UT Expansion in Houston, and Teaching Tacos: Thursday’s Show (February 11, 2016)

According to the University of Texas, which has purchased more than 300 acres in southwest Houston, the University of Houston has declined UT’s invitation to be part of a task force to plan how the land may be used. UH officials aren’t happy about UT’s planned expansion into Houston, which UT characterizes as an opportunity to collaborate on an “intellectual hub.” The University of Houston Alumni Association has joined UH administrators in urging a halt to the expansion.

Is this just about turf protection, or is there something more to UH’s opposition? On this edition of Houston Matters, we talk it over with Benjamin Wermund, who covers higher education for the Houston Chronicle.

Also this hour: The Kinder Institute at Rice University tonight (Feb. 11, 2016) will host a talk by Dr. James Sallis on designing cities for active living. He’s the director of Active Living Research, a program from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. What is active living, you ask? We find out.

Then: You may have stumbled across an article or two last week about a University of Kentucky course on “taco literacy.” The class offers students a chance ot learn about food and culture in a largely Latino area of Lexington. Well, it turns out, Houston has its own class on tacos with similar goals. We talk with instructor Temple Northup, associate professor of communication at the University of Houston. (We also listen back to a conversation from 2014 with Jeffrey Pilcher, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, who has examined the role Texas plays in the globalization of Mexican food).

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