The history of East Texas State Teachers College (ETSTC) comprises the history of the university now known as East Texas A&M University from its renaming as East Texas State Teachers College in 1923 (to define its purpose "more clearly") to its renaming as East Texas State College in 1957 (to recognize its broadening scope). During this era, ETSTC was led by four different presidents (Randolph B. Binnion, Samuel H. Whitley, A. C. Ferguson, and James Gilliam Gee), two of whom (Whitley and Gee) served for more than a decade. The ETSTC period was marked by increasing recognition, notably through obtaining membership in the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) in 1925, as well as marked growth in its faculty, student enrollment, and physical plant. ETSTC grew from 65 faculty in 1925 to 132 in 1957, from approximately 1,000 students in 1925 to over 3,000 in 1958–59, and from six buildings valued at roughly $500,000 in the early 1920s to a physical plant valued at over $4 million in 1949.
While in the early 1920s ETSTC's faculty lacked advanced degrees and was relatively poorly compensated, by 1927 a majority of the faculty held degrees higher than bachelor's degrees and by 1957, 59 of its 132 faculty members held doctorates. All four ETSTC presidents exerted a marked conservative influence on the campus; during his presidency, for instance, Whitley disapproved of smoking and refused to hire married women. The ETSTC era also included the Great Depression, which witnessed a steep drop in enrollment and federal student aid principally from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and the National Youth Administration (NYA), and World War II, which saw the campus host the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), and the Civilian Pilot Training Program, while 63 former students were killed in the conflict.
The post-World War II era at ETSTC was marked by a return to growth, in terms of the faculty, student enrollment, and physical plant alike. New dormitories and athletics buildings, including Memorial Stadium and the Field House, were built during this period. Gee's tenure as president, which began in 1947, included two major controversies: his feud with Sam Rayburn, the congressman representing Hunt County and an alumnus of the college, and his support of a doctrinaire general studies program that angered and alienated numerous faculty and resulted in the demotion of two "dissident" department heads. Gee also was able to block integration from occurring at East Texas State for much of his presidency; the college would not integrate until forced to do so by the Board of Regents in 1964.
The ETSTC era was also a banner period for athletics, as the school joined the Lone Star Conference (LSC) as a founding member in 1931, while during the "Golden Fifties" both the football and men's basketball teams won multiple conference championships, and the basketball team won the NAIA national basketball tournament in 1954–55. The 1920s and 1930s have been referred to as the "truly golden age" of student clubs at East Texas State, and despite the vast majority of the student body having $5 or less in spending money a month in 1925, students found creative and inexpensive forms of recreation, from attending theaters and dating to attending college-sponsored events such as Saturday night dances and appearances by noted performing artists such as John Philip Sousa and the United States Marine Band as well as noted speakers such as Frances Perkins, Emily Post, and Carl Sandburg.
1920s
East Texas State Normal College (ETSNC) was renamed East Texas State Teachers College (ETSTC) in 1923, to define its purpose "more clearly". In 1925, the college became a true four-year institution when its "sub-college" program was transferred to its training school; however, it was slow in gaining respect from the University of Texas at Austin, which refused to accept ETSTC credits beyond the sophomore level at face value until 1922. Even before being fully recognized by UT Austin, though, East Texas State students had gained admission at various other prestigious universities, including the University of Chicago, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University. Furthermore, in 1925 ETSTC was granted membership in the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), "the South's major accrediting agency for institutions of higher learning".
On November 20, 1924, President Randolph B. Binnion resigned the presidency to become provost at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee, and the board of regents selected Samuel H. Whitley as his successor. Whitley was the Dean of the Faculty at ETSTC and a professor of mathematics at the time of his selection, prior to which he had been a high school principal in Corsicana and, briefly, Assistant State Superintendent. Whitley was inaugurated as ETSTC's third president on January 16, 1926, the same day as the dedication of the Education Building, the first campus building to be paid for by state funds. The building was constructed with an appropriation of $285,000 from the Texas Legislature and was built by the Jones Construction Company of San Antonio; it featured a 2,500-seat auditorium and originally included 35 classrooms. It was later renamed the Arthur C. Ferguson Social Sciences Building and, as of 1993, was still one of the most-used buildings on campus. By that year, all of the buildings constructed during the presidencies of Mayo and Binnion had been demolished and replaced, leaving the Ferguson Social Sciences Building as the oldest structure still standing on campus.
Like Binnion before him, Whitley subscribed to a conception of "normalism" that was similar to Mayo's, which helped ease the presidential transition. Under Whitley, the college's student population increased, eclipsing 1,000 in 1925 before reaching 1,953 during the 1932–33 school year. State funds failed to keep up with enrollment growth, however, rising only slightly from $253,060 during the 1926–27 academic year to $265,950 in 1932–33. Another challenge facing ETSTC during the 1920s and 1930s was the state of its physical plant; aside from the new Education Building, many campus buildings were in poor condition, especially Industrial Hall and Old Main (which were eventually demolished in 1941 and the early 1950s, respectively). New buildings were constructed to address this issue during the Whitley administration: in 1927, a new two-story, colonial-style president's home was built for Whitley just to the south of the Education Building, and in 1929–30 the school's first dedicated library was constructed, featuring room for 125,000 volumes and a showpiece two-story, reading room. The library also included classrooms and a museum, and featured such ornate details as dark oak woodwork and bronze chandeliers.
Just before Whitley became president in 1925, ETSTC employed a total of 65 faculty, which grew to 80 by the 1932–33 academic year. Historian of the university William E. Sawyer described the teaching loads for the 1925 summer normal institute as "excessive": one single teacher was assigned to teach agriculture, physical geography, physiology, and zoology, while another teacher taught ancient history, modern history, Texas history, United States history, and school law. However, due to the relative paucity of the school's budget, salaries remained low: during the early 1930s, department heads were paid $3,600 annually, but salaries as low as $2,500 for associate professors, $1,800 for instructors, and $728 for maintenance staff were recorded. in 1926, the Texas State Finance Committee had set the salary for all the presidents of the state teachers colleges at $5,000, along with a residence. In 1931, Whitley admitted that ETSTC's salary scale was "lower than...any other state institution".
Furthermore, in 1932, the school began giving employment preference to native Texans and adopted a policy of not employing more than one member of any family. According to history professor Donald E. Reynolds, ETSTC was "reported to have the lowest cost per student in the state", and a 1933 report on the school by the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools found that it only spent $160 per student, additionally noting that both its library and faculty were undersized and "somewhat below average" in comparison to comparable schools. In 1938, no raises were given to faculty, and equipment budgets were drastically cut, from $4,500 to $1,800 for the chemistry department and from $9,200 to $3,800 for the industrial education department. By 1940, ETSTC employed 135 teaching faculty.
Reynolds argued that "academic standards had risen faster nationally...than they had at ET", and noted that in 1925, ETSTC employed more faculty members with no college degrees or only bachelor's degrees than with master's degrees. That year also marked the hiring of Rural Education department head Albert S. Blankenship, the school's first member of the faculty to have earned a doctorate. To address this general lack of credentials at ETSTC, Whitley implemented a policy of hiring and retaining only faculty members who had obtained advanced degrees, which resulted in a majority of the faculty holding degrees higher than bachelor's degrees by 1927 and, by 1933, 8 faculty with doctorates, 72 with master's degrees, and just 6 with less than a master's degree (either a bachelor's degree or no degree at all). Whitley once confided: "I am doing my durndest to shake this old faculty up here, so that some of them will get Ph. D.'s but I am having the dickens of a time of it".
In addition to academic credentials, Whitley also stressed "proper" behavior, albeit not as strictly as Binnion: while he did not officially disapprove of dancing as his predecessor did, Whitley did disapprove of smoking, refused to hire married women, and was displeased with the thought of his faculty spending their weekends in area cities perceived to be more "liberal" than Commerce. According to Sawyer, however, at least one teacher was fired and multiple female students dismissed for dancing during Binnion's presidency.
During the 1923–24 academic year, ETSTC was offering 370 classes in 23 different disciplines, compared to 156 in 17 subjects when it became a state school in 1917. Additionally, the high school-level "sub-college" program was gradually phased out during this period, as it was reduced to only the senior level of high school in the late 1920s and was completely eliminated in 1931. Other structural changes during the ETSTC era came from the state government in Austin, including a shift from Mayo's old quarter system to semesters and more stringent requirements for prospective teachers and the programs that educated them, including a new statewide policy effective from 1934–35 that required teachers employed by schools receiving state aid "to have a minimum of two years college training and to hold a State teaching certificate".
Great Depression The reverberations of the Great Depression struck Texas and its economy in earnest during the 1932–33 academic year, with the State Legislature reducing ETSTC's budget for that year by over $35,000; over a three-year period, the school's total budget was reduced by over 25%. Although Whitely did not resort to mass layoffs, he did drastically reduce salaries (faculty saw a 25% reduction in their compensation in fall 1934), while he himself lost his life's saving in failed banks.