Southern Methodist University

Southern Methodist University, situated on a 163-acre campus in suburban University Park (an incorporated residential district surrounded by Dallas), remains independent of state support and nonsectarian in its teaching, although it is related to the Methodist Church. The school was the project of the Texas Educational Commission, made up of representatives of the five annual conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Texas. These conferences in 1911 accepted for the church the ownership and control of the institution. In order that it might begin on a broader foundation, especially in regard to its theological and graduate schools, the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 1914 made the university the connectional institution for all Methodist conferences west of the Mississippi. In 1939, with the unification of the Methodist Church, the ownership of the university was vested in the South Central Jurisdictional Conference of the Methodist Church, comprising the states of Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. Since September 22, 1915, when the school opened with an enrollment of 706 in two buildings on a bare hillside, the institution has grown to have a plant made up of seventy-three permanent buildings on a well-planned campus and an enrollment of 9,000. Assets totaled $527 million, which included a $352 million endowment in 1992.

The university is divided into the Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, the Meadows School of the Arts, the Edwin L. Cox School of Business, the School of Engineering, the Dedman School of Law, the Perkins School of Theology, the Center of Teacher Education, and the Division of Education and Lifelong Learning. SMU offers eighty different undergraduate majors and confers a number of bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.