| News Article |
After Prop. 4: Who gets
the money?
By Sito Negron
The
vote is over. Now comes the debate.
After voters
approved Proposition 4 last week, they ignited a statewide
debate about how seven Texas universities can access about $25
million a year to grow their research portfolio.
The
funds come from a $500-million endowment the proposition
created to help the schools reach “tier-one” status, a
designation that puts them in the running for more federal
research funds.
The University of Texas at El Paso is
one of those universities, and like the others, it’s trying to
figure out exactly what some of the state eligibility criteria
mean.
It’s also focusing on what it’s done well
recently – securing federal and other research grants – as it
prepares its case for tier-one status.
That case may
take years to develop, or at least to gain political and
bureaucratic support, as two of the seven universities in the
group of so-called “emerging” tier-one schools are thought to
have a leg up.
Those two are Texas Tech and the
University of Houston. They are closer than the others – UTEP,
UT San Antonio, North Texas, UT Arlington, and UT Dallas – to
meeting the state criteria.
In addition, three of the
schools are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with its huge
population base and heavy political support.
“I do
think Texas Tech and the University of Houston have a leg up
because of their large base of graduates and their standing in
the Legislature, and their fund-raising capabilities, and a
number of things the Legislature wants you to have to match
some of this stuff. But I think UTEP gets across the goal
line,” said Rick Francis, an El Paso banker and Texas Tech
regent. “I think (UTEP President) Diana Natalicio can get it
done. I have a great deal of belief in her.”
Step
one: $45 million
The first step is to have $45 million
in research-specific grants for at least two years, something
none of the emerging schools had as of six months ago,
Natalicio said.
UTEP is at about $30 million, she said,
and “I’m confident we’ll get there.”
The Legislature
will appropriate the money starting with the 2011 session, she
said. So as to when UTEP might meet the $45-million benchmark,
she said, “Obviously the sooner the better, because the sooner
you get to that threshold criteria, you’d be one of the
institutions eligible to participate in the funding that will
become available after 2011. None of the institutions is now
eligible, last time I looked; maybe Houston has moved there.
So we all have work to do.”
Once the grant threshold is
met, the six other criteria kick in. Of those, two are clear –
a required endowment value of $400 million, and awarding 200
doctoral degrees per year. Both Texas Tech and University of
Houston meet those criteria.
One measure that’s
semi-clear calls for a Phi Beta Kappa chapter on campus or
membership in the Association of Research Libraries, “or the
equivalent.”
But the remainder are rather fuzzy,
requiring schools to have “high-achieving” freshman classes,
“excellent” graduate programs and “high-quality”
faculty.
Natalicio said that the next procedural step
is for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to meet
either later this year or early in 2010 to refine the
criteria.
“I hope that we will have an opportunity to
have input on, what are the metrics to be used to measure
quality? There’s still quite a bit of work to do to get to the
point these criteria are more clearly articulated,” she said.
“This is kind of a broad outline and there’s still work to be
done.”
Border impact
During discussion on
bills that addressed the push for more tier-one schools in
Texas, state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh tried to change the criteria
to give UTEP a better chance.
One amendment would have
changed the requirement for 200 doctoral degrees to 100, and
allow a school to qualify if it had 20-percent growth in
Ph.D.s awarded over three fiscal years.
Another was
aimed at reducing Texas Tech’s clout and boosting El Paso’s
and San Antonio’s by adding a criterion favoring schools
located in population centers. Neither amendment
passed.
Shapleigh said the context for those
amendments, and for the push to tier-one status, is an
historic under funding of the border in general, and higher
education in particular.
Added to that is the state’s
refusal until recently to allow doctoral programs at border
universities. The state responded to historic education
inequities through various programs over the years, including
in 1989 launching the South Texas Border Initiative to fund
higher education.
Shapleigh noted the context and his
concerns with the criteria and the “coronation of the
University of Houston and Texas Tech University” in a May 18
letter to Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. In it, Shapleigh asked that
a second border initiative be developed “to reverse decades of
institutionalized and systemic discrimination against our
Borderlands universities.”
Shapleigh admitted that
wasn’t likely to happen. Meanwhile, he said, the community now
must rally behind UTEP the way it did with Texas Tech during
the push for the medical school.
“Now the question is,
what is our path to success? What criteria do we invest in, in
order to achieve a nationally recognized research university
at UTEP? That is a leadership question for 2010,” Shapleigh
said.
“Every great Southwestern city has a great
university at the heart of its education and economic
development endeavor. For El Paso to succeed, UTEP must
succeed, both as an undergraduate center of excellence and a
post-graduate national research university. That’s the simple
truth about El Paso’s future,” he added.
Community
support
Natalicio said Shapleigh’s historical take on
under funding of border universities was correct.
“I
agree that it’s going to require a greater investment by the
state if we hope to be competitive economically. And so I
think the evidence for this is the relatively smaller number
of doctoral programs at institutions on the border,” she said.
UTEP has been able to grow those programs “rather quickly,”
she said, going from one doctoral track in 1990 to 16 today,
with “a number in the pipeline.”
Still, this year UTEP
awarded just 59 doctoral degrees, a long way from the required
200. Compare that to Texas Tech, which has more than 50
doctoral programs, and awarded 221 Ph.D.s this
year.
“We’re marching forward and over time we’ll get
there, but compared to institutions in the Dallas-Fort Worth
area, which have much larger numbers of doctoral programs,
it’s difficult to produce the number of doctoral graduates
stated in the criteria if you don’t have the programs,”
Natalicio said.
What UTEP does have going for it is
Natalicio’s place on the National Science Foundation board,
and she’s a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. Both put
her in a position to attract research funding, which
Shapleigh, who has been critical of some aspects of
Natalicio’s tenure at UTEP, said has been a real
success.
Natalicio said that while she works through
the process at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board
to refine the criteria, the community has a role as
well.
“One thing the community can do, which is what
the community did in the case of the medical school, is to
articulate in very clear terms the importance of UTEP becoming
a tier-one university to the future of the region,” she said.
“People in the community can articulate that in ways UTEP
can’t, because they are presumably less biased or less
conflicted than we would be.”
She added, “They did a
very good job of making that case in the steps leading up to
the funding of the medical school,
and I think that’s what
needs to happen here as well. In addition we need financial
support, which validates essentially that support, that moral
support if you will, or economic development argument much in
the way that Paul Foster helped signify with his major gift to
the medical school.”
Natalicio said the UTEP endowment
is at about $150 million, well below the criterion of $400
million set forth by the state.
“Frankly, that’s a
criteria whose validity I believe does not make a whole lot of
sense,” she said.
Natalicio said that while $25 million
a year split among as many as seven universities doesn’t sound
like a lot of money, it can provide the edge to create
specialized programs and hire faculty.
Although
universities work with enormous budgets, as with cities, the
vast majority of money goes for fixed costs like salaries,
equipment and maintenance. Relatively smaller amounts can help
leverage grants and other funding sources to build specialty
programs that can lead to tier-one status.
“We just
raised $4.1 million and got $3 million in a state match.
That’s $7 million in the past couple of months we didn’t have
before to invest in graduate programs and research,” she said.
“That makes a big difference and will enable us to target the
funds and give us flexibility we didn’t otherwise
have.”
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