2012–2013 REPORT

Not since its birth 129 years ago has The University of Texas at Austin undergone a period of transformation as explosive as it has during the Campaign for Texas.

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Cutting-edge facilities are sprouting

up all over campus in disciplines

as varied as communication, liberal arts,

computer science, business, and engi-

neering. And the intellectual foundation

of the university is expanding just as

rapidly, using innovation to tackle the

important issues facing the world. Our

finest minds are developing treatments

for debilitating diseases. They’re shedding

new light on the origins of the universe.

They’re cultivating tomorrow’s scientists,

engineers, artists, and entrepreneurs.

They’re driving the national conversation

about the future of higher education,

and they’re developing new ways to

do it all more efficiently.

The world is taking notice of The University of Texas at Austin.

1st

1st

15th

among public universities

15th2013 U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT NATIONAL UNIVERSITY RANKINGS

2013 U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT PUBLIC UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL RANKINGS

mccombs school of business accounting

program

college of education

ut programs rank in the

top 10 nationally

ut programs rank in the

top 25 nationally

4156

25thin the world’s top 100

universities

25th

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The university ranks 15th in the latest

U.S. News & World Report rating of

public universities. UT fares particularly

well in the magazine’s 2013 graduate

rankings, which lists the College of

Education No. 1 among public universi-

ties. The McCombs School of Business

accounting program ranks first as well.

Other top 10 programs include the

College of Pharmacy at fourth, the

School of Social Work at seventh, and

the Cockrell School of Engineering at

eighth. At the graduate level, 41 UT

programs and specialties rank in the top

10 nationally. Fifty-six others rank in the

top 25. Another publication, the journal

DesignIntelligence, ranks the School of

Architecture’s undergraduate program

second in the nation.

UT is also winning international

acclaim. One of the world’s foremost

observers of higher education, London-

based Times Higher Education, has

ranked UT Austin the 25th-best univer-

sity in the world.

The university is making these strides

with great efficiency. If you combine state

general revenue, tuition revenue, and

revenue from the Available University

Fund, UT performs its mission at the

lowest per-student, per-year cost of any

university in its 12-school peer group of

national public research universities.

Our numbers are part of our strength.

INDIVIDUAL FOUR-YEAR GRADUATION RATE

5-year goal: 70%

2006 2012

48%2017

patents awarded

to the university since 1883

800 52%

52, 00

9,000 3,800 500

students per year

13,300 degrees per year

bachelor’sdegrees

master’s and doctor’sdegrees

professionaldegrees

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Doing more with less, we are teaching

52,000 students a year, granting

13,300 degrees, including 9,000 bach-

elor’s, 3,800 master’s and doctor’s

degrees, and 500 professional degrees.

Those numbers make UT the state’s

largest producer of bachelor’s degrees

and the nation’s second-largest producer

of PhDs. UT ranks 10th in the nation in

the number of degrees granted to Latinos.

At the same time, UT works as an

economic engine for the state. Last year

UT attracted $628 million in new outside

research funding, up 14.4 percent from the

previous year and up 35.5 percent over

the past six years. About 800 patents

have been awarded to the university

since its inception, and licensing revenues

in 2010–11 were $25.6 million.

Graduation rates are continuing to

rise. The four-year graduation rate is

52 percent, up from 48 percent in 2006.

President Bill Powers has set a goal of

70 percent in the next five years.

UT is doing all this in the face of

declining state support. Only 13 percent

of UT’s budget is provided by taxpayers,

down from 47 percent in 1984–85.

PERCENT OF UT’S BUDGET PAID BY TAXPAYERS

1985 2012

47%

2006

13%

are votes of confidence in UT’s ability to

change the world, and they have come

from all branches of the university fam-

ily. You are giving gifts of all sizes, small

and large. (Small gifts play a particularly

important role, as 84 percent of all gifts

are less than $1,000.)

Some are choosing to give through

future gifts, such as bequests in their

wills. Many of the beloved icons of today’s

University of Texas would not exist without

How did we get here? Simply put, generosity.

Our donors have brought us

two-thirds of the way toward the

$3 billion goal of the Campaign for Texas.

Since the campaign began, 29 percent

of alumni have joined us as we work to

make UT the best public university in the

country. Your gifts — which come fol-

lowing an economic recession of historic

proportions — speak volumes. They

84+z84%

of alumni have contributedto the campaign for texas

29%29% gifts under $1,000

How did we get here? Simply put, generosity.

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future gifts. Try picturing UT without

the Tower or Littlefield Fountain. Or the

Davis Mountains without McDonald

Observatory gracing their peaks. In

addition to changing the physical face

of the university, future gifts have also

been used to recruit brilliant scholars,

educate students, and foster ground-

breaking discoveries.

If our goal were to raise more money

than any previous UT campaign, we

would have already succeeded. The

university’s next most successful

campaign, We’re Texas, raised

$1.6 billion from 1997 to 2004. But

our goal is not merely to become a

great American public university; it

is to become the greatest. Not for

greatness’ own sake, but for the

difference we can make.

campaign participation

116,487individual

alumni

95,612individual

non-alumni

9,620corporations,

foundations, etc.

of alumni donors are first-time donors

35%35%

Our peopleDuring the first two-thirds of the

Campaign for Texas, the university’s

groundbreaking research and programs

took center stage. The last one-third,

that crucial $1 billion, gets more per-

sonal. Our state-of-the-art research

facilities and collections are important

tools. Now we need to invest in the

people who will use those tools to

change the world.

The good news is we’re well on the

way, counting some of the world’s best

scholars among our students and faculty.

But we need more like them, and we

need to keep the ones we’ve got.

Today’s University of Texas provides stu-dents with a revitalized undergraduate experience that makes use of new tech-

niques and new technologies. We’re creating a higher-education model that is more inter-active, more social, and more collaborative. And we’re taking that experience to the most promising students possible.

Scholarships and fellowships help UT recruit the best undergraduate and graduate students — students who go on to win Rhodes, Marshall, and Hertz awards. Many would not be here if not for the financial assistance they receive. Of our 52,000 students, 6,714 received endowed scholarships this fall.

Our students are using your gifts to change the world in concrete ways. Take, for example, Harrington Fellows (Photo 1) and Powers Fellows (2), some of UT’s most promising grad-uate students. These premium fellowships help attract scholars working in such areas as politics and race, sustainable design, cardio-vascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases, battlefield innovation, higher-education pro-ductivity, immigration and cross-cultural issues, pharmaceutics and gene therapy, mood and anxiety disorders in children and adolescents, and improving the delivery of services to members of military families with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

With the help of scholarships, we’re bring-ing the benefits of a UT education to a more diverse group of students than ever before. For

example, university supporters in South Texas have banded together to create the Rio Grande Valley Scholars Program (3), which provides $10,000 renewable scholarships to promising students from the valley who demonstrate financial need and show excellence in academ-ics, leadership, and community service. This fall’s inaugural Rio Grande Valley Scholar, Alejandra Guerrero, is  an honors graduate of Roma High School, where she excelled in the swim team, student council, choir, academic clubs, and volunteering. An anonymous grant to the program is funding Guerrero’s scholar-ship, and supporters have raised $160,000 of the $200,000 needed to help a second student from the Rio Grande Valley come to UT.

The very best are coming to Texas because of our Forty Acres Scholars Program (4). Now in its second year, the Forty Acres Scholars Program welcomed 14 recipients this fall in disciplines as varied as Business Honors, Plan II, engineering, architecture, social work, and neuroscience. The Forty Acres Scholars Program is the university’s first full-ride merit scholarship, covering tuition, room and board, books, and summer enrichment activities such as internships, study abroad, research, and service learning. When fully funded, it will be one of the nation’s largest merit schol-arship programs.

Our exceptional students deserve an excep-tional education. The Commission of 125 has determined that UT students must graduate

STUDENTS

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not only with knowledge in their majors but with certain intellectual qualities as well: Students should leave the Forty Acres knowing how to write, reason, and learn independently and as part of a group. They should understand and appreciate cultural diversity in the U.S. and abroad. They should be able to lead and to use their knowledge ethically. The School of Undergraduate Studies serves as the university’s champion of undergraduate innovation, working to instill these qualities through courses across the curriculum. This approach, combined with a revamped under-graduate curriculum, first-year Signature Courses, and freshman interest groups, provides a student experience no other university can match.

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When you learn of new discoveries at The University of Texas at Austin, you’re hearing about the work of our

faculty. They are recipients of such honors as the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes and MacArthur

“genius” grants. But their contributions don’t end with research. They are also the teach-ers who impart our students with the tools, knowledge, and enthusiasm to go on to change the world.

We are ranked among the country’s pre-mier institutions of higher learning because of our faculty, and with more like them we can become No. 1. Gifts, particularly endowed gifts, enable us to offer the compensation and incen-tives that bring the best and keep them here.

Chairs are the most prestigious endow-ments a faculty member can hold, followed by professorships and fellowships. In addition to supplementing faculty members’ salaries, endowments can provide additional fund-ing for research. Last year, 264 faculty

members held chairs, 347 held professor-ships, and 291 held fellowships. During the Campaign for Texas, donors have created new faculty endowments in such varied disciplines as piano, entertainment studies, computer engineering, petroleum engineering, law, physics, international trade policy, global health policy, human ecology, urban planning, business, photography, interior design, opera conducting, literature, astrophysics, national security, and many others.

Timing matters in landing world-class fac-ulty. One strategy is to recruit up-and-coming scholars whose stars are just beginning to rise. By the time their careers are at their zenith, they are well established as UT faculty members.

UT’s competitors, however, have no prob-lem with poaching our best faculty members. Once we have recruited superstars, we must continuously work to keep them. Chairs, pro-fessorships, and fellowships allow us to do so.

FACULTY

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For our scholars to do their best work, they need the best facilities. The physical face of the campus has undergone a

transformation since the Campaign for Texas began, with the goal of these ultramodern facilities not merely to keep up with the times but to define them.

The College of Communication’s new Belo Center for New Media (1) opened this fall on the west edge of campus. The five-story, 120,000-square-foot Belo Center serves as an interactive learning space for students, a landmark gateway to campus at the intersec-tion of Guadalupe and Dean Keeton streets, and home to the KUT Public Media Studios. With a budget of $54.8 million, the Belo Center includes a performance studio, cinema-grade presentation space, an outdoor stage, and a multimedia newsroom designed to be both an interactive classroom where students acquire state-of-the-art professional skills and a working newsroom that will serve as the editorial nexus for producing the School of Journalism’s news website, Reporting Texas.

The campus’ second student union building, the Student Activity Center (2), opened in January 2011 next to Gregory Gymnasium on the East Mall. Funded by a 2006 student referendum, the SAC includes 149,000 square feet of indoor space and 25,000 square feet of outdoor space. The building includes 13 meeting rooms, a theater, an auditorium, a ballroom, restaurants, and a coffee shop. The Student Activity Center houses offices for graduate

and undergraduate student legislative orga-nizations, several student centers,  and  the  Anthropology Department.

Students are also the focus of the new Holland Family Student Center (3) in the Jackson School of Geosciences. The new center, housed in renovated space in the Jackson Geological Sciences building, opened in June. Its $8.1 million cost was financed entirely by donors. The 11,000-square-foot facility includes a public commons area, a student study area, student services for advising, tutoring, and career placement, and meeting spaces for students, faculty, and research scientists. One of the highlights is the Magic Planet globe, a six-foot diameter interactive display. The globe shows a wide range of earth systems phenomena, from hurricanes and tsunamis to plate tectonics. It will be used for instruc-tion, public outreach, and visualization of research projects.

More change is on the horizon.

Next door to the Student Activity Center, the College of Liberal Arts (4) is making histo-ry. Private donors have chipped in $20 million toward a new $85 million building. The six-story, 206,000-square-foot new Liberal Arts Building will open in spring 2013. The Liberal Arts Building, which will bring the college under one roof, will include 30 modern class-rooms, student study areas and meeting rooms, and laboratories and offices for 250 faculty.

FACILITIES

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Cockrell School of Engineering students are expected to achieve technology break-throughs as they solve real-world problems in critical areas such as energy and human health. However, the 7,700 students of the Cockrell School are pioneering 21st-century innova-tions in classrooms and laboratories built for mid-20th-century technology. To implement a more effective method of educating future engineers, the Cockrell School is building the state-of-the-art Engineering Education and Research Center, or EERC (5). The EERC has 430,000 gross square feet of modular, flexible space that will accommodate robust interdisciplinary teaching and research, team learning, and project-based educa-tion. Engineers learning in an environment with hands-on practical projects and inte-grated, cross-disciplinary mentoring will be best prepared to produce a high economic and social return on our investment in them. The EERC will cost about $310 million, of which $205 million has been committed by the UT System Board of Regents and The University of Texas at Austin. In August 2012, the Board of Regents also approved the design plans for the EERC — a significant milestone. The last step is for the Cockrell School to finish raising $105 million in private philanthropic funding from individuals, foundations, and corporations. Depending on fundraising progress, the construction could begin in 2013, and faculty and students could move into the EERC by 2017.

Like Liberal Arts, the Department of Computer Science is also uniting in a common space. Once spread across campus in seven buildings, the entire department will be housed together for the first time in its history. Its new home: the Bill and Melinda Gates Computer Science Complex (6), opening this winter. The 140,000-square-foot complex will help create a computer science powerhouse in the Southwest, enabling the department to increase its faculty by 40 percent and its stu-dent body by 50 percent. The complex, which includes the Dell Computer Science Hall, will be a state-of-the-art facility for computing research, collaboration, teaching, and outreach. The mingling of research labs and offices with modern, computing-oriented classrooms and labs will ensure that students share in the excitement and entrepreneurial challenges of

cutting-edge and multidisciplinary comput-ing research.

Already one of the top business schools in the country, the McCombs School of Business is aiming even higher. With a goal of being one of the world’s most prominent business schools by 2017, McCombs is enhancing its ability to attract the best full-time MBA students with a new $155 million, 458,000-square-foot Graduate Business Education Center. The new building is the cornerstone of a facilities plan that also includes renovations to the ex-isting College of Business Administration and Graduate School of Business buildings, both of which will be devoted to undergraduate edu-cation once the new building opens. The new Graduate Business Education Center will cater to the unique needs of MBA students. The new building will be configured similarly to the office environments in which MBAs work, with space for teamwork and large-group meetings, as well as rooms for negotiations and client presentations. The building is slated to open in February 2017, on Whitis Avenue between MLK Boulevard and 20th  Street across from the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center.

A $6 million renovation and revitaliza-tion plan for the Briscoe Center for American History (7) will create a new cultural hub worthy of the center’s internationally known trove of historical material, which includes 6 million photographs, 160,000 books, more than 84,000 linear feet of manuscripts and archives, 57,000 sound recordings, 31,000 maps, 17,500 film and video recordings, 5,500 newspaper titles, and 18,000 artifacts of ma-terial culture. The renovation of the center’s space on the first floor of Sid Richardson Hall will be marked by distinctive exterior signage and an inviting, modern exhibit space with a changing display of rarely seen historical photographs, maps, documents, journals, and manuscripts. A public programming room will play host to an ongoing series of intellectually stimulating lectures, screenings, classes, and book talks. Just as the Blanton Museum of Art and the LBJ Library are cultural attractions drawing visitors from the campus, local, and global communities, the rejuvenated Briscoe Center will be a destination that attracts not only educators and researchers but also his-tory devotees from around the world.

What are our faculty doing with these premier facilities? They’re working on treatments for diseases such as

Alzheimer’s. They’re paving the way for the businesses that will lead Texas into the future. They’re creating better doctors, using classic art to sharpen their powers of observation. They’re developing social programs to help veterans reintegrate into society after their service, and they’re innovating custom pros-thetics for injured veterans. They’re close to breaking new ground in human understanding of the nature of the universe.

Modern medicine has helped to extend our lives, but it hasn’t yet found a way to prevent neurological decline. Today, more than  5 mil-lion Americans are living with Alzheimer’s, and their care costs about $183 billion a year. Mechanical Engineering Associate Profes-sor Adela Ben-Yakar and College of Natural Sciences Professor Jon Pierce-Shimomura are forging paths toward an Alzheimer’s cure (1) by asking a basic biological question: Why do we age?

Together they are studying the effect of different Alzheimer’s drugs on C. elegans worms. The worms’ genetic makeup is similar

to humans, and their short life span enables faster understanding of which drugs are  most effective.

At UT, the “real world” isn’t postgraduation. It’s one thing to learn about business models in the classroom, quite another to work side by side with local entrepreneurs to get a startup off the ground. That’s why graduate students are jumping at the chance to participate in the Jon Brumley  Texas Venture Labs (2), a program that pairs emerging business leaders with teams of graduate and PhD students in business, law, engineering, and natural sciences at The University of Texas at Austin.  The student teams share their knowledge base, help write business plans for the fledg-ling companies, and get hands-on experience in bringing innovation — and jobs —  to the marketplace.

Future doctors are learning to dissect art (3) at the Blanton Museum of Art. They’re part of an innovative pilot program at the Blanton that allows University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) students to hone their diag-nostic skills and powers of observation. The Blanton and UTMB’s Internal Medicine resi-dency program at Seton Healthcare Family

PROGRAMS &RESEARCH

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have been working together to bring small groups of third-year medical students to examine beloved works of art. The goal is to teach these future doctors to become attentive and thoughtful observers of patients’ unspoken visual cues.

Soldiers who have returned from war with missing limbs are now facing another grueling battle: learning to regain their mobility — and their lives — through the use of prosthetic devices. UT is paving the way for more customized prosthetics (4) and orthotic devices. Professor Rick Neptune and a group of mechanical engineering students are using UT Austin’s own technique called selective laser sintering — a process that begins with a computer design and ends with a sturdy yet flexible prosthetic device that is tailored to the wearer.  And in the School of Social Work, training programs and research in military social work will help fill the mental health needs of active-duty troops and their families as well as America’s newest veterans return-ing from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What if Sir Isaac Newton was wrong? UT research is challenging what we thought we knew about the origins of the universe and the principles of physics.

Since the big bang the universe has been expanding. According to the law of gravity, that expansion should slow down and everything should start coming back together. But instead the universe is not only continuing to expand, it’s doing so at a faster rate. The mysterious force causing this phenomenon is known as dark energy (5), and it constitutes 70 percent of the universe. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) at McDonald Observatory is the first major exper-iment to probe dark energy. In the coming years and decades, astronomers will study exploding stars, map millions of galaxies, and plot the gravitational influence of dense galaxy clusters. Particle physicists will probe conditions near the time of the big bang. And all of them will tweak their models of how the universe began, how it has aged, and how it will end.

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The destination

Thanks to the Campaign for Texas,

one of the country’s finest

universities is on its way to becoming

the best. We’re attracting the minds,

both faculty and students, who will

solve today’s challenges and shape

tomorrow’s possibilities. We’re giving

them the tools and the inspiration they

need to conduct their pioneering work.

Our vision for The University of Texas

has taken — will take — commitment,

but with it comes rewards we are just

beginning to comprehend. We are, after all, changing the world.