A Texas university looks like Bhutan because of one National Geographic issue
After a fire destroyed a young Texas mining school in 1916, the dean's wife remembered photographs of Bhutanese monastery fortresses she had seen in National Geographic. The rugged hills above the Rio Grande reminded her of the Himalayas. Her suggestion stuck, and the University of Texas at El Paso still builds with sloping walls and overhanging roofs.
UTEP began as the State School of Mines and Metallurgy, funded by a bill the Texas governor signed on April 16, 1913. It opened on September 28, 1914, with 27 students in former military-institute buildings beside Fort Bliss, and a practice mineshaft survives on campus. Two years later enrolment was 39, including its first women, Ruth Brown and Grace Odell. Then on October 29, 1916, fire gutted the main building, and in 1917 the school rebuilt on donated land at its current hillside site, looking across the border at Ciudad Juárez.
Kathleen Worrell, married to the first dean, Steve Worrell, proposed the dzong style, known for massive sloped walls, deep eaves and painted bands. Architect Henry Trost carried it forward, and every building up to 1950 followed the look, later extended to the Sun Bowl stadium and even parking garages. Bhutan noticed: a prince has visited, and in 2009 the kingdom gave the campus a hand-carved wooden temple. In 2024, however, students voted to demolish one original building under a plan to raze more historic structures by 2034.
The school's name changed several times, becoming Texas Western College in 1949 and taking its current title in 1967. It trained the first Peace Corps class in 1961. Its most famous moment came in 1966, when coach Don Haskins started five Black players in the NCAA basketball final and beat an all-white Kentucky side 72–65, finishing 28–1. The story later became the film Glory Road, which took some liberties with the facts.
The record is not spotless. In 1968 the track programme stripped eight Black athletes of scholarships after they boycotted a meet at Brigham Young University, among them future long-jump world record holder Bob Beamon; the coach later regretted it. Today UTEP holds the top R1 research ranking, reported $145.7 million in research spending for fiscal 2023, and offers the only bilingual creative writing MFA in the country.
Source: University of Texas at El Paso
