"Hooker's account will appeal to anyone who has ever studied, taught, or worked at UNM. But its significance goes far beyond nostalgia. New Mexico was still a territory when the university was founded.

And because the founding of UNM coincided with the arrival of the railroad in New Mexico, the growth of the university coincides with Albuquerque's transition from small town to city as well as with the territory's attainment of statehood and the changes it has experienced in the course of the twentieth century.

To read Hooker's inside account of the ways decisions were made, buildings were funded, and the university interacted with federal, state, and local governments and events is to understand the ways institutions grow and change and the interaction of wise planning with the inevitability of unintended consequences."--BOOK JACKET.