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.