An Abstract Thing We Call “Intellectual Atmosphere”: Science, Urban Development, and Business/Government Relations in Dallas, 1956–1969

This article explores the efforts of Dallas businessmen, especially the leadership of Texas Instruments (TI), to build a science and research sector to facilitate new types of capital accumulation for Dallas and North Texas in the 1960s. The creation of the Graduate Center of the Southwest (GRCSW), and its subsequent transformation into the public University of Texas at Dallas in 1969, offers new perspectives on science and research, urban growth strategies, and the relationship between business and government in the postwar Sunbelt. TI leaders envisioned the center as a way to become more competitive in the microelectronics industry and also to direct urban growth and, ultimately, create a city and region that better reflected the private, growth-oriented interests of the Dallas business community. However, when the center began to falter economically in the mid-1960s, TI leaders sought out the state to take it over and transform it into a science and technology graduate school branch of the University of Texas system (UT). The exchange, although mutually beneficial, demonstrates how powerful businesses coopted the resources of the state to further their own ends.