McCombs Alum Leads UT System Shake-Up

New University of Texas System Board of Regents chair, Kevin Eltife, BBA ’81, prioritizes working with the Legislature.

by London Gibson

Kevin Eltife, newly elected chair of the UT System Board of Regents, thinks he will be able to improve the way the system communicates with legislators — because he was once one.

A former Texas state senator and mayor from Tyler, Eltife was elected board chair in December. In his new role, Eltife says his primary focus is working more closely with state legislators on the system’s budget.

The UT System oversees eight universities and six academic medical centers, including The University of Texas at Austin and its Dell Medical School. In 2019, 11.7 percent of the UT System budget will come from state appropriations. The number varies from year to year depending on resources and need.

Eltife says because the legislature provides significant support for the system, it is important that regents communicate openly with legislators.

“We have to earn their trust, and we have to show that we’re spending the dollars they give us efficiently and effectively,” Eltife says. “Having been on the other side, having sat on the finance committee in the senate, I know what they want, and I know what they deserve from us. And I’m going to make sure we do that at the UT System.”

When Eltife was first appointed to the board in 2017, it was in the midst of tension between the legislature and the system over a $215 million purchase of land in Houston, where then-Chancellor Bill McRaven had hopes of expanding UT’s presence.

Many lawmakers were upset that they weren’t consulted before the plan was announced, and Eltife says this point marked a low in the relationship with the legislature. He says it should have been handled differently.

“We should have certainly gone to the legislature and gotten our statewide elected officials and our legislators on board and explained why it was important to the UT System to have that piece of land,” Eltife says. “I don’t think we did our homework on it.”

Eltife has been one of the most outspoken critics of system spending. He co-chaired a task force looking for cuts within the system, which released a report in October recommending the reduction of up to 110 jobs within the UT System administration. The system had about 700 full-time employees on its payroll before the layoffs began. As of this January, more than 60 positions had been cut.

Eltife says it’s important to make cuts at the system level because the majority of the money saved can be passed to its universities and academic medical centers. He says he hopes that the cuts will free up more resources to students and prevent tuition increases.

“Our No. 1 goal, mission, and job is to do everything we can to put resources in the hands of our institutions to improve our students’ experience and our patients’ experience,” Eltife says. “That is the ultimate goal and mission of the system.”

Regent James C. “Rad” Weaver, BBA ’98, and former Regent Sara Martinez Tucker, MBA ’79, are also McCombs graduates. Martinez Tucker resigned in January.

As Eltife moves forward as board chair, he says working with legislators and mending some of those relationships is of primary importance. He plans on having all 14 institutions present their financial pictures to the board before the next session in 2021.

“We don’t want to wait until session to show up asking for money; we need to be over there in the interim as well,” Eltife says. “It needs to be a partnership, every year, ongoing.”

Eltife says he has received positive feedback from the senate finance and house appropriations committees regarding the reorganizational task force, and some senators have even cited it as a model for other statewide educational systems.

However, he says there’s still more work to do.

“You’re not going to fix this overnight,” Eltife says. “We’re going to work tirelessly to earn the trust of the legislature and show them that every dollar they give us we appreciate, and we spend wisely.”

This article appeared in the spring 2019 issue of McCombs magazine. Click on the link to see the full issue.