ACEVEDO POO-HOOS CIGARROA'S "AMERICA'S U."

By Baltazar Acevedo y Arispe, Jr., Ph.D
The Chancellor of the University of Texas recently proposed the next great bold initiative for South Texas higher education, the University of Texas de las Americas.
This “new and improved institution” will replace some elements of the dysfunctional UT-Brownsville and Texas Southmost College Partnership that was legislated into existence as the next great thing in 1991. The proposal will also alter the role and scope of the University of Texas-Pan American. This column will address some critical issues that the legislative delegations and the taxpayers from South Texas need to consider before this new institution becomes another drain on our state’s limited fiscal and human resources.
As one who conducts research to explain the phenomena that is evident in higher education, I see two critical missing pieces in the proposed puzzle. These pieces include “data” and “accountability.” Nowhere is there even a mention of how the board of regents, the legislature and we taxpayers will hold the UT System accountable for this initiative’s outcomes. How will we know that the UT System will do it right this time? It is evident, to me, that there was not much oversight of the administration of UT-Brownsville by the system in Austin during the past 20 years. Should we trust this system again and why? Even more important to me is whether the right team of horses is ready and capable of undertaking this arduous journey.
It is curious that there is no mention of putting together a new executive team for the “new” UT-Brownsville campus. The old guard, that has a demonstrated history of nonperformance, will apparently be retained. It is clear that the deck chairs are being transferred to another ship just as the next great thing of 1991 sinks into the Gulf of Mexico.
We, the citizens and stakeholders of Texas higher education, need to know why the present executive and management team is being handed the helm to a new ship. As taxpayers we should demand to see the data that drives this initiative that will cost us millions of tax dollars at a time that resources are scarce and the needs in our state are great.
The South Texas legislative delegations to Washington and Austin are literally tripping over themselves to sponsor a bill to create another layer of bureaucracy to impede the sustainable development of South Texans. These are the same leaders who were not concerned about the debacle at UT-Brownsville and Texas Southmost College. I propose that what we now need are leaders with courage as described by Gus Lee who observes that, “courage is the backbone of leadership.” Lee holds that, “leaders of courage demand excellent conduct of others because they first require it of themselves. Their courage inspires prodigious results.”
I fail to see such courage in the elected lawmakers from South Texas as they fail to demand facts to either confirm or reject this proposed university. They must also demand that accountability be a key component of any such proposal. I challenge these lawmakers to ask these tough data based questions and respond to these observations:

• Have these lawmakers read in detail the full proposal by the UT Chancellor and did the data that they reviewed convince them of the merits of such a proposal?
• Why does South Texas need a research university and how will it expand this community’s quality of life?
• How did this proposal suddenly rise to the top of the heap? South Texas needs more funding for public schools and the expansion of economic and workforce training for an unemployed, unemployable and underemployed population.
• Finally, these lawmakers and the balance of the Texas legislature must ask the UT System: Did we not try this act once before when we created UT Brownsville in 1991 and if so, what happened?
• A final question here is: Did the taxpayers of our state receive an outstanding return on their investment from the UT-Brownsville and Texas Southmost College Partnership? As a resident taxpayer in Brownsville, I fail to see such.
Why should we trust these lawmakers when they failed to demand accountability when the previous attempt to implement a sustainable university at Brownsville failed?
This state legislative cadre consists of Senators Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville, and Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen, and Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, and eight Texas House members from South Texas - René Oliveira, D-Brownsville, Ryan Guillen, D-Rio Grande City, Armando “Mando” Martinez, D-Weslaco, Eddie Lucio III, D-San Benito, Sergio Muñoz, D-Mission, R.D. “Bobby” Guerra, D-McAllen, Terry Canales, D-Edinburg, and Oscar Longoria, D-La Joya.
I am reminded of an observation by Noam Chomsky who states that, “the general population doesn’t know what’s happening. And it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.”
It is unfortunate that the both the South Texas legislative delegations fall within the parameters of this observation. This absence of knowledge is evident in the statement from the Texas State Senator from Cameron County who said that, “the enrollment for the new university is projected to be 27,659, with over 5,000 faculty and staff positions as well.”
As a researcher, I will question these projections. What is the source for these exaggerated claims?
In 2002 the mantra emanating from UT Brownsville was “20,000 students by 2010.” If I am not mistaken, there are barely 7,800 students at the Brownsville campus as of the fall semester of this year.
Of course, we have all come to know that elected officials and some leaders are always correct since they are anointed with an ever-expanding knowledge of data or they simply make it up as they approach the podium. It is also disheartening when academic leaders use a large brush to paint over the serious nature of the issues before the policy makers of this region.
The president of UT-Brownsville recently presented herself and her peer at UT Pan American as “foot soldiers” at the beck and call of the UT System Chancellor. I believe that the true “foot soldiers” are the 248 employees of UT Brownsville that will be receiving pink slips with her affixed signature within the next few weeks.
I question whether these presidents are the change agents needed to produce prodigious results. Instead they serve as amplifiers for the UT System. The Chancellor must provide proof positive for why these presidents should even been considered as part and parcel of the leadership cadre for the proposed university. Bill Gates claims that Microsoft became a successful enterprise because it always identified the best and most competent people in the company and gave them the toughest assignments. I do not see that happening here.
These are the leaders that cannot make heads or tails of why it takes over 80 percent of their students from six to eight years to graduate with a bachelor’s degree.
What I do see, in press releases and photographs, is much giddiness related to the Chancellor’s proposal. The recent pubic displays at UT-Brownsville and UT-Pan American reminded me of the high school sock hops at Muleshoe high school in 1962. I also see a confederacy of lemmings that is poised to take a collective leap into an abyss and take our tax dollars with them.
My fellow Texans, what we have here is a demonstration of a system void of any accountability led by a political and academic leadership that is charged with the development of our sustainable future. I contend that we need presidents at these institutions that see themselves as representing the interests of South Texas.
They should demonstrate the courage to let the UT System know that it is they who have their feet planted in the soil of this region.
They need to stand up and let the Chancellor and the Board of Regents know that it is they who are in touch with the heartbeat of South Texas better than someone who has an office at 601 Colorado Street, Austin, Texas, nearly three hundred miles away from the daily reality of what it means to be la gente del Valle del Rio Grande.
I contend that South Texas does not need a new university.
Our political leadership must have the courage to be thorough in its assessment of this proposal. There is no record that the taxpayers of this region have ever been engaged, consulted or invited to provide any meaningful input to the Chancellor to guide the creation this institution. What is evident is more of the top-down policy management orientation from the UT System that is out of touch with the reality of an emerging Texas as it is fails to prepare our most precious resource, our youth, to be engaged in a competitive world economy.
The mission of this over extended university system should not be on research but rather on becoming an institution that moves fast and is always in a responsive than in a reactive mode. What we have here is a proposal for a slow boat that cannot compete with the supersonic universities in Argentina, Chile, Norway, Sweden, Mexico City and Monterrey Tech.
Has the UT System presented data from any feasibility studies to ground a case statement for why there is a need to build another version of UT at Brownsville?
If such an institution comes to be then it would be superimposed over a landscape that is littered with the failed outcomes of the old institution that was created by legislation in 1991.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency prohibits the construction of new sites on “brown fields” or contaminated soil. Brownsville needs to be declared a brown field since it is still toxic and contaminated from the failed UT Brownsville and Texas Southmost College Partnership. This brown field must be thoroughly cleansed before we can even consider allocating our tax dollars to ill prepared leaders to practice educational administration.
What is evident to me is the hubris of the UT System and its Board of Regents whose collective actions are rather patronizing and condescending to South Texans. It is disingenuous by the board of regents to claim that because one of its members, the Chancellor and a member of his executive team are from South Texas that they know us.
I would challenge any of these individuals to tell us the last time that they walked among the common folks of this region, visited an elementary school along Military Highway or engaged residents of a colonia in a meaningful and rigorous dialogue on issues that affect their lives. I am from Muleshoe in the South Plains of the Texas Panhandle.
I have not lived there since 1964 and I would never purport to have an understanding of the challenges and opportunities that are present in that region of Texas where my extended family and I subsisted as agricultural laborers and vaqueros.
The Chancellor makes an unfounded claim that; “the new university will provide great prestige for the UT System because it will be a Hispanic-serving institution. As a result of it being a Hispanic-serving institution, the UT System will be able to leverage more federal funds.”
Is he not aware that all institutions of higher education in South Texas have been designated Hispanic Serving Institutions for the past 20 years? What this proposal will surely accomplish is to keep our Tejano youth incubated at South Texas universities that are seeking an altered mission, purpose and identity.
Our students should be preparing to gain entry to the Tier I universities north of Kingsville.
Why is there even a focus on prestige? What we need is an educated citizenry since prestige is not accepted as currency at the local HEB grocery store; wages earned from a good career do pay for the groceries.
Kenichi Ohmae in his book, the Borderless World, infers that the cash register cares only if you have the money to pay the bill.
I propose that what this region needs is a superior regional community college district and technology training centers throughout the Rio Grande Valley.
We need replications of what Dr. Shirley Reed and Dr. Cesar Maldonado are doing quite well at South Texas College and Texas State Technical College.
What Brownsville needs is a regenerated and rejuvenated Texas Southmost College to rise again after it was almost decimated by the UT System and its former governing board of trustees. We need and should demand the equivalent of the systems that made the Dallas County Community College District, the Tarrant County Community College District and the Austin Community College District among the best in the nation.
I also believe that South Texas needs a strategic plan to build and sustain superior independent school districts to produce graduates that can be either employed or ready to be admitted to universities that will prepare them for the future. We need to infuse the vision and leadership DNA of Dr. Danny King, the outstanding superintendent of the Pharr, San Juan and Alamo School District throughout the other 36 school districts in Region 1.
Legislators that represent South Texas should demand increased funding for the 37 school districts in Region 1 that are among the fastest growing in term of student population in this state. At present, some of these school districts are living hand to mouth with barely sufficient financial resources to meet the ever-expanding educational needs of their predominately Mexican-American students.
David Bornstein and Susan Davis in their book, "Social Entrepreneurship," observe that the inordinate demographic shifts, as those evident in South Texas and “the accelerated pace of change, the spread of technology, the urgency of financial, health, and environmental crisis, and the interdependence of that has collapsed boundaries, our response time must quicken; we must anticipate problems and attack them at their source before they grow and multiply. And we must continually invent new solutions as conditions change.”
 Essentially, they are proposing that we need institutions with agent changes as their leaders.
The proposed university does not provide a change agent model but rather one that retains cumbersome relics and an inner management circle from the old UT Brownsville. I question whether these are the leaders who can extend a vision from South Texas to the Americas leading to the southernmost tip of Argentina known as Tierra de Fuego. These individuals need to be jettisoned as one does bad cargo that holds back a ship’s progress.
I recall reading a column in the New York Times about a Wall Street marketing strategist who claimed that if you cannot impress consumers with quality then wow them with a “new and improved campaign to sell them the same old product.”
They will eat it up and ask for seconds every time. The same cynicism is evident in this proposal by the UT System.
I would ask my fellow Texans to heed the advice of Anthony Bourdain who warned the readers of his book,  "Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly," to never consume the Sunday gourmet buffet. He knows, from personal experience, that this buffet is a composite of all the leftovers from the previous week that have been warmed, rehashed, and heavily spiced to resemble attractive dishes with fancy names. I posit that what is being proposed is a buffet to be known as the University of Texas de las Americas.

(Baltazar Acevedo y Arispe, Jr., Ph.D., is a distinguished graduate of the College of Education’s Doctoral Program at UT Austin and a retired tenured professor of leadership and research from a South Texas campus of the UT System.)