UT on the Cover of New Texas Monthly [Unveiled]

By Tim Taliaferro in Promote & Protect on September 17, 2012 at 10:26 am | 19 Comments

For those of us who follow University of Texas news closely, we’ve known since the beginning of the summer that Texas Monthly has been working on an article about UT, and that none other than Paul Burka was going to write it.

Burka is a UT law grad and a lecturer in UT’s Plan II Honors Program. He can also rightly be called one of the deans (so to speak) of Texas political journalism. You might be wondering, then, why is a politico writing about higher education?

Because for the last two years, higher education—and especially The University of Texas at Austin—has been the subject of some fierce political battles. Those battles still rage, as Texas Monthly’s October cover quite clearly illustrates, and they are battles that all Texas Exes everywhere should know about.

For close UT watchers and supporters, there isn’t much new in this article. But it is without question the most comprehensive telling of what has transpired in recent years, which is why the Texas Exes and The Alcalde are delighted to bring you this exclusive excerpt—and to encourage you to read the full thing.

If you haven’t been following this debate, this is a good opportunity to get caught up. If you didn’t even know there was a debate, even better. Read this, and you’ll get the gist of it.

We encourage Texas Exes everywhere to inform themselves and, if willing, to get involved. The battle is indeed for soul of The University of Texas.

Tuition is skyrocketing. Enrollments are exploding. And the street value of a college degree is up for debate. Don’t look now, but a pitched battle is under way over the future of higher education in Texas. Ground zero is UT and Texas A&M, where a powerful group of reformers backed by Rick Perry is trying to rethink the way universities work—over the screams and howls of the faculty and staff. Will they destroy the university in order to save it? Or will they actually save it?

Last August, on the first day of classes for the fall 2011 semester at the University of Texas at Austin, I stood on a pebbled apron of the UT Tower in a patch of shade and took in a timeless scene. A parade of youth passed before me, their backs bent to accommodate the weight of their packs. Guys in baseball caps and baggy shorts sailed a Frisbee across a parched lawn beneath a flagpole. Girls with ponytails and jogging shorts screamed with delight when they spotted a familiar face.

The setting was at once uplifting and reassuring. In any year, on any campus, the first day of class is a moment, like the first day of spring training, when all things are still possible, when everything seems poised to turn out exactly as we want it. The entire world is nothing but promise. Looking out at the students’ faces, I recalled the days four decades ago when I was the one walking across this very campus as a law student. I remembered something Paul Woodruff, the dean of undergraduate studies, had once told me: “UT,” he said, “is the largest concentration of smart young people in the world.”

Behind me loomed the Main Building and the Tower, the symbol of the pride and power and prestige of the university (notwithstanding the damning description by the late folklorist and UT professor J. Frank Dobie, who once said its top resembled a “Greek outhouse”). Occasionally students would glance up at the arcade that shades the entrance to the Tower, above which an inscription from John 8:32 reads, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” It is a noble sentiment that is at the core of any liberal arts education, yet from where I stood, it was freighted with irony: though they gazed upon this line of scripture, few of the students crossing before me knew the truth about what was happening inside the citadel on which the words are carved. Few were aware that a high-stakes battle over the future of the university—and perhaps the future of higher education in Texas—was raging inside, pitting President William Powers Jr. and much of his faculty against reform-minded members of the UT System Board of Regents, who had been appointed by, and were loyal to, Governor Rick Perry. Few realized that over the course of the academic year that lay ahead, this battle would upset the seemingly placid grounds of the Forty Acres.

Ah, the happy ignorance of youth. What most of the students walking past me that day were blissfully unaware of is that higher education in Texas is at a crossroads. Among the sweeping reforms that were being advocated for UT were tying professors’ salaries to student evaluations, increasing the workload of professors, quantifying the amount of work that professors do and the value they add to the university, and generally bringing the efficiency of a major corporation to the academic sphere. Reforms, in other words, that would radically transform how our big public universities operate.

The students could be forgiven for not having a clue about any of this. UT appears to be an icon of stability and prominence—the embodiment of the establishment itself. Along with Texas A&M University, the state’s other flagship university, it seems to grow richer, more successful, and more powerful every year. The two schools have arguably the strongest brands in the state, with a passionate network of alumni who feel intimately connected decades after they graduate. Both are proud members of the Association of American Universities, the most exclusive club in academia, whose membership is restricted to 61 leading research institutions. In the most recent edition of U.S. News & World Report’s list of the top American universities, A&M was ranked 58th, UT was 45th. When you factor out the elite private universities, UT ranked around number 15, the same spot as the Longhorn football team in the 2012 preseason poll. All, it would seem, is well.

Yet seen from a different angle, the world in which these two institutions exist is in distress, beset by skyrocketing tuition costs, tight budgets, and an existential crisis about the value of a college degree. Though a diploma is still seen as the surest ticket to the American dream, the price of admission has exploded over the past decade. Now too many families find themselves uncertain about how to pay for tuition—or can’t afford it in the first place. And for those students who do enroll, many end up with a huge debt after they graduate and limited options for finding a job. Enter the reformers, who contend that this situation is unacceptable and that universities must reinvent themselves if they are to survive, that they must adapt to the changing world around them.

The view from inside the ivory tower is that universities are like the monasteries of medieval Europe, where monks labored to save civilization during the Dark Ages by copying and preserving the texts of antiquity. UT’s motto, “Disciplina praesidium civitatis” (roughly translated as “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy”), is an echo from that era. The college’s administrators and faculty take that belief seriously—UT always takes itself seriously—just as they take seriously the state constitution’s injunction that UT shall be a “university of the first class.” This is, after all, a state where education has not always occupied a revered place in the state’s pantheon of values, and within UT there exists the sentiment that without the university, intellectual life in Texas would leave much to be desired. Deans and department heads consider it their duty to recruit the best and brightest minds, students and faculty, and to send professors forth to pass along their wisdom to students, thereby assuring the survival of civilization and progress. The most elite faculty members conduct research that is designed to improve the human condition. The American university system, its admirers say, is the envy of the world.

The view from outside the ivory tower is quite different. Critics of higher education say that those who inhabit these contemporary temples are living off the fat of the land; that they answer to no one except one another; that, like the monks of old, they cultivate their vineyards, sniff heady wines, and raise lush crops on fecund soil while doing . . . what, exactly? Publishing papers few people will read? Conducting research of questionable value? Lecturing a couple days a week for nine months out of the year? The critics argue, with some justification, that the university is not responsive to its “customers”—the students, who have come in pursuit of a certain piece of parchment, and their parents, who often underwrite the cost. In their view, for the university to continue on its current course would bring great peril, and the only way to ensure the future success of UT, A&M, and other major public institutions of higher education across the country is to pursue an aggressive reform agenda that stresses accountability, efficiency, and productivity.

In Texas over the past four years, these critics have made a series of attempts, some more overt than others, to enact that agenda. The reforms were first rolled out at Texas A&M, during the 2010–2011 academic year, causing a major uprising among the faculty and endangering the school’s hard-won academic reputation. At the end of that year, the chancellor for the Texas A&M University System resigned, and many speculated that it was because he was unwilling to move fast enough on the reform agenda.

The next year, the reformers turned their attention to UT. Just as had happened in College Station, members of the administration and the faculty in Austin resisted the proposals, and a battle ensued that continues to this day. As the semesters unfolded, and as the students whom I’d watched on the first day of school wrote their papers and took their exams, the struggle spilled out into the public eye again and again, in boisterous faculty meetings, online campaigns, long-range plans from Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa, statements by the board of regents, resistance by Powers, and countless stories in the local and national press. Today, as I write this, another school year has begun. But the resolution of the struggle remains very much up in the air. The sides have been chosen. The stakes are clear. Yet the victor is far from certain.

Read the full article at TexasMonthly.com. Or look for the magazine on newsstands on Thursday.

Tags: battle over UT, battle over UT-Austin, bill powers, higher ed reform, jeff sandefer, Paul Burka