Campus Landmark Turns 50

Editors’ Note: This feature appears as it was published in the spring 2017 edition of UT Dallas Magazine. Titles or faculty members listed may have changed since that time.
Left: The transmission tower being constructed in 1967. Right: An aerial view of the tower in 2016.
Since 1967, a 250-foot-tall transmission tower has been a fixture on the north end of campus.
The tower was originally built to broadcast The Association for Graduate Education and Research (TAGER) network, a closed-circuit television education system.Created to deliver courses via telecast, TAGER was the brainchild of University co-founder Cecil H. Green.
“We’d tie together, by means of this closed-circuit television system, all the existing colleges and universities, and even the medical schools. And then put classrooms, also, in technical industrial plants,” Green said in a 1994 interview with the American Institute of Physics’ Center for History of Physics. “In order to make a successful industrial enterprise here, we had to get it completely involved in education. Which has paid off, of course.”Fifty years later, the structure remains a familiar landmark on campus, functioning as a transmission tower for several companies.
Founders Building, TAGER tower and a jogging track comprised the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies (which became UTD) in the late 1960s.

Interview of Cecil H. Green by Ronald E. Doel on October 17, 1994, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA, aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/3932