A very good friend of mine, Jay from Crawford, is a 1974 University of Texas graduate. I had lunch with him on Tuesday, and he had just been on the air with Chris Salcedo on WBAP. Jay is outraged (a gross understatement) by the nighttime removal of the monuments.
Jay is a 6th generation Native Texas. His children went to UT, his mother and his grandmother went to UT. When the statutes were removed overnight, the next day Jay removed his diploma from the wall and shredded it. He mailed half of it to Paul Foster, Chairman of the Board of Regents and the other half to Admiral William McRaven, Chancellor of the University of Texas System. A letter accompanied the shredded diploma, demanding that the statutes be replaced immediately in broad daylight until a democratic transparent decision is made as to rewrite history.
There are more, stronger (but clean) statements from Jay while on the air.
If you'd like to listen to Jay's words, the Chris Salcedo archives are online at
http://www.wbap.com/chrissalcedo/. Go to the 8/22/2017 , select the 9:30-10:00 segment. It's about 4:30 into it. It looks like about 5 days worth of archives are available, so it won't be up there too much longer.
I agree with Jay - this was a cowardly thing to do, overnight, without input from UT Alumni in particular or Texans in general. These statutes are public property located on a State funded campus, and are not the private property of UT President Gregory Fenves, who received his Bachelor in Science degree from Cornell and his Ph. D. from UC Berkeley.