UNT’s long road to top-tier status

It is perhaps ironic that the passage last week of Proposition 4 came so close to the approval of a new football stadium for the University of North Texas. Both actions promise much, but they come with no guarantees. Building a new stadium doesn’t ensure that the Mean Green football team will start winning ball games, and the latest amendment to the Texas Constitution doesn’t mean that UNT will start raking in grants that would catapult it into the ranks of top-ranked research institutions.

Still, they’re both starting places.

Proposition 4 will give seven emerging Texas universities — UNT among them — an opportunity to vie for their share of a $500,000 higher-education account. The other institutions affected are Texas Tech University, the University of Houston and the University of Texas campuses at Arlington, Dallas, El Paso and San Antonio.

Some $25 million of the fund has already been allocated, with UNT getting about $1.7 million to match new private research gifts.

In order to get more, the universities will have to meet certain “benchmarks,” some of them well-defined, some of them rather murky at this point.

One requirement is that an institution have “high-quality students and faculty,” but nobody seems to know exactly what that means yet. UNT insists it has both — what else could it say? — and we would tend to agree, with the possible exception of that half-naked, green-painted Mean Green undergraduate who threw up on our editorialist’s shoes at the Louisiana-Monroe game. How the requirement will be defined by the newly formed National Research University Fund is still up in the air.

Other requirements are more concrete, and UNT will have its work cut out for it in meeting them.

The fund requires a participating university to award at least 200 doctorates a year, and UNT squeezed by that one in 2007-08 with 211. We assume it can keep up the good work, but we’d like a little more of a cushion.

Another benchmark is the $45 million in restricted research dollar expenditures. UNT, with $11.2 million, isn’t close to that yet, but no other university has met it either, and UNT President Gretchen Bataille told the Record-Chronicle’s Candace Carlisle that the goal is reachable within five or 10 years.

Another benchmark is a $400 million endowment, and UNT is miles away from that at an estimated $90 million. No estimates were forthcoming as to when that goal might be reached, if ever.

The bright spot in all that is that not all of these benchmarks have to be reached. We don’t know how many will be required or if UNT has much of a shot of meeting those that are, but as Dr. Bataille said, “We’re happy to be in the mix.”

Slow and steady wins the race. If it’s lucky, UNT may become a top national research institution about the same time that the Mean Green football team tops the BCS rankings.