University of North Texas

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of North Texas sits in Denton, a city of roughly 170,000 people in the northern reaches of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Founded in 1890, UNT has grown from a teachers college into one of the largest research universities in the American South. By fall 2024, it enrolled 46,180 students, making it the fourth-largest university in Texas and the biggest in the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area. What turned a small normal school into an R1 research powerhouse? And what does a university that claims firsts in jazz education, green construction, and early college programs reveal about how regional institutions reshape entire regions? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

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• 2. From Teachers College to Research Giant

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  In 1976, the Carnegie Foundation gave North Texas its first significant research classification, designating it a Class 1 Doctorate-Granting Institution. Four decades later, in February 2016, the Carnegie system reclassified it at the highest level: an R1 Doctoral University with Very High Research Activity. That reclassification placed UNT in the most selective tier of American higher education. Accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools stretches back to 1925, but the university's appetite for research built slowly. Membership in Oak Ridge Associated Universities, a consortium of 105 major research universities, dates to 1954, linking UNT early to national laboratories and federal science partnerships. The Physics Department's Ion Beam Laboratory sits at a particular edge of that scientific culture. It operates four accelerators, including a 3 MV tandem Pelletron and a 200 keV Cockcroft-Walton accelerator, and conducts multidisciplinary research across medium-energy ion beams ranging from 10 keV to 15 MeV. The facility occupies about 4,000 square feet inside the Physics Building on the main Denton campus. UNT has hosted the Conference on the Application of Accelerators in Research and Industry in even-numbered years since 1976. The Biology Department adds its own scale: the Life Sciences Complex covers more than 176,000 square feet of LEED Gold-certified research space, with rooftop greenhouses and one of the nation's largest university aquatics labs. Limnology work at UNT traces back to the 1930s under Joseph Kean Gwynn Silvey, who lived from 1907 to 1989. In 2023, Texas formalized its investment in UNT's research future through the Texas University Fund, seeded with $3.9 billion and designed to deliver an annual $100 million permanent endowment to four participating universities.

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• 3. Jazz, Music, and an Unusual Kind of First

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  North Texas was first in the world to offer a degree in jazz studies. That single fact drew musicians and scholars to Denton from across the country, and eventually from abroad. By the 1940s, the College of Music had already grown into one of the largest music institutions of higher learning in North America. Today it holds the largest enrollment of any music school accredited by the National Association of Schools of Music. The music library, founded in 1941, houses over 300,000 volumes of books, periodicals, and scores, along with roughly 900,000 sound recordings. U.S. News and World Report ranked UNT's jazz studies program the best in the country every year from 1994, when it began evaluating graduate jazz programs, through 1997, when it retired that category. The university's jazz ensemble, the One O'Clock Lab Band, has been nominated for seven Grammy Awards. Radio station KNTU, broadcasting at 88.1 FM, has carried jazz as its predominant format since 1981. On the 22nd of March 1988, the station increased its broadcast power from 6,700 watts to 100,000 watts, extending its signal to roughly a 60-mile radius from the Denton campus. KNTU is now part of the Mean Green Radio Network, which claims a reach of 10 million listeners. Bill Mercer, a faculty member who lived from 1926 to 2025, shaped a generation of sports broadcasters and radio personalities out of North Texas, including Mark Followill, the television play-by-play voice for the Dallas Mavericks since 2005.

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• 4. Mean Green and the Origin of a Nickname

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  In 1966, North Texas fielded a football defensive squad that finished the season second in the nation against the rush. Fans and media called them the Mean Green, and the nickname stuck. That same season, Joe Greene was a sophomore at North Texas, playing left defensive tackle and competing in track and field. When Greene joined the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1969, Pittsburgh fans assumed that "Mean Joe Greene" was a nickname Greene had carried from childhood. What they did not know was that "Mean Green" referred to the team color and the team, not to Greene personally. North Texas's athletic department, media, and fans found the national confusion charming. By 1968, the words "Mean Green" appeared on shirts, buttons, bumper stickers, and the cover of the university's football brochure. The mascot behind that color story has its own history. The American eagle was officially adopted on the 1st of February 1922, following a student-faculty council debate and a student election. The eagle's first nickname, Scrappy, arrived in 1950. In 1974, during the Vietnam War, students renamed the mascot Eppy because the word sounded less warlike. The name eventually returned to Scrappy, where it has stayed. Men's basketball added its own landmark in 2023, when North Texas won the National Invitation Tournament, capping a run that had also included Conference USA titles in 2022, 2021, and 2020.

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• 5. The Fight Song and the Man Who Wrote It

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  Francis Edwin Stroup was born in 1909 and died in 2010, which means he lived to be 101. He won a university-sponsored fight song competition in 1939, ten years after graduating from North Texas, composing both lyrics and music for "Fight, North Texas." The contest was organized by Floyd Graham. Stroup taught summers at North Texas from 1939 to 1942. He was a collegiate academician who played piano mostly by ear and never majored or worked in music professionally. While serving as an associate professor at the University of Wyoming from 1946 to 1950, Stroup rewrote the lyrics for the chorus of "Ragtime Cowboy Joe," which the university adopted in 1961 as its fight song. After leaving Wyoming, he headed the Physical Education Department at Southern Arkansas University from 1950 to 1959, then joined Northern Illinois University as a Professor of Physical Education. There, Stroup rewrote the chorus of the NIU "Loyalty Song" by Alonzo Neil Annas, who lived from 1882 to 1966. That version was informally adopted in 1961 and officially in 1963 as the Huskie Fight Song. He also composed songs for Drake University and the University of Chicago. Stroup was inducted into the Halls of Fame of Northern Illinois University and the University of North Texas in 1987. The alma mater tells a parallel story. In 1919, music student Julia Smith and third-year football letterman Charles Kirby Langford co-composed "Glory to the Green and White," which the university adopted as its alma mater in 1922. Smith wrote the music; Langford, who lived from 1903 to 1931, wrote the lyrics.

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• 6. Sustainability and Green Construction

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  In 2008, North Texas became the first large public university in Texas to sign the American College and University Presidents' Climate Commitment. At that time, five full undergraduate-graduate institutions in Texas were among the 658 signatories, and UNT was the largest of those five. The university committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2040 and to meeting a minimum LEED Silver rating for all new buildings. DATCU Stadium, which opened in 2011, became the first newly built sports stadium in the nation to earn a Platinum LEED certification, the highest of four LEED levels. It features wind turbines, eco-friendly building materials, and native landscape architecture. The Life Sciences Complex, also completed in 2011, earned a LEED Gold rating. It includes four climate-controlled rooftop greenhouses and an aquatics laboratory with more than 2,500 tanks. By the time the Princeton Review's 2012 Guide to 322 Green Colleges listed UNT for the second consecutive year, the university was ranking in the top 17 percent of green-compliant universities nationwide. Forty percent of campus energy was drawn from renewable sources, and 43 percent of buildings had undergone energy retrofits. Since 2009, the university had recycled nearly 1,000 tons of waste. In 2017, UNT purchased a year's worth of renewable energy credits, allowing the campus to run on renewable energy for that period.

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• 7. Traditions and Tangible Objects

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  A 2,000-pound bell arrived in Denton from Michigan in 1891, one year after the university was founded. It rang as a curfew bell from 1892 to 1928. The Talons, a spirit and service organization formed in 1960, retrieved the bell in 1964, mounted it on a wagon, and began rolling it around the football field to rally crowds. After the bell developed a crack, it was retired to the University Union in 1982. A replacement 1,600-pound bell took its place at games. The Talons also fire a cannon called Boomer at football games, a tradition dating to the 1970s. The cannon is a 7/8-scale M1841 6-pound smooth-bore muzzleloader mounted on hand-crafted solid oak from the campus. Talon alumni restored it three times; the most recent restoration was in fall 2007. The Mean Green Machine, a green and black 1931 Ford Model A Tudor Sedan, was donated by alumnus Rex Cauble in 1974 and driven at football games and special events. In 2012, engineering students installed a NetGain WarP 9 electric engine. McConnell Tower, the clock tower atop the Hurley Administration Building, is lit green after football victories. The clock face shows two different times: 1:00 to honor the One O'Clock Lab Band, and 7:00 to mark the curfew set in 1892. The 22-foot bronze statue In High Places, a flying eagle sculpted by Gerald Balciar, was dedicated during the university's centennial in 1990. Maple Street Hall became the first all-vegan college cafeteria in the country when it opened on the 22nd of August 2011.

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• 8. Programs That Came First

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  Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, known as TAMS, began in 1987 as the first program of its kind in the United States. It admitted Texas high school students, typically rising juniors, through competitive selection. Students lived on campus, completed their final two years of high school, and earned transferable college credit simultaneously. At the time of reporting, TAMS remained the only such program in Texas and one of five nationally. The Journalism school has its own claim to distinction: eight Pulitzer Prizes have been won by five alumni, among them Bill Moyers and Howard Swindle. Curricular journalism at North Texas dates to 1945. The graduate division launched in fall 1970 under Reginald Conway Westmorland, who lived from 1926 to 2021. In 1999, twelve years after the death of Frank Willis Mayborn, who lived from 1903 to 1987, the graduate program was renamed in his honor. The College of Health and Public Service claims it was the first American university to offer a degree in Emergency Management and Disaster Science, having done so in 1983. The College of Merchandising, Hospitality and Tourism offers the only Bachelor of Science in Event Design and Experience Management in Texas. Its Master of Science in International Sustainable Tourism, offered jointly with the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center in Costa Rica, was the first degree of its kind in the United States. Art classes at UNT began in 1894, four years after the university was founded, and the first Master of Science degree in art was awarded in 1937. The Intensive English Language Institute, established in 1977, has prepared international students for university study in the United States for nearly five decades, operating from Marquis Hall on the Denton campus.

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