Scott Caven, chairman of the UT System Board of Regents, acted quickly this week on the advice of three presidents of universities in the system.
Presidents William Powers of UT-Austin, Juliet Garcia of UT-Brownsville and David Daniel of UT-Dallas spoke before the regents Wednesday about the importance of maintaining both research and teaching in the duties of faculty and identifying the best teaching methods.
Caven introduced a motion Thursday at the regents meeting to include an additional $15 million in the system budget for the establishment of a yearly monetary award for selected teachers across the system's nine universities and the support of commercializing research conducted at UT-Austin.
The initiative will distribute $1 million annually over the next five years to UT-Austin for teaching-excellence awards and will receive an additional $1 million for research commercialization. The eight other system campuses will divide $1 million every year over the next five years for the awards.
"Our faculty are extremely dedicated to teaching and, while there are existing ways to encourage teaching accomplishments, we should do more," Caven said in a statement.
Powers said individual awards from the initiative will be monitarily substantial, but said the selection process and number of awards given will be decided in the coming weeks.
The initiative is part of the system's $11.5 billion budget for the 2009 fiscal year, which the regents approved Thursday.
The regents also unanimously passed a proposal Thursday to alter ethics rules for University of Texas Investment Management Company, which manages the assets of the UT and Texas A&M systems. The change allows UTIMCO board members to invest privately in existing UTIMCO investments.
UTIMCO CEO Bruce Zimmerman said the decision "puts [UTIMCO board members] right in the square of what state of Texas law is, what other state funds' rules are, what other private and public endowments' rules are."
When UTIMCO directors do make private investments in UTIMCO investments, those interests will be disclosed, Zimmerman said. The board members are still prohibited from owning more than 5 percent of any UTIMCO investment. UTIMCO directors must annually disclose any private investment they own.
The rule barring UTIMCO board members from investing in UTIMCO investments was
implemented in 2000. Zimmerman said he learned of the rule shortly before his appointment as CEO in May 2007 and soon began to investigate whether similar rules were in place for other university endowments.
"We actually had our general counsel do a survey of the 14 largest public [university] endowments, and in fact only one other than ourselves had that prohibition," Zimmerman said. "It kind of reinforced our view that there were a lot of really good things put in place [in 2000], but that this one particular prohibition was arguably an overreaction."
Zimmerman said UTIMCO is basically a headhunter organization that hires investment fund managers to invest money on the behalf of the UT System.
"The problem with the no co-investment at all is that it really puts up a barrier for our directors to give us a heads-up on a really good assessment that might be coming," Zimmerman said. "When they hear of a really good investment, they wouldn't tell us about it."
The Houston Chronicle reported earlier this year that former regents chairman Charles Miller, who championed the UTIMCO reforms in 2000, now favors relaxing the rule.
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