In special late-afternoon ceremonies on Nov. 12, The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD), one of the fastest growing public universities in the country, will formally dedicate a 152,000-square-foot addition to the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.
The dedication ceremonies will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Engineering Complex Courtyard, and a reception will follow. Although the new building opened in August, in time for the 2002-03 academic year, the formal dedication was delayed until November, when members of the University of Texas Board of Regents will be in town for a two-day meeting and visit to UTD. The regents allocated $30 million toward the new engineering and computer science building.
Funds also were raised from private sources. Contributors to the expansion program included the Texas Instruments Foundation, Zyvex Corporation and Mrs. Eugene McDermott, widow of a co-founder of Texas Instruments (TI) and the research institute that in 1969 became UTD, $2.5 million each; Alcatel Americas and Ericsson Corporation, $1 million each; Fujitsu Network Communications, $500,000; and the Meadows Foundation, $350,000.
UTD’s engineering and computer science school is named for another co-founder of TI and the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest, the late Erik Jonsson, former mayor of Dallas. The Jonsson School awards more computer science degrees annually than any other university in the United States and was the first school in the country to offer an ABET-accredited degree in telecommunications engineering (ABET is the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology). Last year, UTD joined the ranks of a select group of universities that grant a B.S. degree in software engineering.
UTD President Dr. Franklyn Jenifer said that having the formal dedication of the new building while members of the Board of Regents were in town was UTD’s way of thanking the regents for their support of “not just this critically important project, but of U. T. Dallas in general.”
Jenifer noted that the Jonsson School addition, which took about 17 months to complete, was just one in a series of recent improvements on the UTD campus approved by the regents. Construction has begun on a 200,000-square-foot building for the School of Management and a 23,000-square-foot satellite facility for UTD’s Callier Center for Communication Disorders, he said, and renovations are under way to the existing buildings used by the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Jenifer emphasized that all of those improvements were “badly needed at UTD,” which now enrolls more than 13,000 students.
UTD’s enrollment has soared more than 42 percent in the last four years.
The Jonsson School currently has more than 3,600 students and is the second largest of UTD’s seven schools (the School of Management, with nearly 4,500 students, is the largest). The three-story addition, which is architecturally compatible with the existing engineering facility and contains state-of-the-art classrooms and equipments, will allow the Jonsson School eventually to grow to more than 6,000 students.