UT Chancellor McRaven's priorities: Houston, diversity, brain health

Nov. 05--Update 9:50 a.m.

In a wide-ranging speech on Thursday laying down his strategic plan for the next five years, Chancellor Bill McRaven called on the University of Texas System to establish a campus in Houston and to become a nationally recognized leader on issues such as brain health and national security.

McRaven also called for the system and its campuses to quickly improve the diversity of top echelon administrators, and to work more closely than ever with K-12 educators on raising literacy levels.

The board gave McRaven approval Wednesday to negotiate the purchase of about 332 acres in Houston for what he described as an intellectual hub that would seek to play on Houston's strengths in medicine, energy and other fields. He said it remains to be determined whether it would become a full-fledged university or a branch of another campus.

"All options are open," he said when asked for details about the Houston campus. "It will have a footprint that hopefully will be very similar to a university."

The mostly undeveloped land, which McRaven said would take years to shape into a campus, is 3.5 miles south of the Texas Medical Center. The UT System already has two institutions in Houston, MD Anderson Cancer Center and the Health Science Center at Houston.

Details for that and the other initiatives will be fleshed out and eventually brought to the Board of Regents for review, McRaven said.

Earlier

Ten months into his chancellorship of the University of Texas System, Bill McRaven will sketch out his strategic plan for the system and its 14 campuses Thursday before the Board of Regents.

Although system officials declined to release even bare details of the plan in advance, they were nonetheless effusive in their praise of it.

"I have had the opportunity to get a preview of Chancellor McRaven's plan, and I can tell you that it is bold, compelling and uncompromising," board Chairman Paul Foster said in a statement. "This audacious strategy promises to make the UT System the nation's premier public system of higher education, to serve the people of Texas at unprecedented levels, to tackle some of our state's and nation's greatest challenges, and to train the world's finest doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists, public servants, entrepreneurs and leaders."

McRaven has a tough act to follow. During his time as chancellor, Francisco Cigarroa oversaw the creation of two medical schools, one in Austin and one in the Rio Grande Valley, as well as the creation of a new university in the Valley to replace UT-Brownsville and UT-Pan American.

Two well-placed sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the plan in advance, said McRaven would not propose any new universities. Increased collaboration across campuses would be one of the pillars of his plan, they said.

McRaven's announcement comes just days after the UT board chastised one of its members, and days before a court hearing at which McRaven's lawyers will defend his decision to withhold some records of an admissions investigation from that regent, Wallace L. Hall Jr.

Hall has sued McRaven in an effort to obtain records, including confidential student information, from the investigation, which found numerous examples of favoritism by Bill Powers, then president of UT-Austin. Powers said his orders to admit some students that the admissions office wanted to reject were always issued with the university's best interests in mind.

Foster said at a regents' meeting last Thursday that Hall's criticisms of the flagship campus and McRaven have been inaccurate and demoralizing. Regent Jeffery Hildebrand said at that meeting that it was important for the board to offer support for McRaven in advance of his broad vision for the system.

Hall said he would welcome more decorum and has tried to speak with McRaven but that his overtures have been ignored. The regent said McRaven's lawyers made false statements about him at a recent court hearing and have falsely accused him of leaking confidential student information to the press.

McRaven is a retired four-star admiral and Navy SEAL who famously coordinated the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed. His last posting was as commander of special operations forces in all branches of the U.S. military.

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