Daily Archives: December 11, 2005

The Chron continues to ignore the real UH story

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uh_logo.gifThe Houston Chronicle’s latest story about the University of Houston prompts me to wonder when the local newspaper is ever going to sit up and take notice of the far more important story that impacts Houston’s primary public university in particular and financing of Texas’ public universities in general.
The latest Chronicle story is a slapdash effort that discusses a UH initiative to increase its entry requirements told through the prism of a suburban student’s visit to the UH campus. As is typical of most Houston suburban high school students, UH is a third choice behind the University of Texas and Texas A&M University, and nothing in the visit to the UH campus related in the Chronicle article changed the student’s mind.
However, the Chronicle inexplicably continues to ignore the far more imporant story. Given the relative contributions of UT, A&M and UH to the welfare and economy of the State of Texas, does it really make sense for the University of Houston to have an endowment that is only 4% the size of the University of Texas endowment and only 10% the size of Texas A&M’s? As discussed in this prior post, that is one of the absurd legacies of the obsolescent Permanent University Fund on higher education in Texas, and it is not even mentioned in the Chronicle’s story on UH.
Frankly, rather than dismissing UH as an unattractive choice compared to UT and A&M, a more accurate analysis is that UH is providing far more “bang for the buck” in furnishing a quality educational resource for Houston and Texas at a fraction of the endowed capital of UT and A&M. That the system of funding Texas public universities unfairly deprives UH of the capital that would facilitate a jump to Tier I status is the real story that the Chronicle should be pursuing.

The UT brand

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UT brand.jpgInasmuch as big-time college football is to the National Football League as triple A minor league baseball is to Major League Baseball, a team’s branding rights can become an important asset. Along those lines, this interesting Austin American-Statesman article reports on the surge in royalty income that the University of Texas is enjoying from its athletic teams’ recent successes:

The Longhorns’ Rose Bowl victory over Michigan in January and the baseball team’s national title in June helped boost University of Texas merchandise royalties 29 percent to $4 million in the last fiscal year, . . . So far this year, [UT] has collected more royalties than any of the 200-plus schools affiliated with the Collegiate Licensing Co., which coordinates licensing for most major universities.
To license its trademarked logos, UT charges 8 percent of a product’s wholesale price. If a $20 Longhorns T-shirt has a wholesale price of $10, UT would get receive 80 cents. It might not sound like much, but consider that retail sales of collegiate merchandise topped $3 billion last year, according to Collegiate Licensing.
Add a football championship to that, and last year’s $4 million could end up looking like a paltry sum.

The article goes on to note that UT’s annual royalties from merchandise sales had fallen to a mere $600,000 as of the end of the John Mackovic era, which suggests that UT’s considerable investment in Mack Brown has been pretty darn savvy, after all.

Eugene McCarthy and Richard Pryor, R.I.P.

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Eugene McCarthy.jpgrichard-pryor.jpgFormer senator and Presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy and comedian Richard Pryor died yesterday. Here are McCarthy’s NY Times and WaPo obituaries, and here are Pryor’s NY Times and LA Times obituaries, along with this rather touching and sad post by Roger Simon. Moreover, Riehl World has this compilation of links to some very funny Pryor stand-up routines.
McCarthy’s first and only serious Presidential campaign came during the tumultuous year of 1968. McCarthy’s campaign was based primarily on opposition to the Vietnam War and it effectively ended the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who elected not to run for the Democratic Party nomination after McCarthy’s anti-war campaign showed unexpected strength early in the campaign. After fellow Democratic Party candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June (which occurred just two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King), the Democratic Party convention that year took place in Chicago amid riots and civil strife, and ended up nominating Senator Hubert Humphrey, who lost a close election to Richard Nixon. Although McCarthy went on to become somewhat of a Democratic Party gadfly over the ensuing decades, there is no question that his 1968 Presidential campaign sparked societal forces that changed the American political landscape dramatically — the Democratic Party held the White House for 36 of the first 68 years of the 20th century, but has held it for only 12 of the past 37. McCarthy was 89 at the time of his death.
Pryor was a talented stand-up comedian and comedic actor whose career was cut short by self-destructive behavior. He almost died in 1980 after he set himself on fire while free-basing cocaine, but he ended up using the incident as a joke in his routine — “You know something I noticed? When you run down the street on fire, people will move out of your way.” Pryor was 65 at the time of death and had been suffering from the effects of multiple sclerosis for many years.