UTMB should apologize for censoring professor

Her fentanyl work is saving lives

One year ago, on a summer evening after dinner, Kevin McConville asked his mother if there were any more slices of pizza left. When she said no, the 10th grader went to bed. The next morning, his parents couldn’t wake him.

Police found an Altoids tin near his bed filled with light blue counterfeit pills tainted with fentanyl. He’d been using them as a sleep aid, a friend later told Kevin’s grieving mom.

He was just one of at least six students at Hays CISD, a school district between Austin and San Marcus, to die of a fentanyl overdose since summer 2022. Many of them were accidental and many of the parents didn’t see any warning signs of drug use. Kevin had been planning for a career in the military or welding. Across the state, fentanyl deaths have soared more than 500% in the past four years according to provisional state data.

Such stories only add more urgency to the work of Joy Alonzo, a doctor of pharmacy who cochairs the Texas A&M Opioid Task Force. In 2019, under her leadership, A&M’s health science center became the first in the nation to train every student in recognizing and treating opioid overdoses.

She’s met mourning families, including from Hays County, and crisscrossed the state training thousands of people on the front lines.

She knows her work has saved lives because trainees have called her asking for refills of naloxone, a medication that reverses the effects of opioids, after using it on people overdosing.

If Alonzo’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she’s been caught up in Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s campaign to rein in academic freedom at Texas universities.

As we wrote last week, she was accused of making a disparaging remark about Patrick during a talk in March at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Before she could even drive home from Galveston, UTMB was in the process of issuing a censure. A&M put her on unpaid leave for two weeks while her comments were investigated.

In an op-ed published by the Chronicle last week, the lieutenant governor wrote that Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, whose daughter attends medical school at UTMB, told him that Alonzo had made “a false and inappropriate personal attack on me.” Responding to the op-ed, Buckingham tweeted, “When a professor states, ‘Your Lt. Governor says those kids deserve to die’ regarding the group of kids in Hays County who tragically lost their lives to fentanyl … it has no place in a lecture and is indefensible.”

Alonzo quickly responded, saying she never uttered those words in her speech, which she’s given many times in many places. No known recordings were made of the UTMB talk. A student who spoke to the Texas Tribune on the condition of anonymity said that Alonzo’s critical comments had to do with the lieutenant governor’s opposition to policies such as the legalization of test strips for fentanyl–a critical tool for stopping the accidental overdoses that rocked Hays County.

Gov. Greg Abbott had a change of heart in supporting test strip legislation this year but it failed nevertheless.

After reviewing Alonzo’s slides and talking to a graduate student who attended the UTMB speech, the A&M investigation could not “substantiate the allegation that Dr. Alonzo made unprofessional or inappropriate comments about the Lt. Governor.”

In a statement, A&M Chancellor John Sharp wrote, “Bottom line, Texas A&M investigated when the University of Texas Medical Branch, where Dr. Alonzo was appearing as a guest lecturer, issued a public statement censuring Dr. Alonzo without providing any evidence, it turned out, and unfortunately still hasn’t retracted that censure.

What else would you have the university do but check it out?”

Is Sharp simply deflecting blame to UTMB? After all, he was quick to assure Patrick in a text and by phone that an investigation was taking place at A&M. (When the Tribune published Sharp’s text, the news compounded the public outcry over how journalism professor Kathleen McElroy was treated by A&M after her hiring was derailed by administrators cowering to outside influences.)

The summary of the Alonzo investigation includes a confusing timeline and A&M faculty are right to ask for a clarification of how investigations are initiated. Even so, Sharp has a point about UTMB’s role in this affair.

It appears UTMB officials had no business issuing a rash censure based on little or no evidence.

And media coverage, admittedly including our editorials, grilled A&M while largely letting UTMB off the hook.

It’s time to hold UTMB accountable.

When we asked UTMB officials Thursday if they’d rescind their censure of Alonzo, we got this confounding email response from Stephen Hadley, UTMB associate vice president, marketing and media communications: “The University of Texas Medical Branch never censured Dr. Joy Alonzo, a Texas A&M University professor who gave a guest lecture to UTMB Neuroscience and Human Behavior students during class on March 7. Based on information available at the time, UTMB was concerned the guest lecturer’s statements did not represent the position of the university and censured those statements.”

Fine, so the school didn’t censure the professor–just her statement. But what statement?

It appears no one can agree on what exactly Alonzo said. We asked Hadley for clarification and got no response. Perhaps because there isn’t one.

The A&M investigation cleared Alonzo. Now it’s UTMB’s turn to rescind its censure of Alonzo’s statements and apologize.

The school’s actions shed a negative, political light on a professor who is desperately trying to elevate life-saving policies, protocols and drugs above politics.

Watch the series of videos that Hays CISD put together in their attempt to stem the crisis at their schools. You won’t see any partisanship or political theater.

No woke agenda or right-wing talking points. What you will see are grieving parents. Footage of an overdose and near death in a school parking lot. A principal who breaks into tears and asks for the camera to stop.

We believe everyone involved in the imbroglio around Alonzo’s talk, including Patrick and Buckingham, would be moved by those stories.

We need a hard reset. We need to shift the focus from a politically tinged game of telephone to the real lives that are at stake.

UTMB should take a step in that direction by rescinding its censure, apologizing to Alonzo, and thanking her for the work she’s doing every day to prevent opioid deaths across this vast state.