When confronted with challenging times like ours, it is easy to lose heart, appreciation, gratefulness and admiration— in a word, thanksgiving—for the people and places we call home. Our University has been fortunate to have many distinguished leaders.
One of those luminaries is President J. A. Hill, who began a 30-year legacy of leadership in September 1918 after President R. B. Cousins resigned. While numerous factors led to Hill’s successful tenure as president, I believe that one of his most salient strengths was his career as a historian. While many of Hill’s ideas seem antiquated, his intentionality in moving the institution forward, and indeed his success, is something for which we should all be thankful.
In a speech on Nov. 24, 1932, to the Texas State Teachers Association in Fort Worth, Texas, Hill situated the times with prescience only available to a skillful historian. Please remember with me the times and the state of our nation. In the vice grip on the thirties, one jaw of which was World War I, and the second jaw of which was World War II, and the pressures of these wars squeezed this seemingly endless Great Depression into our national consciousness. Challenges unlike any previously endured.