Publisher's Synopsis
"As the Texas A&M University-San Antonio celebrates its tenth anniversary as a standalone institution in 2019, it is well into its march towards the future--a future of "audacious aspirations" according to president Cynthia Teniente-Matson. But like most bold ideas, the dream of a four-year public university on San Antonio's underserved South Side did not become reality effortlessly. Immense challenges--political, economic, academic, and ideological--confronted those early believers who fought hard to establish a new branch of the Texas A&M University System in San Antonio as the twenty-first century began. Through archival research and interviews with former political leaders, faculty members, alumni, and current students at A&M-San Antonio, author Catherine Nixon Cooke has discovered a saga that really began several hundred years ago, when jaguars and rattlesnakes still dominated the landscape of the original San Antonio de Bexar, ind
