Agenda, Cultivation, and Campus Divide

In 2025, Texas Southern University (TSU) dominated Houston headlines with a frequency far exceeding that of its neighboring institutions. Financial audits, governance disputes, and safety concerns have been relentlessly amplified, creating a dominant public narrative of institutional instability. Yet this framing becomes deeply problematic when viewed alongside serious—and sometimes more severe—incidents at the University of Houston (UH) and Rice University that have drawn comparatively restrained coverage. The disparity reveals more about how media agenda-setting and cultivation shape perception, rather than campus realities.

Agenda-setting theory posits that media outlets shape what the public considers important by selecting which stories to emphasize and repeat. TSU’s challenges—particularly a state audit citing weaknesses in financial controls and procurement—became a sustained media event. The repetition mattered. Each follow-up story reinforced the notion of chronic dysfunction, rarely contextualized within the broader landscape of higher education governance challenges across Texas.

At UH, however, 2025 unfolded with a troubling pattern of campus crime that directly affected students’ safety. There were armed robberies, sexual assaults, and repeated incidents near parking garages and residence halls. Students organized protests, demanding accountability and protection. The university responded with multimillion-dollar security upgrades and emergency policy changes. Yet, although these developments were reported, they lacked the sustained framing that would have placed UH under prolonged scrutiny. The stories appeared episodically, not cumulatively—treated as unfortunate events rather than symptoms of systemic concern.

Rice University’s case is even more illustrative of selective framing. As one of the nation’s most prestigious private institutions, Rice experienced incidents in 2024–2025 involving sexual assault allegations, student mental health crises, and controversies around campus policing and disciplinary transparency. These matters surfaced briefly, often framed with careful language emphasizing “ongoing investigations” or “institutional response,” before quickly fading from the news cycle. Rarely did coverage escalate into broader questions about campus culture, governance, or safety at Rice.