For the past forty year the non-profit (501c) “Alliance for Higher Education” has been one of the primary leaders in helping bring higher education innovations and services to the broad North Texas region.  Originating in 1965 as “The Association for Graduate Education and Research” (TAGER), it pioneered the first television-delivered, interactive educational offerings in the region, bringing classrooms of both public and private institutions directly to students at their workplaces. Ultimately over 20,000 graduate degrees were awarded to students based on their TAGER coursework.  In 1980, to provide a wider variety of cooperative services to education in the region, TAGER merged with the Inter-University Council to form the “Association for Higher Education of North Texas” (AHE). AHE member institutions were public and private universities and community colleges in an area extending to Wichita Falls and Stephenville on the West, Commerce in the East, Sherman in the North and Waco to the South.   Later, in the early 1990’s, the name was changed again to the “Alliance for Higher Education” in conjunction with a broadening of the strategic objectives and geographical reach of AHE.

At its peak membership over 30 educational institutions were members of AHE and participated in such services as interlibrary loans, a regional library catalog, joint purchasing agreements, etc. in addition to access to the TAGER TV system.  While educational institutions have traditionally been the official “members” of AHE from its inception, supporting participation by business, industry and public sector individuals and organizations has been equally strong.  For example, Cecil Green, one of the founders of Texas Instruments, originally funded TAGER.  While much of the strategic input for AHE came from its long-standing “Council of Presidents” of the member educational institutions, the central, governing Board of Trustees for AHE has always included a majority of non-academic members from business, industry and the public sector.

Over the years AHE has been a leader or key participant in a variety of initiative benefiting higher education – too many to discuss in detail here – but two of them may help convey the nature and scope of these efforts:

1. In the early-to-mid 1990’s AHE worked with a coalition of Dallas civic groups and several AHE member educational institutions to raise funds for and found a downtown University Center in Dallas to allow both downtown employees and “southern sector” residents ready access to a boutique of advanced education providers.  AHE initially staffed and operated the center for the first two years until it became self-supporting. Today six private and public universities and the Dallas County Community College operate the “Universities Center at Dallas” offering higher education access to thousands of students.
2. In the mid-to-late 1990’s AHE raised over $5M in cash and business-provided “in kind” equipment and service to upgrade the old TAGER analog TV network to an all-digital system including a fiber optic data “spine” spanning D/FW from TCU on the west to the University of Texas – Dallas in the east.  The project included a major new building (Center for Collaborative Learning, Research and Communications Technology) on space leased from the campus of UTD.  Later, the area’s first Internet 2 “GigaPoP” was added to service many of the university communities in the North Texas area.

With the rapid growth of the Internet and a strong downturn in defense-related industry funding for TAGER courses in 2002, AHE greatly reduced its employee count and agreed with the University of Texas System to donate AHE Internet and building assets, valued at $10-15 million, to the System.  AHE retained an office on the UTD campus and its valuable spectrum allocations and has an annual income stream of around $250,000 from leases of a portion of the spectrum.  Currently AHE has plans to employ that income to make grants to incentivize proposals for external research funding for the area.

In summary, AHE has a long track record of successful, collaborative support of higher education in the North Texas region, with long-standing connections with the areas educational institutions and a unique governance of and support by a combination of education, business and public sector leaders. Because of these reasons, we believe AHE to be the leading candidate for nucleating the North Texas RCIC.  If chosen to do so, in addition to commitment of its annual income stream and other assets, it is the intention of AHE to broaden and strengthen the Board of Trustees to include members of even higher stature in the business and civic communities across the wide North Texas region – and the process of identifying candidates for this is already under way.