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UTEP (University of Texas at
El Paso)
A
public coeducational university
Common
clues: Sch. Near the Rio Grande; Western Athletic Conf. Team; The
Miners of the NCAA; El Paso campus; Lone Star State sch.; Texas
Western, today: Abbr.
Crossword
puzzle frequency:
once a year
News:
Pickax
Sculpture Arrives At UTEP Campus
Video:
Plagiarism
UTEP
The
University of Texas at El Paso, popularly known as UTEP, is a
public, coeducational university, and it is a member of the
University of Texas System. The school is located on the northern
bank of the Rio Grande, in El Paso, Texas, and is the largest
university in the nation with a majority Mexican-American student
population. Founded in 1914 as The Texas State School of Mines
and Metallurgy, a mineshaft still exists on the mountainous,
desert campus. It is composed of buildings of Bhutanese
architecture, with massive sloping walls and overhanging roofs.
In the mid-1950s, UTEP then named Texas Western College became
the first college in a Southern state to integrate its
intercollegiate athletic teams. Although the campus population
was less than 1% African-American, in 1966, basketball coach Don
Haskins and his Texas Western team thrilled portions of the
nation by winning the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship with an
all-black starting lineup, thus breaking an unspoken barrier and
transforming the history of college basketball. By 1967, the
Board of Regents authorized that the name of the college be
changed from Texas Western College to its present name.
Currently, there are more than 18,900 students enrolled at UTEP.
80 percent of UTEP's student population is Hispanic. UTEP is the
country’s only doctoral research intensive university with
a student body that’s predominantly Mexican-American.
The
historical 1966 Texas Western College win over The University of
Kentucky for the NCAA basketball championship was depicted in the
Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer movie “Glory Road,” which
was released on January 13, 2006. Glory Road lies between the two
basketball arenas on the campus, stretching from Mesa Avenue to
Sun Bowl Road.
Today,
the institution is devoted to educating the diverse population at
a sprawling campus in the westernmost part of the State of Texas
along the borders with Mexico and the State of New Mexico.
This
article is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "UTEP".
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