Texas Southern University has announced its annual year-end giving campaign as it closes the Commemoration of TSU’s founding in 1927. The theme, 88 – The Roar is Great! – celebrated the university’s anniversary and served as a touchstone for TSU activities and the Tiger community throughout 2015.
This special donor initiative in the final weeks of the year combines its winter drive, Annual Fund solicitation and a special 1927 crusade to inspire contributions across all philanthropic
spectrums. The 1927 effort coincided with Homecoming and was designed to inspire first-time gifts of $19.27.
Texas Southern has been alive with achievements and success this year, including a thriving and Active student body, acclaimed faculty and staff, and stellar alumni.
Some of TSU’s strategic achievements in 2015 include:
- Adding new civil and computer engineering programs to the curriculum.
- Offering a state-of-the art aviation program with a flight simulator approved by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to produce career-ready pilots – one of only three such programs in the country and the only one available at an HBCU.
- Opening an innovative, high-tech Pharmacy simulation laboratory, the only one its kind in the nation.
- Housing a Maritime Transportation Management and Security degree program in partnership with the Port of Houston Authority, the only program of its kind in the Houston area and the first at an HBCU.
- Spearheading a partnership between Texas Southern, the Chinese government and Beijing Jiaotong University to allow TSU to host Houston’s only Confucius Institute, a Chinese cultural and language exchange program.
- Launching the Urban Academic Village in conjunction with the First Generation program to reinvigorate the undergraduate student experience – particularly for at-risk freshmen and sophomores who may be the first in their families to attend college – consolidating a student-first model focused on testing, advising, counseling and mentoring.
- Awarding 1,750 degrees at Commencement in May, of which 48% were African American males.
- Honoring 30 of the more than 60 TSU football alumni who went on to make their mark in the National Football League over a 50-year span, including Winston Hill, Lloyd Mumphord, and Kenny Burrough.
Texas Southern University continues to educate America’s inner-city youth of color and builds on its legacy as a historically Black institution (HBCU). The university is one of the nation’s pre-eminent, comprehensive metropolitan colleges that addresses critical urban issues and prepares an ethnically diverse student population to be career-ready and become a force for positive change in a global society.