Auburn, College Football and Bobby Lowder

Lengthy article mainly on Colonial Bank and Lowder personally. Those subjects can't be breached without including Auburn football.

VERY insightful article. I'd wondered about much of this for many
years............................



The football fanatic

One thing that no one disputes about Lowder -- friend or foe -- is his
passion for Auburn. In 1995, when then-Gov. Fob James tried to replace
Lowder on the Auburn board, he refused to leave. Lowder fought James
in court and enlisted fellow trustee and political ally Lowell Barron,
a state senator, to prevent a vote on a nominee to replace him.

Meanwhile, he threw his support and his money behind Lt. Gov. Don
Siegelman, James's opponent in the next gubernatorial election.
Siegelman defeated James. In 1999, he reappointed Lowder to another
12-year term and, some prominent Auburn alumni say, agreed to let
Lowder vet new appointees. Siegelman says he admired Lowder's service
to Auburn and denies that Lowder had input on other picks.

Lowder had no problem mixing Colonial business with Auburn business.
When the alumni association launched its first branded credit card in
the mid-1980s, Colonial was awarded the contract. Over the years
Lowder has installed a few of his fellow trustees on the Colonial
board, and others have had business relationships with his bank.
"People always talk about the millions he's given to Auburn," says
Paul Davis, a local newspaperman who's been writing columns critical
of Lowder for two decades. "I always say, What about the millions he's
made off of Auburn?"

And, critics say, Lowder used his sway to settle scores. For years,
Lowder's most vocal opponent on the board of trustees was a lawyer
named John Denson. Denson had a particular interest in Auburn's Ph.D.
program in economics, which had a free-market bent and attracted
graduate students from around the world. When the board conducted a
university-wide review of academic programs in 1999 the Ph.D. program
was eliminated despite its robust health.

During the same review, the journalism department, which Lowder had
publicly blamed for pushing the school newspaper to write negative
stories about him, was folded into the communications school.

"I've never met anybody like that before," says Denson, who is now a
judge in the Auburn area. "Lowder plans long range. He plots. It's not
a flare of temper. It's a calculated plan of control."

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