In November 2015, the man who led the operations to capture Saddam Hussein and kill Osama bin Laden stepped to the podium in a wood-paneled boardroom in Austin, Texas, to embark on a new and very different mission: launching a public university system into the highest level of prominence and respect.
Former four-star admiral and Navy SEAL Bill McRaven had been hired almost a year earlier, with great fanfare, to serve as chancellor of the University of Texas system, which oversees the University of Texas at Austin and thirteen other college campuses and medical schools. Now, addressing the UT board of regents, he was proposing nine “quantum leaps”—major initiatives that, he declared, “will make us the envy of every system in the nation.”
Some of the “leaps” are things other public universities could only dream of doing, in an era of budget cutting. Ten million dollars for a “UT Network for National Security.” Thirty-six million dollars (so far) to “develop a collaborative health care enterprise.”
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