Please excuse three straight posts bashing various Chronicle articles, but this Chronicle/Allan Turner reads like a press release from Rice University regarding the institution’s hiring of former Tulane University history professor, Douglas Brinkley:

The man who once took a busload of college students on a madcap tour of the nation’s historic and natural wonders, including the Grand Canyon and author Ken Kesey’s farm, may be just what Rice University’s austere public policy think tank needs to make itself a household name.
That, at least, was the hope on Thursday as university officials explored the possible benefits of their latest faculty hire ó New Orleans superstar historian Douglas Brinkley ó might bring to Rice and its Baker Institute of Public Policy.
A protege of best-selling historian Stephen Ambrose and a regular commentator for CBS News, Brinkley is renowned for his ability to make complex ideas understandable. He is a prolific author, and his 700-plus page tome chronicling Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast will receive the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Book Award later this month.
Brinkley, said Baker founding director Edward Djerejian, could be “a bridge between the world of ideas and action,” helping the institute spread its policy recommendations to the general public.
“He’s going to bring us a huge amount of visibility,” added Rice humanities dean Gary Wihl.

“Superstar historian”? That characterization of Brinkley is certainly not shared by all in the academic community, as noted in this earlier post regarding this William McCrary review of Brinkley’s Hurricane Katrina book:

Let me confess that I haven’t read all of the writings of Douglas Brinkley. I doubt that anyone — perhaps not even Mr. Brinkley himself — has ever done that. He is a veritable … deluge of literary productivity, with books to his credit on a dizzying array of subjects, ranging from Beat poetry to Jimmy Carter, and from Henry Ford to, most recently, the failed Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Indeed, the range of his literary productions is so wide as to seem indiscriminate. But his bestknown writings seem to have three things in common.
First and foremost is their relentless mediocrity. I cannot think of a historian or public intellectual who has managed to make himself so prominent in American public life without having put forward a single memorable idea, a single original analysis, or a single lapidary phrase — let alone without publishing a book that has had any discernable impact. Mr. Brinkley is, to use Daniel Boorstin’s famous words, a historian famous for being well-known.

For what it’s worth, I have read both Brinkley’s book on Hurricane Katrina and Jed Horne’s Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great Ameican City (Random House 2006). Horne’s book is a good read and far superior to Brinkley’s book, which is borderline unreadable.
Moreover, this skeptical view of Brinkley’s academic talent is not new. Back in 1999, Slate’s David Platz penned this well-know article about Brinkley taking advantage of his friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr. to publicize himself after Kennedy’s death in a plane crash:

According to the Washington Post, Brinkley cut a $10,000 deal with NBC for a week of exclusive Kennedy commentary, but then agreed to provide it pro bono. Editors at George [Kennedy’s magazine] are reportedly so annoyed about Brinkley’s death punditry that they have dropped him from the masthead.
Even amid this week’s staggering hyperbole, Brinkley’s emotional profligacy has distinguished him. He is, as he rarely fails to remind his audience, 38 years old like Kennedy, a vegetarian like Kennedy, and a Sagittarius like Kennedy. That identification with Kennedy accounts in part for Brinkley’s tenuous proposition: that Kennedy’s death is the signal event of his generation, the moment Gen X lost its innocence. In the opening paragraph of his New York Times op-ed, Brinkley opined: “It’s as if suddenly, an entire generation’s optimism is deflated, and all that is left is the limp reality of growing old.” Kennedy’s death may have affected his friend Brinkley this way. I am not sure anyone else outside Kennedy’s circle was so moved.[ . . .]
Brinkley’s sunniness and ardor are appealing, but his public history has its shortcomings. His idols, Ambrose and Schlesinger, have won the admiration of the academy and the public. Brinkley has won the public but has not wowed the academy. Some of his colleagues’ dismay is simply jealousy of his entrepreneurship, but some is more substantive. His books read like good journalism–and that’s no insult–but they are not great history. “He has made no analytical contribution at all,” says one Ivy League historian who professes to like Brinkley.

I am glad that the Chronicle considers Rice’s hiring of a history professor is newsworthy. However, for the Chron article not even to mention the well-known doubts about the academic merit of Brinkley’s work is the type of cheerleading usually reserved for the Chronicle sportspage.

Earlier this week, the discussion in Texas education circles was the University of Houston’s proposal to establish a third medical school in the Texas Medical School in conjunction with The Methodist Hospital and Cornell University. Today, the discussion turns toward one of chronic problems of the Texas system of public universities — what to do about Texas Southern University?
Turns out that former TSU president Priscilla Slade’s spending habits are the least of TSU’s problems. TSU cannot come close to paying its current and projected liabilities, which include the following:

Deferred maintenance on buildings — including daily pumping of water out of the school’s administration building — totaling $54 million over the next 10 years;
Missing purchase orders and outstanding payables from past years to vendors of $1.7 million owed without purchase orders and another $900,000 owed with purchase orders that were not budgeted;
Shuttle service and parking garages do not collect enough fees to support debt service on $34 million in construction projects. Who thought that they would?;
The athletics department has a $2 million operating deficit even though it is subsidized primarily with student fees;
The institution’s computer and information technology is obsolescent and needs to be overhauled at a short term cost of more than $500,000, which is also not budgeted; and
There is a $1.2 million debt service shortfall on two new dorms that are not even fully occupied.

Governor Perry’s office issued the usual strong words about TSU needing to fix its problems immediately. But, really. What the heck is the TSU board of regents to do in the short term? Hold bake sales to raise money?
Texas Southern’s financial problems are chronic and are not going away absent a re-evaluation of its place among Texas public universities in general and the Houston area’s need for multiple open admission institutions, in particular. Although it provided an important service to Texas in the days of segregation, TSU has been largely overtaken in providing the open admissions service to the Houston area by the University of Houston-Downtown, which does a better job of educating its students and, over the past decade or so, has grown into a larger institution than TSU. Of course, it helps that UH-D has access to the University of Houston system’s relatively modest endowment, a distinct advantage that TSU has never enjoyed.
So, what to do with TSU? Well, it’s clear that providing minimal emergency funding for its short-term financial problems — the usual response — is akin to throwing money on a dormant campfire. TSU needs to be merged into one of the major university systems — the UH system probably makes the most sense at this point — and then the legislature needs to provide realistic short-term and long-term funding while UH absorbs TSU, probably into a second UH-D campus. But however TSU is reorganized, one thing is clear — providing funding for its current financial problems without a long-term plan for reorganizing the institution and redefining its purpose would be a failure of leadership, something that Texans have endured for far too long in the funding and administration of their public universities.