History of School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences, University of Texas, Dallas. The history of the school cannot be separated from the history of university as whole, or indeed from that of the U T System and the state of Texas as a whole, so we will have to move back and forth between developments at the various levels over time. The Texas Legislature passed the act accepting the Southwest Center for Advanced Study, renaming it UTD, and making it a part of the U of Texas system in 1969. In fact, they passed it and then re-passed, with some changes. The act sought to affirm the legislature’s support for SCAS’s research program and for enhancing the technological potential of the area, and of Texas, but at the same contained important safeguards to assure schools already in the area that UTD would not compete with them. UTD was authorized to begin undergraduate programs in the social sciences from the Fall of 1975. The first President was Bryce Jordan. Jordan had a Ph. D. in music and had served as Vice President for Academic Affairs at U T Austin in the very difficult times of campus upheaval attending the Viet Nam war. He was installed as President July 1, 1971, having been vetted and approved by a faculty committee of scientists who had been part of SCAS. Lee J. Smith joined UTD a month later to serve as Dean of the Faculties. According to informal accounts, his task had been to assure that UTD had the most up to date computer assisted operational infrastructure then available, from the admissions process through the library. But when he suddenly left (with his secretary) in June, 1974, to become President of TSU at San Marcos, nothing had been put in place. Alexander Clark was hired from the LBJ School to replace him and serve as Academic Vice President. He also served as Acting Dean of the School of Social Sciences for a few months over the summer of 1975. The library did what it could under Edward Walters, its first director, and our registrar borrowed software from U T Arlington. The new programs were divided through four schools: Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Interdisciplinary Studies (also sometimes called Individual Studies). The schools of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and Management already existed. Natural Sciences and Mathematics was formed by relabeling the programs of the Southwest Center for Advanced Study (more often referred to as SCAS). The school of Management had been formed in 1972. The internal policies and organization of the university were strongly influenced by outside constraints. Texas has no constitutional firewall between the legislature and the universities; the legislature can require anything and, in principle, the universities have to do. By the same token, the governor can exercise a line-item veto. The legislature appropriates the budget for each campus in the UT System separately, but if the governor dislikes an item, he can remove it, which Governor Clements did for a new university mainframe computer for UTD in about 1980. For UTD, the most important of these legislative constraints was what amounted to a “non--compete” understanding 1 with the higher education institutions in the area that already existed. The enabling legislation required that our admissions standards would be no lower than those of U T Austin, which necessarily meant that the would be substantially higher than any other institution in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and the Coordinating Board assured that our graduate programs would not duplicate any already in the area, which why we lacked convention programs in Arts and Humanities as well in the social sciences. Our status as an upper level institution, taking only Juniors and Seniors (and hence not competing with the Community Colleges) was also a part of this, although this has been a practice in Texas for many new campuses, until they build up. For those recruiting new faculty, the required academic standards were a selling point, and for at least many of those who were recruited it was an attraction. The undergraduate programs in the School of Social Sciences were Anthropology, Geography, Economics, Geography, Government, and Sociology. Only one graduate program was authorized: Political Economy. The overall orientation of the new programs was articulated primarily by a group of new faculty from the humanities and social sciences Regina Kyle, Robert Plant Armstrong, Carolyne Galerstein, Alexander Clark, President Jordan, and others. There were two main watchwords: “interdisciplinarity” and a specific kind of “relevance” that included practicality and saliency. The advertisements for faculty positions in the social sciences also emphasized an interest in “phenomenology.” This primarily reflected the interests of Robert Armstrong, although Regina Kyle was probably also sympathetic to the orientation. Armstrong had previously been editor of the University of Arizona Press, which he made a major publisher in this tradition. The advertisements certainly conveyed the impression that something interesting and unexpected was happening in North Texas. Interdisciplinarity was the more widely prominent theme in our hiring advertisements and represented a stronger bond of common thinking between the pre-existing programs in the sciences and business, but did not have an agreed upon meaning in any but a negative sense. We would not have the conventional departments, isolated and self-contained, catering to equally isolated and self-contained groups of students. By the same token, we would not have the conventional courses in the conventional sequences, although what we would have was not at all agreed upon. “Relevance” was meant to designate the alternative. Courses would be on important topics, whether they fell with one discipline or across several, and curricula would be designed by combining courses around such topics whether or not they fell within one program or across several. Initial hiring for the social sciences was done mainly by Robert Armstrong and Alexander Clark. Armstrong had a PhD in Anthropology and was Professor of Anthropology. His area of expertise was African art, and he had a notable collection of Benin heads. Alex Clark had a PhD in Sociology and strength in the sociology of law. Alex once said that the search involved interviewing over two hundred prospective 2 faculty; both Clark and Armstrong traveled widely meeting candidates in various cities. For Armstrong this involved overcoming a very strong antipathy to flying, which he had acquired in the course of surviving the crash of passenger plane in south-east Asia. 1974-75 was a very bad year for faculty jobs nation-wide, although of course it would have varied by discipline. There must have been very large numbers of initial applications for every person interviewed. Most faculty hired were non-tenured, and Alex Clark has said they hired with the expectation that there would be substantial attrition in the first few years. Tenured faculty were brought to campus for interviews by a faculty committee drawn from the Natural Sciences and Mathematics. The committee included Polycarp Kush and Ivor Robinson. Dr. Kusch had shared the 1955 Nobel Prize in Physics, and had come to UTD a few years before from being the equivalent of Academic Vice President at Columbia, and finding that he preferred not to continue to confront student protests associated with the Viet Nam war and that University's policies regarding cooperation with the United States’ government in that connection. Total faculty in the University in the Fall of 1975 was about 217. Social Sciences began with 24 tenure track and tenured faculty. Since he was a Sociologist, Alex Clark should be regarded as the first social scientist hired with tenure. The second was Armstrong, both at the rank of Professor. Associate professors were Murray Leaf (Anthropology), John W. Sommer (Geography), Robert Firestine (Political Economy), Lawrence Redlinger (Sociology) and Stephen Weismann (Political Science). Weisman was hired without tenure. According to the 1976-77 catalog, the Assistant Professors were Geoffrey Alpert (Sociology), Marvin Cohen (Political Science), Francis J. Cummings (Political Science), Francine Daner (Anthropology), Rockwell Gray (Philosophy, but housed on the ground floor of Green), Donald Hicks (Sociology), Leanne Hinton (Linguistics and Music), Richard Hula (Political Science), Wayne Ruhter (Economics), Peter Skafte (Anthropology), Alex Stepick III (Anthropology), and Bernard Weinstein (Political Economy). Instructors (who had not completed their PhD’s at the time they began teaching here) were David Craigie (Sociology), Ronald Lah (Anthropology), Robert Norton (Economics), Paul Peretz (Political Science), David Raddock (Political Science, transferred from the Business school), and John Rees (Geography). In addition to beginning its undergraduate programs in its first two years, UTD also had to conduct a self-study for accreditation. We had been accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, but only for the graduate programs. The self- study began in October 1974, with Daniel Harris, Professor of Chemistry, as its Executive Director and Chairman of the Self-Study Steering Committee. Unfortunately Dr. Harris became seriously ill in Spring of 1975, was hospitalized, and died in the summer of the same year. A basic organization had been agreed on, but nothing had actually been compiled. Vice President Clark appointed Murray Leaf to be the Executive Director, and Dimitri Lang and Wolfgang Rindler as co-chairs of the Steering Committee, all effective October 1, 1975. Professor Lang was the university electron microscopist, and Professor Rindler is a mathematical physicist. The Steering Committee was made up entirely of faculty, mainly from the former SCAS and the 3 Callier Center for Speech and Communication, which had also become part of the new university. The arrangement had an oddly useful effect; discussions of issues that came up in the self-study organization often led to the resolution of problems and issues that were emerging and creating difficulties in the emerging academic organization.