Baylor University: Oldest in Texas, Founded by a Republic
Near Waco, Texas
The large campus spreading along the Brazos River in Waco belongs to Baylor University, the oldest continuously operating university in Texas, chartered not by a state but by a republic.
On February first, eighteen forty-five, Republic of Texas President Anson Jones signed the act creating Baylor University. Texas would not join the United States for another year. The institution was the vision of three Baptist missionaries, Robert Emmett Baylor, James Huckins, and William Milton Tryon, who wanted to plant a university in the wilderness before anything else took root. Sam Houston, the republic's most famous soldier-statesman, donated five thousand dollars to help get it started.
Baylor opened in Independence, Texas, a small town about a hundred miles southeast of where it sits today. For forty years it grew there. Then the railroad came, and the railroad changed everything. In eighteen eighty-six, Baylor's trustees voted to merge with Waco University and relocate to the growing rail junction on the Brazos. It has been here ever since.
Among the many names associated with Baylor, two bear special mention in medicine. Denton Cooley and Michael DeBakey both built their surgical careers at Baylor College of Medicine and went on to become two of the most consequential heart surgeons in American history, Cooley performed one of the earliest heart transplants in the United States, and DeBakey pioneered bypass surgery.
In athletics, Robert Griffin the Third won Baylor's first Heisman Trophy in twenty eleven, and the women's basketball program won the NCAA championship in twenty nineteen, followed by the men's program in twenty twenty-one.
Baylor has also navigated significant institutional failures. A basketball player was murdered by a teammate in two thousand three. A football scandal from two thousand eleven through two thousand sixteen, in which the university suppressed assault allegations against players, led to the firing of the coach and the resignation of the president.
It is a place of considerable achievement and considerable reckoning, which may be the most honest description of any institution that has lasted this long.
