We recently told you about Bill Powers, the president of the University of Texas at Austin who was told to resign or be fired.

Jon Cassidy of The Federalist explains the controversy.

The University Of Texas’s Admissions Scandal, Explained

The president of the University of Texas was supposed to be fired last week for insubordination and corruption.

UT President Bill Powers has a problem saying no to politicians who want him to let their unqualified kids in, and he has a problem saying yes to even the simplest requests from his nominal boss, Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa. So it was fitting, in a way, that Powers managed to avoid being fired for refusing orders by simply refusing an order.

Last week, Cigarroa told Powers to submit his resignation by Friday or face a humiliating public dismissal at the Board of Regents meeting today. Powers chose Option C: Keep his job as president for the next school year, then go back to teaching at the law school. Cigarroa gave in, for the third time in the last year, under pressure from Powers’ many friends in the legislature.

The reason it’s been so extraordinarily difficult for Cigarroa to push Powers out—questions of fortitude aside—is the same reason this is more than a weird local story. The admissions process at the state’s flagship school is deeply infected with political influence, and it’s become so obvious that Powers’ backers now resort to a shrugging rationalization: “Everyone does it.”

They may have a point. Everything made secret decays into corruption, from child welfare systems to foreign intelligence courts to the admissions departments of public universities. But if the other schools are as bad as UT, we have a national problem, because UT is letting applicants into its top-ranked law school whose scores on the Law School Admissions Test could be achieved by filling in bubbles at random.