UT Dallas Through the Years: 1970s

[Katherine] Welcome to a special mini-series from the UT Dallas CometCast Network, celebrating the 50th anniversary of UT Dallas’s founding. You’ll hear from the people who were there to witness the university’s growth throughout the decades and learn more about what makes UT Dallas such a special place.

Hi, I’m Katherine and I’ll be your guide as we look back through the years. The 1970s was a topsy-turvy time in the United States. The fight for equality that was ignited in the ’60s continued on. The Beatles broke up. President Richard Nixon resigned his office in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The country celebrated its bicentennial and Star Wars debuted. At UT Dallas the decade saw the University’s first physical expansion, the arrival of the Love Jack sculpture on campus, the addition of junior and senior undergraduate students and the creation of several schools including the School of Management and the School of Arts and Humanities. It was also a time that saw the University’s spirit and traditions begin to take shape.

Dr. Bryce Jordan was the first president of UT Dallas, serving from 1971 until 1981. He took the helm of an institution that was young but growing rapidly. The University expanded its faculty from 50 to 215 and increased student enrollment from 40 to more than 7,000 during his tenure. UT Dallas also began accepting juniors and seniors during his term and he awarded the first bachelor’s degrees at spring commencement in 1976. Among his many other UT Dallas legacies was his selection of the University’s colors — orange and green. In a 2009 interview he recalled his time at UT Dallas.

[Bryce Jordan] I had been made the offer by the Board of Regents of North Texas and had accepted the offer and my now deceased wife, Jonelle, and I went to Denton to look over the president’s home and decide on the colors of the rooms and where the new swimming pool was going to be and I was very excited about that. Late one night Jonelle and I were sitting up talking about our move to Denton. She went to bed and I was still up reading and I got a call from Mickey LeMaistre, who then was chancellor of the UT System, asking me to turn down that offer and go to UT Dallas. I was very surprised because I was the least likely person around to be president of UT Dallas, being a historical musicologist and having been formerly head of the music department at UT Austin. And a few days later after I had given up the North Texas job I went up to Dallas to meet with the so-called selection committee of the faculty. That was chaired by a cosmologist space scientist named Ivor Robinson. I met with that committee — I’ve forgotten who else was on it; I think Stan Rupert, who was a, a molecular biologist, and I think Anton Hales, who was head of geosciences as they called it — I met with them. We talked for a while and I was puzzled enough that I said to Ivor Robinson, ‘Why in the world would you scientists want this musicologist to be president of your university?’ And I never will forget Ivor’s response. He said ‘Dr. Jordan, you don’t know a thing about what we do and we like it that way.’ And that’s how I became president of UT Dallas.

My mother was living in Weatherford, west of Fort Worth near where she had grown up and she was then in her 80s. She wanted to know about when I was going to work so my wife and I went to Weatherford, picked her up and brought her out to see quote ‘the campus.’ There was a single dirt road running up to the Founders Building and we drove onto that dirt road and my mother said, ‘Bryce, what have they done to you?’ And that was sort of the impression because there was a sign out on Campbell Road the painted had peeled off of. I don’t know whether it said SCAS or whether it said UT Dallas — it may have said one or the other, either Southwest Center for Advanced Studies or UT Dallas. And that was the extent of it. So that was my first impression. Uh, I thought we needed a logo. We didn’t have one and I sat on with some colored pencils and sketched this out and I wanted to, I wanted it to have the UT in it for sure, because that’s a prestigious pair of initials for the Dallas-Fort Worth area, but I wanted it to have a D there as well so I drew the oblong shape and then put the dividing line between UT and D and I wanted the colors of UT Austin in it because I knew everybody would understand and would recognize burnt orange and white but I wanted another color to identify it with UT Dallas and thus the green was added. That’s how it happened. And I knew that some of the things I suggested would never happen and I, uh, envisioned that it would be heavily science-oriented. I saw the necessity that it have some strength in the social sciences and humanities and so I drew up a plan which involved all of those. I decided that the institution should be as interdisciplinary as possible. That was a fairly new concept in those days and still many great universities don’t really participate, don’t pursue that sort of thing.

[Katherine] Dr. George Fair joined UT Dallas in 1975 as an assistant professor. Over the next two decades he held various positions at the University; he became the dean of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies in January 1994 and the vice president of diversity and community engagement in 2014. In 2000 he also started the Academic Bridge Program, which helps high-potential first-generation college students complete a college education.

[George Fair] Well I, I came in when the actual undergraduate university began, which was the September of 1975 and uh I felt that it was a great opportunity to help begin a new university. I came from the University of Pittsburgh, which is an older, well-established university in, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, obviously. I came to help bring a focus — we started at that time a special education program, an education program that trained special education teachers, okay and also for persons that wanted to become special education teachers. And my focus was on teaching math to students that were enrolled in special education programs. Yeah, well, when I first came, uh, which is back as I said in September ’75, there were only the the Jonsson, the McDermott and the Green buildings were just being opened and so we just opened those in September or really August of ’75. The existing buildings were only Founders and Berkner and there were no housing. The administration was located in a small temporary building on Waterview Parkway so I guess I could say that the the number of buildings clearly were, was less than 10, okay. It was just, uh, pretty much a, very much of a kind of small, isolated area in which we had this university we were beginning. The campus was most active in the evening and there was not very much campus activity during the day and so it was pretty much kind of, uh, barren during the day but then the campus would come to life in the evening.

I guess, I guess the favorite memories, just the idea of, of starting a new university and uh, developing new courses, developing new programs and, and we had the, uh, freedom to do that, uh, and so I think that was, uh, the very optimistic thing that, that I, I think that is, was exciting. And it was also exciting for the students because several of the students that we had had been, either had gotten their first two years at the community college or had or were transfer students. Most of them were transfer students from other universities who had come and moved to this community but didn’t have a way of completing their education, okay. And so when we started out with the upper division courses that enabled many of these students that had not had an opportunity to complete their education to do so. Having been here for 45 years, okay, uh, there was no way that you could imagine what it was uh going to be like 45 years later. You just, just hadn’t and the growth has been consistent over the years and then especially the moment in 1990 when we began to take in freshman and sophomore to make it a full-scale university. That’s been, is significant and then just the the growth that we’ve seen that it’s become a full-scale residential undergraduate and graduate university and that I’ve been a major part in to play, had a major part to play in doing that.

[Katherine] Dr. Ross Roser joined UT Dallas as an assistant professor in 1975. He was executive director of the Callier Center for Communications Disorders from 1988 to 2006 and previous head of the doctoral program in audiology at UT Dallas. Roser’s chief research interests lie in the application of hearing instrument technology to improving communication skills. He has been involved in developing and evaluating tactile aids, cochlear implants and hearing aids.

[Ross Roser] At the end of August we were all called into a conference room and the vice president for academic affairs, Dr. Alexander Clark and Dr. Aram Glorig told us that we were now going to be changing our employment status and we’re going to be part of UT Dallas, which is a great surprise. I mean it, it was looming but we didn’t know all the details. Trying to keep a center of that magnitude afloat was getting to be a real challenge so it gave the center some stability and it, of course, it changed their whole mission. We were always involved in research. We always had a clinical program but the educational program became more than just working with children who were hearing impaired but included of course university students and of course at the time was only lower division undergraduate and the graduate programs but overnight we started all of our programs. The impact it had on our mission was outstanding. I mean it was, it was a major impact that has had a long lasting and significant impact on society. I started as, the after I finished my research project I was looking for opportunities across the country and Dr. Glorig came to me and he said, would I be interested in staying in Dallas and being the head of audiology and I didn’t take long to say yes because I realized how important Callier was and the resources available and it fit what I had in mind in terms of my my own goals. Before 1999, audiology was a graduate program but it was not a doctoral level program. In ’99 we transformed it into a the AuD or doctor of audiology program and it is the third-ranked program in the nation. We get over a hundred applicants for about 15 positions so it’s very well recognized. I’m so honored to have been part of that and my own career I look back and, and go that it was serendipitous in the sense that it was unpredictable and being part of it was a phenomenal opportunity. Not only are the things that we do affecting individual people but we are training the clinicians of the future. And so when I go to national meetings and international meetings and I meet our students who are now the leaders of the profession giving talks, publishing papers, taking administrative roles where they are making the key decisions about how people with communication disorders — hearing loss, speech language and hearing loss — are being affected, it’s, it’s, I can’t even, I can’t even express to you how satisfying that is.

[Katherine] Dr. Dennis Kratz joined UT Dallas in 1978 as an associate professor of arts and humanities from the Ohio State University. He held several positions within the School of Arts and Humanities including dean of the school from 1997 to 2019. Kratz has received numerous honors including the University of Texas System Chancellor’s Council Outstanding Teaching Award, the Person of the Year award from the DFW Asian American Citizens Council and a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

[Dennis Kratz] I was at Ohio State University — just huge and organized and I knew my schedule for the next 30 or 40 years. I received a phone call from a good friend who said I know the perfect place for you and I, I remember replying, well, it’s got to be in the sun belt with a, near a big airport and oh yes, interdisciplinary. And he said yep, and I came down here for an interview for a position as associate professor and the atmosphere was congenial and a little bit adventurous. It was new, it was the other part I would describe as chaotic. Nobody knew quite yet what was going on. It was only been a university for three years, really, and the sense was if you came here you’re at the origin of something new and a chance to make it happen, to change it, to contribute to it, to have an impact and what I started telling people years later — because that atmosphere remained — was and it will have an impact on you. This isn’t the place where you can come and do what you’re supposed to do, but the, for example, the first question in the interview was, if you could teach anything you wanted, what would ,what course would you offer? Not ‘Here’s your, here’s what we need.’ It wasn’t a place where you were fitting into a predetermined order but asked to in some way create that order and that was, that was the real– there were other kinds of the environment that go along with being chaotic, uh, but I came down for an interview in June 1978. I was taken to Carolyn Galerstein’s house — she was then the dean of what was then called the School of General Studies — and I was interviewed, uh, by the swimming pool with Carolyn and the assistant professors who were part of the committee and I’ll never forget Victor Worsfold who is one of the legendary original people here, was in an inner tube in the middle of the swimming pool and kind of paddled over to join the, to join the interview and I went, ‘this is okay.’ ’78 — I’ll tell you — to 90 — it was a strange Valhalla. The students were returning students, because we only had juniors and seniors. I kept meeting with these wonderful students, many of whom were women who had interrupted their college education to get married or have children or put their husband through school and they were back in school now. We were just awash in these very intelligent students and they just wanted to learn. Many went on for the PhD. One of the first students in my first class that I taught later went on to get her PhD and become an award-winning professor at the community college. So it was it was an atmosphere that I’d never encountered before with these returning students.

[Katherine] Dr. David Ford joined UT Dallas in 1975 as an associate professor of management and administrative sciences. His long list of accolades includes a Dallas Business Journal 2016 Minority Business Leader Award and one of the inaugural Lifetime Diversity Champion awards from the UT Dallas Office of Diversity and Community Engagement. Ford retired from the university in 2017; at the time he was the longest-serving faculty member in the Naveen Jindal School of Management.

[David Ford] First arrived at UTD July 1, 1975. Dr. Ray Lutz, who was the first dean of School of Management actually was here a year or two earlier and I had met him at a conference, I had known him when he was on faculty at the University of Oklahoma. So this conference was in the fall of ’74. We struck up a conversation and ! said, you know, how are things with the boomer Sooners in Oklahoma? He says, ‘Well I’m not at Oklahoma anymore. I’m now at the University of Texas at Dallas. I’m the new first dean of the School of Management there.’ And so maybe ’75 is the official start but he and a handful of other faculty members were already on board at that time. So when I came home for the Christmas holidays and the fall of ’74 I came out and met with him and a handful of faculty members who were here and he says, ‘Listen we’re recruiting a lot of faculty, getting ready to start up undergraduate programs and so forth.’ And I grew up in Fort Worth. He says, ‘Are you ready to come back home?’ And so they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. You know I had a lot of people there they hired because they were starting upper division undergraduate courses in the fall of ’75. A little hectic because we were scrambling to, you know, put some courses together. I was actually recruited to help set up the MS in management science program as well as design uh some of the doctoral seminars that they ran because they also had had PhD program going at the time and, and then identified other faculty members we, we could recruit in. So it was a little, a little hectic but, uh, the thing I liked about it was that it gave me an opportunity to get in on the ground floor, to really have an impact on the design of the curriculum and, and put my mark on it, uh, in that sense and and so uh, you know it felt good to be able to make a contribution in that way. In fact it was scattered all over about five or six different buildings. It’s interesting because when I arrived in ’75 they were talking about, well, you know, we’re going to be, we’re going to get a School of Management building, we’ll have our own building at some point, uh, in the near future. Well it took almost 25 years for that to happen. But it was great to finally have everybody in the one umbrella, one roof, uh in one space and um that was kind of exciting to move into the new building because it had been talked about, talked about and talked about.

Been pretty active professionally with the academy of management and uh an organization called the PhD Project which, uh, I guess I really am proudest of. That was a project, an organization that was started by KPMG accounting firm. The whole idea behind it was to be able to increase the number of African-American, Hispanic American and Native American business school faculty, because at the time there were less than 300 that they could identify across the the US and in the 25 years since its founding they have quintupled that number. So it’s over 1500 people who are on faculties at schools of business. The first president now that he has transitioned — he’s just retired — he had the idea that, well, you know, if we could change the way people look at the front of the classroom maybe we could get more diverse students in the seats in the classroom and so that was sort of the genesis for starting this and I’m glad to have been on, on the ground floor because I’ve had a chance to mentor a number of young faculty members who’ve come up through the ranks. We’ve seen now people who got admitted to a doctoral program, finished, got appointed to faculties as an assistant professor, moved up through the ranks, have become deans and now we have two, possibly three people who have assumed the role of president having come through the PhD Project and I mean that’s, that’s a great, great achievement.

[Katherine] Dr. Dean Sherry’s career at UT Dallas began nearly 40 years ago in 1972. Sherry researches ways of refining diagnostic tools that may one day lead to better, more insightful diagnoses of medical conditions ranging from cancer to heart disease. Sherry was founding director of the Advanced Imaging Research Center housed at UT Southwestern Medical Center where he has a dual appointment as a professor of radiology. In 2019 he was named interim dean for the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

[Dean Sherry] My name is Dean Sherry and that’s, uh, that was not a title at the time [laughing] and I came here in the fall of 1972. Had an NIH postdoctoral fellowship which I, it was actually a two-year fellowship and then I made the mistake of applying for a job [laughing] because I was really enjoying the research. But you know this opportunity came along for this new university in Dallas that was just kind of starting and they were beginning a chemistry department and I thought well, that’s interesting. So I sent a resume in and they asked me to stop by. I was traveling through Dallas to go to a scientific conference and you know, here I am. The way this started out and people are always amazed when I tell the story about, you know, this place originally was built by Texas Instruments and in fact the very first office I moved into in the basement of Berkner had a, a coat rack behind the door and it had a lab, a white lab coat on there and it said Center for Graduate Studies of the Southwest and I kept that lab coat for about 30 years and finally it kind of fell apart and I had to throw it away. But so that was the history and it’s remarkable because, you know, Texas Instruments actually started as a geology company and yet here they had, they had recruited an entire group of molecular biologists from Germany here and said what is molecular biology? I mean that was way before the time and here yet here they were so there was molecular biology and there were space sciences and mathematics and I guess physics although that was pretty much space sciences at the time and, uh, so chemistry, I guess was, you know, one of the fundamental areas that they had to cover so they hired a small group of us and and we started the chemistry department. You know you’re young and naive and, you know, you can, you know, everybody was looking for faculty jobs and as I remember there weren’t that many at that particular year that you know they ,they go up and down, they fluctuate. But something about Dallas was kind of a, still a relatively small but vibrant place and the university was just starting so the opportunities to have an influence I think was very attractive.

So you know the first years I mean quite honestly, you know, we had very few students. You know we had a master’s program initially but, you know, that was probably maybe a half a dozen students or so, something like that. And I tell people that I was very lucky because because I didn’t have a lab when I came here. Now that sounds strange because most people wouldn’t come unless they already had a lab built. Today I mean people, you know, they got to have everything ready for them to, to get set up. But I say I was lucky because what happened was I came and uh I was an experimentalist so I needed, you know, lab space there, you know, there we were still building it and so I just went off to, uh, UT Southwestern and walked into the biochemistry department and introduced myself to people and they were very friendly and kind and I met a faculty member there — his name was Larry Cotton and he had this big pulsed NMR machine sitting in the corner and I knew of Larry through the literature and so he invited me just to come and work in his lab until the labs were finished out here. So I would come and teach my class and, and then I would just head off to the med school and so I got to know everybody in biochemistry at the time and it really helped because I started publishing, you know, easily within the first year. The other three faculty who were here weren’t because they didn’t have any equipment and space or anything so it was, it was really great for me and the nice thing is, you know, that’s propelled me into something much bigger in terms of eventually ending up as a halftime faculty, you know, appointment at Southwestern. I think the big thing — besides all these wonderful buildings that you see, I mean — is you know this quite, quite honestly when I came here and you know the first building, second, third and fourth they were pretty ugly. I mean pretty plain looking buildings — lots of cement, very few trees. I mean this was an ugly campus and so the, the campus is now really quite magnificent and so that’s been great. But I think the thing that, that I really am amazed at is the quality of the undergraduate students. I mean they’re just phenomenal. I mean absolutely phenomenal. So that’s been extremely rewarding to be part of the very beginning. You know, we used to get mostly junior college transfers and there were good students in, in the, you know, among them but overall the quality of the students today is so much better. And, and so just to have the opportunity to work with young people is just so much fun.

[background music] [Katherine] Thanks for listening to this special mini-series. The CometCast Network is brought to you by the UT Dallas Office of Communications. You can find our other podcasts at www.utdallas.edu/cometcast.