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Austin, Texas (1977)

When you come into Austin, Texas, at night, whether by plane or by car, you can see two buildings brilliantly illuminated against the skyline. One is the state capitol, and the other is the tower that tops the main building of the University of Texas. These two buildings define Austin, and epitomize what makes it so different from the rest of Texas. Here in Austin is not only the government of one of America’s largest states, but also the largest and most respected university in the American southwest. The coincidence of a state capitol and a major university happens less in America than a foreigner might expect; the other examples include Madison, Wisconsin; Columbus, Ohio; and Lincoln, Nebraska.

Austin is not the largest city in Texas--not by any means. In population, at roughly 300,000, it ranks behind Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio. Nor does it have the tall buildings--the “skyscrapers”--that customarily define a metropolis. Nor is it an economic center for the surrounding cattle ranches, which so predominate the center of the state. Nor is it a “Germantown,” like others in this region, which were initially settled by Socialist refugees from the revolutions of 1848. No, what makes Austin different from the rest of Texas are its qualities--its gentle hills, which distinguish it from the surrounding planes; its vegetation, at the northern rim of the south Texas desert; and then the presence of those two institutions with their illuminated, buildings--the state capitol and the university.

The capitol is an imposing, domed structure, in the classical architectural style of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D. C. Begun in 1882, it was completed. in 1888. 586 feet long, 300 feet wide, and. 310 feet high, it was said to be, at the time of its construction, the seventh largest building in the world. Atop the dome stands the goddess of liberty with her left arm raised. The capitol’s dome is sheeted with 85,000 square feet of copper roofing, and the walls below are a rare pink granite (which comes from Marble Falls, Texas, fifty miles to the northwest). The capitol’s interior is just as elegant, with walls of Texas limestone, wood paneling, wide stairways, and tile flooring; scores of well-dressed people stride purposefully about. Perhaps the single most awesome sight is the dome’s interior, with its four tiers of railings and then its geometric patterns leading upward. to a single five-pointed star, the “lone star,” which is the official insignia of the state. Everything is spotlessly clean. Even a foreign visitor would instantly acknowledge that this building is special.

In the capitol regularly meet the state senate and the state legislature; here too is the state governor’s “Reception Room” for public occasions, such as press conferences and official meetings. The state senate, the smaller group, meets in a spacious room in the building’s east wing. Around them are portraits of the most famous Texans, including Stephen F. Austin, after whom the city is named; Sam Houston, who led the army during its war for independence (1836); Lyndon B. Johnson, the only Texan to become President of the United States; and the black Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. Behind the senators’ thirty-one desks are large, detailed murals of battles in the Texas war of independence from Mexico. At the head of the chamber presides the state’s lieutenant governor.

The 151 members of the state legislature meet every other springs in a more crowded chamber, surrounded by a balcony, from which spectators may watch the proceedings. The legislature’s deliberations, unlike those of the Senate, are open to the public, and indeed should be seen by every visitor to Austin. At the front this chamber, on its dais, surrounded by the flags of both the US, and the State of Texas, sits the speaker of the Texas house, whose job it is to preside over the state’s elected representatives. As various as the state itself, the legislature includes young people and elder citizens, farmers and urbanites, businessmen and unionists, blacks, women, Chicanos and Amerindians. Since they are paid only $4,000 annually, most representatives hold other jobs as well. (Approximately sixty per cent are lawyers.) Since Democrats outnumber Republicans in both bodies--28 to 3 in the Senate, and 132 to 18 in the legislature—debates tend to take place within the dominant party, rather than between parties. It is fair to characterize debates in both the senate and the legislature as issue-oriented.”

The capitol itself sits in the middle of a tree-shaded park filled with mementos of Texas history—memorials to the Texas soldiers who died in the two World Wars, the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the Civil War; a bronze statue depicting a typical Texas cowboy; and a memorial for the Alamo, which Texans lost and then regained during their war for independence. On the streets immediately surrounding the capitol are the state office buildings--the new Supreme Court, the Archives and Library Building, the Texas Education Agency, the State Department of Highways and Public Transportation, and the Governors Mansion, among others. All this is a few blocks from the second complex of Austin buildings--the university campus. “Austin is like medieval Paris, “a native once claimed. “Its function is governmental and intellectual.”

The University of Texas at Austin is the largest in the state, with approximately 42,000 students, 1,800 faculty, and. 9,000 auxiliary personnel. It is the most various and complex as well. The whole is divided into several distinct parts, or “colleges” (for undergraduates) and “schools” (for post-graduates); and these in turn are divided into sub-parts, or “departments.” The colleges include fine arts, humanities, natural sciences, social and behavioral sciences, education, engineering, business administration, and pharmacy. Among the graduate schools are divisions of social work, humanities, library science, communication, education, business administration, law and public affairs (The Lyndon B. Johnson School). Within “fine arts,” for instance, are departments of music, drama, and (visual) art. In the school of “communications,” say, are departments of radio-television-film, journalism, advertising and speech. As a major university, the Austin campus teaches nearly everything that anyone would want to study in any field, and all of the 4,000-plus courses offered in its comprehensive catalogue will indeed be taught, as long as a minimum of five students show up. Indicatively, no other university in the southern U.S awards more doctoral degrees.

While most large American universities have sprawling campuses, with buildings separated by parking lots, all of which are tied together by an intracampus bus service, the University of Texas at Austin remarkably compact. Nearly every building of importance sits within a single square mile. The specialized schools, the university libraries (with its four million books), the art galleries, most of the laboratories, the computer, the concert hail, several motion-picture theaters, the dormitories, the classrooms and even the mammoth 60,000 seat football stadium are among the hundred buildings within walking distance of each other. At the eastern end of the campus, on its own hill, is the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, which houses not only his professional papers for visiting scholars, but also audiotapes, videotapes, and films about his life, in addition to a replica of Johnson’s Oval Office at the White House in Washington. There is no bus operating within the campus, although the university sponsors free bus service to carry both students and employees to and from the surrounding neighborhoods.

The most prominent building is, of course, the tower. Here are the offices of the university’s administration. (The current president, Lorene Rogers, was previously a professor of nutrition; she is currently the only woman to head a major university in America.) At the base of the building is the University’s main library with over one million books, mostly in the humanities and social sciences. Open during the school year from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., this has open stacks which enable borrowers to find their own books on the shelf and inspect adjacent titles. A few hundred yards away is the Humanities Research Center with its unrivaled collections of three million manuscripts, 800,000 rare books, countless photographs and the professional papers of prominent people, such as the writers D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Dylan Thomas; the mathematician Albert Einstein, and the politician Alexander Kerensky. The University of Texas library is known to rank with Harvard and Yale among the largest, most comprehensive libraries in North America.

One reason why the university’s physical plant is so extravagant is that the state legislature, at the end of the last century, gave it some West Texas land. Thought at the time to be useful only for cattle-grazing, these properties were eventually revealed to have vast oil deposits. The profits from these land holdings can go only to the construction of buildings. Operating expenses, such as faculty salaries and library acquisitions, must thus be separately appropriated in the bi-annual meetings of the state legislature, which, needless to say, watches the nearby university closely.

In part because Austin is such an attractive place to live and its climate is so hospitable, many students take more than the customary four years to obtain their bachelor degrees (supporting themselves with part-time jobs in student-centered businesses), and among the people at all university events, and even in the classrooms, are numerous ex-students who are still tied to university habits. In a class of mine on recent American art and literature were four women in their early forties, Austin residents all, who took their BA degrees at the University twenty years before and, though unregistered, have been attending classes ever since. Another student of mine, a younger alumnae, arranged to take off from her job two afternoons a week to come to my class. Her employer, a scientific instruments manufacturer, was accustomed to such requests from their staff. Since Texas residents pay only $50tuition per semester for the full course—load (plus $100 more in miscellaneous fees), in contrast to $480 required from non-residents, it is scarcely surprising that most of the UT students are Texans (and that many are the children of UT alumni). Nonetheless, the University attracts students from around the world-not only Europe but Asia and the Middle East as well.

The University is a major presence in Austin--economically, socially and even politically. Economically, it is, quite simply, one of the two largest employers, and it joins the state government as the biggest constructor of office buildings. As, say, a major Austin employer of construction workers, the University has an economic power whose secondary and tertiary effects are almost incalculable.

Indeed, construction is the heaviest industry to pollute the air, as most of the other prominent local businesses are the sort that depend upon university-educated person--not only engineers but sophisticated executives. International Business Machines, America’s principal manufacturer of computers and office equipment, has a research and development laboratory near Austin; Texas Instruments, whose specialty is electronic calculators, has a plant in town. The largest locally based company is Tracor, which manufacturers advanced scientific equipment. One lure that all these companies have in attracting prospective employees is, of course, the close proximity to a cosmopolitan university.

Socially, the University offers an abundance of cultural activities. On a typical weekday in Spring, April 21, there were several different motion pictures playing on campus; a poetry reading; a “musical showcase” at the student union, a lecture on “energy and food” by a California official, a economics lecture by Walt Whitman Rostow, a UT professor who was formerly a advisor to President Johnson; two one-act “satires on American sexual mores”; a lecture by the city’s mayor on “The Next Two Years”; two productions by guest lecturers for a conference on “Fiction in Performance; a French Department conference on literary theory; a prominent Berkeley sociology professor speaking on ‘The Structural Foundations of Nationalism.” One need not attend a single class to have the university fill his or her day with cultural activities. (Most of these events are listed in the student-produced daily newspaper, which mixes national news with local reportage in its twenty-plus pages; it is distributed free on campus.)

The daytime social center of the university is Guadalupe Street, at the western end of the university proper. Here are the bookstores, the stationery stores and the restaurants that cater to the students, in addition to an abundance of street vendors selling food, flowers, jewelry, newspapers and clothing. This street is customarily called “the drags” The city itself has, of course, the motion-picture theaters and concert halls typical of a large American university town.

The University community has also become a major force in local politics. In a city of 300,000 people, nearly one-sixth of them are officially attached to the University, and perhaps an equal number work in University-related business and/or are members of University families. Once the minimum U.S. voting age was lowered from 21 to 18, Austin suddenly had 30,000 new voters, who tended to favor certain kinds of candidates--those who were liberal in their concern for social welfare, but conservative in their opposition to the economic growth of Austin. Their principal slogan is “quality of life,” which they saw threatened by tall buildings, by new highways, by suburban housing developments; a secondary slogan was “no growth.” This new student vote was largely responsible for electing in 1975 an Austin City Council that was remarkably different from its predecessors--or from the other urban governments in Texas. Instead of elderly white male executives and businessmen, this new city council had three women, a black, a Mexican-American, and a blind white millionaire. One of the women, a psychology professor named Emma Lou Linn, was commonly called “a doctrinaire liberal,” because of her refusal to succumb to the American political custom of expediency in working with her colleagues. A second councilwoman was a recent German immigrant whose principal public commitment is an environmental concern, epitomized by her vocal desire to save trees. The new Austin mayor was Jeff Friedman, a Jewish New Yorker, thirty years old in 1975; he had come to Texas only eight years before, to attend the University law school. While there, he became prominently involved with “radical” causes. Within a year after his graduation, he was elected to the City Council. In a state that is very conscious of regional accents, it is quite unusual to hear a mayor whose speech reveals that he is clearly not from Texas. Here too, what makes Austin different from the rest of the state is the political clout of its students.

Wherever you hare a swarm of single young people, there are bound to be places for them to congregate, not only within the university, but outside of it. In Austin, there are bars and restaurants. Given Austin’s warm temperature, the most popular drink is beer, and the most famous of its beer halls is Scholz Garden. Strategically situated between the capitol and the university, it is known as the place where both students and politicians congregate. A large cavernous place, it can seat as many as 120 people under its roof, and as many as 250 more outside under its trees. Austin’s most characteristic restaurants serve a blend of food known as Tex-Mex, part Texan and part Mexican. Customarily inexpensive, Tex-Mex dishes are student favorites. The base is the “tortilla,” a flat bread made of either corn or flour, which can be served both hard and soft. A “taco” is a hare corn tortilla, curved into a shell, and then filled with meat, peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, and grated cheese. A “burrito” contains refried beans and cheese which are placed inside a soft flour tortilla that is then folded around it. A “chalupa” is a hard flat tortilla with refried beans and cheese, lettuce and tomatoes; and this is served on a plate. Nachos are flat corn tortillas topped with melted cheese and jalapenos, a very spicy pepper that can also, in chopped form, be put into the other Tex-Mex dishes. A stranger’s first bite into an jalapeno is apt to shock his taste buds; but before you vow never to eat them again, you come to realize that this mighty little pepper provides the kicker that gives Tex-Mex food its characteristic taste.

Most Tex-Mex restaurants also serve “enchiladas” and “tamales,” which, by contrast, are generally considered purely Mexican, rather than indigenously Tex-Mex. Slightly more expensive are the Bar-B-Q, restaurants, which broil large hunks of meat over charcoal for several hours; slices are served with beer, bread, beans, potato salad, and coleslaw, for lunch and dinner.

The University community also provides the principal constituency for Austin’s single most famous cultural export--progressive country music. The songs of the city are so famous that National Educational Television regularly broadcasts, nationwide, a country music program called, simply, “Austin City Limits.” On any night of the week, Austin is reputed to have more live music available, per capita, than any other American city. The musicians play in large spacious halls that have such striking names as the Armadillo World Headquarters, the Split Rail, the Broken Spoke, the Silver Dollar, and the Soap Creek Saloon. Some of these places start their live music in the afternoon, especially on weekends, and the sounds go well into the night. It is at places like these, as nowhere else, that professional reputations in progressive country music are initially established and that students and working-class whites (called “red necks,” from working in the sunshine) come together. The king of Austin’s “cosmic cowboy” country music is Willie Nelson, a middle-aged singer and songwriter; and among his closest friends, typically, is Darryl Royal, the university’s athletic director and former football coach.

“The quality of life” is, as we noted, a crucial issue in Austin politics; and perhaps because so many of its citizens are interested in preserving its particular cultural tone, Austin is indeed a very nice place to live. The air is clean, the people are friendly (even strangers on the street saying “Hi”), and the temperature is steadily warmer than it is up north. Sunbathing in February is not uncommon, and certain nights in March will be so warm that a top coat is not necessary. This is the kind of climate that draws people outside--to Austin’s opulent parks, it beer gardens, its backyard. charcoal grills, and the banks of the Colorado River that intersects the city. Nonetheless, in Austin, unlike Southern California, to which it is frequently compared, the seasons perceptibly change, the summer bringing a steady heat that reduces the student-faculty population by one-half and that sends the remaining Austinites to an immense spring-fed swimming pool within the city limits (“Barton Springs”) or to nearby Lake Travis, a large body of water whose limestone cliffs remind some people of Greece.

Northerners commonly say of Austin that, “It’s like California, but nicer; it’s not as nasty.” Here, indeed, are the surviving vestiges of melioristic optimism, more characteristic of the American sixties, where strangers cordially greet each other and fundamentally antagonistic groups try to live at peace. It is precisely this quality of sweetness that persuades students to come here, and then college-educated workers, rest-hungry workers, and finally retired people, many of whom, having worked elsewhere around the world still warmly remember Austin from their university days. This attractive tone also explains why Austin should be, statistically, one of the fastest growing cities in America. Indeed, nearly everyone I know who has ever visited here, for any length of time, has fond memories of the place. Though I initially came as a visiting professor, on a four-month job, it is precisely this cordiality that will surely draw me back.