actively making matters worse," was probably correct.