Southern Methodist University opened in 1915 on donated farmland north of Dallas, and it has spent the century since dressing itself in red brick and white columns. The Georgian look was set by Dallas Hall and carried on by architect Mark Lemmon, whose buildings line the older quads. This walk starts beneath the Dallas Hall dome, visits the library, auditorium, and chapel of the historic core, strolls down Bishop Boulevard, and finishes at two major museums: the Meadows Museum of Spanish art and the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
About this site
Southern Methodist University is a private college or university in Dallas, Dallas County. It is one of 18 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Dallas County.
The site sits at 32.8453, -96.7849 near Dallas. The nearest cataloged historic site is Dallas Hall (Southern Methodist University) (historical marker), about under a tenth of a mile away. Others within a short drive include Perkins Hall of Administration, Hyer Hall, and Florence, Fred, Hall.
Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
History
Southern Methodist University was chartered on April 17, 1911, by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, after Dallas business leaders out-lobbied a competing plan to build a Methodist university in Fort Worth. Robert Stewart Hyer, who had led Southwestern University in Georgetown, became the first president and chose the Latin motto Veritas liberabit vos, approved by the trustees in 1912. In 1914 the church's General Conference made SMU its university for conferences west of the Mississippi, a role it took on after losing control of Vanderbilt. Construction delays pushed the opening to September 1915, when about 700 students arrived at a nearly empty hillside north of downtown. Dallas Hall, a domed, columned building modeled on Thomas Jefferson's Rotunda at the University of Virginia and named to thank the Dallas donors, initially housed most of the young university's operations and gave the campus its nickname, "the Hilltop"; it is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. SMU began admitting Black students in the early 1950s, starting with the Perkins School of Theology, and desegregated its wider student body over the following two decades. The school drew national attention in 1987 when the NCAA shut down its football program for recruiting violations, and in 2013 it welcomed the George W. Bush Presidential Center to the southeast corner of campus. Today SMU enrolls roughly 12,000 students across its Georgian-style campus in University Park and competes in the ACC.
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