The first time that I made a presentation about the “Layers of UTEP History” it was met with two responses. On one hand, the audience was extremely fascinated by UTEP’s compelling story of transformations. “We didn’t realize what the past was like and how much things have changed!” Then came the second response in the form of a question: “How do these layers compare to the things that other historians have written?” This great question deserves a thorough answer.

Four books have been written about UTEP’s history. The occasion of the school’s fiftieth anniversary prompted Francis L. Fugate’s Frontier College: Texas Western at El Paso, The First Fifty Years (Texas Western Press, 1964) and President Joseph M. Ray’s On Becoming a University: Report on an Octennium (Texas Western Press, 1968). Twenty-five years later came Nancy Hamilton’s UTEP: A Pictorial History of the University of Texas at El Paso: Diamond Jubilee, 1914-1989 (Texas Western Press, 1988) and Diamond Days: An Oral History of the University of Texas at El Paso (Texas Western Press, 1991), compiled by Charles H. Martin and Rebecca McDowell Craver.

Fugate organized his story chronologically, pausing at times to develop some themes more than others. Ray’s history reads as an administrative report (which it was), listing all of the accomplishments of his presidency. Writing in the 1960s, both authors were keen to distinguish where their college was or was going from its past. In a sense they set up two contrasting layers–then versus now/future.

At the seventy-fifth anniversary two other schemes were adopted. Martin and Craver organized the oral histories they presented under headings derived from the institution’s name, with three parts for the Texas College of Mines (1914-1948), Texas Western College (1949-1966), and UTEP (1967-1991). Alternately, Hamilton mapped UTEP’s history onto a decade-based framework (which was followed on the 90th anniversary website).

In the twenty-first century, the then/now framework seems unwieldy with 100 years of history in view. Likewise, employing the institutional name structure would diminish the many significant transformations since 1967. The decade-based chronology also grows difficult in that at present UTEP has participated in eleven decades (1910s through 2010s), leaving audiences puzzled over why 100 years requires eleven decades.

So in looking at the layers of UTEP history, we attempted to avoid those shortcomings and we also set out to reframe the story in terms of transformations relevant to the development of the institution. In many ways this parallels the way that people think about individual lives. When asked about one’s past, a person usually responds that such-and-such occurred “when I was in college” or “the summer after we moved to El Paso” and so on. Years and decades follow: “I graduated in 1984″ or “So that means it would have been the summer of 1957.” Years and decades are the tools that help us make sense of other more important changes. The layers of UTEP’s history help us understand the significant transformation of a small mining school into a public research university.

“What is UTEP’s story?” There are a few ways to answer this question, none of which are fully satisfactory.

1. The first is by changes in the institution’s name. This falls short because the name changed three times between 1914 and 1920 while the institution changed comparatively little; at the other end, it has been named UTEP since 1967 and much has changed. A related approach is to mark periods in history by presidential tenures. This one also feels reductive in light of the variety of personalities within the institution and the powerful influence of external contexts.
2. A second approach is to divide up the century by decades—what happened in the 1910s and 1920s and so on. This one falls apart almost immediately. The school opened in 1914 and in 1917 a fire destroyed the main building at the first location (now on Ft. Bliss). So in 1918 the school moved to its current location and employed the Bhutanese architectural style. Thus, in UTEP’s story the year 1918 is far more significant than 1919 or 1920, making a change by decade feel forced and artificial.
3. A third approach takes its initiative from commemorative milestones—a book at the 50th anniversary, another at the 75th, and so on. Those numbers call attention and help mobilize resources, but they have no real relation to the institution’s history.

I recently put the question of UTEP’s story to several historians and we had a fruitful discussion that I plan to share over the next several days. But before sharing the “dates and facts” I want to talk about the bigger picture. We decided to look at UTEP’s story in terms of the aspirations of the people who cared about it–campus leaders, students, and community members. Unlike individuals who acquire more privileges simply by reaching age 16 or 21 or 65, universities transform as a result of conscientious planning and coordinated effort—often over the course of several decades.

We identified five aspirations in the institution’s history: a small mining school founded in 1914 expanded into a city college in the late 1920s; national impulses after World War II pulled it into a wider regional college before campus leaders actively moved to establish a regional university in the early 1960s; finally, in the mid-1980s the institution moved toward becoming a public research university.

We chose to call these periods “layers” because while UTEP is clearly no longer a small mining school with 27 students, elements of the mining layer remain—our nickname, the pick ax, our mascot, and so on. While the one-time city college still serves El Paso students it now also draws students from around the world. One new layer does not replace earlier ones, but rather builds on them. Over the course of a century all of the layers have been built and blended into today’s university. One of the purposes of this blog is to excavate back through the layers, observing the ways that history has unfolded and how the past is connected to the present; we hope it will also provide a clear context for thinking about the future.

Acknowledgements: My thinking benefited immensely from conversations with Willie Quinn, Charles Martin, Claudia Rivers, Dennis Bixler-Marquez, Charles Ambler, Kristine Navarro-McElhaney, Abbie Weiser, and Laura Hollingsed.