BlogHouston.net’s Kevin Whited notes this Chronicle/Todd Ackerman article about the University of Houston floating a proposed new Texas Medical Center-based medical school in a collaborative project with The Methodist Hospital and Cornell University’s Weill Medical School.
Unfortunately for UH, the proposal has zilch chance of floating for much more than a few minutes amidst the shark-infested waters of Texas educational politics. Heck, the political forces in Texas cannot even agree to provide adequate funding of UH’s uncriticizable goal of becoming the state’s third tier I research university. The University of Texas, Texas A&M University, and Baylor College of Medicine — Methodist’s former longtime partner — are just a few of the powerful political forces that would almost certainly line up against the UH-Methodist proposal.
Yet, the UH-Methodist proposal has merit, so here’s a proposed modification. Rather than start another medical school from scratch, let’s merge the University of Houston system with the Texas A&M system and have A&M expand its fledgling medical school into the Texas Medical Center from its current central Texas outpost. From a broader standpoint, the merger makes sense because it gives the A&M system something that it desperately needs — a major urban presence — while also giving UH something that it has always lacked — that is, access to adequate endowed capital. Such a merger would also provide A&M with the law school that it has always coveted and would greatly facilitate UH’s elevation into a tier I research institution, which is something that would substantially benefit the Houston area.
While the University of Texas would almost certainly oppose such a merger, perhaps a deal could be struck at the same time to merge the Texas Tech University system into the UT system while organizing the remainder of Texas’ non-affiliated public universities into a third university system for funding and administrative purposes. Such a structure would give Texas a similar structure to that of the reasonably successful California model, which has generated far more first rate, tier I research universities (10) than the current dysfunctional Texas system (2). Indeed, almost anything would be a huge improvement over the current Texas system, which allocates a disproportionate amount of endowed capital to the UT and A&M systems while starving the remainder of Texas’ public universities.
Make sense? You bet. Chances of happening? Probably not much. But just as UCLA and Cal-Berkeley co-exist productively in the same university system in California, UH and A&M could do the same in Texas. And just as two major university systems work side-by-side together to educate Californians, a similar structure would be a substantial improvement in the educational system of Texas.