Just the other day, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed HB 51, a bill designed to set up incentives for the state’s emerging research universities to become so-called “tier one” schools. This bill aims to encourage three universities in North Texas in that quest: UTA, UNT, and most importantly for us in Richardson, UTD.

This is happy news for UTD, which celebrated its 40th birthday just days before the signing of HB 51. 40 years – that got me to thinking about my experiences at UTD in its very early years.

UTD, Forty Years Ago

Forty years ago, there was a program at UTD called the Clark Foundation Summer Program (it still exists in a modified form) . This program, supported by an endowment from the Anson L. Clark Foundation of Dallas, offered positions to selected students as summer participants in the research activities at U.T. Dallas, primarily in science, mathematics, and engineering. This program must be one of the longest running programs in UTD history, because I was in it near the very beginning.

UTD was formally created in 1969, when the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies (formerly the Graduate Research Center) was donated to the University of Texas System. The institution was about a mile west of my parents’ house in Canyon Creek in north Richardson, which, in those days, was more vacant lots and empty fields than homes or commercial buildings.

When I spent two summers in the Clark Foundation program in 1970 and 1971, the school was still commonly known as the Graduate Research Center or even the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies, since the name of UTD had not really taken hold yet in the popular consciousness. Indeed, in looking back at my personal experience, I didn’t even realize that the school had been renamed a year before I first participated in the Clark Foundation summer program.

There were only two buildings that I can recall at UTD in 1970, the Founders’ Building and the building next to the microwave tower, whose name escapes me. The most prominent feature on campus was that microwave tower looming over the campus, which connected UTD to other schools in the area through TAGER. TAGER was a microwave-enabled transmission system that connected a number of area universities through video and audio feeds, enabling students from one university to attend classes at another university. In fact, in the early 70s, one of my student jobs at the University of Dallas (the one in Irving) was being the camera technician for ancient Greek and business classes (an interesting combination, typical of UD) originating in Irving.

I am not even sure that any classes originated from UTD in those days; I suspect that UTD was more important in the TAGER network for geographic reasons – microwaves travel by line of sight, and the schools farther to the north (like Austin College) needed connectivity with the Dallas-based schools (like SMU).

UTD Growth

As I noted, in those days, UTD was a couple of buildings in the middle of a treeless field in a remote corner of the city. I don’t know, perhaps there were a couple of hundred people in the facility, which awarded only graduate degrees in a few select scientific and engineering disciplines. Today, UTD, a fully accredited four-year institution, has 30+ buildings (not counting the student residences) on that cotton field prairie with 15,000 full and part time students, offering more than 125 academic programs across its seven schools. And now it’s working on that tier one status.

Think about it: today, UTD has nearly 400 faculty members alone, not counting the 500 or so other instructors and approximately 1,900 administrative staff who work there. This makes UTD the 6th largest employer in Richardson, with a huge impact on the local economy. The 15,000 students have their economic impact as well.

Now compare UTD to UT, the premier tier one school in Texas (assuming that you are not an Aggie or a Rice Owl). In the mid-60s, the main university enrolled 27,345 students, including 4,307 students in the graduate school, and the faculty numbered more than 1,800. So, at that point, while UTD was a couple of hundred people, UT was about twice as big as UTD is now.

But UT didn’t stop growing. Today, forty years later, UT is home to more than 50,000 students, 2,900 faculty and 21,000 staff members. So what can we expect UTD to do over the next several decades, given that UTD has plenty of land on which to expand? If UTD proceeds on track, we can expect the faculty to grow from its current level of 400 or so to 1,000 (because even today UTD does not believe it has sufficient faculty for its current student population), the staff to grow from 1,900 to perhaps 5,000 or more, and the student population to grow from 15,000 to nearly 30,000.

Note that the largest employer in Richardson is the RISD, with about 4,700 employees today. Since that number is not likely to change much over the years, UTD is on track to become the largest employer in Richardson.

Now, these are my personal estimates based on what has happened at UT in Austin, but UTD’s own strategic plan (see http://www.utdallas.edu/strategicplan/pdf/Creating%20the%20Future,%20Our%20Plan.pdf) for the next ten years calls for an increase in the student population of about 50% and for an increase in the faculty of almost 60%. And since the staff is to faculty ratio is typically 5, 6, or 7 to 1 or so, this will lead in the next decade to a total non-faculty staff count of more than 3,000.

And this is counting only the direct employment of the University. The fact is that “[b]usinesses want to establish themselves around large universities,” as Texas State Representative Dan Branch (R-108) said recently in support of HB 51. The University of Houston, in its own bid to become one of the next generation of tier one universities in Texas spawned by HB 51, says the following about the impact of a research university on the community:

“Funds invested in a university's research enterprise multiply throughout the economy. Economists estimate that every $10 million in research expenditures:

• Creates 334 new jobs
• Adds $8.6 million in wages to the regional economy
• Draws $500,000 in additional state revenue, including tax revenue
• Generates $13.5 million in local sales”
(see http://www.uh.edu/about/tier-one/index.php)

A school is considered to be tier one when it spends at least $100 million to $150 million in research annually, so you can do the arithmetic yourself on the school’s potential impact.

So, a much larger university, new hi-tech businesses, and thousands of new jobs – the obvious questions are: where are these people going to live and where are they going to spend their money? The answer to a large extent will be “Richardson”.

UTD, Good Neighbor to Richardson

But the huge economic impact of UTD to Richardson is only half the story. What many residents don’t realize is that the University is not subject to Richardson zoning laws. That is, the school can build whatever roads and buildings it wants in whatever locations on campus that it wants, and there is nothing that the City can legally do about it. In many university cities, there exists a persistent tension between the school and the local municipal government, as each tries to stop the other from negatively affecting its constituents.

However, for decades, the UTD administration and our City government have made a point of developing strong relations with each other. Rather than unilaterally building roads and buildings, the school informs the City about its plans and is more accommodating than they are required to be when the City asks for changes. A good example is the main entrance to the school. While the original street entrance to UTD back in the 60s and early 70s was on the south side of the campus from Campbell Road on North Armstrong Parkway, at that point in time the school did not own the land that fronted on Campbell. So when the school decided to design and create a main entrance, it chose to do it at Floyd and Lookout because the school already owned the frontage on this intersection. However, the neighborhoods to the east of the school feared that this choice of a main entrance would lead to a huge increase in traffic through residential streets, and after much discussion with the City, the school agreed to acquire the frontage along Campbell and move the main entrance to the south side of campus, rebuilding and renaming North Armstrong Parkway in the process.

UTD cooperates with the City on a variety of areas:

• trails – the trail along Floyd Road north of Campbell was built with money that the City of Richardson secured in a grant from Collin County, but actually lies on UTD property. This trail becomes part of the larger trail system in Richardson.
• parks – part of Point North Park (between UTD and the residential neighborhoods to the east just south of Renner) actually lies on UTD property, but the City has a 50 year lease on the property (which it is in the process of renewing)
• drainage – UTD is aware of the potential impact that accelerated rain runoff from future development can have in the Richardson neighborhoods just to the south, and not only keeps the City informed of its development plan, but also considered amending its own plans – such as possibly adding a retention pond in the future – to ameliorate the impact of construction.
• sewer services – UTD in the last couple of years, UTD was part of a multi-jurisdictional swap to enable the better provision of sewer services to a property on the north end of campus.
• public safety – even though all the buildings on the west side of Waterview north of Cullum (i.e., most properties north of ITT and Lennox) are actually in Dallas, UTD, Richardson, and Dallas worked out an arrangement so that Richardson police and fire cover the one building that UTD owns on this side of the street, so that all UTD properties are covered by the same department.

Forty yeas ago, UTD was a couple of buildings on a treeless plain in the middle of nowhere on the edge of Richardson, but far-sighted leaders both at UTD and in the City government made sure that UTD and the City would grow together, to the lasting benefit of both. That’s four UTD presidents, three Richardson City Managers, and twenty City Councils in Richardson. We should remember to thank all these leaders as UTD – Richardson’s University – evolves into its well-deserved tier one status in the 21st Century.

William "Bill" McCalpin is a longtime Richardson resident.

The author of this editorial is solely responsible for its content and the stated opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the The Richardson Echo. This editorial was unsolicited.