The new ou President

I hate starting a new thread for just this but I couldnt find a decent place to drop it into

The new guy seems like he will fit in well there

 

Not my president.

 

I sort of liked Boren, at least some of the time

 

I liked Boren and still do. This guy can take OU and the Big XII down faster than the Titanic. Yes, OU is swimming in red ink and has way too much administrative cost, but name one school that doesn't. Boren can raise the money (see also A&M) , Gallogly may have just pissed that away.

OU is not Lyondel and won't respond accordingly.

On the other hand, Gallogly isn't a snively, whiny little bastard sneaking around in the dark doing **** without discussing it with anyone.

 

Boren is popular and well-liked on campus, in the community and most everywhere he goes. The new guy wasn't hired to be popular and I doubt he'll ever be the beloved figure on campus, stopping to take selfies with students etc. that Boren remains. The very political Boren seems to enjoy the interaction as much the people he encounters. For Austinites, unless you are old enough to remember Jake Pickle, you aren't likely to have encountered a comparable package of power and gregariousness.

 

Crockett,

I don't know that we have always agreed, but in my opinion you have been a good poster; however, to mention Jake Pickle in the same anything with Dr Boren is beyond unforgivable. I like Dr Boren.

I shall not go on from there, other than to say that, yes, Pickle was significantly better than Lloyd Dogett, but so was Hugo Chavez.

 

I was just a kid when I encountered Pickle. He seemed surprisingly affable, but I didn't know him well.

 

I wish he had said that about Bowlsby, not Boren.

 

Crockett,

Pickle was very friendly and a great glad-hander. He did great things for the independent gas producers of Texas, as well as other sectors of our energy economy.

 

I think Gallogly will be great, like Patterson.

 

What a doosh

 

The J.J. Pickle Research Campus sounds like it's something aggy would have --- an academic facility dedicated to pickle research.

Seriously though, Jake definitely brought the bacon home to Austin for funding while he was in Congress (along with his predecessor "Big Ears" Johnson).

But I think it should have been named the J. Neils Thompson Research Center.

Professor Thompson detailed to me in a one-on-one conversation in his civil engineering office one day about what the center's origins were.

Seems that a critical element for the WWII effort was magnesium, apparently alloyed with aluminum for bomb casings that were light and burned at a very high temperature when set off. Also seems that the Germans were aware of the U.S. efforts in this area of munitions.

German U-boats sunk over 50 ships during the war in the Gulf: German uboats in the Gulf of Mexico mostly because of oil supply. But the Texas Gulf Coast shelf was an important source of magnesium and related ores in the shallow seabed. The U-boats patrols in the Texas Gulf so concerned Washington that they could affect U.S. supplies of magnesium that it looked frantically for other ore sources.

Professor Thompson and his colleagues were made aware that the Central Texas limestone could be a good source of magnesium, far out of the reach of German U-boats, and thus the research began in Austin during WWII for this effort --- thus the founding of the Balcones Research Center, now the J.J. Pickle Research Campus.

So, I'm a bit biased, but would prefer the name of this important UT-Austin component be named for Professor J. Neils Thompson, or at least the "Thompson-Pickle" Research Center.

On a related subject of facility naming to UT basketball, would be a shame if the new facility just throws away Dr. Denton Cooley's name in the process:



I assume Dr. Cooley contributed some serious cash to help build this facility (the Cooley Pavilion practice facility for basketball) and his legacy shouldn't be tossed aside for a computer salesman's medical school, a one-year UT student.

Thompson and Cooley also have an important contribution beyond their legacies in their profession after UT graduation.

Thompson was on the 1934 UT football team that went to South Bend to beat the Domers 7-6, perhaps UT Austin's first most important football win.

Cooley was a 3-year letterman from 1939-41 on UT's basketball team; Texas' first Final Four was just 2 years later in 1943, after Cooley had graduated and gone to med school at UT Medical - Galveston, then Johns Hopkins.

These UT alums should not be forgotten just because of some non-graduates who have a bankroll in the millions or billions.

 

I recall reading that the limestone pit off Far West Blvd was part of the effort to find Magnesium (now filled with grocery stores, apartments, etc.).