Remember, this is the state that fired a President (Texas A&M's previous) for refusing to take a chunk of athletic losses ($18 million) out of academics. Sports rules. The ADs are more powerful than the Presidents. Rick Perry's ideas about Higher Education are laughably pathetic (faculty pay is tied to student evaluations, etc.) In a state that spends so little money per pupil on public education at the state level, while rich towns build enormous football stadiums, it's no surprise that U. Texas is dropping in reputation among its peers.
There was a time when Texas academics mattered to the rest of the nation because it was such a big influential state. In order to keep the Texas market, textbook publishers would kowtow to the Texas State Board of Ed. by inserting all sorts of craziness into textbooks distributed all over the nation. But now with electronic publishing and on-demand printing, and the internet, the Texas crazies have been isolated, and Texas has been revealed as the backwater it really is.
A few years ago, I posted an article by a Texas Economics professor named David Hillis that showed how Texas sports was in the red. This was back when Texas was "only" earning $115m in revenue. In two short years, they have somehow jumped to $163m. I seriously doubt they are in the red anymore, though I haven't seen any breakdowns. That's an astronomical revenue number, and it rivals the day-to-day operational budget of the entire university in Austin (i.e. most university expenditures are locked down--endowment, research funds, health care, etc.; only a small portion of the budget is fungible). Now you know why sports are tipping over the academic side there.
