UT Politburo (predictably) begins laying foundation for next tuition increase....

"As a dog returns to his own vomit,
So a fool repeats his folly."
Proverbs 26:11

[Note: This story is actually a week old, but it remains worth noting because it's such a textbook example of how they operate.]

[Note II: You can see our testimony over why reigning in tuition hikes is step one to restoring financial accountability in higher education here.]

LOL, of course:

University of Texas System regents sketched out a strategy Friday to ensure that proposals to raise tuition and fees in the 2018-19 and 2019-20 academic years are warranted and to seek support from local officials, lawmakers and statewide elected leaders before adopting them. The effort to bolster the tuition-setting process with an eye toward enlisting political support comes after a legislative session that saw the Texas Senate vote 29-2 to freeze academic charges for two years at the state’s public universities and to sharply restrict future increases. But the measure, Senate Bill 19, didn’t emerge from a House committee.

“I think more than ever we need to do everything we can to educate them,” Regent Kevin Eltife, a former Republican state senator from Tyler, said of lawmakers. “They may not like it, but we need to be able to say when we go to session in ’19, ‘Look, we had to do this. Here’s the need, here’s why we did it, and we did our best to visit with all of you.’ And we need to target the reps and senators from the area of the institution and we need to target” the House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Finance Committee.

Regent Rad Weaver said it will be crucial to find local champions for any tuition increase. “There’ll be one or two within each local delegation, and we need to identify those early on and make sure that they’re informed,” he said.

Regent Janiece Longoria agreed. “They can be very helpful with state leadership in helping frame the message about why it’s so important, assuming that they need a tuition increase and assuming that it’s the right amount,” she said.

Regent Sara Martinez Tucker, who chairs the UT board’s Academic Affairs Committee, said campus leaders would be expected to play a key role in making the case to elected officials for any tuition increase. Her committee signed off on the strategy Friday, and the full Board of Regents is expected to go along with it at a meeting later this month.

....

Chancellor Bill McRaven noted that a political calculation is inevitably part of the decision.

“If you look at the facts that will be presented in terms of the needs for the institutions to generate additional revenue, we are clearly going to have to balance that with the political will, and I think we all understand that moving forward,” McRaven said.

A few points:

• You'll notice that all the regents pushing this (Eltife, Weaver, Longoria, and Tucker) are Abbott appointees; the 3 remaining Perry holdovers all seem to be keeping their heads down.

• This is EXACTLY what we told the Senate nominations committee (and several individual senators privately) would happen if the Senate confirmed the last round of regent nominees.

• All this at a time when, according to the Board of Regents' own numbers, institutions across the system are receiving record revenues AND UTIMCO is more valuable than ever.

Bottom Line: This was soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo predictable (which is why we predicted it)....

UT Bureaucracy tells Board of Regents System finances growing stronger

"But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves."
James 1:22

We spent a couple hours at the UT Board of Regents meeting this morning.  We heard on update on various commercialization efforts and the meeting of the Board's finance committee.  They painted a rosy picture.

The most promising commercialization efforts are apparently coming out of the MD Anderson Cancer center.  We didn't follow all the details, but were all for any progress that can be made in the fight against cancer.  While the presentation made sense on the merits, we found something about Regent Hildebrand's over the top cheer-leading for it unsettling.

During the finance committee meeting, we learned several interesting nuggets:

• Revenues up across the board (with a few small exceptions).

• The system owns mineral rights on 2 million acres of land in West Texas; we knew it was a lot, but we'd never heard the full number before.

• They're going to be issuing a new round of leases on 225,000 of those acres this September.

• The fracking revolution continues: Due to technological advances, money continuing to flow into system coffers despite low(ish) oil prices.

• UTIMCO up $2 BILLION since January: "The pot continues to grow."

• Fund exposed to inevitable market correction.

• Rad Weaver getting appointed to UTIMCO board.
• Note: Until proven otherwise, we stand by what we said about Rad Weaver after his confirmation hearing.

Which leads us to two additional conclusions:

1. No matter what the legislature does with state funding, the UT system is going to come out ahead of where they were a year ago.
2. There's NO justification for a tuition hike this fall.

Bottom Line: We will see....

Texas Senate flushes their higher ed credibility down the toilet....

"Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time,"
1 Peter 5:6

Well, isn't this a fitting way for the whole fiasco to end:

Former state Sen. Kevin Eltife, a Republican from Tyler; Rad Weaver, CEO of a company owned by UT-Austin megadonor Red McCombs, and Janiece Longoria, a former vice chair of the UT System board, were named to the board by Gov. Greg Abbott. They replace controversial Regent Wallace Hall and two other board members who were appointed by former Gov. Rick Perry.

The vote was 29-0, with Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, and Borris Miles, D-Houston voting "present" instead of "yes." Miles and West, who are both black, said they supported the nominees Abbott chose but were frustrated that there are no black members on the UT System board.

[Author's Note: Emphasis added.]

Read the whole thing here.

This was the only point of leverage the Senate had over U.T., but it turns out they'd rather talk a big game than back it up with action.

It just is what it is, but the silver lining is that every single senator now owns everything that will come out of U.T over the next two years.

Bottom Line: Remember this day the next time you hear the Texas Senate make a threat.

UT Regent confirmation hearing tests the Texas Senate's capacity for willful self-delusion....

"And this is the inscription that was written:
MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN."
Daniel 5:25

The good news is that they haven't voted yet.  The bad news is that the fix remains as in as it's been and that vote will be a formality when the committee meets next week.  Yesterday, we called this fiasco dirty politics worthy of House of Cards and nothing that occurred in today's confirmation hearing changes that.

Everything you need to know about this process can be summed up in the fact that Kirk Watson said that he was "very pleased" and "looking forward to swift confirmation."  That being said, Watson did ask each of the nominees to define how they see their role as individual regents.  Ironically, it was in response to a question from Kirk Watson that all three nominees admitted they see the the role of an individual regent to be a yes man for the chancellor.

We will confess to being pleasantly surprised by Kevin Eltife's testimony.  He spoke of the need to end "smoke and mirrors" budgeting while committing to ending the practice of building new buildings without sufficient funds raised for ongoing maintenance and operations.  That's a pretty meaningful cost driver and if a potential Regent Eltife can make progress in that area so much the better.

Janiece Longoria was a talking points repository.  She was the president-elect of Texas Exes prior to being nominated by Governor FoxNews Abbott and was previously on the Board of UTIMCO.  Honestly, that's all you need to know, although she also gave winking approval to the admissions scandal.

Rad Weaver is, straight up, not qualified for this position.  We're doing our best to be polite, but it's impossible to be truthful without saying that the word bimbo comes to mind.  His response to every single question from Senators was some variation of the phrase "I don't know."  Well, if you don't know the answer to basic questions about how the system is governed, you shouldn't be serving on the Board of Regents!  If these Senators had any self respect, they would have been offended at how many times they were told "I don't know."

Senator Birdwell sounded like a cuck asked a milquetoast question about whether the new Board will respect the chain of command as it relates to the relationship between the UT system and the legislature, which Birdwell deemed "unsatisfactory" currently.  All three nominees mouthed the platitudes you would expect them to mouth in response to such a question.  But actions speak louder than words and everything you need to know about how these new Regents will view the legislature can be summed up by the fact that Rad Weaver failed to do basic preparation for his confirmation hearing.

In response to various questions from Senators Kel Seliger and Borris Miles, Eltife and Longoria spoke unfavorably about the UT system's Houston land grab.  Meanwhile, Chancellor McRaven was chided for the Houston project in a separate hearing.  But that doesn't change the reality that, even if you take Eltife and Longoria at their word, McRaven has a 7-2 majority on the Board to push Houston forward and the legislature isn't going to do a damn thing to stop him.

To his credit, Senator Van Taylor told a fantastic Aggie joke.

The only Senator who demonstrated a basic grasp of reality during this hearing was Dawn Buckingham.  She asked pointed questions about admissions and tuition and disdainfully left it at "we will see" when she received buzzwords and truisms in return.  But Senator Buckingham did everything we asked her to do when we discussed this issue on the campaign trail.

We are working on technical issues related to the video of our personal testimony and will share it in a separate post; the indefatigable Jon Cassidy has more here, the Statesman has more here.