in 1969 and founded in 1973. UTPB is now home to over 7,000 students and 250 teaching faculty.
== History ==
The University of Texas of the Permian Basin began in 1973 as a university that initially offered only junior, senior, and graduate level programs. Among those who pushed for the establishment of UTPB was the oil industrialist Bill Noël, who with his wife, Ellen Witwer Noël, became major philanthropists of the institution.
In 1991 the university began accepting freshmen and sophomore applicants, and in 2000, the J. Conrad Dunagen Library and Lecture Center was completed, featuring a twenty-station multimedia lab and classroom.
During 2006, the university was holding discussions with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about the construction of a new High-Temperature Teaching and Test Reactor which, if successful, would finish licensing and construction around 2012. It would also be the first university-based research reactor to be built in the US in roughly a decade, and one of the few HTGR type reactors …
