Seton Healthcare Family

UT launches construction of Dell Medical School

April 22, 2014 By Bill Powers

With Bill Powers from left are Sen. Kirk Watson, Jesus Garza of Seton Healthcare Family; Brenda Coleman-Beattie of Central Health, and Dean Clay Johnston

Yesterday, campus and community leaders gathered at the corner of 15th and Red River Streets to celebrate the next phase in the creation of UT Austin’s Dell Medical School, starting construction on three buildings that will form the heart of the school: an academic building, a research building, a medical office building. These will be joined by a teaching hospital to be built by Seton Healthcare Family in the fall.

Leaders who spoke at the event included Sen. Kirk Watson of Austin, who has been instrumental in moving the school forward; Brenda Coleman-Beattie, chair of Central Health, the health care district for Travis County; Jesus Garza, the CEO of the Seton Healthcare Family; and Clay Johnston, the founding dean of the Dell Medical School.

It was an exciting day made even better by the presence of high school students and undergraduates studying premed subjects, medical residents, local doctors, and representatives from throughout the community.

Community members write their hopes for the Dell Medical School on signing boards at the groundbreaking

In the coming months, we’ll see these buildings begin to take shape. It will be a thrilling reminder of what is now on the horizon for UT Austin. Before we know it, we’ll be cutting a ribbon.

What starts here changes the world.

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.

UT Austin medical school on the way

November 7, 2012 By Bill Powers

UT Medical School Proposition 1 press conference 2012

With deans and Provost Steve Leslie at a press conference this morning to answer questions about UT's future medical school

November 6, 2012, will be remembered as a momentous day in the history of The University of Texas. It was the day that a UT Austin medical school became a reality.

Yesterday, the voters of Travis County agreed, through passage of Proposition 1, to add the final crucial piece of the funding puzzle to this complex project. It would not have happened without the energy and leadership of Sen. Kirk Watson, and I want to thank him again for sharing our passion for this issue and leading the charge so ably. Additionally, I would like to thank our Board of Regents and the Seton Healthcare Family for supplying the school’s other major building blocks. Healthy ATX and its members as well as UT students themselves were crucial to the initiative’s success. I am sure that numerous other partners will join the project in time.

A medical school will forever change the scale and scope of UT Austin education and research, and it will bring much needed specialties and community health care to Central Texas. In the coming months, we will form a steering committee of academic and medical leaders, begin the search for the school’s inaugural dean, finalize the financial strategy, and move swiftly ahead on numerous logistical fronts such as where to construct the school’s teaching hospital and academic buildings. Our goal is to open the school to its first 50 students in the fall of 2015.

I’m grateful to the citizens of Travis County for their vote of confidence in UT Austin’s ability to leverage our state’s flagship university for the betterment of the whole community. I’m equally excited about what this will mean for our faculty and students in the years and decades ahead.

What starts here changes the world.

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.

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