Two years after Hurricane Ike’s surge crossed Galveston like a speed bump on its way to Houston, planners and academics are staring down multibillion-dollar public policy dilemmas. To describe Ike as a “wake-up call” understates and trivializes the matter. Like other coastal areas around the nation and around the world, the Houston-Galveston region is only now grappling with complex and costly questions of how to protect sprawling seaside development from the combination of subsidence and an expected sea-level rise from global warming.

The former chairman of the UT System Board of Regents on why demography is destiny, why higher education isn't necessarily the key determinant of the state’s economic future, why Texas doesn't need more tier-one schools and how colleges abuse the financial aid system.

Like a conglomerate auditing balance sheets, the Texas A&M University System has for six months been dissecting the financial contribution of every faculty member on its 11 campuses around the state, subtracting the salary of each from the tuition and research money he or she brings in. The resulting metrics present in stark detail exactly where the system gets the most and least bang for its payroll buck — and have raised the hackles of professors at all levels, who liken the approach to grading assembly-line workers on widget production.

Robert Rodriguez's latest movie, arriving in theaters today, is reawakening the controversy over a content provision in the state's film industry incentives program. Supporters say the intent is simply to safeguard the image of Texas. Critics charge lawmakers with taking a machete to free speech.

Nothing has helped Texas "close the gaps" of higher education achievement more than financial aid for low-income students. But with coming budget cuts, tens of thousands of students could lose out on the state's largest and most generous financial aid program.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana exiles have fundamentally changed Houston, and vice-versa. The uneasy arrangement was a shotgun marriage: Many evacuees had no choice in whether or where they went, and Houstonians had no choice, for humanity's sake, but to take them in.

It could take years before the seven emerging research universities in Texas (Texas Tech University, the University of Houston, the University of North Texas, the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Texas at El Paso) transform themselves into top-tier research campuses — if they do at all. But the state now pays them for demonstrated progress toward that goal, pitting them against one another in competition for limited funds. Officials from all seven will appear before a joint hearing of the House and Senate higher education committees today, seeking to show off progress to lawmakers and to size up where they stand against their peers.

The longtime House member from Plano and newly installed chancellor of the Texas State University System (sorry, Sen. Wentworth) talked to the Tribune on Thursday about why he took the job, the importance of Hispanic outreach, the case against cutting the state's higher ed budget, the trouble with the Legislature and what a good governor shouldn't do.

Can a $3 million marketing campaign to promote higher education change the culture of a country-sized state in which just 27 percent of the population has a college degree or certificate? It worked for cancer ...

Private, for-profit colleges, which offer professional certificates at a steep cost, have come under fire for peddling big student loans to vulnerable Texans in exchange for credentials of dubious value.