Guy Bailey has been on the phone a lot lately, talking athletics. Talking stability. Talking money. Talking heartland football. These are uneasy days for the president of Texas Tech and his eight counterparts across the shrinking Big 12 Conference. The 16-year-old league appeared to have averted another implosion last week when its remaining nine schools’ athletic directors met in Dallas to pick up the pieces after Texas A&M announced it would become the third member to leave the league in the last 16 months.

  On an unseasonably warm afternoon in January, Terri Barnett rode in the passenger seat of a vehicle barreling south on Indiana Avenue toward the nearest animal clinic. Her prize-winning 2-year-old Yorkshire terrier, Holly, lay in her lap on the brink of death, her tongue blue and eyes open. Barnett, too emotional to drive, attempted CPR between sobs as a groomer behind the wheel screeched into the Above & Beyond Pet Care Hospital parking lot and rushed the dog inside.

Texas Tech employees with newborn babies at home soon will find it easier to step out for lunch. But not their own. A $70,000 grant from the Texas Department of State Health Services will help Tech officials renovate between five and six breast-milk pumping locations, or lactation rooms, across campus. When they open in January, these rooms would feature pumping equipment, refrigerators and, ideally, running water.

Texas Tech's governing board is scheduled to set tuition for the upcoming school year Thursday during a special meeting in Dallas, where every university dollar could land under a microscope. Regents' meeting in the Metroplex comes nearly a month after lawmakers passed a state budget that shaved nearly 7 percent from the system's budget, amounting to nearly $30 million in cuts from its Lubbock flagship alone. Anticipating cuts, school officials asked the board in March to approve a tuition increase window of up to 6 percent.