WESLACO, Texas - Four deans at UT-Rio Grande Valley want the university to do a lot more to help the Hidalgo County Prosperity Task Force achieve its goals.
The task force was set upon by Hidalgo County Judge Richard Cortez to address poverty in the county.
The four UTRGV deans are Dr. Luis Torres-Hostos, founding dean of the School of Social Work, Giorgio Gotti, dean of the Robert C. Vackar College of Business and Entrepreneurship, Dr. Jose Dávila-Montes, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and Peter Cortez, dean of Libraries.
In an interview with the Rio Grande Guardian, Torres-Hostos said their initiative has the support of key leaders at UTRGV, including Interim Provost Dr. Can Saygin, Senior Vice President Veronica Gonzales, and Associate Vice President Ron Garza.
“The Prosperity Task Force has been around at least since 2020-2021 and me and a couple of other colleagues from the university were part of the original members. Then Judge Cortez expanded it, brought in Mario (Reyna) to work very closely with us, and we now have about seven or eight different work groups that are part of the task force,” Torres-Hostos explained.
Mario Reyna, executive director of RioPlex and a former dean of business at South Texas College, is coordinator of Hidalgo County Prosperity Task Force.
“We have been thinking about a way to reengage the university with it in a more comprehensive way. How can we get involved as an institution?" Torres-Hostos said. “So, about four or five of the deans got together and started talking about how we can create some synergy between all the different UTRGV folks that are part of the different task forces work groups.”
Torres-Hostos continued: We also had a meeting with the Vice President of Research, Dr. Saygin, who is now, as of May 18, our interim provost. This is wonderful because he's wearing those two very important hats.”
Torres-Hostos said the four deans challenged themselves to see how to create greater synergy between UTRGV and the task force.
“We thought about, hey, why don't we create a new center? Universities always think about these things, they're always reinventing the wheel. But we already have a lot of research centers that touch on different aspects of the Prosperity Task Force, so we kind of shifted gears a little bit.
One of the ideas the deans came up with, Torres-Hostos said, is to identify one UTRGV faculty member that can be the point person for each of the task force work groups, “so that way we can have coordination between what we're all doing.”
Torres-Hostos said one of the “low-hanging fruit” resides with the Dean of Libraries.
“How do we create a repository of data and information about the different aspects of the task force that can be accessible to everybody across the university, but also in the community? That's low-hanging fruit, because we already have a system in place at the university to make that available. So, I think that's going to be the first product, the first deliverable of this partnership with the task force.”
Torres-Hostos said he and his colleagues were particularly pleased to receive the support of Dr. Saygin.
“We had met with Dr. Saygin before he had assumed the role of interim provost, and he was all in favor of our ideas. Ron Garza, who's in the office of Veronica Gonzales, our senior vice president for government and community relations, supports us also. Ron is over commercialization and development, and that kind of stuff, and he's also part of the task force meetings. And so we're trying to create synergy.”
An issue at large universities like UTRGV, Torres-Hostos said, is that the right hand sometimes does not know what the left hand is doing.
“So, we've got to come together, create synergies, avoid duplication of effort, and just work together. And I think that that's what's happening right now, as these four deans have come together.”
It was put to Torres-Hostos that having UTRGV collate all the data the task force both needs and is accumulating, would be huge.
“And how to make sense of that date. I have a colleague in Houston, who's a computer scientist, and he's always saying that when people say, ‘oh, we don't have any data, we don't have any data,’ that that's a myth. What he says is that we are data-rich but information-poor. We have tons of data, and sometimes we struggle to make sense of that data. So we must all come together. We must figure out first, what data do we have, next, what does that data mean, and then, what are we going to do with it.
Asked if there was anything else he would like to add, Torres-Hostos said:
‘I am excited about moving forward, UTRGV is the university of the Valley, as President Bailey is always saying. And Judge Cortez himself says the Prosperity Task Force isn't just about Hidalgo County, it's about the Rio Grande Valley. So, I think it's a marriage made in heaven.”
Editor's Note: Here is the Rio Grande Guardian's interview with Dr. Torres-Hostos:
