The story of the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) begins not with a university at all, but with a mine.
In 1913, the Texas State School of Mines and Metallurgy was founded to train engineers for the booming mining industry in the American Southwest. Its first class consisted of just 27 students, mostly men with dust on their boots and ambition in their eyes. It was a practical school, born of industrial need. But when fire destroyed the original building in 1916, something unusual happened—something that would set UTEP apart from every other campus in America.
Kathleen Worrell, the wife of the school’s dean, had recently been flipping through a copy of National Geographic and had become enamored with an article on Bhutan. She was struck by the images of Dzong architecture—fortress-like monasteries built high in the Himalayas, with sloping walls, overhanging roofs, and vivid geometric patterns. In her mind, there was no reason why a mining school on the border of Mexico and Texas couldn’t look like a monastery in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon.
To the everlasting credit of whoever was in charge of such decisions, they agreed.
And so, in the midst of the Chihuahuan Desert, a university rose that looked more at home in the shadows of Everest than in the shadow of the Franklin Mountains. It was the first—and remains the only—university in the United States designed entirely in the Bhutanese architectural style.
That whimsical, almost romantic decision set the tone for what UTEP would become. It is a borderland school, not only in geography—perched mere blocks from Mexico—but in identity. It straddles cultures, languages, and economies. Its student body is majority Hispanic, many of them first-generation college students. For decades, the school was underfunded and overlooked. Yet like the miners it was originally meant to serve, UTEP learned to work with what it had. It became scrappy, then excellent.
Under President Diana Natalicio—who led the university from 1988 to 2019—UTEP underwent a quiet revolution. Natalicio believed that access to education without quality was meaningless, and that excellence without access was elitism. So she pursued both. By the time she retired, UTEP had achieved national recognition as a top-tier research institution, all while remaining one of the most affordable and accessible universities in the country.
To walk the campus today is to encounter contradiction made beautiful: Himalayan towers bathed in West Texas sun. Students speaking English and Spanish, switching between the two like a dance. High-tech labs nestled inside buildings that look like ancient temples. At the center of it all is a belief that education is not a luxury—it is the rightful inheritance of anyone willing to work for it.
That’s the story of UTEP. A mining school reborn as a multicultural beacon. A Bhutanese dream rising from desert dust. And proof that sometimes, when you look far away—say, in a copy of National Geographic—you end up discovering what you want your home to be.