Troubling times are on the horizon for the Brackenridge Tract and the University.
The Tract, which is owned by UT, is devoted to married student housing, renting for commercial and residential development and the “Brackenridge Tract” field laboratory.
Last year, the UT regents began to consider how they could more use out of the site.
The architectural firm hired by the UT regents recently released its recommendations. The New York-based firm, Cooper, Robertson & Partners LLP, suggested building a student housing unit and either reducing the lab to 56 acres or relocating it to another site. If it’s relocated, the new field lab will most likely be in McKinney Roughs, a park in Bastrop County.
The biology department has resisted any changes to the field lab since the regents first began considering new plans. The integrative biology sub-field is the most highly regarded of UT’s life sciences fields, according the Austin American-Statesman.
Not having a significant field lab would certainly hurt the program’s standing, not to mention the University as a whole. There are also scores of professors who have devoted decades to research at the Brackenridge site — relocating or minimizing it would disrupt essential work.
“If implemented, either of the Cooper-Robertson plans would irreversibly damage the teaching and research programs, as well as the academic reputation, of the University of Texas,” biology professor David Hillis said when the plans were released. “These plans are clearly not in UT’s best interest.”
The biology department’s complaints that moving the lab would hurt the University’s mission are valid — and that’s why the department has nothing to worry about.
It is clear to everyone involved how important the field lab is. After all, none of the plans being considered so far would do away with a field lab altogether.
A move to McKinney Roughs might even allow for more future expansion than the Brackenridge Tract, which is currently surrounded on all sides by urban development. The hourlong drive to the new site will be annoying, but not prohibitive. Graduate students and professors will still have a site to pursue research — admittedly a less convenient one.
What moving the lab will end forever is the ability of non-major biology students to experience a field laboratory setting. Almost every lower-division, non-major biology class makes at least one trip from the 40 Acres to the tract, if only for extra credit.
These excursions allow liberal arts and business students to develop the interdisciplinary skills central to the goals of the recently inaugurated School of Undergraduate Studies. But no lower division class has the time to travel over an hour to a new site.
According to the School of Undergraduate Studies’ Web site, the goal of the core curriculum is to allow “students to put their major coursework into a broader intellectual context and to understand how other disciplines raise and answer important questions.” What better way to do that than to allow non-science majors to experience, if for only a day, what it is like to work in the stifling Central Texas heat observing ants’ behavior?
The relocation of the Brackenridge Field Laboratory would be a minor setback for the Department of Biology. Yet those who stand to lose the most — those of us who desire the interdisciplinary education the new core curriculum promises — have been largely silent on the issue.
It’s time for the rest of us to join the fray. Maybe pressure applied by the University at large can achieve what the Biology Department has so far failed to do alone: Show the regents that educating is the goal of the University, not making money.
Counts is a plan II honors, business honors and history major
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