Thursday, Sep 11, 2025 • Brian Lopez : Contact

This story was originally published in the Summer 2025 UTA Magazine 130th edition. Find more magazine stories here. 

Whenever a new faculty or staff member joins UTA, it doesn’t take them long to learn two truths about their new employer: First, parking on campus is a rare and precious commodity, and second, something about the University inspires tremendous loyalty—and longevity—in its employees.

“For me, UTA is the ideal place to work,” explains Janet Wehner, who began her career in enrollment management in 1976 as a work-study student. Many things have changed in the University’s admissions office over the past 48 years, but she has remained a constant.

She’s also not the only one who started here as a student and never left.

Wei-Jen Lee originally came to UTA to pursue his doctoral degree. After graduating in 1985, he was hired to help develop the College of Engineering’s Power System Simulation Lab, then offered a permanent job as an assistant professor of electrical engineering. Today, he leads the whole department.

“I’ve always enjoyed my work at UTA,” he says. “My career is closely tied to this university.”

Tom Hall was raised and educated in Arlington, only leaving to earn his PhD at Oklahoma State before returning to teach in 1981.

“Coming to UTA was attractive because my family was located in Arlington, I owned a house in Arlington, and I knew many of the accounting faculty from my time as a student,” he says.

Though he may not have predicted back then that his tenure would last 45 years (and counting), the combination of familiarity and personal freedom on the job has kept him here.

“It also helps that the Accounting Department has had good chairs over the years,” he adds. “Liking and trusting your immediate supervisor makes for a very comfortable work environment.”

The story of UTA can only fully be told by hearing from its faculty and staff—after all, who knows its history better than those who witnessed it firsthand?

Currently, UTA employs 31 faculty and staff who have celebrated at least 40 years of service at the University. Over their careers, they have witnessed incredible technological advancements, unprecedented campus expansion, and the development of multiple generations of students and scholars.

Through their memories, we see the story of a university in transition—from offering its first doctoral degrees to earning the prestigious Carnegie R1 designation, from enrolling 14,000 total students to graduating almost that many annually, from a regional player to a national leader.

Their stories paint a vivid picture of the University’s past half-century, so we’re letting them tell it for themselves.

Part I: Welcome to Maverick Country

In the 1970s and ’80s, when most of our longtimers began working at UTA, student enrollment was growing rapidly, bringing the need for more faculty, staff, and facilities. A good snapshot of the period can be seen by looking at Wendell Nedderman’s presidency. Over those 19 years, 1972–91, enrollment increased from 14,000 to over 25,000, research expenditures grew from $200,000 to $12.7 million, 20 new buildings or additions were constructed, and schools for nursing, architecture, and education were launched.

In addition to the general population boom in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, a significant reason for this growth came from the University’s introduction of graduate degrees to its curriculum. Once UTA began offering its first doctorates in 1969, it needed faculty who could conduct research, publish their findings, and train students to do the same.

David Hullender Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor (55 service years): I was recruited by the department chair while I was completing my PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I turned him down for two years, but after he learned that I moved to Fort Worth, he convinced me to teach a night class. I enjoyed it and felt compelled to teach, joining full time in fall 1970. The rest is history.

A decade later, a similar scenario played out in the Chemistry Department, but Krishnan Rajeshwar needed little persuading to join the faculty.

Krishnan Rajeshwar Chemistry Professor (41 years): When I started out as a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State, funding for my field, renewable energy, was plentiful because of the energy crisis and oil embargo in the 1970s. But by the time I was applying for full-time positions in the early ’80s, the national policy had changed. Funding for such research had dried up big time, and academic positions were highly, highly competitive.

I applied all over and had maybe two bites out of 100. At UTA, the College of Science had just started offering a doctoral program in chemistry, and it was very important that they recruit faculty who could bring in grant money. That was a key aspect of my hiring.

By the 1990s, a new skill set was added to the wish list of faculty hiring committees: entrepreneurial skills. Venkat Devarajan worked for over a decade at LTV Missiles and Electronics (now Lockheed Martin). Then one day, his alma mater came calling.

Venkat Devarajan Electrical Engineering Professor (41 years): John McElroy, the engineering dean at the time, called me and said they were looking for somebody to not only do researching, teaching, and administration, but also potentially help create and encourage a startup company culture at UTA. I agreed because that’s exactly what I wanted to do—the timing was perfect. Also, it was nice to be wanted like that!

Within their new departments, the incoming faculty found community. When David Narrett first arrived in Arlington from his native New Jersey, he was on his own. That quickly changed as he settled in to campus life.

David Narrett History Professor (40 years): I had no family in Texas, so it was quite a challenge coming here alone. But we had a lot of young people in my faculty cohort in the History Department, and back then most of us lived in Arlington, so we would socialize together.

One of my fondest memories was playing on our department softball team. We would go out in the summer, no matter how hot it was at five in the afternoon, and play. Then after the game, we would go from the field to a colleague’s home nearby and just sit on the patio into the evening, relaxing and chatting.

Hullender: When I joined the Mechanical Engineering Department, there were only about 19 full-time tenure-track faculty, and the average age—I was 26—was very young. Intramural sports were a big deal for us—the faculty played soccer, volleyball, softball, flag football, and basketball, and there was a lot of competitive interaction with the student organizations.

Narrett: The camaraderie in my early years at UTA helped me feel at home in Texas.

Whether they came from near or far, however, the new UTA employees began as most people do at their first jobs—in a tiny office.

Hullender: I was in a storage room without a window. My wife created a pretend window with a mirror and drapes; it made a big difference.

George Kondraske Electrical Engineering Research Professor (45 years): Actually, my first office was in the Engineering Lab Building and had windows. My current office doesn’t!

Tom Hall Public Accounting Professor (45 years): I still have the same office furniture that was assigned to me when I joined the faculty in 1981. My department chair did offer to buy me a new desk some years ago, but I preferred to keep my old one.

John Darling Campus Composter (41 years): I had no office then or now. Back then, I worked in a room with areas for preserving biologic specimens and cataloging. Now, I’m in an open-air shelter with a sink and a garden hose to clean buckets for collecting compost material.

Part II: Tools of the Trade

In the 1970s, offices and classrooms on campus made use of the available technology—telephones, mimeographs, overhead projectors—along with tried-and-true methods of old.

Janet Wehner Enrollment Management Associate Director (48 years): Staff members communicated with colleagues across campus through memos sent through campus mail or carried by hand. For students, we sent letters and postcards through postal service mail.

Hullender: Nobody had a personal computer until the early 1980s. Using a computer required a modem connecting your phone line to a mainframe computer at a different location.

Daniel Levine Psychology Professor (40 years): We used the blackboards so much that one of my colleagues suggested that we be compensated for “white lung disease” from inhaling chalk dust.

Kondraske: We did not have copy machines as we now know them when I started in 1982. In the Electrical Engineering Department, we used something called a Spirit Duplicator (a mimeograph, not a religious tool) to make copies of tests for class. It was smelly and messy.

Hall: Preparing copies was a time-consuming task that often left ink stains on your fingers. We used a mimeograph to create duplicates, then assembled the pages with a “sorting” machine. It had about 30 slots, one for each unique page of the test or handout. When you pushed the button, the machine grabbed a page from each slot and presented one complete set for stapling.

This was even more true in the University’s labs, libraries, and research facilities. Though the new faculty certainly had the desire and drive to conduct important research, the available equipment was somewhat limited.

Hullender: In the late 1960s, card-reading computers provided the possibility of advanced (but very limited) engineering analysis to those fortunate enough to teach themselves how to program. I used to have to do advanced computing after midnight on the University’s mainframe computer in the basement of Davis Hall [now the University Administration Building]; that was the only computer available with enough memory and speed to run my programs before the University opened at 8 a.m. the next morning. Today, these programs run on a laptop in seconds.

Devarajan: When I was doing my PhD here in the late ’70s, there was a big IBM 370, and you had to submit punch cards that somebody else would run through the computer. You just stood there patiently waiting for the printout, then pored over the result. If you got it wrong, you had to do it all over again because it was not interactive.

Kondraske: Early PCs were just starting to be introduced, and the one available for use in the biomedical engineering office had a whopping 512 kilobytes of memory. For other storage, the computer had what was known as a floppy disk drive, which had a 360-kilobyte capacity.

Wei-Jen Lee Electrical Engineering Chair (42 years): As a graduate student in the early ’80s, I used a calculator, pencil, and paper to do homework and a terminal to connect to the University’s central computing system to run simulations. I remember the day the hard disk crashed when I was making a final adjustment before heading out to California to give a project demonstration. My students and I stayed up the whole night to recover it, and I made it to the presentation with only a 90-minute delay.

Rajeshwar: It’s incredible the technologies my generation has gone through in our lifetimes. The first computer I bought for the office was a Macintosh with a very small screen. In the lab, we had analog (XY) recorders to transcribe data for the laboratory instruments. We never had digital output for most of them, just analog.

Even the more quotidian tasks involved with writing and publishing research required considerable effort.

Beth Wright Art History Distinguished Research Professor (43 years): I wrote my 630-page dissertation on a typewriter. A typo meant that I must retype the entire page.

Hullender: I think the greatest challenges were communication and library literature searches. If an article wasn’t on the shelf in the library, then you had to somehow find a library that did have it. I remember taking trips to Denton and Austin to retrieve articles that I urgently needed.

Bill Carroll Computer Science and Engineering Professor (44 years): Some of us in computer science and engineering actually physically installed the first internet network at UTA. We couldn’t get the University to do it because they still weren’t convinced the technology was here to stay.

Although we can look at today’s technological marvels and wonder how employees a half-century ago got anything done, not all of the new advancements were embraced by UTA faculty and staff. In fact, some still prefer the older methods.

Wright: For me as an art historian, seeing artworks digitally is worse now. With glass slides, the image resolution was crisp—and far more accurate—and our students could see the colors in a darkened room. Classrooms now have a constant light on for safety, so the image we see is not as accurate a representation of the original art.

Kondraske: Certain tasks are clearly more efficient now, and productivity has increased. I have mixed feelings, however, as there were fewer distractions back then—for me as well as for students—enabling more focused thinking and work time. I do miss that.

Part III: Growing Pains

Change is never easy, and as the University expanded in size and scope, it had to reshape its identity to match its new reality. Even by 1987, a state committee tasked with assessing Texas’ 37 public colleges still wanted to characterize UTA as a “comprehensive university” with an emphasis on teaching, not an “emerging national university” with an emphasis on research.

Faculty and staff were on the front lines, fighting to help UTA achieve the recognition it deserved while also grappling with the shifting priorities this upgrade in status demanded.

Darling: Even back when I was a student here in the ’60s, some of my favorite professors would lament that because of the need for young researchers in science to specialize so much and so early, they would have to miss the benefits of a liberal arts education.

Carroll: There was still a junior college mindset on campus, and the idea of doing research was pretty foreign to most people. They weren’t necessarily against it, but they weren’t really for it either. People had to develop a different perspective about what kind of school we were and what kind we wanted and needed to be.

Levine: The University sort of had a mom-and-pop feel in the early days when it was smaller. I think we have lost something in terms of the intimacy, but the overall trade-off has been positive.

While the advances in technology seen in more recent decades aided UTA’s evolution into a research university, they also introduced new challenges—and concerns—for educators.

Hullender: Until the early ’70s, handheld calculators didn’t exist. I used a slide rule to do complicated math calculations, which required that I be proficient with the multiplication tables to make sure the answer and decimal place were correct. It also forced me to apply common sense to my calculations.

One of the biggest challenges today is that students rely on calculators and computers to do all the thinking and, consequently, avoid applying common sense and predicting what the answers should be.

Narrett: On average, students are less accustomed simply to reading a text and drawing what they can from it and enriching themselves that way. The root of the word “education” in Latin is “to lead out from”—we must go outside the self to enrich the self. That’s what education is. If we’re just locked in our own shells, we can’t really learn. In my view, there is a timeless value to honest inquiry that leads to new and exciting discoveries. These are values that will be always true, I think.

Devarajan: You have to work hard to make attendance worthwhile for students sometimes. In some classes you succeed; in other classes, not so much.

Kondraske: We, as faculty members, tremendously influence what we see in students. In general, I think the students are basically the same then and now: They look to faculty to guide them and respond accordingly.

Bill Corley Industrial Engineering Professor (53 years): Everything is less personal now because things are often online. With the ubiquity of the computer and internet—together with everything associated with them—most things are done remotely. I hope in the future we continue to have mostly in-person classes. Interaction in person is as valuable to the university experience as the knowledge gained.

Hullender: Advanced technology such as computers and the internet are essential for classrooms today; however, it has been and will always be required that the teacher be successful at motivating and inspiring the students to want to learn. Technology helps but is not the key to doing this. As it has been said, “Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire.”

Part IV: A Job Well Done

Though many things have changed over the past 50-plus years, the University’s mission of improving lives through education remains the same. So does the passion of its faculty and staff, the dedication of its students, and the promise of its graduates.

Carroll: I still believe that no matter how much research you do or how important it is, the most valuable thing we do as a faculty is produce graduates.

Lynn Peterson Engineering Senior Associate Dean (41 years): I have been very fortunate that at UTA I have been in position where I was able to contribute in a significant way to our students.

Rajeshwar: I truly feel blessed to just be around our students; it makes me feel younger!

Wright: I really think that it’s still true that UT Arlington is better known nationally and internationally than it is locally. And that’s a real pity. I think that the more people find out about us, the more they’re impressed. But we’ve been here all along doing amazing work. It’s an amazing campus.

That amazing campus and the vibrant community filling it are two of the many reasons these longtime employees have stuck around so long.

Levine: I like to say I was interdisciplinary before it was cool; in my early days at UTA, I sensed that the climate was hospitable to this mindset and to faculty trying new things out. I think that because the University had not really established its reputation yet, it was more willing to experiment than a lot of other institutions. That flexibility is one of the reasons I’ve stayed.

Wehner: UTA has provided me opportunities for continuous learning both as a professional and a person. I love what I do and enjoy working with my coworkers.

Carroll: Once you get here, you sort of develop an attachment to it and want to keep contributing. I used to say I was on the feet-first retirement plan, meaning that I would have to be carried out that way.

Devarajan: This is nearly a perfect job for me. I’ve had no complaints at all, and that’s why I stayed this long.

Rajeshwar: People ask me all the time, “Raj, when are you going to retire?” I say, “When I’m horizontal!” They’re going to have to wheel me out of the office!

Kondraske: About 30 years ago, when the NBA announced the name of the new professional basketball team coming to Dallas, I recall a bumper sticker that said “Mavericks—Nowhere but UTA.” I think that attitude and spirit has endured and hope it will continue to do so.