What is a Branch of the University of Texas?
There is more to the term "branch" than meets the eye
Posted 6 November 2022
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, state-run public universities across the United States began creating branches. Branches were satellite campuses under the direct management and control of a university’s governing board and its president. Branches fell into two types. In first, some universities would create a branch campus by simply opening a new campus elsewhere in the state. In the second, a state legislature would create a chartered branch, which was a standalone university or college but placed under the control of an existing public university’s governing board. In other words, a chartered branch was an institution created by a sovereign government’s legislature, while a branch campus was an extension, division, or department created by the trustees. Seen another way, a chartered branch could field a football team while a branch campus could not.
In Texas the term branch took on a different meaning. Since the word appeared in the state’s constitution of 1876, legislatures, attorneys general, and the courts had to interpret the term not by how it was used in other states, but in the context of organic law—the law from which all other state laws would originate.
In Texas, being a branch meant self-sufficiency. As envisioned by the founders of the republic and, later, the state, the yet-to-be-founded public university, known as the “University of Texas,” was not to receive funding from the state’s general fund. A public land-grant endowment—the Permanent University Fund, or PUF—would pay all associated costs, from building construction to annual operating expenses, through the annual income it generated, and placed into the Available University Fund (AUF).
The central debate around the creation of a University of Texas was whether it would consist of one campus or two. Regionalists wanted to take the university to the people, given the size of the state, and wanted campuses in both East and West Texas. In the antebellum years, that meant east and west of the Trinity River, which runs from present-day Dallas to Houston. Citadelists, however, wanted a single campus, a shining institution on a hill to which all the state’s youths migrated. Both sides agreed that campuses should be placed in rural townships and not cities.1
Before the Lone Star State could settle this debate (it lasted five decades), the legislature created today’s Texas A&M University in 1871. Not wanting to lose out on free money, the state applied for a land grant under the federal Morrill land grant, which granted the state federal land to pay for the establishment of a technical college. This placed legislators in a bind. The federal dollars had to go toward building a college; not operating it. As it would be tuition-free, the state saw itself obligated to pay for its annual operating costs and that of a separate Black agricultural college. By 1875 the state legislature found itself using general funds to pay for the college, something they were loath to do.
Texas rewrote its constitution in 1876. In the article on education, the writers solved the funding conundrum by constituting A&M College a branch of the University of Texas. This gave the institution access to the Permanent University Fund. However, they let stand a law that allowed the college to retain its own governing board. This meant that when the University of Texas was established five years later, the UT Board of Regents found themselves not only sharing the meager proceeds of the AUF but also with no control over the A&M, despite it being a branch of the University of Texas.2
When UTEP was created in 1913, only three institutions qualified as branches under this definition: UT Austin, UT Medical Branch (the only school with “branch” in its legal name), and Texas A&M University. (Prairie View A&M University, the state’s Black institution, had its access taken away by an earlier attorney general who argued that the 1876 constitution omitted the school.) While legislators and UT administrators often referred to the School of Mines as a branch of the University of Texas in its early years, legal opinion varied as to whether it qualified for the Permanent University Fund. The regents tested this opinion in 1917, when it attempted to pay for construction cost overruns on the school’s new Paso del Norte campus. When the state’s attorney general said no, legislators passed a bill in 1919 that “made and constituted [the school] a branch of the University of Texas.” With this act, UTEP received the funds it needed to pay off its debts through the PUF. A decade later in 1928 , a new attorney general reversed this opinion and declared the school was not a branch of the University of Texas, as only a vote of the people could establish its branches. The attorney general did rule that this did not mean the school was not a component of a University of Texas system, since the legislature always had the constitutional authority under article 3, section 48 to create and place multiple institutions under a single governing board.
UTEP did finally become a branch in 1956, after a vote of the people granted it access to the PUF. However, by then the term had fallen into disuse across the nation, as states embraced the expanding legal concept of university systems consisting of components under a single governing board. Texas A&M, however, remains a branch of a University of Texas today with one-third access to the AUF despite having a separate governing board.
Research Notes
"University of Texas President's Office Records, 1884-1948 (Mss. 4-)."Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
"University of Texas President's Office Records, 1907-1968 (Mss. VF-)."Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
State of Texas, Biennial Report of Attorney General, 1926-1927/1927-28 (Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones, 1928).
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, Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/689214.
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Austin would not become a large city until the latter twentieth century.
The Regionalists and Citadelists solved their debate for the time being in 1881 by allowing the people of the state the option to vote on the location of two branches—a main branch and a medical branch. The 1881 vote placed the Main Branch in Austin and the Medical Branch in Galveston.