On March 21, 1925 an estimated 10,000 South Texans gathered in Kingsville for the laying of the cornerstone for the new College they had struggled so hard to establish. The campus consisted of only the main building and a home for the president and his family. The people of Kingsville had donated 381.4 acres of land and promised to provide utilities including water, electricity and gas for use by the school. The campus was located in the middle of what had been an onion field and there were no paved roads to the campus.  But, the school had been located here because it was a safe community where fathers were not afraid to send their daughters to be trained and educated to be teachers.  This was to be a teachers college, although classes were provided for those who might want education in different disciplines. The school would quickly work for Southern Association accreditation so that the course work could be transferred to the other large colleges.

    On June 8, 1925 the new school opened with an enrollment in that included 113 regular College students; 100 summer normal students seeking teacher certificates; and 63 sub-college level, or high school students seeking teaching certificate preparation.  President Cousins had decided that the campus should reflect the people and culture of this area and established the tradition of having each of the buildings on campus reflect a Spanish Mission Revival style of architecture. The first  building, and most of the buildings on this campus even today have the red tile roofs, with bell towers and the curve gabled parapet. In the first building the tower on the east side is a stylized version of the tower at Mission San José. The tower on the west is a replica of the tower at Mission Concepcion. The curved gable parapet represent the Alamo, also a former mission. On the campus even today most of the buildings have the red tile, the curved gabled parapets and other characteristics of the Spanish Mission style. The faculty gathered for the first time, coming from a variety of places, but all personally chosen by Dr. Cousins who had very definite plans in place to develop his new school for training teachers, while building moral character and a respect for God and Country.

     The new college was created specifically to deal with what politicians  called “The Mexican Problem” and although bilingual education was at that time against the law, the faculty at this new and progressive school immediately began working to creating a curriculum that provided teachers a basis for working with bilingual and multicultural children. In cooperation with the Kingsville school they established a laboratory school in the Spanish speaking neighborhoods of Kingsville and wrote a curriculum that looks much like what we today call English as a Second Language. The educational program was progressive for the time, though today would be considered harsh. Schools were segregated. Children were not allowed to speak their native language, and were even punished for doing so. But, at the beginning of this century all over the country there was an attempt to deal with new immigrant populations and to teach them how to be comfortable and competitive in a predominantly English speaking country. On the east coast they were dealing with a European immigrant population. In South Texas we were dealing with a primarily Spanish speaking population.

                               1925-1929