Higher Education in Texas: Its Beginnings to 1970 by Charles R. Matthews (review)

Texas, with 1.5 million college students, is second only to California in postsecondary education enrollment. Over the past century, however, scholars of American higher education, from Alexander Flexner in 1908 to the recent work of John R. Thelin, have paid little attention to the Lone Star State. This neglect reinforces a belief that Texas has contributed little to the development of America's colleges and universities. Even scholarship that would shed light on the unique problems Texas stakeholders face today is seriously lacking; the last comprehensive history of higher education in the state was published in 1955.

Charles R. Matthews, the retired chancellor of the Texas State University System, addresses this lack with Higher Education in Texas: The Beginnings to 1970. Matthews, who earned his doctorate in education from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006, has taken his dissertation on the Permanent University Fund—the state's endowment for public higher education—and wrapped it in several additional chapters that borrow heavily from three once-seminal, but now dated, secondary texts. Forgoing a fresh look at primary sources, the result is a somewhat serviceable book that informs readers about the early years of Texas higher education while providing little insight on the many other forces that drive contemporary issues, such as regionalism, factionalism, ethnocentrism, and corporatism, and which continue to shape Texas higher education policy to this day.

By ending his study in 1970, Matthews does little to advance our understanding of Texas postsecondary education, especially when it comes to diversity. He claims that this date not only takes this immense topic through the civil rights era but also that legal issues concerning diversity were well settled by the end of the 1960s. Yet Matthews is content with spending his chapter on black access to higher education by discussing the importance of the 1950 Sweatt v. Painter case, which forced the graduate school of the University of Texas at Austin to admit black Texans. Missing are several other landmark Texas cases that followed in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, such as White v. Smith, which forced the hands of governing boards and legislators, as well as any discussion of the lingering strife that surrounded the desegregation of athletics, dormitories, and the arts. Matthews's arbitrary 1970 cut-off date also omits significant advances in Hispanic education, including the rise of the Chicano campus movement, followed by the landmark 1992 court case, LULAC v. Richards, which resulted in the South Texas Border Initiative and transformed higher education in the predominantly Hispanic regions of the state.

Despite the shortcomings, Higher Education in Texas offers much worthwhile content. Matthews's book hits its stride in chapters recognizing the importance of land to higher education and the challenges of coordinating more than two hundred colleges and universities. Land grants for education, which trace their origins in America to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, provided the financing model for the Republic and State of Texas. Matthews deftly explains the state's attempt to create a permanent endowment to pay for higher education, only to see its efficient and effective use impeded over the years. In his chapter on management, he questions (but does not answer) why Texas needs six separate public university systems with their own governing boards, while every other state has no more than two. Matthews acknowledges that more work needs to be done to research this topic. This assertion recognizes that only then will Texans come to fully appreciate the institutions that they have and address the challenges that colleges and universities, public and private, face in the decades to come.