Texas Tech: West Texas Fights for Its University

There is a photograph from November nineteen twenty-four that tells you something about the relationship between Lubbock and Texas Tech University: the cornerstone of the Administration Building is being laid before a crowd of twenty thousand people. In a city of a few thousand residents at the time, that crowd represented every person from miles around who could find a way to attend.

The fight to get a university in West Texas had been long and bruising. The Texas legislature had debated the question for years. A branch campus of Texas A&M had been authorized for Abilene in nineteen seventeen, then repealed two years later after the governor was found to have falsified the site committee's location recommendation. New legislation passed in nineteen twenty-one was vetoed by Governor Pat Neff, who cited hard financial times in West Texas. Some West Texans, furious at Austin's indifference, reportedly suggested the region should secede from the state.

Finally, in nineteen twenty-three, the legislature created Texas Technological College as an independent institution, not a branch of anything. The site competition drew several towns. When the selection committee visited Lubbock, they found residents lining the streets in numbers that left the committee overwhelmed. Lubbock was chosen on the first ballot.

The college opened for classes on October first, nineteen twenty-five, with an enrollment of nine hundred fourteen students, men and women together from the start, and four schools: Agriculture, Engineering, Home Economics, and Liberal Arts. It was renamed Texas Tech University in nineteen sixty-nine, and today enrolls more than forty-two thousand students, making it the sixth-largest university in Texas by enrollment.

The campus's Romanesque architecture, designed to echo the Spanish mission tradition of the Southwest, remains one of the most distinctive university campuses in the region.