Sixteen Verifiable Errors and Misstatements in UTEP’s 2024 Campus Master Plan

When history goes off the rails

Click here to sign the petition to save UTEP’s core campus

The following has been revised to point out a sixteenth error captured by an alert reader. The University Historian is most grateful.

The University Historian is puzzled. How does UTEP, a top-tier research university, publish a flawed, mistake-ridden document like this, especially one that the public will scrutinize with a fine-toothed comb?

Here are fifteen verifiably wrong claims UTEP makes in its Campus Master Plan, which was released the week of 28 October 2024.

HISTORY AND CONTEXT

INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY

The University of Texas at El Paso was founded as the Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy in 1914. The school opened with 27 students in a single building located at Fort Bliss. After that building was destroyed by fire, the campus was moved to its current location in 1917. In 1919, the institution became part of The University of Texas System, and the name was changed to the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy. (p. 9)

#1) The institution was founded in 1913, not 1914. Senate Bill No. 183 was signed into law by Gov. Oscar Colquitt on 16 April 1913, creating a mining school in El Paso. The school was established and opened in 1914 after the University of Texas System Board of Regents approved its first budget and hired and appointed the president of UT Austin, Sydney Mezes, its first president, and Steve Worrell, its first dean. This came after the El Paso Chamber of Commerce completed its purchase of the El Paso Military Institute, as required in S.B. 183.[i]

#2) UTEP was founded with the legal name the State School of Mines and Metallurgy. While the students, faculty, and members of the media informally referred to the school as the Texas School of Mines, or TSM, “Texas” would not legally become a part of the school’s legal name until 1919, when it was renamed the Department of Mines and Metallurgy of the University of Texas.[ii]

#3) UTEP was named the College of Mines and Metallurgy of the University of Texas in 1920. Not 1919, as claimed in the plan.[iii]

#4) The School of Mines opened with two buildings. The El Paso Military Institute, which a group of citizens donated to be the school's first home, consisted of two buildings designed by Henry Trost, not a single building, as described by the plan.[iv]

#5) UTEP has been a part of the University of Texas System since 1913. The 1919 law making the school a “branch” of the UT System was an attempt to get around a provision in the state’s constitutional requirement to receive monies from the state’s higher education endowment, the Permanent University Fund, or PUF, to pay for cost overruns on building construction at the new Paso del Norte campus. In 1928, the state’s attorney general ruled that the 1919 bill was unconstitutional and unnecessary, as the legislature had the legal right to create a system by simply placing components under a single governing board, which it did in 1913. UTEP lost access to the PUF but gained access to the legislature’s general fund.[v]

Click here to sign the petition to save UTEP’s core campus

Although the curriculum retained a focus on engineering and science, liberal arts courses were offered as early as the late 1920s. The first master’s program was established in 1940. The school changed its name to Texas Western College in 1949 and again to The University of Texas at El Paso in 1967. (p. 10)

#6) Liberal arts courses were first offered in 1916. Within one year of the opening of the School of Mines, Texas, in 1915, the legislature passed the first of several laws over the ensuing decade to make school attendance compulsory for all children. In 1916, the UT Board of Regents noted the “deplorable” lack of liberal arts courses at the mining school. In addition to Spanish, offered in its first year, the school added English and economics in 1916. Over the next decade, the school added history and other humanities courses, attracting many of the region’s students only interested in receiving enough college credits to qualify for a state teaching credential. These students were referred to as irregular, special, or non-traditional students, as opposed to “regular,” which was the term for full-time students studying mining engineering.[vi]

#7) In 1949, the state legislature changed the school’s name to Texas Western College of the University of Texas. The school preferred to be called the University of Texas at El Paso but settled for TWC after the regents opposed elevating it to a university.[vii]

#8) In 1966, the UT Board of Regents approved renaming the school from Texas Western College of The University of Texas at El Paso to The University of Texas at El Paso, Texas Western College. All the regents did was reverse the school’s legal name, which the legislature had approved in 1949. No one objected to the simple style change, emphasizing The University of Texas. In 1967, the legislature removed Texas Western College from the name.[viii]

The University now has an enrollment of more than 24,000 students and offers 74 bachelor’s, 70 master’s, and 26 doctoral degree programs. It is ranked in the top 5% in the high research category by The Carnegie Foundation for national research institutions and is ranked fourth in Texas for federal research expenditures at public universities. UTEP is also one of 22 Hispanic serving institutions to achieve R1 status. (p. 10)

#9) UTEP was designated an R1 research university by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, part of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, established the CCIHE.[ix]

#10) According to the CCIHE, UTEP is one of 15 R1 institutions classified as a Hispanic-serving institution. Not twenty-two.[x]

#11) UTEP was the oldest four-year baccalaureate public university recognized as an HSI. Of the nineteen HSIs, as defined by the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities in 1992, UTEP was the oldest baccalaureate school when the federal government created its own HSI designation that year.[xi]

#12) In many ways, UTEP has always been a leading Hispanic-serving institution. Since it opened in 1914, its mining courses attracted Hispanic students from not only the United States but also Mexico, Central America, South America, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.[xii]

Click here to sign the petition to save UTEP’s core campus

BHUTANESE INFLUENCE

After the first building at Fort Bliss was destroyed by fire, Dean Stephen Howard Worrell chose the current location overlooking Sunset Heights and downtown El Paso. Dean Worrell’s wife, Katherine, remembered how the site at the foothills of the Franklin Mountains reminded her of a 1914 National Geographic article, titled “Castles in the Air,” about the temples occupying a similarly picturesque landscape in the Kingdom of Bhutan. (p. 12)

#13) The name of the school’s first dean was Steve, not Stephen. Worrell’s first name was, simply, “Steve.” Many official primary source artifacts confirmed this, many written in his own hand, including his UT application, his diploma, employment records, and marriage announcement. Many authors over the years have erroneously called him Steven or Stephen. He usually signed his name as “S.H. Worrell,” using only initials, a widespread practice of the time. Former dean John Kidd even had to correct the obituary issued by the College of Mines at Worrell’s death, crossing our Steven and writing Steve. Despite Kidd’s best efforts, he could not prevent the regents from naming a dormitory on campus “Steven Howard Worrell Hall” in 1940.[xiii]

#14) Steve Worrell’s wife was named Kathleen. Not Katherine.

#15) A committee chosen by Gov. James E. Ferguson selected the site, not Dean Worrell. Gov. Ferguson appointed Mayor Tom Lee, State Senator Claude Hudspeth, former state representative Richard Burges, and Dean Worrell to a site selection committee. The committee rejected Worrell’s selection of the Paso del Norte site in favor of one near today’s eastern terminus of Scenic Drive. The committee selected the Paso del Norte site when deed complications scuttled that plan.[xiv]

Thus, the first building was designed using motifs from Bhutan by Henry Trost, a prominent El Paso architect in the early 20th century. The architecture is characterized by massive, battered walls, deep over-hangs, high inset windows, and dark bands of brick with mosaic-tiled mandalas—symbols of unity. (p. 12)

#16) The first buildings were designed by Charles Gibson, who originated the Bhutanese Revival style. However, a controversy resulted in the selection of Henry Trost of Trost & Trost as the principal architect. The faculty rejected Trost’s initial proposals, insisting on Gibson’s Bhutanese Revival design and floor plans designed by John Kidd. After a three-month impasse, the regents purchased the designs from Gibson and assigned them to Trost, who prepared the final designs and plans.[xv]

As a UTEP alumnus, The University Historian is dismayed and embarrassed by this flawed Campus Master Plan. It does not help UTEP’s reputation as a top-tier research university.

When a university outlines its future plans, the ethos it projects is crucial for establishing credibility and trust among stakeholders. The University Historian emphasizes that inadequate historical research—often relying on outdated secondary sources—can lead to significant misrepresentations in important documents like UTEP’s 2024 Campus Master Plan.

The reliance on unverified narratives not only compromises the integrity of the university’s historical account but also raises doubts about its commitment to accuracy and transparency. Errors in the CMP, such as the uncritical copying of text from previous plans, undermine the institution’s credibility and suggest a preference for myth over factual history.

University administrations wield considerable influence over institutional narratives; thus, prioritizing publicity over public history can lead to a culture where inaccuracies are overlooked. If a university cannot accurately represent its own history, it casts doubt on the reliability of its future plans, ultimately jeopardizing its ethos and undermining stakeholder trust.

---

You’ve made it this far. Now is the time to take action.

Click here to sign the petition to save UTEP’s core campus

---

Notes

[i]  State School of Mines and Metallurgy—Creation of, S.B. 183, 33rd Texas State Legislature (1913); Minutes of the University of Texas System Board of Regents, 28 Apr. 1914, University of Texas System Board of Regents, Austin (hereafter cited as Minutes, UTSBR).

[ii] S.B. 183 (1913); Minutes, UTSBR, 29 Jan. 1919.

[iii] “Nomenclature of Departments to be Changed Soon,” Daily Texan, 30 May 1920.

[iv] El Paso Military Institute, “Buildings and Grounds,” Catalog, 1912-1913, 1912.

[v] Constituting and Making the School of Mines and Metallurgy at El Paso a Branch of The University of Texas System, S.B. 198, 36th Texas State Legislature (1919). For more on the history of this act, see P. J. Vierra, "'Maybe It Will Turn Out Better Than We Had Expected': The School of Mines and the Legal Foundation of the University of Texas System," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 121, no. 4 (2018), 360–386.

[vi] Maurice Faber to Fred W. Cook, report, 17 Oct. 1916, VF8Aa, University of Texas President’s Office Records, Briscoe Center for American History, UT Austin (hereafter cited as UTPOR); See also the school’s catalogs from 1915 through 1927.

[vii] Texas Western College of the University of Texas, S.B. 299, 51st Texas State Legislature (1949).

[viii] Minutes, UTSBR, 27 May 1966.

[ix] Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, Resources, (n.d.)

https://carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu/

[x] Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, Resources, (n.d.)

https://carnegieclassifications.acenet.edu/

[xi] Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds; Hispanic Association of Colleges and University, https://www.hacu.net/hacu/default.asp.

[xii] See the school’s catalogs and yearbooks from 1914 through 1950.

[xiii] See the school’s catalogs and yearbooks from 1914 through 1923.

[xiv] Richard Burges to Robert Vinson, letter, 2 Jan. 1917, 2B84, Richard Burges Papers, Briscoe Center for American History, UT Austin.

[xv] “Mine School Building to Have both Beauty and Convenience,” El Paso Herald, 6 Jan. 1917; Minutes, UTSBR, 24 Apr. 1917.