First SMU Professors Shaped Today’s Legacy

From the beginning,SMU’s founding president, Robert Stewart Hyer, knew that the quality of the new university he was leading would depend on the caliber of the faculty attracted to its classrooms, laboratories and studios. They, in turn, would attract and inspire students with high aspirations. In 1914, a year before SMU opened, Hyer recruited faculty members in music, theology, humanities and sciences, who would help shape the mission and the curriculum.