Enlighten Me

Rodney Crouther (00:07):
Hi, this is Rodney Crouther.

Eddie Sanchez (00:09):
This is Eddie Sanchez.

Rodney Crouther (00:10):
And welcome to Enlighten Me. Hey, Eddie, as you know, this year we're celebrating the 125th anniversary of Texas State University as an institution.

Eddie Sanchez (00:22):
Yeah, there's a lot going on around 125, especially here in our division.

Rodney Crouther (00:26):
And I know we had our official launch of the celebration at commencement early in May, but this is going to be a full year of us taking a look at Texas State history and how we became the fairly huge and really active university that we are today. So for this month, I thought we would just use Enlighten Me to take. For this month, I thought we would just take a look at how did Texas State start and what have we grown into today, and maybe get someone in here to talk about where we want to go in the future.

Eddie Sanchez (01:04):
So I know that our theme has kind of been past, present, and future. So who did you get a chance to talk to about those things?

Rodney Crouther (01:11):
Well, for past, I started off by going to the library and our wonderful people at our University Archives because they know the history of Texas State, I think better than anybody.

Margaret Vaverek (01:23):
Hi, my name is Margaret Vaverek. I'm a librarian at Texas State University.

Rodney Crouther (01:29):
We're very grateful to have you here during our 125th anniversary episode. Since you know a fair amount about the history of our institution. Everyone says Texas State was founded as a teachers college. So what exactly were we when we opened our doors to the first class?

Margaret Vaverek (01:46):
Well, thank you, Rodney. First of all, let me say it's a pleasure to be here. There's not much I enjoy more than talking about the history of this very special place. So we were founded as what was called a normal school to train teachers for the public schools.

Eddie Sanchez (02:01):
Hey, Rodney. So I've always been curious, did she explain why they called it a normal school?

Rodney Crouther (02:06):
Yeah, actually she did. It wasn't just a arbitrary name in, and it doesn't mean, oh, it's just a regular school.

Margaret Vaverek (02:11):
It was called a normal school — the movements started in the 1700s in France actually.

Rodney Crouther (02:16):
Oh, wow.

Margaret Vaverek (02:17):
It was to establish teaching norms, pedagogical norms for teachers. And so there was old program and they called them normal schools. I can't do French, but they were normal schools and so that everybody would be teaching had the same base to teach from.

Rodney Crouther (02:37):
OK, so kind of just setting a standard for public education.

Margaret Vaverek (02:40):
Right, right. So that's what we were founded as, and I always call 1899 our paper anniversary. That's when we were founded by the legislature, but then the legislature, of course, didn't fund the school. So they said, OK, if you can get the land for the school, then you can have a normal school there, but you have to get the land. So we establish it, but we're not going to give you funding. So get the land, get it figured out.

Rodney Crouther (03:07):
Right. You said we weren't actually a college when we opened our doors.

Margaret Vaverek (03:11):
Just a normal school. All we did, you could only get a teaching certificate. You could not get a college degree.

Rodney Crouther (03:17):
And actually, I remember from doing, as we started our research for this, that who we recognized as our first president was actually his title was principal at the time.

Margaret Vaverek (03:26):
That's right. T.G. Harris was the first head administrator for the institution, and he was called the principal.

Rodney Crouther (03:34):
Just like a high school.

Margaret Vaverek (03:36):
Just like a high school.

Eddie Sanchez (03:38):
So when did we actually become a college?

Margaret Vaverek (03:40):
The legislature in 1916 said, OK, the normal schools can now grant degrees, and they had sort of been leading up to it. They kept adding course work and stuff. So 1916, the legislature says, oh, you can start offering degrees. I think it was like 1919, we had our first graduate with a bachelor's degree from here.

Rodney Crouther (04:06):
And actually thinking about that, I know in the late 1800s, early 1900s, it wasn't uncommon for higher education institutions to be gender segregated, and it's an outdated term, but were we gender segregated when we started or were we always what they used to call co-educational?

Margaret Vaverek (04:24):
We were always co-educational. Of course, we had more — it was, again, it was geared to teachers — so we typically had more women than we did men, but it was co-educational from the start.

Rodney Crouther (04:38):
Looking at, I mean, obviously starting to grant degrees, bachelor's degrees was a big stepping stone. Just looking back over our long history now, what were some of the other major moments of our advancement from a normal school into what we are today, a full-fledged research university?

Margaret Vaverek (04:57):
Well, so we started granting bachelor's degrees and then we started granting master's degrees I think in the ’30s, and then Ph.D. in my lifetime here in the early ’90s, I believe. So we've made that progression. And of course we were, the name was Southwest Texas State Teachers College for years, and we dropped teachers from that in 1959. But we've always had a very strong education department here and trained a lot of teachers.

Eddie Sanchez (05:32):
So I know we've changed our name a lot. Do you know exactly how many times we have?

Margaret Vaverek (05:37):
I'd have to count. I think it's seven.

Rodney Crouther (05:40):
OK, yeah.

Margaret Vaverek (05:41):
I think it's seven.

Rodney Crouther (05:42):
The name changed 24 years ago was not the only one.

Margaret Vaverek (05:45):
Oh, no, no. We were the normal school. Then they dropped "normal," and we became a teachers college, and then we were a teachers college for a long time, and then they dropped "teachers" and we were just a college. And then in ’69 we became a university, and then later they dropped the "Southwest" from the name, and so it was Texas State University-San Marcos first. Then that lasted not very long, and then they dropped "San Marcos," and it's just Texas State University. So I think we've found our niche. I think we've found our spot.

Rodney Crouther (06:17):
Do all those name changes kind of track how we've evolved as an institution and expanded our mission from just training teachers?

Margaret Vaverek (06:25):
Sure. I think really once we dropped ""teachers from the name that sort of formally severed those ties, although they certainly a big part of what we do, even still, but as the name changed, the number of programs increased and the student population has exploded.

Rodney Crouther (06:50):
What were some of the major programs that started that evolution?

Margaret Vaverek (06:53):
And I don't have the dates in front of me, but we had the business school grew a good bit in the ’70s, and we've always been pretty responsive to the needs of the community and the needs of the area that we serve.

Rodney Crouther (07:11):
Right. That's a good thing to know that Texas needed teachers at the turn of the century. So we were training teachers, but I guess as the economy and demands of the population here changed, our university changed with it.

Margaret Vaverek (07:25):
That's right. That's right. I mean, it's a big place. It's a big bureaucracy, but we remain flexible and responsive to the needs of the school. We had, we helped train pilots during World War II on this campus. Now the Gary Job Corps here in town was an airbase.

Rodney Crouther (07:47):
Oh, really?

Margaret Vaverek (07:48):
And we helped train pilots. So we've always been responsive to the community that we share here and to the greater — we're into Texas State Global, which is great, but we've always been responsive to what was going on around us, and we just keep broadening from that to Texas State Global, which I just think is exciting.

Rodney Crouther (08:17):
Frequently when we look at our history, talk about having the only president to graduate from a Texas university with LBJ, and his signing the Higher Education Act here. But do you have any other things that people generally don't know but should know that's fun or interesting about Texas State history?

Margaret Vaverek (08:36):
Oh, there's so many things. Don't get me started.

Rodney Crouther (08:40):
Oh no, please get started.

Margaret Vaverek (08:42):
There are some great things.

Rodney Crouther (08:44):
What are some of your favorites?

Margaret Vaverek (08:45):
Well, a couple of my favorites are the Stallions.

Rodney Crouther (08:49):
Oh, the statue on the Quad.

Margaret Vaverek (08:50):
The statue on the Quad is actually a work of fine art by a woman named Anna Hyatt Huntington was a gift to the university in the early 1950s. There's a lot of information about it online. It's a very fine piece of art. We painted over it at some point, but it

Rodney Crouther (09:11):
Oh, why did we paint over it?

Margaret Vaverek (09:12):
Well, we painted over it because, and I won't name any names, but there was a rival school in football that used to come every year and they would spray paint over the stallions.

Rodney Crouther (09:23):
Wow. Oh, so football pranks?

Margaret Vaverek (09:25):
Football pranks. I don't know what we did. I don't know what we did on their campus, but that's what they did on ours. They would, and so eventually the physical plant folks were like, yeah, we can't keep cleaning this. So they painted over it.

Rodney Crouther (09:38):
What was the original finish?

Margaret Vaverek (09:40):
It is actually cast aluminum. The detail is brilliant. If you've ever been to Brook Green Gardens in near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that's an outdoor museum really for large sculptor. And that was founded by Anna Hyatt Huntington and her husband, Archer, who was a railroad magnate. There is a similar statue there at Brook Green. So if you go to Brook Green Gardens website and look at their, it's kind of their symbol for the gardens, so you can see what it looked like. The detail was just exquisite.

Rodney Crouther (10:15):
Tell us some of your history with Texas State. You mentioned that you were a student here.

Margaret Vaverek (10:19):
I was. So I came to campus in the fall of ’79 as a freshman and got a bachelor's degree and a master's in history, and then went to up to North Texas State to get what's now the University of North Texas to get my master's in library information science, which I did, did that in ’85 and then graduated in December of ’85 and got a job as a librarian here on the 1st of February in 1986 and been here ever since. And it's a joy to be in this place and watch it grow and watch it change and get to be a part of it.

Rodney Crouther (11:04):
I imagine probably our first couple of presidents couldn't imagine having the research profile that we've got here today.

Margaret Vaverek (11:10):
Oh my gosh. No, no, no. It's interesting because people talk about the campus and they talk about, or particularly the faculty, and we remember the Run to R1, which is fabulous. We have always had scholars who were engaged in their fields. I mean, one of our early education faculty was Empress Zedler, and she was the second woman on campus to have a Ph.D. She came in the ’40s. She worked with in what we would now call speech communication. She worked with students who, or children who had the capacity for speech but didn't speak, and now that's a very well-known field and there's lots of study. But it started right here. She in fact took students or people from her clinic on the Today Show in 1958. Wow. That demonstrate her techniques with working with students. So we've always had faculty who were engaged as scholars. Now not to the level that they are today. Certainly.

Rodney Crouther (12:13):
Give us one more great fact that people should know.

Margaret Vaverek (12:16):
We had snowball fights on this campus every year from 1964 until 1979. There was a big, big snowball fight on Quad.

Rodney Crouther (12:26):
OK. How do you engineer a yearly snowball fight in Central Texas?

Margaret Vaverek (12:29):
Well, it's like this. One of our journalism faculty left the university in the early ’60s and went to work as what I would call a media relations person for the little college in Houghton, Michigan, which if you look at a map, it's in the upper peninsula and it's way up in the upper peninsula.

Rodney Crouther (12:56):
So almost Canada.

Margaret Vaverek (12:57):
Yeah, we are talking feet of snow every year. So I mean, he was a marketing, he was a journalism guy. So he got ahold of a gentleman named Bruce Roach who was running our news service at the time, and he said, we should send some snow to our less fortunate brethren in the south. And so they got this fraternity to sponsor and they would crate up a couple crates full of snowballs and it was a thing. And then in turn, we would send our Galliardia, our Homecoming queen, to Houghton to preside over their winter carnival. I think we got the better deal on snowballs. I don't know about going from whatever the winter was like in San Marcos to winter in Houghton. It's pretty cold.

Rodney Crouther (13:51):
All right, well thank you so much for sharing some really interesting tidbits of history that even, and I've been here a while and I had not heard a couple of these, so thank you so much.

Margaret Vaverek (14:01):
It was my pleasure, Rodney. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it and I wish us all well for the 125th. Can't believe it's that time already. I was here for the 100th and all of a sudden it's 25 years later and it's like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do?

Rodney Crouther (14:14):
It goes fast.

Margaret Vaverek (14:14):
It does go fast.

Eddie Sanchez (14:19):
That was really cool to hear about the snowball fight. I hadn't heard that story before.

Rodney Crouther (14:22):
Yeah, I mean doing it as a tradition, I guess you would have to import it. You can't guarantee snow in San Marcos in Central Texas. Yeah.

Eddie Sanchez (14:29):
So you had an opportunity to talk to somebody about our past and history. Who did you talk to next about what's going on currently?

Rodney Crouther (14:36):
Well, next I wanted to really take a look at who Texas State is as a research institution since that's the focus of so much energy on campus now from the students and the faculty. So I went and talked to the man who is really in charge of coordinating research on campus.

Shreek Mandayam (14:54):
I'm Shreek Mandayam. I'm the vice president for research here at Texas State University.

Rodney Crouther (15:01):
As we celebrate our 125th anniversary this year, we thought you'd be the ideal person to join us to talk about who we are as an institution today, who is Texas State as a research institution.

Shreek Mandayam (15:14):
I was looking at 25 years ago when our first research records were kept here and this institution was at $4 million in research expenditures. Just last year, our Texas State faculty have been successful in securing over $141 million in research.

Rodney Crouther (15:37):
Wow. So the last two decades we've done a lot of heavy work

Shreek Mandayam (15:42):
A little bit, and these dollars come from prestigious federal agencies.

Eddie Sanchez (15:48):
So who's funding this research for us?

Shreek Mandayam (15:50):
National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S, Departments of Education, Energy, Defense.

Rodney Crouther (15:59):
Are all investing in research here at Texas State.

Shreek Mandayam (16:02):
And our faculty are talented, they're passionate, they're persistent, and they are comparable to any top tier research university in the country.

Eddie Sanchez (16:12):
Hey, Rodney, so since I've been working here, I've heard the phrase Run to R1. Did he explain what that means for the university?

Rodney Crouther (16:19):
Yeah, we talked about what that's going to mean both on campus and for the community as a whole here.

Shreek Mandayam (16:25):
So the Carnegie criteria for R1 are based on two metrics. One is total research expenditures and the other is Ph.D. graduates.

Rodney Crouther (16:39):
OK.

Shreek Mandayam (16:41):
Fortunately, those are the very criteria for us to receive annual allocations from the Texas University Fund.

Rodney Crouther (16:49):
Oh, what's the Texas University fund?

Shreek Mandayam (16:51):
The Texas University Fund is a $4 billion permanent endowment set aside by the state of Texas last year.

Rodney Crouther (16:59):
Oh, right. I remember hearing about that.

Shreek Mandayam (17:01):
And voted into law by a referendum by the citizens of Texas.

Rodney Crouther (17:04):
Thank you, voters.

Shreek Mandayam (17:05):
And for four universities, of which Texas State University is one, and we have started receiving allocations from this fund starting this year. This means more allocation to Texas State University from the legislature which benefits the entire institution.

Rodney Crouther (17:28):
Great. So that's creating opportunities across the board here.

Shreek Mandayam (17:31):
Absolutely. And I really want to talk about opportunities for our students. Oh, great. Because our most accomplished researchers here at Texas State are also our most dedicated teachers. So our students have opportunities to work as research assistants in our faculty labs.

Rodney Crouther (17:51):
Is that just like for Ph.D, candidates or students at all levels getting their hands in the research?

Shreek Mandayam (17:56):
Students at all levels, including freshmen students. So I strongly encourage students to seek out professors and see if they have jobs to work in their labs.

Eddie Sanchez (18:05):
I'm sure that looks good on student resumes when they're out searching for jobs.

Shreek Mandayam (18:08):
Not only does it look great on the resume, but our students will develop skills that when they are competing for internships or they're competing for jobs, they can stand up to graduates from the best institutions in the country.

Rodney Crouther (18:22):
And what are some of the research areas today that Texas State is already pretty strong in? What do we like to brag about?

Shreek Mandayam (18:29):
So our areas of research expertise at Texas State are in these three main areas, I would say public health and public safety, as we see in the work done by the Translational Health Research Center, the Texas School Safety Center and the ALERRT Center. Second, infrastructure and the environment, as we've seen in the work done by the Materials Application Research Center and the Meadows Center for the Water and Environment. And finally, data science and AI as in the work done by our newest center, the Center for Analytics and Data Science. But at the same time throughout the university, we have a strong emphasis in research in STEM education, which brings us back to our foundation as a teachers college. We have not lost that yet.

Rodney Crouther (19:18):
Students that may not be interested in STEM but are still interested in research, are there research opportunities in things like education or sociology going on here?

Shreek Mandayam (19:26):
So research at Texas State encompasses the entire university, all departments, all areas of scholarship and every college.

Rodney Crouther (19:35):
Going back to some of the strengths you mentioned, those are obviously public safety, infrastructure, civil engineering, and environmental studies. Those are all growth industries for students looking for employment in the future. But those also seem to touch on things that have been really critical needs in America and the world.

Shreek Mandayam (19:57):
So the interesting thing is our faculty right now can answer the calls of the state of Texas, the United States, and the world to solve some of our toughest problems that exist in society, in health, in education, in infrastructure.

Rodney Crouther (20:15):
Yeah. I don't think it's possible to watch news for more than 20 minutes without hearing a story about healthcare and different parts of our healthcare system being in crisis. And same with growth in major cities and internationally. So we're addressing real world needs, not just chasing a designation for bragging rights.

Shreek Mandayam (20:35):
Not only are we addressing these societal needs in our research labs, but we are job creators. Research universities are economic engines in community. Our STAR Park is the place where research that is created in our labs transitions to the private sectors and creates new companies and provides jobs for our graduates.

Rodney Crouther (21:02):
Does that mean that our research programs here and through centers like STAR Park are developing relationships with employers and private sector industries in the Central Texas area here?

Shreek Mandayam (21:11):
Private companies spin in to STAR Park to work with our faculty and students and our faculty and students' expertise spin out into private companies within STAR Park.

Rodney Crouther (21:22):
So these relationships create opportunities for people to graduate with a job offer along with their diplomas.

Shreek Mandayam (21:28):
Multiple job offers.

Rodney Crouther (21:30):
Speaking to, and some people in our audience may not be familiar with everything that goes on here at Texas State. What's your favorite research program like to pull out? It's just like trivia. Did you know we're doing this at Texas State?

Shreek Mandayam (21:44):
I have many favorite research programs here at Texas State, but that one that comes to mind was just awarded by the National Institutes of Health. It is to study whether volunteerism improves your cardiovascular health.

Rodney Crouther (22:01):
Really?

Shreek Mandayam (22:02):
So we know that volunteering in society makes us feel good, but do you know it also makes us healthy and we are collecting evidence for that at Texas State. I thought that was a really cool project.

Rodney Crouther (22:14):
That's not something I've heard of in anything online or in social media as a fitness trend, volunteering for better health. What's the immediate future for research at Texas State?

Shreek Mandayam (22:26):
We are running, actually racing to R1. I'm confident that we will get there by our stated goal year of 2027. We are doubling the number of doctoral programs here at Texas State and providing more opportunities for our students to get graduate education. We are increasing the number of research programs and sponsors that provide funding to Texas State.

Rodney Crouther (22:55):
That's not just here at our San Marcos Campus, correct? I've heard there's some exciting things happening at our Round Rock Campus too.

Shreek Mandayam (23:01):
Our Round Rock Campus is critical to our research growth. We are working closely with the Round Rock Chamber of Commerce in establishing a life sciences incubator on our Round Rock Campus. That is a place where companies in the health and life sciences, entrepreneurs in these areas have an opportunity to start up their company and work with Texas State faculty and students as their company grows and prospers. So I would say the future of research at Texas State has never looked brighter.

Rodney Crouther (23:41):
We'll be right back after this.

Eddie Sanchez (23:53):
That was a really interesting piece of research that was conducted, Rodney, I had never heard about volunteering having that sort of physical benefit for an individual, definitely makes me want to get out there a little bit more.

Rodney Crouther (24:04):
Yeah, right. No, it was really exciting talking to Shreek and talking about how much research is happening all across campus and how everyone on campus, faculty and students, even freshmen are involved in it. I've been involved in a research study on campus in the last year and I'm staff. It's really encouraging to see that level of just commitment and energy around it.

Eddie Sanchez (24:24):
Yeah, this is a really exciting time to be here. I've been here for a couple of years and things are just changing rapidly and as amazing as everything is right now, I know that we're growing and getting even better. So did you have opportunity to talk to anybody about the future, where Texas State is headed?

Rodney Crouther (24:40):
Yeah, like rounding out our episode here, talking about our past and our present, looking toward the future. I went to the man who can't stop talking about our future. It's I think one of his favorite things to talk about, and I'll let him introduce himself.

Kelly Damphousse (24:55):
Hi, I'm Kelly Damphousse. I'm the president of Texas State University.

Rodney Crouther (25:02):
As we're celebrating our 125th anniversary, what does it mean to you to be president at a milestone like this for the institution?

Kelly Damphousse (25:10):
It's interesting. It's important to celebrate milestones because it gives you a chance to kind of pause and look back to what all the things you've accomplished. And I've only been here two years and so I'd love to take credit for all the things we've done, but it gives me a chance to celebrate other people. Just for example, President Trauth who was here for 20 years before I was here, in many ways we're going to be celebrating some of the things that she kind of got in motion that now are starting to come to fruition. But there were nine presidents or eight presidents before her. I'm the 10th president here and each one of them left a legacy. I start thinking now about what will my legacy be when I leave here at some point. But this is a time to look back and to focus on our legacy and the foundation that we have as we begin to think about what the next 125 years looks like.

Rodney Crouther (25:54):
That leads into my next question because our theme for this episode is Texas State Then, Now, and Next. So what will the next 125 years look? What's your vision for the next 125 years?

Kelly Damphousse (26:09):
I hardly have a vision for the next five years if I can't imagine that things have changed so tremendously just in the past couple of years in higher education. You think about how athletics is changing with the transfer portal and name, image and likeness and how finances are changing athletics. You think about artificial intelligence and how that's changing how we teach. Just think 20 years ago, not everyone had email addresses and think about how dramatically technology has changed what we're doing in higher education. Oh, certainly. And then think about what we're doing on our campus. We are transitioning from being mostly teaching school to a research university, and we really are a research university already, but our goal now to become an R1 institution, get at the highest level of research enterprise. Those are all things that will maybe 25 years from now when the next president is celebrating the 150th anniversary, they'll look back at this period, the 125 through 149 period of incredible change. There's so many inflection points that are happening and so many influences that are happening that are going to change who we are in spite, even if we don't want to change, it's going to change. And so we have to be flexible and be ready to do that change.

Eddie Sanchez (27:21):
So what are two or three things that are taking place right now that are going to impact our future?

Kelly Damphousse (27:26):
I could list off 15 for you, but I'll try a couple three or four elevator pitch style, elevator pitch style. I think one thing that I think we're really excited about is what's happening in Round Rock. We have been up in Round Rock for 25 years, and when we first started going up there, we were meeting in temporary buildings behind a high school, and eventually we got the Avery Building, and we got 101 acres of property there, and we started building other buildings and Nursing Building and Willow Hall and so on. For some reason we just kind of stalled and it became kind of the health professions location and other colleges weren't very involved there, but we think that there's huge potential in Round Rock, and we think we can have 10,000 students there. With the land that we have there, the building capacity that we have, the number of young people who are living in that area, the number of non-traditional students who are wanting to get a college degree or maybe get a master's degree is just growing tremendously in that area.

(28:19):
And so we think that that place can grow a lot and we're investing a lot right now in Round Rock. We have about 1,800 students there this spring. We think we can have 10,000 students by 2030, and so that'll be a huge play for us. Also, we think becoming an R1 institution is going to be a big deal for us. It puts us in the same level of Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Texas, A&M, LSU, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and so on. These schools that are the flagship schools of the state that represent something that is the heart of innovation and discovery. And we think that we're well positioned by 2027 to become an R1 institution, which will set us apart from a lot of other schools. We already have great researchers here and we recruit faculty from around the world here, but there'll be a new type of faculty who want to come here to come do research here and put Texas State where it belongs on the map, as far as the epicenter of discovery in this Innovative Corridor you have between Austin and San Antonio, we're right in the middle of that and all the stuff that's happening in those two huge cities, we're at the epicenter of that. And certainly you have a school in San Antonio that is highly involved in research. You got one in Austin as well, but we could serve as a bridge between those two and do things that they're not doing that could really make us, I think, pretty special.

Rodney Crouther (29:38):
Even those institutions can't do everything.

Kelly Damphousse (29:40):
They can't do everything. And some of the things they're doing, we could do as well, but there's things that they can't do or aren't doing that we can do to complement them. And so we're in competition with them in some ways, but we're also looking to complement things for the state. The state doesn't need every university to do the same thing, but the state needs all the universities to be able to do a lot of stuff. We graduate more teachers from Texas State University than any other university in the state, and more Texas teachers have our diploma on their wall than any other university in the world. And so that goes back to our heritage, our legacy.

Rodney Crouther (30:15):
That leads into my next question actually. That was our founding mission was training teachers before we were even a college, let alone a university. So how does that mission look going forward to the next 125?

Kelly Damphousse (30:27):
Well, we are one of the few schools in the country that has graduated a president and a king, so king of country, George Strait, and President Lyndon Baines Johnson. President Johnson was an education major and a school teacher. So from fairly humble beginnings, he took his natural prowess for engaging in the political arena and moved on from there. But he came here to be a teacher. So many of our students, especially our early alumni, that was primarily what they were doing, was to come here to become a teacher. And we never want to lose that legacy that we have about teaching future teachers because we have to think about education from a holistic perspective. It's not just two-year schools and four-year schools. It's also the K through 12 experience and we have to feed that pipeline. And so we have to have the best teachers in K through 12 to prepare people, not just to do well when they go to college, but also to be thinking about going to college.

(31:23):
Too many people right now are in 10th and ninth grade right now thinking college isn't for me. I'm not ready for it. I'm not, my parents didn't go to college. We don't have any money. I can't afford to go, and I'm not smart enough to go to college and so on. We need our teachers that we're training to go into K through 12 and get people into the mindset of like, I can go to college. I can make it happen. I tell students all the time, if you think you're not smart enough, you probably are. And if you're not sure, go to community college and kind of get that straightened out. If you think you can't afford to go test me on that. See if we can't find you a scholarship to help you get here. And the third thing is to find, and it helps students find their people when they get here. If we can fix finances and academic tutoring and then fix fit where people feel like I've got my people that I'm with, we can fix a lot of issues related to retention and graduation rates. Those are the three main factors for determining whether or not a student will stay in college and ultimately graduate.

Eddie Sanchez (32:19):
I know that culture has played a big influence on students' decisions when they decide on whether or not they're going to come to Texas State. So did Dr. Damphousse talk about how we're going to maintain that legacy of culture as we move forward and continue to grow?

Rodney Crouther (32:33):
Yeah, he certainly recognizes maintaining the culture here as a key part of keeping Texas State Ss Texas state.

Kelly Damphousse (32:40):
A previous institution I worked at, I would always ask students, why'd you come to the school? And the answer was almost always, "I got a good scholarship." And I just left a lunch I had with a couple of freshmen and I asked them why they came here and both of 'em said, well, I wasn't sure about coming here, but I came to campus on a tour, or one of them came here for a student event when she was a junior in high school and she said, I just fell in love with the place. It just seemed like a great place to be in. But they're looking at the architecture and the river and the lake and the buildings and so on.

Rodney Crouther (33:10):
We definitely win on the beauty pageants. That's right. This is a gorgeous campus.

Kelly Damphousse (33:13):
Absolutely one of the most beautiful campuses I've ever been on, and I've been around the country and seeing college campuses everywhere. But what they discover is more than just the beauty of the river and the campus, but it's the spirit of family and community that they find here. Our faculty are highly engaged with our students outside the classroom and people feel like they're not just a number. People know who they are. The other thing is I think that people feel like they can come to Texas State and be themselves.

Rodney Crouther (33:44):
Before we wrap up here, as you said, you're in your second year here and this is 125th celebration. So just give us, do you have a top one or two bits of Texas State trivia that you've learned as we've prepared for this celebration?

Kelly Damphousse (34:00):
Well one of the, I dunno if it's trivia, but one of the traditions that I love is the jumping in the river. And I think that's a relatively recent phenomenon where students at graduation will walk out the door and jump in the river at Sewell Park. We've got so many pictures and videos of people doing it, and it's one of those things that is distinctively Texas State. That doesn't happen anywhere else. Other schools have rivers nearby, but nobody jumps in the river at those schools.

Rodney Crouther (34:25):
Most of them aren't spring fed, pure water.

Kelly Damphousse (34:27):
Spring fed, the water's 72 degrees all year round, and the water's crystal clear. And so I love that tradition. I love the Strutters, for example. Again, quintessential Texas State, the Strutters program, the young ladies who've been doing that for 60 years now, representing the university, not just on our campus but around the world as they perform at parades and other events, inaugurations and so on. I love the fact that our football team has kind of turned the corner here, and that's actually raising our profile nationally because to be honest, your football team has a huge influence on people's idea of your university. And if the football team is not performing well, the school isn't reflected very well. And I love our bowl game that we went to. We want that to become a new tradition of going to a bowl game every year. When I came here, I saw our mascot and the mascot's name was Boko.

(35:19):
Oh, yes. And I didn't know it was, where's Boko come from? So I looked it up and I said, oh, it's a made up word. I thought it's stood for something. And they selected the Bobcat as a mascot back in the 1920s. So mascot's been around for a long time, didn't have a name until the 1960s, I think. 1964, I think that's right, yes. Yeah. They had a contest to say, what are we going to name this mascot? We're going to have someone walking around with a costume on. The person who won it was one of our female students, and she won $5 for coming up with a name, Boko.

Rodney Crouther (35:54):
Huge grand prize.

Kelly Damphousse (35:54):
Yeah and she literally just made it up out of nowhere, but she got $5 and for all of eternity will be known as a person who invented the name Boko.

(36:05):
And it was interesting, when I came here, I thought our Boko mascot costume was kind of passive. It kind of looked like the eyes were kind of crooked and the nose was pink and it kind of looked a little too, a little too cuddly. Too cuddly. And so I asked the athletic department if it was time for a reboot on Boko, and they did. They came out with a little bit more aggressive-looking bobcat. There's this SuperCat and there's kind of the angry cat logo. I said, kind of model it on the angry cat because it's a little bit more aggressive. So they brought it out and I think it looks fantastic. And there was some concern, maybe it's too scary for kids and stuff like that, but nobody seems to bother that. It is less about what the mascot head looks like than the personality, the person who's wearing it.

(36:48):
And if you're lighthearted and our mascots, the young men who are performing as Boko, they are incredibly gifted and they're super funny and they're lighthearted and everyone loves the new mascot look. And so that was kind of a piece of tribute. Where did the name come from is just kind of totally made up. One of the things that I think is important as we approached the 125th, we're looking forward, of course, about the future of our university, but it's also important to respect the legacy and the foundation and the past as well. And increasingly, I have tried to express to our alumni that we certainly are leaning in on the Texas State name. We think for a national reputation, it's important to not have a regional connotation by having Southwest in it, but we also want to recognize the value of SWT, and we're all Bobcats, even if we went to SWT or Texas State.

(37:43):
And I think a lot of our alumni resonate with that, that we don't want to ignore the legacy. So whenever I custom make hats because kind of hard to find the hats I like, I usually put Texas State on the front and Southwest Texas State on the back so I can honor both of those legacies, the future, the legacy of yesterday, and the legacy that leans in for tomorrow. And that's kind of our logo, motto for the 125th, the Legacy for Tomorrow. So I love tying those things together because I am a lay historian and I love the value of putting into today's story, the context of yesterday, how did we get here? And then how do we get people who are here now to there, whatever there is. That's what I've loved about the Texas State Next because we're helping people get to what their next is.

(38:34):
It's refreshing to be able to be freed up to talk about Southwest Texas State, but also be freed up to think about what the future of Texas State University looks like, and the future of Texas State is the future of Texas. We educate a lot of Texas kids. 95% of our students are from Texas. Homegrown. Increasingly number of international students are coming here. We're working hard to introduce Texas State to the world, and they're becoming a lot more applications from out of state and from international locations as well. But we'll never forget that our job is to educate Texans to build the Texas of tomorrow, and that's a great legacy as well.

Rodney Crouther (39:10):
Yeah, I loved recently, at least how closely our campus demographic matches the same inflow into the state of Texas.

Kelly Damphousse (39:19):
So our demographics look exactly like the demographics of Texas, a percent of Hispanics, Blacks, Asians, others, and whites, exactly monitors. So we're the most diverse campus in the state of Texas. Also most applied to school in Texas. It says something about our status, people are no longer thinking of us as this small party school that's got a small population that not much is happening there to now being this very vibrant place with 40,000 students, very popular and still has the life aspect that people have fun when they come here, but there's also the serious part of the academic thing that is actually starting to become more recognized to people as well.

Rodney Crouther (39:58):
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to stop in and here's to the next 125.

Kelly Damphousse (40:04):
I can't wait for the next 125. I may not be here for the next 125 or the next 25 years, but I will do everything I can in the time that I have left to make those people 25 years from now proud of what we did here in 2024.

Eddie Sanchez (40:35):
Rodney, those were really enlightening conversations. I'm glad that you had an opportunity to talk to all these people, especially because even though you and I are in the midst of this 125, there's still so much for us to learn, for us to kind of discover. So thank you for reaching out to all those people.

Rodney Crouther (40:50):
Yeah, it was kind of fun, even with all the work, this whole episode was kind of a moment to step back and just appreciate where we started and what we are today and get excited all over again about where we're going.

Eddie Sanchez (41:03):
I know that you and I have done quite a bit of work when it comes to creating the history and piecing together the history for our audience. So is there anywhere that they can go to find more information?

Rodney Crouther (41:13):
Oh, absolutely. Check out the show description for this episode. We're going to have some links in there to our eras pages that takes you really more in depth into a lot of the moments and the people that made Texas State, Texas State throughout the years, through great years and challenging years, like war years and past epidemics and things. We've been through a lot as a community here and definitely keep an eye on our social media for the next year. We're going to have a lot of information on there, continuing the celebration of 125 years of Texas State history. And as much as we talked about here, we barely scratch the surface, the tip of the iceberg of Texas State history. There's a lot.

Eddie Sanchez (41:52):
Well, I'm excited to learn with everybody else.

Rodney Crouther (41:55):
Well, thank you for listening to Texas State Then, Now, and Next. Eddie, what do we have coming up next month?

Eddie Sanchez (41:59):
So this upcoming episode is probably one of my favorite episodes because I got a chance to talk about something that we frequently talk about at the office, music.

Rodney Crouther (42:08):
Yes.

Eddie Sanchez (42:09):
I'm going to be talking with a couple of our faculty members about the research they've conducted. I get to learn a little bit about Texas music history and we kind of just get to explore the topic in general.

Rodney Crouther (42:18):
Oh, that's fun. I know we've got some great Texas music resources on campus, but I'm not going to try to guess what you've got coming up.

Eddie Sanchez (42:25):
Thanks for this episode, Rodney, and I look forward to sharing mine next month.

Rodney Crouther (42:29):
Yep. We'll talk to you next month, folks. This podcast is a production of the Division of Marketing and Communications at Texas State University. Podcasts appearing on the Texas State Podcast Network represent the views of the host and guests not of Texas State University.