Panel Discusses "The Texas Book Two" After Recent Book Release

According to Cat Osterman, UT alumni and Olympic gold medalist, when you become an athlete at the University of Texas, you become part of history.

“I think current students [will benefit from this],” Osterman said. “There’s a lot of history we don’t know about. It’s just really eye opening to see not just the university from different people’s perspectives but to read historically about why a building is named the way it is or why is it put where it is on campus, things you just don’t think about.”

On Sept. 8, Book People, an Austin independent book store, hosted David Dettmer, a coordinator in the president’s office at UT, Cat Osterman, the current pitching coach at St. Edward’s university, and retired Austin American Statesman reporter Brad Bucholz to discuss “The Texas Book Two: More Profiles, History, and Reminiscences of the University” which compiled 21 essays to create a history of UT that will appeal to more than just the student body.

For Osterman, the book was a way to historically understand what there is to the UT campus, more than just burnt orange and football. Osterman contributed to the book with a piece she wrote about her time at UT as an athlete and student.

“Wearing burnt orange is an honor, and being able to join athletes like Earl Campbell, Ricky Williams, Roger Clemens… and many others is almost unimaginable to me,” Osterman wrote in her piece entitled ‘The Perfect Game’. “After my career as a player at Texas was over, I was astonished by how many people spoke my name in the same breath as [them].”

“The Texas Book Two” started coming together less than a year after the first book was released. Dettmer realized that there was more content and history that needed to be addressed.

“I hope that people outside of Texas could look at these first two Texas books and if they say, ‘Well, what is UT? What makes it tick? What makes it the way it is?’ I hope they can get a sense of that by reading through these essays,” said Dettmer, the past publications handler in the Dolph Briscoe Center for American history at UT.

The Texas Book series is an attempt to address more than the recognition UT is known for, including its athletic department and educational success. According to the University Press, the series’ publisher, the book “creates an informal, highly readable history of UT.”

“When you go to look at what are the big stories about UT and the ones that immediately come to mind are Governor Ferguson trying to shut down the university because they wouldn’t do what he told them, when the regents fired President Homer Rainey in 1944, their struggle with integration, and then [you] cover all of the grandeur that UT is [with those],” Dettmer said.

Listed in the table of contents alongside pieces about the first African American undergraduate, Anna Hiss, the “feminist before her time”, and the beginnings of Austin City Limits, writers also reflect on the university’s history of pushing itself back. 

“At its best, the University of Texas moving forward is an awesome sight to behold,” Dettmer wrote in his forward to the book. “When Texans marshal their creativity, skill, ambition, and courage, the result is special-it is world class, and typically it is unmistakably Texan. However, if there have been periods of great advancement in UT’s history, then implicit in Faulkner’s statement is the understanding that there have also been periods when the University has not fostered great advancement.”

The book, although not meant to be an easy read or another piece of burnt orange decorum, brings in readers outside of the university.

“I have three sons and a husband who did undergraduate and graduate [at UT],” Betsy Phisher, a supporter of the university and an attendee of Sunday’s talk said. “It’s been a good experience for them. I still root for UT even though I didn’t graduate from [there]. It’s a big part of my life and it is good.”

At its close, the book serves as not just an insight into the school, but also into the minds of past students and the victories, as well as the struggles, they faced during their time as longhorns.

“It’s nice to make contributions to something that I’m hoping, assuming, has a permanence to it, that it will always exist in a library or database somewhere and be useful to people,” Dettmer said. “Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and Shakespeare therefore has immortality. People will always be reading Hamlet. It’s nice to have created something that will have some lasting power.”

[To see images from the book keep scrolling]