Best Faculty Money Can Buy?

No more lone stars at the University of Texas

For generations after its founding in 1881, the University of Texas at Austin seemed to have only one long-range game plan: its football program. As recently as 1975, a university committee evaluating academic standards concluded that U.T. was "not yet a university of the first class." But in recent years this sprawling, state-chartered institution, with 48,000 students, 2,100 faculty and 6,300 courses, has been playing a kind of academic catch-up game--raiding superstar talent from the faculties of such schools as Harvard and Princeton. Its weapon: a gusher of endowment money, fueled by oil wells on 2 million acres of West Texas land donated by the state in 1883. Says U.T. Vice President William Livingston: "All the money in the world won't create a great university. But you can't create a great university without it."

U.T. is clearly trying to buy its way to a top academic rating. This semester it lured Nobel Physicist Steven Weinberg down South. He left behind a prestigious, endowed chair at Harvard in exchange for a Texas-size salary (reportedly more than $100,000) and a commitment from U.T. officials to hire other top specialists in elementary-particle theory. Says Weinberg, 48: "I'm trying to build up a group of theoretical physicists, and I'm being given the resources to do it." At U.T. he joined Physicist John Wheeler, 70, the distinguished nuclear-fission expert who came to Austin in 1976 after 38 years at Princeton, and Marshall Rosenbluth, 55, a leading plasma physicist. Rosenbluth was lured away from Princeton when U.T. pledged a cool $5 million for five years to establish an institute for fusion studies.

The endowment at the University of Texas, surpassed only by Harvard's, generated $128 million in income from oil and gas leases this year alone (according to the state constitution, two-thirds goes annually to U.T. and one-third to Texas A & M). Says Weinberg: "Everyone seems acutely aware of the opportunity this university has of making the same move that Berkeley once made--of becoming an absolutely peerless university." In the mid-'70s oil revenues were sunk into concrete edifices: $32.5 million for a basketball arena, $6.5 million for swimming, $2.5 million for baseball. Last year the university dedicated a $40 million fine-arts center, as well as a $10 million addition to the law school. A $32 million business administration building is now under construction, along with a $17.9 million university teaching center; a $26 million chemical-and petroleum-engineering building will soon be up for bids. The library, with nearly 5 million volumes (among them, a Gutenberg Bible), now stands eighth among U.S. and Canadian academic libraries.

The master builders of Austin are now turning their energies to human resources. Fund raisers are trying to endow 100 more chairs in order to recruit more first-class scholars. Several graduate programs are already formidable. The schools of education, business and law rank in the top ten, and the doctoral programs in linguistics, German, Spanish and botany rate in the top five. For rank-and-file faculty, however, salaries lag behind comparable institutions. Furthermore, Austin offers a sparse benefits program, no sabbatical leaves, and little money for attending professional meetings. As a state institution, U.T. must admit more academically weak Texan undergraduates than it might like to. This fall it hopes to reduce the number of students and increase the quality by requiring in-state applicants to be in the top 25% of their high school graduating classes or have a minimum combined SAT score of 1,100.

U.T. officials have confidence in their game plan. When an M.I.T. official charged Texas with recruiting its physicists like football players, Vice President Livingston retorted that if M.I.T. officials learned the technique they would have a better football team. Perhaps U.T. has not yet induced a brain drain southward, but it has clearly been scoring some points.

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