"Maybe It Will Turn Out Better Than We Had Expected": The School of Mines and the Legal Foundation of the University of Texas System

Tuesday night the Texas School of Mines will have its first commencement program and three graduates will receive their diplomas. The program will be given in the assembly hall of the college, beyond Fort Bliss, and is one of unusual interest to El Paso as the School of Mines is a branch of the University of Texas.

—El Paso Herald, Saturday, May 27, 1916

In the days leading up to its first commencement on May 30, 1916, the students, faculty, staff, and local supporters of the State School of Mines and Metallurgy, commonly known as the Texas School of Mines (TSM), gathered in the school's commodious assembly hall in the main building on Lanoria Mesa, adjacent to Fort Bliss. In decorating the hall, they festooned it with banners and bunting of orange and white—the colors of the Main Branch of the University of Texas (UT) in Austin.¹

Meanwhile, in an office down the hall, a frantic Steve Worrell, TSM's dean, hurriedly drafted telegrams and letters to the interim president of the University of Texas, William J. Battle. A bewildered Battle had demanded to know under what authority Worrell had acted in authorizing the conferral of degrees, especially since the fledgling school was only in its second academic year. Worrell believed that the faculty held this power under the Senate Bill No. 183 (1913), which created the institution. Not so, responded Battle, reminding the defiant dean that although the act stated that the faculty determined who would receive a degree, conferral required the approval of the school's governing board. Worrell did not press his claim and blamed the misunderstanding on Battle's predecessor, Sidney Mezes. Battle, for his part, accepted Worrell's explanation that the three graduates had matriculated in 1914 with advanced standing and allowed the commencement to take place. Following the commencement, the school's governing board—the Board of Regents of the University of Texas—retroactively approved awarding the Engineer of Mines degree to Vere Leasure, Lloyd Nelson, and Clyde M. Ney.² Battle, however, had declined Worrell's invitation to deliver the commencement address, beginning a decades-long practice by sitting presidents (and chancellors) in Austin of graciously bowing out from appearing at the commencement exercises at what would become the University of Texas at El Paso, or UTEP.³

As the correspondence between Worrell and Battle shows, the structure of higher education in Texas was not quite settled by the second decade of the twentieth century. Was TSM a branch of the University of Texas in 1916? Based on an examination of documents from the period—board minutes, legislative records, newspaper articles, letters, telegrams, and oral histories—a justifiable claim can be made that the School of Mines was more than a branch; it was a component institution of a system under the authority of the UT Board of Regents. State law at the time, however, remained ambiguous on this point, and the relationship of the School of Mines to the University of Texas's Main Branch in Austin would remain imprecisely defined for years to come. Resolving this ambiguity would eventually lay the legal foundation of the modern University of Texas System.

The UT System's own website claims that the institution now known as UTEP joined the system in 1919, some five years after the School of Mines first opened. The website, citing Donald Whisenhunt's Encyclopedia

Dean of the School of Mines, Steve Worrell, c. 1920. C. L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, University of Texas at El Paso.

of Texas Colleges and Universities, is probably referring to Senate Bill No. 198 (SB 198), a 1919 act of the Texas legislature that, as its name implies, set about "Constituting and Making the School of Mines and Metallurgy at El Paso a Branch of the University of Texas." The act has long been interpreted as equating branch status with official membership in the UT System...