Southern Methodist University

When Southern Methodist University’s founding president Robert Stewart Hyer selected Harvard crimson and Yale blue as school colors in 1911, he wasn’t being subtle about his ambitions. The physicist-turned-administrator, who was branded a turncoat by his former employer for abandoning plans to relocate their institution, went all in planning the new campus.

He named campus streets after Ivy League universities and built Dallas Hall so monumentally large that when it opened in 1915, it was the entire university.

Classrooms, science labs, a library, administrative offices, a hamburger grill, a barbershop, a post office, and a mummy previously exhibited at the State Fair of Texas all coexisted under one domed roof inspired by Jefferson’s Rotunda and the Roman Pantheon. The building’s monumental size, standing alone on a flat prairie, became the origin of SMU’s nickname, “The Hilltop”.