UT Arlington: From Military Academy to Space Age

The University of Texas at Arlington has one of the more winding origin stories in Texas higher education. It started in eighteen ninety-five not as a college but as Arlington College, a private K-through-ten school created largely because the local public schools were so underfunded and inadequate that parents sought an alternative. It enrolled between seventy-five and one hundred fifty students in a two-story schoolhouse.

Over the next two decades the institution changed its name and mission four times. It became Carlisle Military Academy in nineteen oh two, then Arlington Training School, then Arlington Military Academy, cycling through identities as its leadership searched for a sustainable model. In nineteen seventeen, educator and lobbyist Vincent Woodbury Grubbs persuaded the Texas Legislature to transform the site into a state-supported junior college affiliated with Texas A&M, calling it Grubbs Vocational College. By nineteen twenty-three it had been renamed North Texas Junior Agricultural College.

The school spent nearly five decades inside the Texas A&M University System before transferring to the University of Texas System in nineteen sixty-five. Full university status followed, and enrollment began a dramatic climb. By the fall of two thousand fourteen, UT Arlington carried nearly thirty-five thousand students, a sixty-five percent gain from two thousand one, making it the second-largest campus in the entire UT System.

The university's most poignant connection to the wider world came through an alumna named Kalpana Chawla, who earned her master's degree in aerospace engineering here in nineteen eighty-four. Born in Karnal, India, she became the first Indian-born woman to fly in space. On February first, two thousand three, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart during re-entry over Texas, killing all seven crew members including Chawla. UT Arlington named a residence hall Kalpana Chawla Hall in her honor and established a graduate scholarship in aerospace engineering to carry her legacy forward.