About this Book

"As the Texas A&M University-San Antonio celebrates its tenth anniversary as a standalone institution in 2019, it is well into its march towards the future--a future of "audacious aspirations" according to president Cynthia Teniente-Matson. But like most bold ideas, the dream of a four-year public university on San Antonio's underserved South Side did not become reality effortlessly. Immense challenges--political, economic, academic, and ideological--confronted those early believers who fought hard to establish a new branch of the Texas A&M University System in San Antonio as the twenty-first century began. Through archival research and interviews with former political leaders, faculty members, alumni, and current students at A&M-San Antonio, author Catherine Nixon Cooke has discovered a saga that really began several hundred years ago, when jaguars and rattlesnakes still dominated the landscape of the original San Antonio de Bexar, indigenous peoples dwelled along the river, and early Tejanos like Jose Navarro and Juan Seguin pushed for a public university. Ten years after its establishment, more than 6,600 students are enrolled in Texas A&M-San Antonio's more than forty undergraduate and graduate programs, working towards degrees from its three colleges--arts and sciences, education and human development, and business. In just a decade of existence, the new campus has witnessed the graduation of more than 10,000 students, and an expansion boom that rivals the speed of its jaguar mascot is underway."--