Page 10 - The First Fifty Years
P. 10
Do Not Delete 1/8/2015 10:14 AM
4 HOUSTON LAW REVIEW
***
(MORE THAN) HUMBLE BEGINNINGS2
The official motto of the University of Houston is: “In Time.”3
Just-in-time, in the Japanese industrial sense? Mañana, in the
American slang sense? In due course,4 in the plodding sense
generally associated with American academic writing? Perhaps
all of the above.
Stripping aside all else, the University of Houston, as
founded, was about leveling. The purpose of the University was
to uplift the working people of the City of Houston and give them
a chance to succeed, or fail, in college.5 As founded, UH was all
about the Open Door, with due allowance for substantial
numbers of students exiting by the Back Door when they did not
succeed.
The University began life, under the leadership of
enterprising Houston public school superintendent E.E.
Oberholtzer, in 1927, and became a four-year institution
(assuming its present name) seven years later.6 In those days,
the University of Houston offered a chance to obtain, but clearly
not the guarantee of, a post high school degree on a shoestring.
Not surprisingly, at a school which continually has faced
significant financial challenges in advancing its mission,
academic quality was, generally speaking, less important than
tuition income.7
A.A. White’s Law School
Against this background, nothing more startling could have
occurred than the creation in 1947, within the University of
Houston, of a college dedicated to excellence. A.A. White, the
founding dean of the College of Law8 and a top-ranking law
graduate at SMU (with graduate study at Columbia), saw no
reason for the law school Oberholtzer had engaged him to begin
to be anything less than first rate. While the University could
provide his new law school no better quarters than old military
services barracks (later upgraded to the basement of the
university library), White was undeterred:
I told President Oberholtzer my ambition would be to make
the law school better than the University.9
Oberholtzer had in mind a big law school, defined by quantity:
the more students the College of Law enrolled, the more income it
would produce. White had in mind a quality law school.