The serious answer is that while there are lots of things a Chancellor should do, the vast majority would take a lot longer than a day. Like building up other system campuses to the point where they would be realistic options for good students in TX, the way the UC system has multiple options for CA.
Maybe kill 25 by 25.
Or steal someone from another school to run the A&M foundation. Raw donation numbers aren't the right metric for capital campaigns... we need to sell initiatives differently to the donor base. I've also been struck by how the foundation asks faculty to identify donors instead of using us to sell what we are doing to donors they already found. I suspect this is related to our history of who gets rich among our former students.
I may be being unfair to the foundation, based on my very limited interactions with them. But a few years ago, some colleagues from a B1G school were being used by their fundraisers to talk to big money donors in Texas about a building. They struck out, but they told me that these donors expressed that while they wanted to give to A&M, they never got asked.
I've also seen a case where an old Ag wanted to make a big donation for a specific research focus, but it was held up by lots of different people trying to horn in on taking some of the money and credit.
Maybe kill 25 by 25.
Or steal someone from another school to run the A&M foundation. Raw donation numbers aren't the right metric for capital campaigns... we need to sell initiatives differently to the donor base. I've also been struck by how the foundation asks faculty to identify donors instead of using us to sell what we are doing to donors they already found. I suspect this is related to our history of who gets rich among our former students.
I may be being unfair to the foundation, based on my very limited interactions with them. But a few years ago, some colleagues from a B1G school were being used by their fundraisers to talk to big money donors in Texas about a building. They struck out, but they told me that these donors expressed that while they wanted to give to A&M, they never got asked.
I've also seen a case where an old Ag wanted to make a big donation for a specific research focus, but it was held up by lots of different people trying to horn in on taking some of the money and credit.