The University of Texas at Arlington

The University of Texas at Arlington began at a site which had been occupied by a series of private institutions since 1895. In 1917 local residents obtained state support for buying the property and forming a branch of Texas A&M there under the name Grubbs Vocational College, a junior college with a high school department. In May 1923 Grubbs was renamed North Texas Junior Agricultural College, and ten years later the high school unit was dropped. By 1945 students referred to the two-year college as NTAC. Only three deans ran the college from 1917 to 1949: M. L. Williams (1917–25), E. E. Davis (1925–46), and E. H. Hereford (1946–49). In 1948, in the reorganization of Texas A&M, NTAC was made a major branch and Hereford became president. In May 1949 the school was renamed Arlington State College. At that time the institution had about 110 teachers and 2,000 students. In 1959 ASC became a four-year senior college that granted undergraduate degrees in the arts and sciences, engineering, and business administration. Student enrolment was 6,388. A major building program between 1950 and 1965 saw the completion of eighteen projects valued at $14,225,000.

The growth of Arlington and the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area provided the impetus for the rapid development of the college after 1959. In April 1965 the Texas legislature transferred Arlington State College from the Texas A&M University System to the University of Texas System for administrative purposes. In March 1967 the name was changed to the University of Texas at Arlington. At that time the faculty numbered 486 and the students 11,501. In 1964 the institution received full accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities. The Texas Association of Colleges and Universities extended similar recognition. Relevant accrediting associations approved undergraduate programs in accounting, business administration, social work, architecture, and nursing. In 1965 UT Arlington offered undergraduate degrees in arts and sciences, and engineering, as well as associate degrees in commercial and technical subjects. In 1966 the university initiated master's programs in economics, electrical engineering, engineering math, math, psychology, and physics. As early as 1958 the university had begun outreach programs. The foreign language department participated in a cooperative program with the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Dallas County. Also the university participated in the Association of Higher Education, a consortium in North Texas, to introduce undergraduate and graduate courses on closed-circuit television. The Energy Research Center was established in 1968 to sponsor research in electricity generation and transmission. Centers in a dozen or so other fields were started. Beginning in 1960 various departments organized lecture series and short courses. In 1964 the history department inaugurated the annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, which brought together leading scholars of American history. The electrical engineering department in 1967 began offering an annual two-week course for electrical power engineers. The Center for Economic Education (1972) offered credit and noncredit courses for public school and college personnel.