medical school

Looking Back on 2012 and Looking Forward

December 20, 2012 By Bill Powers

As 2012 draws to a close, I want to thank all the members of the UT family for your support during another challenging year. Kim and I appreciate the countless kind words and gestures from the Longhorn community.

There are many exceptional accomplishments for which we should all take great pride. In partnership with the citizens of Travis County, Seton Healthcare Family, Central Health, and other important allies, we have embarked on creating a medical school for UT Austin. Our Longhorn athletes performed magnificently at the London Olympic Games. Thanks to our amazing faculty, we entered the world’s Top 25 universities according to a leading observer of higher education.

Senior William Berdanier was recently awarded the Marshall Scholarship to study mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University. And just earlier this week the Longhorn volleyball team won the national championship. We’ve moved into the state-of-the-art Belo Center for New Media, and in the coming months, we’ll cut ribbons on the Liberal Arts Building and the Bill & Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex and Dell Computer Science Hall.

The national conversation on the future of public higher education will continue, but I want you to know that UT will be at the forefront. We have aggressively committed energy and resources to improving classroom learning and four-year graduation rates. In a few days, I will receive the report of the UT Committee on Business Productivity, a group of 13 business leaders who have made an extensive review of our operations, systems, and processes in the interest of making UT the most efficient university in the nation. Within the year, I’ll have the honor of serving as chair of the Association of American Universities, the prestigious alliance of 61 of the finest research universities in North America.

Starting next month, I’ll be working with the Texas Legislature to help shape public policy and support of higher education in our state. I will keep you posted on our priorities and issues that affect our campus. In all of this work, UT depends on your support. With your help, I’m confident that the coming year will hold even greater success for your university.

I’d like to share this article listing some of the biggest UT stories of 2012. Finally, Kim and I want to wish you and your family a safe and joyful holiday season.

Best 12 Stories of the Academic Year

May 31, 2012 By Bill Powers

As the 2011-2012 academic year comes to a close, it’s a good time to look back on a dozen good milestones and accomplishments from the year. All of these achievements, which we reached as a community, indicate our growing strength as a university of national and international importance. So here, in no particular order, is my list:

(Clicking on the numbered item will take you to a related article.)

1. Medical School Momentum
With support from Senator Kirk Watson, the UT System, the Seton Healthcare Family, and others, we now have real momentum toward a medical school at UT Austin.

2. Four-year Graduation Rate Initiative
Our Task Force on Undergraduate Graduation Rates submitted more than 60 recommendations for faster time-to-degree, and we’re already acting on them.

3. Study finds UT No. 2 in efficiency
Factoring together multiple indicators of efficiency such as graduation rates, state support, and faculty employed put UT Austin nearly at the top nationally.

4. New Deans and Vice President
Leadership is critical to the success of any institution, and this year we recruited four outstanding executives to the campus. Luis Zayas became dean of Social Work; Linda Hicke will lead Natural Sciences; Ward Farnsworth is our new dean of Law; and Gage Paine will become our new vice president for student affairs.

5. Course Transformation
Using new educational technology and new findings in cognitive science, introductory courses in chemistry, statistics, and biology have been energized by experimental formats that increase interaction between students and teachers and among students themselves. And class attendance is up.

6. Big 12 strengthens with new members
The Horned Frogs and Mountaineers joined the conference to replace departing Aggies and Tigers.

7. Stampede
UT’s Texas Advanced Computing Center won a National Science Foundation supercomputer grant worth a potential $50 million.

8. Alumni join students in The Project
Texas Exes chapters pitch in to take UT students’ community service project nationwide.

9. UT Business professors, Graduate Programs in Education and Accounting No. 1 in nation
The Princeton Review gave McCombs faculty top honors; U.S. News and World Report again ranked the graduate programs in our College of Education best among public universities in the nation and our graduate accounting program was ranked No. 1 for the seventh straight year.

10. UT hosts Fire Relief Benefit
Star-studded Erwin Center event raised $725,000 for Bastrop County fire victims.

11. Harry Ransom Center acquires J.M. Coetzee Archive
A Nobel-winning novelist trusts his alma mater with his papers.

12. Campaign for Texas reaches $1.93 billion
We expect to reach the $2 billion milestone this summer.

I’m so proud of this university and all it does every day to make the world a better place. Although no one knows what will be on this list a year from now, I know it will change the world.

Regents act on medical school funding and UT Austin tuition

May 3, 2012 By Bill Powers

As you may have now heard, today the UT Board of Regents took actions that will have profound effects on our university.

The Board voted to allocate $25 million recurring, with an additional $5 million for eight years, to fund a medical school in Austin. This allocation — along with a pending $250 million commitment from the Seton Healthcare Family for a new teaching hospital — moves us closer than ever to bringing a medical school to UT Austin. The founding of a medical school at UT would be an enormous event in the life of the University, would offer dramatic new opportunities for our students and our faculty, and would advance health care in Central Texas.

Nevertheless, I’m disappointed to report that the Board declined to adopt our tuition recommendation. Instead it voted to freeze undergraduate tuition at its current level for Texas residents at UT Austin for the next two years. It did allocate $6.6 million of non-recurring money from the Available University Fund (the endowment from the West Texas oil lands) for those same two years. It adopted our request for a 3.6 percent increase for graduate students but declined to adopt it for the second year. Tuition for out-of-state undergraduates will increase by 2.1 percent for two years rather than 3.6 percent as we requested. The tuition freeze was not applied to any other UT System school.

While many students naturally will welcome the news of a tuition freeze, we should understand the serious consequences for UT Austin and for the ability of Texans to benefit from strong public universities.

Our university is supported financially by four pillars: state funding, tuition, research grants, and philanthropy. State support in constant dollars per UT student has fallen for more than a quarter century. With a multi-year tuition freeze, the second pillar of our funding structure effectively will be cut each year by the rate of inflation. While we appreciate the AUF allocation, it will provide less than half of the increase we had planned for. Moreover, a one-time allocation, however much it might mitigate short-term problems, cannot substitute for stable, recurring, sustainable funding needed to support long-term efforts aimed at student success.

This action inevitably will affect our ability to teach our students and make new discoveries. Our tuition proposal, which was unanimously recommended by the students on UT’s Tuition Policy Advisory Committee, was dedicated to fund initiatives to enhance student success, improve four-year graduation rates, and increase scholarships.

As we prepare for next year’s budget, I will work with faculty, students, staff, and our administrative leadership to address how we use our resources to protect the quality of education here at UT.

The University of Texas has pursued excellence and has steadily grown stronger for 129 years. I am committed to protecting the quality of a UT education for Texans, for our children, and for our grandchildren.

Momentum building for UT Austin medical school

April 25, 2012 By Bill Powers

With Senator Kirk Watson (left) and Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell (right)

Many of you know that we are steadily building a coalition to support a medical school at UT Austin, and we have had several major developments lately.

Last weekend, the Seton Healthcare Family, the largest health care provider in Austin, committed $250 million to build a teaching hospital that would be a key component of a UT Austin medical school education. This commitment is subject to a couple of board votes by Seton and the national nonprofit health care system to which it belongs, but no problems getting final approval are expected at this time.

On Monday, I joined Senator Kirk Watson, who is leading the effort to bring a medical school to Austin with a 10-point plan, and other community leaders at the Lance Armstrong Foundation headquarters in Austin to help launch a new educational initiative — Healthy ATX.

Healthy ATX is an online forum for dialogue about advances in health care and medical education in Austin, and Central Texans are being asked to share their own health care stories on the site to increase awareness about the need to expand health care excellence and education Austin.

A world-class medical school in Austin would benefit our university and the community, and with these important commitments we are one step closer to realizing a momentous development in the University’s history.

What starts here changes the world.

UT and Austin Moving Forward Together

October 7, 2011 By Bill Powers

On Thursday morning, I participated in a panel discussion about the growth of Austin at a Leadership Austin breakfast. Joining me on the panel were Senator Kirk Watson and Jesus Garza of the Seton Family of Hospitals. Our wide-ranging conversation addressed major concerns around Austin’s growth.

As I explained during this panel, in my view, Austin is not faced with a huge number of things we must accomplish to move forward as a community; we have three or four major issues that will require hard work and political will.

Smart transportation planning is not only key to the quality of life in the region but affects all manner of other things, like housing prices. We’re nothing without the environment, so protecting it and planning for growth, especially with regard to our water quality and supply is crucial. We must invest in education, both statewide k-12 and higher ed. And not least, we need to see to the quality and availability of health care.

The enormous expertise of the UT Austin faculty will inform our community’s decisions in every one of these areas as UT and Austin move into the future together. And nowhere more than at the intersection of education and health care.

As I said in my State of the University Address last month, we are moving ever closer to developing a medical school at UT Austin. There are myriad details yet to be worked out, but we are poised to tackle this region-transforming project. Our strengths in natural sciences and engineering, nursing and pharmacy, social work, business, economics, and many other areas make us the natural home for Texas’ next great medical school and teaching hospital. It will take foresight and perseverance, but I believe we can and we will create a UT Austin medical school.

On a completely different note, this is a special weekend for Longhorns everywhere as we face down our archrivals OU at the Cotton Bowl. I’m on my way to Dallas with the team today and hope to visit with many of you there. Our Horns are looking great. So let’s be safe, have fun, and beat those Sooners!

Go Longhorns!

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