UT System Cancels Houston Expansion

Lulz

UT tried to build their "Intellectual Hub" in Rice's background.

You guys are dumber than I thought.

 

It's off Willowbend?

 

McRaven needs to go for attempting to pull off something this dumb. New campuses are highly political and even attempting to create one requires buy in from members of the legislature and local leaders. You can't just randomly buy land and assume you can brute force anything. This isn't even a partisan thing. Republicans and Democrats from Houston almost uniformly opposed this.

 

I thought they got a good deal in the land though if I remember the articles at the time. Maybe no?

 

Nope. That was the spin UT put on it but the land brokers said they paid at or above market value.

Honestly just another example of UT hubris.

McRaven isn't qualified for the position he has at UT.

 

Lulz at y'all being all high and mighty about UT getting **** blocked. Nobody cares. We don't care, UT doesn't care, nobody cares.

 

What is bad about having a another school. It gives students another option. Rice university in its original charter was to only educate white students. Even now Rice is a small school. I don't really see a downside to having more non profit schools.

 

Because it undermines the UH system. UH would shrink as a result of this and this would completely destroy everything UH has been trying to do as far as growing its profile and improving the quality of its offerings and student population.

Plus UH and UT draw from the same state resources, a new school (an a political environment where Texas politicians don't want to fund anything) would result in politicians being forced to pick sides and UH would most likely lose that battle.

I'm actually a UT alum but this was unbelievably stupid. McRaven just threw away millions that should have never been spent on land that will now be unused. If you care about UT, how the heck can you be ok with this? This is bad management, pure and simple.

And you should want all Texas universities to succeed. This move was designed specifically to undermine an existing public institution. Everyone knew that this was a shot at UH.

 

I don't really care one way or the other that much, and surely there are sunk costs into this project, but the majority of the investment is in land which still holds its value. It doesn't seem like it will be a big financial hit.

 

This was the result of UH not getting in the Big 12...

http://www.hookem.com/story/texas-lawmakers-line-support-houstons-bid-join-big-12/

 

It was still a stupid purchase that showed terrible judgment even if its not a big hit. You don't make decisions around new campuses without getting the legislature on board. This has always been the case. When UT wanted to get a medical school built in the Rio Grande valley, they spent years lobbying legislators to get their approval before making financial decisions around that. They didn't just randomly buy property and land and pray that the legislature would be on board.

UT has had years of experience with this process (in recent years with the new medical schools in Austin and the Rio Grande Valley). The fact that McRaven just rushed into this showed terrible judgment and as chancellor, he should be held responsible.

 

Could be the start of a great new show called Flip the Flop. They can put it on the Longhorn Network.

 

No doubt. And I concur that the process was backwards.

I'm just pointing out it's not completely wasted millions of dollars. Also, schools do of course do investing... this obviously doesn't fall into that category as it wasn't the purpose of the investment... BUT, I can only assume that part of the purchase decision certainly included investment analysis and downside protection, etc. Meaning part of the reason the process went faster and not in the order it should have might have been because they had a comfortable fall back option - sell the land, probably at a profit.

 

Why is UH going to shrink? Their are plenty of students. Competition is not bad. If UH does good then why will it shrink?