Fall Convocation

The University of Texas at El Paso

A 21st Century University

It was in the depths of the depression, in 1931, when C. L. Sonnichsen arrived on the train from
Boston a few days after completing his doctoral exams.

He was to teach English at a mining school that was adding a liberal arts degree in a cluster of
buildings that looked like a monastery plucked from the Himalayas and dropped at the foot of the
Franklin Mountains in the Chihuahuan desert, almost a mile and a half north of the city of El
Paso.

He didn’t initially expect to stay long, but, like Horace Greely, he had gone west and grew up
with the country. Eventually, this long-serving English Department Head wrote the introduction
to a book on the pictorial history of this university.

He wrote of that first year, arriving on campus:

“And yet, there was much to be said for this struggling country college. For one thing, it
was desperately needed. El Paso was not yet a city, but it was growing fast. The schools
needed teachers. The businessmen needed young men and women with special training. It
was 600 miles to Austin – too far for many people to go for an education. No school was
ever prayed for and worked for with greater dedication. The mining school, it should be
said, filled a special need.”

Desperately needed. . .

Worked for . . . and prayed for . . . with great dedication . . .

It was school that filled a special need.

Teaching

Like most American public universities established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century, this one began with a strong foundation of teaching a practical subject – mining. The
trend toward a new kind of higher education began with the Morrill Land Grant Acts and
continued with the post-World War II GI Bill.

Teaching. Not just for the children of the wealthy and privileged to prepare them for the clergy
or law or medicine, these universities were to be “accessible to all, but especially to the sons of
toil,” as Senator Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont memorably said.
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Higher education is and for over a century has been the single greatest gateway to economic and
social mobility in America.

The businessmen needed young men and women with special training.

The schools needed teachers.

More than 88 years after Dr. Sonnichsen stepped off the train less than two miles from here, this
commitment to excellent teaching – to meeting the educational needs of our community –
continues in earnest.

And our faculty continue to be recognized for their excellence in teaching.

More than 70 of our faculty members have been honored by the University of Texas Board of
Regents since 2009, when the first of the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award was given.

This year, two more faculty members will receive the Board of Regents’ Outstanding Teaching
Award and I would like them to come forward to be recognized for their achievement.

Dr. Martine Ceberio, Associate Professor of Computer Science, and Denise Lujan, Director of
Developmental Math.

Teaching excellence results in student success and we see examples of it all across campus.

Take, for example, the Corporate Academies in the College of Business. Curricula developed in
partnership with business enables students to work and learn, gaining a deeper understanding of
industry best practices and giving students an advantage in the job market after graduation.

Engaged learning is also paying off in the College of Science. Last year, nearly 45% of science-
focused students maintained a GPA of 3.5 or higher. Their average time to degree completion is
less than 4-and-a-half years, and almost 80% of science students who apply to graduate degree
programs are accepted.

And we see student success among our athletes. Last year 160 UTEP student-athletes – a school
record – were named to the Conference USA Honor Roll, with cumulative grade point averages
of 3.0 or better. Our athletes and coaches want to compete for and win conference
championships as athletes – and to be their best selves in the classroom as well.

While UTEP has experienced 21 straight years of growth in enrollment, the world of post-
secondary education is changing and we are meeting new needs in new ways.

We are expanding opportunities for professional and distance enabled education. This fall our
English Language Institute (ELI) collaborated with the Center for Instructional Design to
develop and offer fully online courses in English grammar, reading, writing, speaking and
listening.

And this year we welcomed our third cohort of pharmacy students. These 54 future pharmacists
will join the more than 90 pharmacy students we enrolled in our first two cohorts in the only
pharmacy school in the country that requires three years of Spanish as well as study in the
community.

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National Model – National Challenges

While UTEP serves as a national model for excellence in higher education, we must also
acknowledge the challenges that face us.

Nationwide, following the 2008 recession, states reduced taxpayer funding for higher education.

Over several decades the cost of public higher education has shifted away from taxpayers and
toward financially stretched families. Some have called into question the relevance of higher
education in recent years, particularly with the burden of debt that can accompany it.

Let us be clear. The world around us is changing. We are in an era of increasingly global,
knowledge-based economies. This change will only accelerate in the coming decades. Coming
out of the recession, 7 out of every 10 new jobs created required some post-secondary education
or training.

The regions of the world that educate people will thrive in the 21st century. Those that don’t, will
be left behind. What was good enough for our parents and our grandparents is not good enough
for our children and our grandchildren.

UTEP must take its place as a national leader, a 21st century university.

Sometimes, people talk about higher education is a service or product that only benefits those
who receive it. To be sure, higher education is the ticket to a dream for individuals and their
families. It continues to be the greatest gateway to social and economic mobility in America.

But that’s not all it is. We must continue to advocate for taxpayer support of public higher
education because the education of others benefits us all.

When our children are sick, we all benefit when there is an educated nurse at urgent care.

When the rains come, we all benefit because an educated civil engineer designed the arroyo that
takes water safely through this campus to the Rio Grande below.

When we touch any of a thousand things today from the cell phone in our pockets to the report
on the investments in our retirement account, we all benefit from the education of the person
who brought that product or service to us.

Our lives are longer, healthier, more prosperous, and safer, and more filled with beauty and joy
when we live in an educated community where everyone has developed their gifts to the fullest.

We must continue to make the case for cost-effective, publicly supported, higher education in
Texas and across this country.

Cost-Effective

And, yes, it must be cost-effective. We are not here to coddle the sons and daughters of privilege.

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UTEP provides excellent education at one of the most reasonable prices for a top tier university
in America. We will continue to do everything we can to control costs and keep college
affordable for families.

In that regard, I wanted to personally thank the 45 faculty members who stepped forward to work
with IT and library staff to help UTEP make the shift to low cost or no cost text books –
particularly for core courses for freshmen and sophomores.

We will focus our early efforts on the large freshman and sophomore courses like Physics, where
the textbook costs over $300. $300 is a week’s work for a student making a bit more than
minimum wage.

We will keep college affordable for the “sons – and daughters – of toil.”

Exclusion is Not Excellence

But there is another trend in higher education that UTEP must continue to counter.

Too many universities have lost their way and bought in to national ratings lists that claim
exclusivity as a virtue.

Do we think a restaurant is the best in the country because they close the door on 90% of the
people who are hungry?

UTEP choses to be part of a core group of exceptional universities that will not be judged by
whom we exclude, but by whom we include and their success.

Exclusivity doesn’t define excellence. Success defines excellence.

UTEP Will . . .

UTEP will advocate for continued public support for higher education.

UTEP will keep the cost of a college degree affordable.

UTEP will be judged by the students whom we include and their success.

UTEP will be a leader among 21st century universities.

Research – Advancing Discovery of Public Value

There was much to be said about this struggling country college…

Of the many struggles faced by the College of Mines in 1931, the most pressing for the faculty
was their purpose. President Dossie Wiggins - who succeed UTEP’s first president, John Barry -
told his faculty that they were there to teach. Period.

President Wiggins even went so far as to tell his faculty that they were hired much in the same
way Wiggins bought his mules - and he intended to get as much mule as he could for his money.
“Dossie’s Mules” – the faculty called themselves – but they knew they had more to offer.

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They knew, Dr. Sonnichsen said, that they were there to acquire, record, and disseminate
knowledge. And so, Sonnichsen explained, the new PhD faculty began doing research on the
region. One among them chronicled botany up to the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico,
and another produced a definitive study of the geology of the Franklin Mountains. They dug up
fossils and set students to work writing theses on Mexican novelists. They took students to
Mexico every summer to study art and studied Texas fiction and folklore.

They did the work that came to hand.

This comprehensive public research university with a strong sense of place and engagement in
the region – grew from the seed they planted.

Imagine what Dr. Sonnichsen and his faculty peers would think of us now.

$91 million in research expenditures and a portfolio of 353 research awards that total more than
$272 million in committed external funding.

Our Border Biomedical Research Center engages more than 80 health care and science faculty
and is driving discoveries that will address health disparities in cancer, diabetes and other
diseases. It was recently awarded another $19.2 million from the National Institutes of Health.

We have developed expertise in space vehicle materials derived from studying the debris of the
Shuttle Columbia that fell from the sky over Texas, and we are one of the best in the world at the
neuroscience of bilingualism . . .

In water desalinization and patterns of migration …

We don’t just transmit knowledge at UTEP; we create it.

Engaged scholarship – the scholarship of place – defined this campus from the beginning, and
continues to drive us today.

Impact

Dr. Sonnichsen’s story begins in 1931, but our history of meeting the educational needs of our
community date back to our earliest days in 1914. UTEP has been supported by and supportive
of the region in which we live.

Every day in the brief month since I arrived, I have met accountants and marketing managers, lab
technicians and high school coaches, musicians and builders, physical therapists and engineers,
law enforcement officers and even a few lawyers … who are UTEP alumni.

More than 8,500 teachers in the El Paso area are UTEP graduates.

But impact is more than what our graduates do.

33,000 people enjoyed a college football game in a stadium carved into a mountain two weeks
ago and others listened to a stunningly beautiful cello concert at the Fox Fine Arts Center.

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We share our expertise with the city to reduce and reuse precious groundwater and support
continuing education in quality improvement for small businesses throughout Texas . . .

Our students run free speech therapy clinics for those without insurance, and our faculty and
students not only analyze economic trends in the region, they build businesses to grow the
economy and create jobs.

UTEP positively impacts the health, culture, education, and economy of the community we
serve.

Over the coming months, we will review and seek to revitalize our connections to community,
our understanding of the needs of the region, so that we continue to provide what is “desperately
needed” in our time.

A Woven Figure

History is a woven figure.

In the north of Chihuahua, Spanish explorers found two mountain ranges that rose from the high
desert. The gap between them was El Paso del Norte, the gateway for passage, the gateway for
opportunity.

For four hundred years, this place has been the route of trade and the meeting point of cultures
and governments. Who we are, what we do as a university, is connected by web and weft to
those who traveled these routes and settled this place.

We are connected to those early faculty who started on that first day of class in 1914, and to
those first doctoral faculty in the 1930s who chose to advance knowledge by studying and
engaging with this place.

Texas International

In the late 1920s, a state legislator from El Paso named Adrian Pool, created what Dr.
Sonnichsen described as “great clouds of dust” in the Texas Legislature for supporting the
College of Mines.

Representative Pool believed that this “struggling country college” could become a great
international university.

The pictorial history of UTEP was published in 1989, for our Diamond Jubilee. Reflecting on
Adrian Pool’s advocacy, Dr. Sonnichsen said:

“The University of Texas at El Paso, seventy-five years after its birth, has grown from a
small regional college to an important meeting place of cultures. It is in fact, if not in name,
Texas International.”

We are that and so much more.

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UTEP is a comprehensive public research university that is increasing access to excellent higher
education. We advance discovery of public value and positively impact the health, culture,
education, and economy of the community we serve.

We are a 21st century university.

That is our mission.

No school will be prayed for or worked for with greater dedication.

I am honored to be a part of it.

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