The University of Texas at Dallas has aspirations as big as the state of Texas — perhaps bigger.

Even after it was recognized as an R1 institution — the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education’s top tier of doctoral institutions with “very high research activity” — UT Dallas continues to aspire to even greater achievements in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math as well as in management, arts and humanities. 

Reaching those goals — and keeping up with recent rapid enrollment growth — will take many new talented faculty members.

So UT Dallas, ranked fifth in the nation for National Merit Scholars, has embarked on an ambitious journey: to hire an additional 70 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members by 2025 to help push the university into the forefront of scholarship and research.

“The vision of UT Dallas is to become one of the nation’s best public research universities and rank among the most creative and innovative universities of the world,” said Dr. Inga H. Musselman, provost and vice president for academic affairs and the Cecil H. Green Distinguished Chair of Academic Leadership. “To achieve this goal, we think it’s necessary to put forward this aggressive expansion initiative.”

On an upward trajectory

UT Dallas — founded in 1961 as the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest to produce engineers and scientists for Texas Instruments and other North Texas employers — joined The University of Texas System in 1969 with 62 graduate students. It has been growing rapidly ever since.

Enrollment has surged 60% over the past decade, making it one of the nation’s fastest-growing universities, and last fall reached a university-record 31,570 students. Federal research expenditures have grown 68% over the past four years while total research expenditures topped $140 million in fiscal year 2022. 

To accommodate more students and expand its research enterprise, the campus in the North Dallas suburb of Richardson has expanded tremendously. Between 2007 and 2022, UT Dallas nearly doubled the number of facilities and added more than 9 million square feet of building space. Its newest facilities that have opened since 2016 include a bioengineering and sciences building, an engineering and computer science building and a sciences building for physics and space sciences programs. 

Two new buildings to expand UT Dallas’ research and arts footprint are scheduled to come online within the next year. The Texas Instruments Biomedical Engineering and Sciences Building is nearing completion in Dallas and will be shared with UT Southwestern Medical Center. In 2024, UT Dallas plans to complete the first of three buildings of the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum, the university’s new visual and performing arts complex.

In recent years, UT Dallas annually hired about 30 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members to replace those who had retired or departed. The university brought in a modest number of net new faculty members in the past three years to address enrollment growth. But Musselman said a close analysis of UT Dallas’ benchmark institutions — the very best public research universities — pointed to one conclusion: If UT Dallas wanted to expand its research portfolio to reach that level of excellence, it would have to significantly increase the size of its faculty.

UT Dallas emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic in strong financial shape. University leaders calculated they had enough resources to cover new salaries, research labs and other start-up costs. They also had the will to proceed.

“It all comes back to wanting to be competitive as a major public research university,” Musselman said. “We want to give our students the best education possible, and we want to be competitive on the national research scene. To do that, we really have to have a larger faculty.”

Fulfilling its mission

UT Dallas leaders expect that its faculty expansion initiative will help continue to increase enrollment and research output and better serve its students. But the plan does other things as well. 

It will help UT Dallas fulfill its commitment to the region — a commitment that hasn’t wavered since it was founded more than 50 years ago — to graduate well-educated and highly trained students to fill the ever-more specialized jobs in North Texas.

Today, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is home to 7.6 million people and is on pace to become the nation’s third-largest metro area by the next U.S. census. It’s also home to 23 Fortune 500 companies, including Texas Instruments, AT&T and American Airlines. Because there are so many opportunities in business, STEM and other fields, 70% of UT Dallas graduates remain in the region after they earn their degrees. 

The region’s growth has fueled the university’s growth, Musselman said, and UT Dallas must continue to grow to feed the region’s ambition of adding more jobs, more employers and greater prosperity.

UT Dallas has its own aspirations, too: be the most impactful research-intensive university in North Texas and to continue to be the highly-valued supplier of talent to the state’s booming economy.

“Our aggressive faculty hiring initiative speaks to the health of the university,” Musselman said. “It speaks to our goals and our drive to get bigger and better and build on our success.”