University of North Texas leaders said they expect to hit a monetary target in a 90-day “sprint” fundraising campaign.
Earlier this month, UNT President Harrison Keller told the Board of Regents that the fundraiser had brought in $4.2 million, meaning key players are almost over the $5 million finish line. The funds will help UNT gain eligibility for a grant from the newly created Texas University Fund. The campaign wraps up on Aug. 31.
Texas voters approved the renaming the University Research Fund the Texas University Fund in 2023. The election established a permanent endowment of $3.9 billion that will benefit the University of Houston, Texas State University, Texas Tech University and the UNT System — the university systems that weren’t eligible for funding from the Permanent University Fund. The PUF was established in 1876, benefiting from the largess of the West Texas oil and gas reserves.
The new fund is meant to earmark state funds for the state’s public university systems that are putting considerable resources to research. UNT is a Carnegie Tier I Research Institution, as are UH and Texas Tech.
In casting their ballots, Texans also approved the creation of a second fund, the National Research Support Fund, which will invest dollars in programs at the University of Texas at Arlington, UT Dallas, UT El Paso and UT San Antonio. The amendment requires the Legislature to approve funding for the support fund every two years.
“Both the House and the Senate ... had $1.3 billion that they had earmarked for additional investments in the corpus of the TUF,” Keller said. “That would be sufficient to buy both Texas State [University System] and UNT [System] into level one.”
The state, however, requires the university systems eligible for the endowment’s funding to pony up some investments of their own.
“We have to meet the performance targets,” Keller said. “We have to exceed $50 million in private and federal-sponsored research now.”
UNT was one of the universities surprised by turbulence in the federal grant system this year.
“Nobody would’ve anticipated that this would be in the year where there’ve been a lot of disruption in the in federal grants,” Keller said. “To date, we’ve lost about $6.5 million across 30 to 31 grants.”
Federal grants have supported research projects across UNT’s colleges, and losing grants can reduce or eliminate research projects.
To make up for the slack in federal dollars, Keller said university leaders launched the campaign to bring in $5 million.
“Securing these funds is so critical for us, because we’ve got the performance target for the TUF that gets inflated each year, adjusted for inflation each year, and you have to meet that target two consecutive years to be able to draw down additional funding. If we were to miss that target this year, the clock would start over,” Keller said.
Should the clock start over, Keller said, UNT would face a higher bar to clear to access more TUF funds.
“Also, we don’t know if the Legislature would have the additional funds to be able to endow for us,” he said. “I should say we’ve also set a target of identifying at least $5 million that could be repurposed in private funds on top of the new private dollars. We are now at $5.5 million, thanks to the partnership of the UNT Foundation and our donor community.”