Greatness Visible
The University of Texas has more going for it today than ever before: unregulated tuition, unfettered diversity, smart students, winning sports teams, first-class cultural facilities, academic programs with buzz, and finally, an administration with realistic goals. So why isn't it living up to its potential? Good question.
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Politicians are not going to pour money into such a system; that's why giving universities control over their own pricing is so important. Tuition deregulation is the new blueprint. It's in step with the climate of the times, which puts great faith in the operation of markets. Instead of trying to convince the Legislature of a university's value, let the market measure it. The better the university, the more it should be able to charge. Educational value will not be the only factor in setting the price, of course. Some students will choose Texas A&M because they want to be in the Corps; some will choose UT because they want to be in a sorority. But if the market works like it is supposed to, it will create the tier system that the political process would not.
Just because an idea makes sense, however, doesn't mean that it is going to win the approval of the Legislature. As long as the Democrats were in control, deregulation was going nowhere. Hispanic and black lawmakers feared that tuition increases would freeze their constituents out of the best colleges; despite UT's pledge of ample scholarships. Rural Republicans felt the same way. But when the Republicans took over, the combination of the large shortfall plus an ideology that was comfortable with letting markets do their work provided the opportunity that deregulation proponents like Governor Rick Perry and Speaker Tom Craddick were looking for. Most legislators opposed it, either because of the effect on their constituents or because they would lose their leverage over UT and A&M. But when budget talks between the House and the Senate deadlocked, Craddick insisted that deregulation be part of the final deal, and he made it stick.
UT isn't home free yet. A lot of resistance to deregulation remains, and what the Legislature gives, it can always take away, especially if UT hikes the tuition rate by a percentage that lawmakers deem too large. After another two or three legislative sessions, though, the new will become the norm, and UT will be able to chart its own course at last.
AND WHERE WILL THAT COURSE LEAD? Faulkner's answer is twofold: "Hire the best talent, and more of it, and lower the student-faculty ratio." He has put the university on a ten-year plan to expand the faculty by 300 members, which he says will lower the student-faculty ratio by 15 percent. (At Texas A&M, where the student-faculty ratio of 21 to 1 is the second-worst in the country among research universities, President Robert Gates has announced plans to hire 450 new faculty members.)
But Faulkner is also concerned that UT not get to be too elite: "The question is not how we can be like Berkeley. It's how we achieve the greatest combined benefit of leadership and scholarship for the people of Texas. We need to be more like Berkeley in some ways. We need a better faculty, one that raises respect for the university. But central to the mission of the University of Texas is the development of leadership. Are we going to be forced to be stratospherically selective in admissions? Berkeley is the greatest academic achievement in a public university ever, but the leadership of California does not come out of Berkeley to the same extent as here."
As the chancellor of a system that includes academic institutions and medical schools, Yudof has his own idea of where UT needs to go: science and more science. "The twenty-first century is the century of biology," he says. "Our major challenge is building up molecular and cellular biology. UT-Austin will have to collaborate with health care institutions to reach its research potential. Many want to establish a medical school here. Nanotechnology—there may be a thousand fields. We have to pick the right niches. A critical mass is very important in higher ed. We have to have more warm bodies for research. California has a thousand members of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering. Texas has two hundred, and a third of them are here. Some state leader needs to say, 'We need to recruit to Texas five hundred professors on the cutting edge of research.'"
But UT science (as opposed to engineering) has all too seldom been on that cutting edge in the past. "Our shortfall is not lack of money but lack of inspiration," says Austin Gleeson, the acting chairman of the department of physics. "Somehow, we always seem to be late here. We were late on nanotechnology. We're always jumping from the dock to the boat.
"Scientists have to make bets about where to put their money. Awhile back, biology bet on ecology. It turned out the winner was molecular. We couldn't even jump from the dock to the boat. Bets are very important. Good scientists are productive for ten to fifteen years, then stay around. When you bet bad, you bet bad for forty years."
THE DIFFERENT WISH LISTS OF FAULKNER and Yudof reveal the split personality of a major public research university. On the one hand, there's the university for undergraduates, a place where the ideal is to provide a user-friendly environment for the nourishing of minds. The way to achieve this—and higher rankings too—is through small classes, a low student-faculty ratio, and interaction among students and faculty. On the other hand, there's the university for the society as a whole, a center for cutting-edge scientific research that can attract companies, generate jobs, and transform a community or a state. Class size and student- faculty ratios are irrelevant to this university. Its job is to create knowledge, not to teach it. Most taxpayers and most parents really don't care what goes on in this university; they just want their kids to have a great experience in college, call home, and come away with useful skills. But the reward system in universities is not designed for those who dedicate themselves to teaching. (The winner of UT's major undergraduate teaching award last spring did not receive tenure and had to leave the university; controversy continues to swirl over the rejection.) The dollars and the prestige go to scholarship and research.
UT officialdom has instituted long-overdue changes to make the place more user-friendly, especially for freshmen. (A low first-year retention rate has hurt UT's rankings in the past.) In a previous incarnation as UT provost, Yudof instituted freshman seminars, so that any first-year student could have the experience of a small class that was taught by discussion rather than lecture. Another innovation is Freshman Interest Groups: First-year students with similar interests can take several classes together so they can get to know one another. (FIGs are voluntary and the groups are put together by the university.) UT has also expanded the number of honors programs, so that around seven hundred freshmen (10 percent of the class) have access to smaller classes. Tuition deregulation will certainly alter the culture of UT as well. As tuition rises, students and parents are going to be demanding value-added too—smaller classes and faster graduation rates.
Business is the most sought-after major on campus, and value-added has a lot to do with it: First, a student can acquire a skill that might actually lead to a job, and second, it's just an exciting place to be. "Professors will drop by at two in the morning to check with people who are working on a project," said senior Sean Paul, the president of the Undergraduate Business Council—an organization that advises the deans on issues affecting students. On the day I talked to him, Paul was ecstatic about U.S. News rankings that put the undergraduate business school in the top five programs in the country, up from seventh. "Our goal is to work with Wharton [Pennsylvania], Haas [Berkeley], Sloan [MIT], and NYU." He paused, and said in an emphatic way, "We know who our competition is."
Paul is pursuing a major in business while minoring in biology, and he intends to go to medical school. Why study business? "Because it has the most interesting work and the most enthusiastic students," he said. "We work on real projects that companies have worked on. In accounting, we reviewed a problem Nordstrom had. Their sales went up but their profits went down. We had to find what went wrong."
When he was at St. Joseph High School in Victoria, he was seriously considering attending NYU instead of UT. He didn't want to stay in Texas. He had no particular loyalties; his parents had moved from India to Chicago to Texas. He had the kind of résumé a business school would find irresistible: He started a business when he was fourteen, offering his services as a deejay at proms, parties, and senior citizens' centers, and earned more than $10,000 while in high school. He also won a state championship in tennis, ran cross-country, co-captained the basketball team, served as sophomore class president, and finished fourth in his graduating class. He waited until the last possible day before making up his mind to attend UT. Now he travels around the state recruiting for the business honors program.
"How's it going?" I asked.
"Oh, it's great," he said. "Everybody wants to be a Longhorn right now."
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