About University of Texas at Austin

FOUNDED: 1883

PHONE: (512) 471-3434

WEBSITE: www.utexas.edu

University of Texas at Austin Mission & Bio

MISSION STATEMENT:

The mission of The University of Texas at Austin is to achieve excellence in the interrelated areas of undergraduate education, graduate education, research and public service. The university provides superior and comprehensive educational opportunities at the baccalaureate through doctoral and special professional educational levels. The university contributes to the advancement of society through research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the development and dissemination of new knowledge, including the commercialization of University discoveries. The university preserves and promotes the arts, benefits the state’s economy, serves the citizens through public programs and provides other public service.

Nearly 140 years ago, The University of Texas at Austin opened with one building, eight professors, and 221 students. Today, UT ranks among the top 40 universities in the world. It is both a community — more than 51,000 students in 18 colleges and schools, their teachers, researchers and staff — and a nation, Longhorn Nation, with a global network of nearly half a million alumni.

In September 1883, The University of Texas was officially opened in a ceremony inside an incomplete building on a grassy hill where the Tower now stands. Classes that semester were held in the temporary Capitol, a three-story building on Congress Avenue housing state government while the current Capitol was under construction. The following January, students reported to the campus and its one building, a ghost of history now known as Old Main.

In 1929, the Association of American Universities confirmed that UT was indeed a university of the first class when the AAU invited UT into membership. In Texas, only three universities are AAU members, and UT was the first by more than 50 years.

In 1950, no flagship university in the former Confederacy admitted black students. That year, the lawsuit of a postman who wanted to earn a law degree at Texas worked its way to the Supreme Court. UT fought integration, but Heman Sweatt prevailed and became the university’s first black student. Sweatt v. Painter became the critical precedent to the Brown case, which finally ended the fallacy of “separate but equal” and began in earnest the slow process of integration.

The year 1963 marked the first time two very different men who made a gigantic impact on the university’s modern character both were in power: Harry Ransom and Frank Erwin.

Harry Ransom came to UT in 1935 to teach English, rose through the ranks, and in 1960 was appointed president, then chancellor of the UT System.

By 2012, Austin had become the 11th largest city in America — larger than San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston or Seattle. And it was the largest by far not to have a medical school and teaching hospital. Community leaders, led by state senator Kirk Watson, wanted a medical school to improve health locally. University leaders wanted a medical school for all the good synergies it would create.

When citizens of Travis County voted for a tax to support a school and teaching hospital, Michael and Susan Dell stepped forward with a gift of $50 million, and the Dell Medical School at UT was born, welcoming its first class of future doctors in 2016.

Dell Med is setting itself apart with the audacious goal of changing health care itself and is already a game-changing asset to Central Texas and the university.