Education empowers people and expands minds, and that is the essence of The University of Texas at Arlington. It began in 1895 as Arlington College, a small private school in Arlington, a town of 1,000 located between Dallas and Fort Worth. For the next 20 years, the school offered a quality private education to the sons and daughters of local residents. The year 1917 marked a watershed as local leaders successfully lobbied the Texas Legislature to make the school a branch of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M University), resulting in the college receiving state support for the first time.

For the next five decades, the school thrived as Grubbs Vocational College, North Texas Agricultural College, and Arlington State College, evolving from a two-year junior college to a four-year college. In response to the concerted efforts of faculty and business and political communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the college joined The University of Texas System in 1965 and two years later became known as The University of Texas at Arlington.

As a part of The University of Texas System, UT Arlington has developed into a comprehensive teaching, research, and public service institution. The University has more than 25,000 students from 150 countries and offers 81 baccalaureate, 73 master's, and 35 doctoral degrees within nine academic units and a graduate school. UT Arlington is classified as a Carnegie Research University (high activity). In recent years, federally supported research has increased more than 200 percent. These research endeavors, along with a dedicated faculty, motivated students, and strategic location, enhance the University's partnership with area businesses and industry.

UT Arlington looks to the future while drawing from the past, blazing its own path in teaching, discovery, and engagement. This course enables our students to imagine a bright future and achieve it. Our emphasis on excellence in undergraduate education is best represented by the Honors College. One of six in Texas, the college is a supportive, educationally and culturally diverse community of faculty and student scholars in which students achieve excellence in academics, research, service, and individual development. Honors students undertake a research project or creative activity in their major discipline leading to completion of a senior thesis, presented publicly every spring and fall.

Our students and faculty pursue their studies in some of the finest facilities in the country. Many undertake research in the Chemistry and Physics Building, a superb 128,000-square-foot structure that boasts state-of-the-art labs and classrooms as well as one of the largest planetariums in Texas. Others work creatively in the Studio Arts Center, a spacious environment with studios tailored for the University's thriving art programs. New residence halls featuring living-learning communities as well as modern on-campus apartments have greatly increased our residential population, creating a more vibrant student life.

UT Arlington is also making a difference in people's lives through its many research partnerships with other institutions. For example, the Department of Energy allocated $2.5 million to the University to help equip an optical medical imaging center in collaboration with UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and UT Dallas. The benefits for patients and physicians of this novel use of light to diagnose disease, evaluate the efficacy of treatment, and better understand human physiology illustrate how partnerships can promote groundbreaking research.

We are aggressively expanding the University beyond its traditional boundaries to better serve the community, the region, and beyond. For example, a much-needed education center in downtown Fort Worth increases access for working professionals to popular master's programs like the cohort MBA, Engineering Management and Health Care Administration. The Fort Worth center will also feature a version of our award-winning executive MBA-Asia program, the largest such offering of any foreign university in China.

To continue the momentum, we initiated an ambitious strategic planning process that culminated in Mavericks on the Move: The University of Texas at Arlington Strategic Plan, 2006-2010. This plan focuses on improving learning, discovery, and engagement at the University and is the result of a series of strategic conversations with campus and community stakeholders. It embodies three general priorities. First, it emphasizes providing UT Arlington's diverse and growing undergraduate and graduate student body with an education that empowers and prepares them for intellectually, professionally, and financially rewarding careers. Inside and outside the classroom, the University seeks to enhance student, staff, and faculty engagement in the learning process.

The second set of priorities highlights developing innovative ideas that can dramatically change the way we live and think--ideas that improve the quality of life and create the technologies, industries, and jobs of the future. Attracting and retaining prominent faculty and building and supporting internal and external research collaborations are two ways of accomplishing these goals.

A final group of priorities concerns accountability and our effective stewardship of public dollars. Continuously making our operations more efficient enables us to devote as much of our resources as possible to teaching, learning, and research. Mavericks on the Move maps an independent educational path that will lead to increased intellectual, personal, and professional growth for all UT Arlington students.