Serving The University Of Texas At Austin Community Since 1900 @thedailytexan | thedailytexan.com
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Volume 120, Issue 97
NEWS
OPINION
SPORTS
LIFE&ARTS
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Texas Theme Park Engineering Group prepares for Engineering Week.
Students should take their own safety precautions when walking on or around campus.
Austin photographers feel pressure to compete in small creative market on Instagram.
Texas men’s basketball drops another conference game against No. 1 Baylor.
STATE
STATE
Judge dismisses two-year class action lawsuit
Texas falls behind in 60x30TX
By Neha Madhira @nehamira14
A federal judge dismissed a two-year classaction lawsuit Monday in which eight women, three of whom are UT alumna, claimed Austin and Travis County officials did not properly handle their sexual assault cases or those of 6,000 women in the county. Judge Lee Yeakel granted a defense motion to dismiss a lawsuit from September 2018, ruling that many of the plaintiffs’ claims had been addressed by laws regarding the handling of sexual assault cases that were passed in the Texas Legislature’s 86th Regular Session in 2019. “We appreciate the judge’s thoughtful and thorough deliberation in this matter and agree that the case should be dismissed,” said David Green, media relations manager for the city of Austin. “Regardless of the court’s ruling, though, the city of Austin remains committed to treating all sexual assault survivors with dignity and respect and will ensure our officers have the appropriate resources and training to investigate all such cases appropriately.” Three women filed the original lawsuit in June 2018 against the current and former Travis County district attorneys, the current and former Austin police chiefs, the city of Austin and Travis County. The suit alleged years of failures with sexual assault cases at the Austin Police Department’s crime lab and the Travis Country District Attorney’s Office, including not submitting sexual assault kits to labs in a timely manner and using labs that did not have the capacity to accurately test the kits. The women argued the defendants violated the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution by refusing to investigate women’s sexual assault cases and discriminating against female survivors, according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs requested for the court to order city and county officials to make changes in current practices used when investigating J U D G E PAGE 3
copyright john jordan, and reproduced with permission
Harrison Keller, Texas higher education commissioner, answers questions from The Texas Tribune about his goals in his position. Keller said that Texas may not meet its education goal of 60% of the population having a postsecondary degree or certificate by 2030 if the rate of graduates keeps slowing.
Low degree rates in Texas prompt higher education commissioner to reevaluate innovation and board’s role. By Laura Morales
@lamor_1217
exas is falling behind on its education goal, known as 60x30TX, which aims for 60% of the Texas population to earn a postsecondary degree or certificate by 2030, said the Texas higher education commissioner in a conversation with The Texas Tribune on Monday. The 2019 Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board progress report to the legislature indicated
that less than half of Texans have a postsecondary degree from a college or technical school. There was a 1.2% increase in graduates from 2017 for 1 43.5% of Texans to graduate in 2019. Commissioner Harrison Keller said the 60% goal will not be met by 2030 at this rate, and progress has slowed in higher education institutions. “If we keep making the same kind of incremental progress we are making, we are not going to hit it,” Keller said in the talk. Keller said although the completion rates should be concerning, it is not an entirely accurate metric for success. “I am more interested in credential production than graduation rates because there are a lot of folks that are left out of traditional calculations of graduation rates,” Keller said. “Some of our institutions, two-thirds of their students aren’t included in their graduation rate calculations because they have so many part-time students.” Keller said to help institutions meet these goals, he wants to restructure the role of the board. Currently, the board must approve all degree programs and
core curriculum courses. He said he wants to allow higher education institutions more freedom in deciding the core curricula and degree plans. “We are going to reposition the coordinating board from a more traditional, regulatory posture to be more of a resource,” Keller said. “I envision a different role for the coordinating board, particularly around our educational and workforce data for the state.” He said the coordinating board will instead evaluate the educational data and set goals and strategies for the state. “We need to encourage and support more local innovation,” Keller said. “(The board has) zero students, zero faculty. We award zero degrees. If we are going to get anything done, it is going to be through partnering with the institutions.” Considering Texas has the 10th largest economy in the world, Keller said educational systems need to meet the demands for the technically skilled workforce of the growing Texas economy. Keller proposed the
coordinating board focus on increasing technical and vocational certificates. “We want to understand what is driving the variants around earnings and feeding the information back into how curricula are put together,” Keller said. Keller said he aims to address affordability among low-income students, middle class students outside of the income range for aid and older students returning to higher education to complete their degrees. Gary Susswein, UT-Austin’s chief communications officer, and Jay Dyer, deputy to the president for government relations, have worked with Keller for several years and attended the event. Susswien said UT-Austin is working internally to promote accessibility and affordability in education. “This is an important part of the 60x30 goals, ensuring more Texans have access to full bachelor’s degrees that prepare them for the workforce,” Susswein said. “We really do feel like we create a more vibrant Texas and are a drive in the strong economy.”
SYSTEM
RESEARCH
Health Biobank to consolidate System research
UT researchers help find new data on coronavirus
By Areeba Amer @areeba_amer
The UT System is consolidating research samples and data from different institutions so that researchers across the UT System can access them in one single biobank instead of several. The UT System Health Biobank will consolidate research from eight academic and research institutions in the system, including UT Health Science Center at Houston and MD
Anderson Cancer Center. The eight institutions formed the UT System Health Biobank Consortium to standardize and expand access to specimens from all institutions, according to its website. A biobank is a collection of specimens and data from volunteer patients that allows researchers to access other researchers’ data for future inquiry, said Dr. Benjamin Greenberg, a professor at UT Southwestern
Medical Center. The biobank connects researchers who are looking for certain data or samples to those who have already collected it, Greenberg said. “If there’s a colleague in Houston who’s going to be doing research on the brain … they could go online into a website that we created and research to see who in the state has brain tumor samples and then reach out to them and form collaboration,” Greenberg said. Dr. Jennifer Beauchamp, associate professor of research with Cizik School of B I O B A N K PAGE 2
dan martinez
/ the daily texan staff
By Anna Canizales @annaleonorc
Two UT researchers helped discover that the new coronavirus likely spread beyond Wuhan into other cities before Chinese officials could initiate a quarantine, according to the UT News website. Coronavirus is a viral respiratory illness. The newest version to infect humans, 2019-nCoV, was first discovered in December in Wuhan and has killed almost 1,000 people, according to the Feb. 10 novel coronavirus report by the World Health Organization. The UT researchers involved in the seven-person team conducting the monthlong study were Zhanwei Du, computer scientist and doctor of
philosophy, and Lauren Ancel Meyers, a mathematical epidemiologist and professor of integrative biology. “We were immediately concerned when we learned that the outbreak was growing in Wuhan, knowing that China was about to enter its Spring Festival period,” Meyers said. “This is the period where hundreds of millions of people travel all around China to celebrate the Lunar New Year. One of the big questions was, ‘How was the increase in travel over the next few weeks going to cause the virus to spread all over China?’” The team, which also included researchers from Hong Kong and France, used historical road, train and air travel data for the Spring V I R U S PAGE 3