In the 87 years since the University was founded, the school has gone through some drastic changes. Originally a junior college with a 12-member faculty, the UH System now spans four universities, with more than 3,600 faculty members at the main campus alone.
UH was founded March 7, 1927 by the Houston Independent School District Board of Education trustees as a junior college with San Jacinto High School, but quickly expanded to a full university in 1934 to become the University of Houston. The University remained at San Jacinto High School until the Fall 1934 semester, when it was moved to its own campus at Second Baptist Church at Milam and McGowen, where it remained for five years.
More than 100 acres were donated by Julius Settegast and Ben Taub in 1936 for the University to use as a permanent location. Hugh Roy Cullen also donated over $56 million, adjusted for inflation, to the school under the stipulation that the University “must always be a college for the working men and women and their sons and daughters. If it were to be another rich man’s college, (he) wouldn’t be interested.”
The University continued to expand and grow, becoming the second-largest university in Texas by 1951. It became a state university in order to combat rising tuition costs in 1963. In 1983, the name of the main campus was temporarily changed to UH-University Park in order to differentiate the campus from UH-Downtown, but it was changed back to simply the University of Houston in 1991.
Since Fall 1995, UH’s main campus has seen its faculty population nearly triple, going from 1,249 to 3,679 professors, associate professors, assistant professors and other faculty such as lecturers and teaching assistants.
Additionally, the student population in that time has roughly doubled, from 23,504 total students to 39,540. The largest number of both students and faculty lie in humanities, fine arts and communication, with more than 5,000 students and 310 faculty in the Fall 1995 semester. Now, though the number of faculty in CLASS has stayed the same, the number of students has doubled.
