University of Texas at Austin

• 1. Introduction

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  The University of Texas at Austin opened its doors on the 15th of September 1883, more than half a century after the first written promise of a public university appeared in the 1827 constitution of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. That original promise produced nothing. A second mandate, written into the Constitution of the Republic after Texas won independence from Mexico in 1836, also produced nothing. Even an 1858 allocation of $100,000 in United States bonds was gutted by the Civil War, leaving only $16,000 in the university's coffers by 1865. What finally brought the institution into being was stubbornness, oil, and a contested popular vote. Today, with more than 53,000 students and annual research expenditures exceeding one billion dollars, it is the flagship of the University of Texas System. But the questions that make UT Austin genuinely interesting go beyond the numbers. How did a university born in financial ruin become a research powerhouse? What did oil have to do with it? And what does a 307-foot tower, a 1,200-pound Civil War cannon, and a carillon of 56 bells tell us about the soul of a public university in Texas?

• 2. A Foundation Built on Conflict

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  Austin was chosen as the site of the new university with 30,913 votes in a popular election held after the Texas legislature organized the university's structure on the 30th of March 1881. Galveston was designated for the medical department. The cornerstone of the Old Main Building was laid on the 17th of November 1882 at the original "College Hill" location, and university President Ashbel Smith expressed optimism about Texas's untapped resources at the ceremony. That optimism would be tested almost immediately by political interference. In 1916, Texas Governor James E. Ferguson became embroiled in a contentious dispute with the university over faculty appointments. His attempt to influence those appointments led to a retaliatory veto of the university's entire budget. The Texas House of Representatives responded by impeaching Ferguson. The Senate convicted him on charges including misapplication of public funds and removed him from office. The university had defended its faculty, but at enormous cost. Construction and expansion remained hampered by a constitutional restriction against using state revenues for university buildings, a barrier that would require a very different kind of intervention to overcome.

• 3. Oil, Money, and the Permanent Fund

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  Santa Rita No. 1 was the well that changed everything. When it struck oil on university-owned lands in 1923, it began filling the Permanent University Fund in ways that legislative appropriations never could. The additional income from Permanent University Fund investments allowed for bond issues in 1931 and 1947, finally providing the construction capital the university had lacked for decades. Those bond issues also settled a longstanding tension with the Agricultural and Mechanical College, now known as Texas A&M University. On the 8th of April 1931, the Forty Second Legislature passed H.B. 368, dedicating to the Agricultural and Mechanical College a one-third interest in the Available University Fund, the annual income from Permanent University Fund investments. By the time the PUF reached over $33 billion in assets as of year-end 2021, its revenues actually accounted for less than ten percent of the universities' annual budgets. That shift forced both systems to pursue sponsored research and private donations aggressively. The O'Donnell Foundation of Dallas, for instance, gave more than $135 million to UT Austin between 1983 and 2013. The Moody Foundation alone awarded the College of Communication $50 million in 2012, the largest endowment any communication college had ever received.

• 4. The Tower and Its Shadows

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  Paul Philippe Cret designed the Beaux-Arts Main Building, including its 307-foot tower, which was completed in 1937. On ordinary evenings the tower glows white; for athletic victories and academic honors it burns burnt orange. At its summit sits a carillon of 56 bells, the largest in Texas, played on weekdays by student carillonneurs who also observe the Westminster Quarters every quarter-hour between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. The tower's history carries a darker weight. On the 1st of August 1966, student Charles Whitman barricaded the observation deck and, armed with multiple firearms, killed 15 people on campus. Eleven died from the deck and below the tower clocks; three more were killed inside the tower itself; two others were wounded inside the observation deck. Police breached the tower and shot Whitman. The observation deck was closed, reopened in 1968, and then closed again in 1975 following a series of suicide jumps. Safety fencing and precautions installed by 1998 allowed the deck to reopen to the public indefinitely for weekend tours. Near the base of the tower, a turtle pond park was created in memory of those affected by the 1966 tragedy. The first presidential library ever established on a university campus was dedicated nearby on the 22nd of May 1971, with former President Lyndon B. Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, and then-President Richard Nixon in attendance.

• 5. Integration, Exclusion, and Reckoning

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  After the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954, a Houston-area teenager named Marion Ford had been accepted to become one of the first Black students at UT Austin. When Ford told a reporter he intended to try out for the football team, the Ford Crisis began and all Black admissions were rescinded until policy could be drawn up. In the fall of 1956, the first Black students entered the university's undergraduate class. They were permitted to live in campus dormitories, but were barred from campus cafeterias. Full desegregation of university facilities did not arrive until 1965. The university had adopted standardized testing for admissions in the mid-1950s, a decision the source describes as at least in part a conscious strategy to minimize the number of Black undergraduates after Brown removed the option of simply barring entry. In June 2020, UT student-athletes released a #WeAreOne statement calling for, among other changes, the renaming of buildings, new statues, and the replacement of "The Eyes of Texas" as the university's alma mater. UT Interim President Jay Hartzell announced a multi-million dollar investment in programs to recruit, retain, and support Black students. A monument to the Precursors, the first Black undergraduates to attend UT Austin, was commissioned for the East Mall. The question of replacing "The Eyes of Texas," however, remained untouched. On the 2nd of April 2024, the university laid off approximately 60 individuals, most of them formerly in DEI-related programs, in compliance with Senate Bill 17 and in response to a March 26th letter from Texas State Senator Brandon Creighton. Faculty and students criticized the move as over-compliance, since the university had already been compliant with the law since the 1st of January 2024.

• 6. Research and the Physical Machine

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  The Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the world's third-largest, anchors the university's McDonald Observatory some 450 miles west of Austin. The university also operates a TRIGA nuclear reactor at the J. J. Pickle Research Campus in north Austin and runs the Texas Advanced Computing Center there, which has hosted a succession of supercomputers: Ranger from 2008 to 2013, Stampede from 2013 to 2017, Stampede2 since 2017, and Frontera since 2019. The university's Applied Research Laboratories, founded in 1946, developed or tested the vast majority of the Navy's high-frequency sonar equipment. In 2007, the Navy granted a research contract funded up to $928 million over ten years. Running beneath all of this, connecting most campus buildings, is a tunnel system constructed around 1928 under the supervision of engineering professor Carl J. Eckhardt Jr. The tunnels stretch approximately six miles and carry communications and utility services; they are closed to the public and guarded by silent alarms. The university's seventeen libraries and seven museums collectively hold over nine million volumes, making it the seventh-largest academic library in the country. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center holds one of only 21 remaining complete copies of the Gutenberg Bible and the first permanent photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras, taken by Nicéphore Niépce.

• 7. Athletes, Legends, and Longhorns

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  Texas has won 50 total national championships, 42 of them NCAA championships. The football team's greatest run came under coach Darrell Royal, who led the Longhorns to national championships in 1963, 1969, and 1970. A fourth title arrived under head coach Mack Brown in 2005, following a 41-38 victory over previously undefeated Southern California in the 2006 Rose Bowl. The baseball team has made more trips to the College World Series, 35, than any other school, winning championships in 1949, 1950, 1975, 1983, 2002, and 2005. The men's swimming and diving team has claimed 13 NCAA Division I titles, more than any other Division I program, a tradition first developed under Coach Tex Robertson. Among individual alumni, Kevin Durant was selected second overall in the 2007 NBA draft after becoming the first freshman to win any of the National Player of the Year awards. Roger Clemens, a seven-time Cy Young Award winner, left Austin after helping the Longhorns win the 1983 College World Series. Golfer Jordan Spieth led the university's golf club to the NCAA Men's Golf Championship in 2012 and went on to win The Masters Tournament three years after leaving the university. Robert Cade, the inventor of the sports drink Gatorade, is also an alumnus. Students and alumni had earned a total of 155 Olympic medals as of 2021.

• 8. Beyond the Forty Acres

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  The university's formal footprint now totals 1,438.5 acres, well beyond the original 40 acres on "College Hill." Walter Cronkite, once described as the most trusted man in America during his tenure as CBS Evening News anchor, attended UT Austin, as did director Wes Anderson and actor Owen Wilson, who wrote Bottle Rocket together while students. Janis Joplin attended the university before her career as a singer; she was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Farrah Fawcett left after her junior year to pursue modeling. Actor Trevante Rhodes competed as a sprinter for the Longhorns and graduated with a degree in Applied Learning and Development in 2012 before starring as Chiron in Moonlight in 2016. Novelist J. M. Coetzee received the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature; Raymond Benson was the only American ever commissioned to write James Bond novels, doing so between 1996 and 2002. Tom Landry, legendary pro football coach, interrupted his education after a semester to serve in the United States Army Air Corps and returned to play fullback on the Longhorns' bowl-game winners on New Year's Day of 1948 and 1949. Admiral William H. McRaven, who organized and executed Operation Neptune's Spear, the raid that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, is among the alumni in government and military service. The Dell Medical School, founded in 2013, is among the university's nineteen colleges and schools, the newest of which, the School of Civic Leadership, was established in 2023.