UTSA: The City That Had No Public University
Near San Antonio, Texas
As recently as nineteen sixty-nine, San Antonio was the largest city in the United States without a public university. For a city of seven hundred thousand people that was an extraordinary gap, and closing it took a deliberate act of the state legislature. Governor Preston Smith signed the bill creating the University of Texas at San Antonio on June fifth of that year, and the founding ceremony was held in front of the Alamo.
The university was built on six hundred acres of land in the northwest of the city, opening its main campus to more than four thousand students in the fall of nineteen seventy-five. UTSA has since grown into one of the largest universities in Texas, with particular strengths in cybersecurity and engineering. What started as an overdue correction to a civic gap became a research institution of national standing.
