The University of Texas at Austin

 

  The University of Texas at Austin (informally UT Austin, UT, University of Texas, or Texas in sports contexts is a public research university and the flagship institution of The University of Texas System.[10] Founded in 1883 as "The University of Texas," its campus is located in Austin—approximately 1 mile (1,600 m) from the Texas State Capitol. The institution has the fifth-largest single-campus enrollment in the nation, with over 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students and over 24,000 faculty and staff. The university has been labeled one of the "Public Ivies," a publicly funded university considered as providing a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

UT Austin was inducted into the American Association of Universities in 1929, becoming only the third university in the American South to be elected. It is a major center for academic research, with research expenditures exceeding $550 million for the 2013–2014 school year. The university houses seven museums and seventeen libraries, including the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum and the Blanton Museum of Art, and operates various auxiliary research facilities, such as the J. J. Pickle Research Campus and the McDonald Observatory. Among university faculty are recipients of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, the Wolf Prize, and the National Medal of Science, as well as many other awards.

UT Austin student athletes compete as the Texas Longhorns and are members of the Big 12 Conference. Its Longhorn Network is unique in that it is the only sports network featuring the college sports of a single university. The Longhorns have won four NCAA Division I National Football Championships, six NCAA Division I National Baseball Championships and has claimed more titles in men's and women's sports than any other school in the Big 12 since the league was founded in 1996. Current and former UT Austin athletes have won 130 Olympic medals, including 14 in Beijing in 2008 and 13 in London in 2012. The university was recognized by Sports Illustrated as "America's Best Sports College" in 2002.


The first mention of a public university in Texas can be traced to the 1827 constitution for the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas. Although Title 6, Article 217 of that Constitution promised to establish public education in the arts and sciences, no action was taken by the Mexican government. After Texas obtained its independence from Mexico in 1836, the Texas Congress adopted the Constitution of the Republic, which, under Section 5 of its General Provisions, stated "It shall be the duty of Congress, as soon as circumstances will permit, to provide, by law, a general system of education." On April 18, 1838, "An Act to Establish the University of Texas" was referred to a special committee of the Texas Congress, but was not reported back for further action.On January 26, 1839, the Texas Congress agreed to set aside fifty leagues of land (approx. 288,000 acres) towards the establishment of a publicly funded university. In addition, 40 acres (160,000 m2) in the new capital of Austin were reserved and designated "College Hill." (The term "Forty Acres" is colloquially used to refer to the University as a whole. The original forty acres is the area from Guadalupe to Speedway and 21st Street to 24th Street.

In 1845, Texas was annexed into the United States. Interestingly, the state's Constitution of 1845 failed to mention the subject of higher education. On February 11, 1858, the Seventh Texas Legislature approved O.B. 102, an act to establish the University of Texas, which set aside $100,000 in United States bonds toward construction of the state's first publicly funded university (the $100,000 was an allocation from the $10 million the state received pursuant to the Compromise of 1850 and Texas' relinquishing claims to lands outside its present boundaries). In addition, the legislature designated land previously reserved for the encouragement of railroad construction toward the university's endowment. On January 31, 1860, the state legislature, wanting to avoid raising taxes, passed an act authorizing the money set aside for the University of Texas to instead be used for frontier defense in west Texas to protect settlers from Indian attacks. Texas' secession from the Union and the American Civil War delayed repayment of the borrowed monies. At the end of the Civil War in 1865, The University of Texas' endowment consisted of a little over $16,000 in warrants and nothing substantive had yet been done to organize the university's operations.