(08-15-2018 08:40 PM)franklyconfused Wrote:  

(08-15-2018 07:30 PM)waltgreenberg Wrote:  

(08-15-2018 05:39 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(08-15-2018 04:05 PM)waltgreenberg Wrote:  

(08-15-2018 03:51 PM)Houston Owl Wrote:  I'm not sure Baylor terminated the deal. I know that Rice was concerned with the shaky financial status of BCM (including the partially finished hospital that was on the ropes).
At the time, BCM had many more faculty members than Rice...there would have been some risk to Rice going forward. (I personally think it was worth the risk, but I can understand the conservative decision).

You're correct. Baylor may very well have terminated the deal, but we backed out first after doing comprehensive due diligence. The numbers were perceived to be just too risky by the BOT.

My understanding was that Baylor U had some voting power (possibly even veto power) with respect to BCM and opposed the deal, and that the risk convinced us not to make any effort to overcome Baylor U's opposition.

Yes, Baylor had veto power. However, the BOT made their decision independent of that. It was deemed far too great a financial risk for the University.

I would have liked to have BCM in a perfect world where it's integrated well, but there was a huge risk of becoming a med school with an attached university. Wikipedia is citing that Rice had $140MM in research funding in 2016. BCM did $225MM in 2017. How would the BOT and administration prioritize if one school suddenly represented 2/3 of all revenue? It'd be real easy to lose sight of what we consider important today.

But if making the USN&WR top 10 was ever the goal, it is for exactly that reason that BMC was an attractive target. The way the USN&WR metrics work, that bump in research funding would probably have gotten us there. Look at the rankings, and almost every university ahead of us has a med school and a law school. There’s a reason. Research funding is mot a metric per se, but it affects a number of things that are metrics.