Each month, Texas State University President Dr. Kelly Damphousse sits down with faculty members, staff, students, alumni, and community members for a conversation about all things TXST — the past, the present, and the bright future of the university.
Part of the TXST Podcast Network: https://www.txst.edu/podcast-network.html
- It is the pinnacle of academic achievement. To me, is one of the most important things that's ever happened in the history of Texas State is getting a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. We are in rarefied air at Texas State now as a result of this.
- Welcome to the podcast that we call "The Current," where we talk to faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends of the university, about what's going on at Texas State University. And what better way to start than to have a conversation with two of our great faculty members? So we have Dr. Bryan Glass, thank you for being here. And Dean Heather Galloway. And so we'll start off, let me hear your Texas State story. And Heather, we'll start with you. How did you end up where you are, and how'd you end up here at Texas State?
- I'm one of the longtimers at Texas State, and I came here in January in 1996.
- [Kelly] Wow.
- And I actually have family members who went to Texas State, an uncle, my sister has three degrees from here. So I knew the place really intimately and knew it was something, you know, someplace that I really wanted to be a part of the mission. So I came as an assistant professor of physics. And then after doing that for about a decade, I transitioned to being part of the honors program at the time. And so I'm the first dean to lead the Honors College. So it's new every year, but it's not new in that we always have amazing students and our mission to educate those students has never wavered.
- Never changed. So where'd you grow up?
- I grew up in Houston. I'm a native Texan, so fifth generation on my mama's side.
- Undergrad, grad school?
- My undergrad was up the road at that big school that I prefer not to name. And then I went out West for my doctoral degree at UC Berkeley.
- UC Berkeley, I've heard of that. Yeah, kind of a well known place. Your first job was Texas State?
- My first job out of graduate school was Texas State.
- And never left. How lucky are we?
- Yeah, but it doesn't feel like I've had the same job. It feels like I've had a bunch of different jobs because the place has changed so much and, you know, and I've changed positions as well.
- And you've got so much context for the change that other people like me don't appreciate. You know, so I remember studying about the university before I applied and while I was going through the application process. But my picture of it, I'm trying to learn more about the history of it, but my picture of it's pretty truncated and yours is much different.
- Yeah, a little longer. And then I heard stories from, you know, my uncle growing up, you know, about what his undergraduate experience was like coming here in the '60s. You know, he lived in Arnold Hall and was a chemistry major from the Valley. So, you know, I've gotten to see a lot of different aspects.
- Bryan, what about you?
- So I grew up in Chicago, and I wound up going to Lake Forest College as an undergraduate, north of Chicago. And then I went over to.
- So Wake Forest College?
- No, no, Lake Forest.
- [Kelly] Oh, Lake Forest.
- Yes, yes, not Wake Forest. Not Wake Forest University. I went to Lake Forest College for my undergraduate degree, where I made a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and then went to the University of Cambridge over in UK.
- [Kelly] I've heard of that.
- Yeah, and then I went to UT to do my Ph.D. because I'm a modern British and British imperial historian. And at the time, UT had the best program in the United States for modern British and British imperial. And then this was my first job out of college, 13 years ago. I actually got hired as an adjunct to teach one class, and it went really well. So then they hired me back permanently versus as a lecturer. Then I became a senior lecturer, and then now I'm a professor of instruction.
- Well, it's great to have both of you here. You mentioned Phi Beta Kappa, and so that's really what I wanna talk about today. So this past year, actually, about a year and a half ago, I guess, we applied again to become a Phi Beta Kappa campus. It wasn't the first time we did this, but we actually were successful this time around. And I remember hanging out with you guys in Washington, waiting with bated breath for the decision. Actually, it was Baltimore, wasn't it?
- Yeah.
- And waiting with bated breath to see if we were accepted, I was having to catch a plane. So I like had to live through the drama leading up to the vote. They voted. And I said, well, good, I'll have time to find out if we made it. And then they said, we're gonna take a break now and we'll come back, and tell you the results of the vote. And so I had to leave, get in the cab and go to my plane. So I missed the big celebration. But let's start at the beginning. And Heather, you might've been probably one of the earliest ones involved here, but what inspired Texas State to go after this recognition?
- I think Cathy Jaffe really deserves the credit for bringing it up, and she somehow found out that I was Phi Beta Kappa. And so we started talking about, you know, what does it take to become, you know, a Phi Beta Kappa chapter at Texas State? You know, what would we have to do? So the two of us started looking at the application process and we started talking to the provost and the deans of the colleges that are most likely going to have students for Phi Beta Kappa. And they were supportive. You know, they said, do you wanna apply? And then 2012, we applied, and we did not get a site visit. And then in 2015, we applied again, and we did not get a site visit. And in 2018, Cathy said, we need to apply. And I said, I'm not gonna, I'm too tired.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- You know, I just can't, I can't do it. There was a lot going on, and I talked her out of it. And so then the pandemic happened, and in 2020, you know, in 2021, they were a little late in posting what was gonna happen. And Cathy asked me again, and I thought, I'm really smart. I'll figure out how to tell Cathy no without telling what's, you know, become one of my closest friends, no. And we'll survey the faculty because that's been, you know, we haven't had enough faculty who were Phi Beta Kappa. And that was one of the reasons the National Chapter thought we couldn't support a chapter. And I surveyed the faculty, and I thought, oh, we're applying for Phi Beta Kappa because we had hired so many new faculty who were Phi Beta Kappa and retained a lot of the faculty who I already knew about. So it was really time, we had crossed that barrier of having, you know, a robust group of Phi Beta Kappa faculty. And that really was one of the things that I knew would increase our chances of actually getting it. So they had changed the process. We had to write an even longer application.
- These things are never easy. There's like typically several hundred pages.
- [Heather] Yeah, just so happens.
- Oh yeah, you've got the application right there, yeah.
- So it just so happens that I actually have the 400-page application. Should anybody wish to carefully read it, but it was quite fun to put together. So we actually turned it in in 2022, and then after we turned it in to 2022, we received a site visit, and they came, they talked to you.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- You know, they met with people, they met with everybody from athletics to our finance people. They checked the university out in so many different ways. That committee decided to, the site visit team, you know, liked what they saw and were impressed. And then they went back and reported to the Committee on Qualifications, and the Committee on Qualifications voted to move our application forward. And so every one of these things takes like six months. So we're waiting, and they call Cathy and I up on a Zoom call and we're like nervous and waiting and then after the Committee on Qualifications voted, it went to the Senate of Phi Beta Kappa. They voted to put our application forward. And so what you saw was the final vote at the Triennial Council.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- So it was very surreal for me because, you know, it had been so long.
- You were working on it and striking out for so long. But it says something, two things, about not giving up, even though you wanted to.
- I did.
- A little bit.
- More than a little bit, like I did not want to write that last application or work. I mean, I had a great team but.
- Well, good for Cathy for sticking with it and encouraging you and eventually you bought into applying again. But then it also speaks to the changing, the changes at Texas State. You mentioned having more Phi Beta Kappa faculty and retaining more of them, as the university shifted to having a greater emphasis on research and bringing in high caliber faculty members that that actually got recognized through this process. Bryan, you were a member of Phi Beta Kappa as a student. What was your memory of being a part of that? And maybe as you talk about that, like why do we care about Phi Beta Kappa?
- Well, you know, I got a letter in the mail, and it was.
- Was it like slipped under your door?
- Something like that, senior year of college, and I didn't know what it was. And I thought maybe it was a joke. So I went to a very small liberal arts school, and I was friends with the dean. And so I went and saw the dean, and I said, hey, can you enlighten me on this letter I got? And he said, oh, that's Phi Beta Kappa. You have to accept.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Whatever you do, do not throw that away. I'm like, why? I've never heard of this. So he ran it down for me why it was so important and such an honor. And then once I learned about it and went through the initiation and you know.
- Learned the secret handshake.
- [Bryan] Yes.
- And you're joking about that.
- Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. Not secret anymore.
- Yeah.
- I really became enamored with the history of it. You know, I'm a history professor, so I absolutely love getting into the history of it and finding out that it is almost as old as the United States itself.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Founded on the 5th of December, 1776, by five undergraduates at William and Mary, College of William and Mary in colonial Williamsburg. And they were trying to come up with a debating society that where they would basically put the Chatham House rules in place where anything you said could not be taken out of. You could take it out, but you could not give attribution to it to try to protect the other members because they were talking about some pretty, pretty hairy subjects given that the revolution was going on around 'em.
- [Kelly] Sure.
- And then it spread from there to Yale and then to Harvard, which kept it alive when they had to shut down William and Mary during the revolution. And it has just been, you know, expanding ever since. It is the pinnacle of academic achievement.
- [Kelly] Sure.
- And I told Heather this when all of her and Cathy's hard work paid off. I said, that to me is one of the most important things that's ever happened in the history of Texas State, is getting a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. It puts us in the top 11.5% of universities.
- Yeah.
- In the United States. Top 10% of students there. You have 17 U.S. presidents who have been Phi Beta Kappa, 42 Supreme Court Justices, more than 150 Nobel laureates. We are in rarefied air at Texas State now as a result of this.
- You know, one of the things that we're always thinking about is, you know, being the best we can at everything, but about also when we target things like becoming an R1 institution or having a great athletics program. It's about the reputation of the university as well. So targeting things that are valuable and things that are hard to attain. So becoming an R1 institution, there's only 130 or so of those out there, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Texas, Texas A&M, and so on. And so we want to be part of that. We want those universities to be our peers, not just our aspirational peers, but our real peers. And the same thing kind of plays out with things like an honor society, like Phi Beta Kappa. And so the oldest, probably most prestigious of the honor societies that are out there. And actually it's not just limited to your GPA, but it's also they're getting a little broader in their scope of disciplines, but traditionally it's been more focused on the liberal arts. You wanna talk about that, Heather?
- Yeah, so the stipulations include that students have to have a predominantly liberal arts and sciences background. So we've been looking carefully at students' transcripts, and do they have enough hours in the arts and sciences? The other stipulation is that they have a math or logic course. It turns out that we have very high, you know, requirements for all of our degrees. So yeah, virtually all of our students meet those, but they also require that students have the equivalent of four semesters of a foreign language. So that's also something that, you know, we look at carefully. So we've been examining transcripts. I think this week we will have the final word on which of our students will be invited to Phi Beta Kappa. So the invitation should go out at the end of this week.
- And we won't be like passing an envelope under the door or anything like that.
- [Heather] No, I think.
- It'll be an email notification probably. Some things have changed.
- Yeah, it'll be email. We may also use, you know, some snail mail, but we're also gonna be using the faculty that we have here because our charter member list is 91 members. You know, we're gonna be circulating that list out to them. You know, many of them will be in the same departments as the students. And so we're gonna encourage them to have meetings that students can attend to learn more, as well as to inform the students directly. We know that that makes a big difference to the students.
- Texas State is already the number one applied to school in the state of Texas among students who are using the Apply Texas website portal. I saw some data this morning. It's 42,000 students, high school seniors have already applied for admission for the fall semester. So we had a lot of people applying, and we welcome a wide swath of students who come here. But I think having Phi Beta Kappa as part of our arsenal now will attract students who might not have thought about coming here. Because it sends a signal about, we talked about the changing perspective of the university, that changes slowly. You can change the football program pretty quickly, but changing the reputation, the academic reputation of a university takes time. But this is one signal of that, don't you think?
- Yeah, I definitely think so. It's always been true here that students who came here got an excellent education.
- Yeah.
- It's, you know, it was never false even from my first year here. But convincing the rest of the world that it was true is not as easy. And I think that, you know, having a national honor society recognize it is, is really important for establishing that.
- Yeah, there are less than 300 chapters in the United States. So right there, you know that you are in select company.
- How many public universities in the state of Texas are Phi Beta Kappa?
- Not sure how many public, I know there are, we are number 13 in terms of the total number of universities in, or colleges in Texas.
- And we'll be the fifth public.
- Fifth public.
- We'll be the fifth. There's four public universities right now. And so tell me about the process now. So the first initiation will be different from the second and third and so on. What are our plans for the first inaugural class?
- We're going to have the, you know, the students, we'll teach the students the secret handshake and then have them, you know, knock at the door and come in. We'll have a lot of the faculty who are named as charter members. We've invited all of them. We'll invite some guests from the Phi Beta Kappa Alumni Association in Austin. They've been very supportive, and we've been working with them. They give out a couple of scholarships that are often won by a Texas State student already. And then we'll also have some founding members that I know we've been communicating about. And I don't think we're ready to announce them yet.
- Not yet, but I think we're, so these are people who will become members of the founding of the founding class?
- They'll be, they'll be found, you know, they will be named as Phi Beta Kappa members. And you know, one of the things that the CEO of Phi Beta Kappa, the Secretary of Phi Beta Kappa, Fred Lawrence says is it doesn't matter if you were joined as a student, which is what they call members in course. You know, they have very archaic, when you're founded in 1776, you have kind of old language for a lot of things. But he said, you know, it's, you know, honorary members are just as important. I mean, we have a faculty member who, you know, actually went to school at Texas State, but then when she was at, I think, believe University of Iowa, she was, you know, Jill Pruetz was made an honorary member. And you are someone who.
- [Kelly] I was too, yeah.
- You know, made so he made a clear point that these are important members. So some of these will be our alumni who of course weren't Phi Beta Kappa when they were students, because we didn't have a chapter.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- So it'll be really fun to be able to announce those founding members as well.
- I'm so glad we're able to do that 'cause we have so many alumni that have been very successful, gone off and done some great things, and would've been Phi Beta Kappa qualified if they, if we'd had that at the time. So it's nice to be able to recognize some of those folks. Yeah, I was the dean of Arts and Sciences at University of Oklahoma. And because of that, I ran the ceremony because Phi Beta Kappa belonged in the College of Arts and Sciences. And at my very first ceremony, they inducted me into the society, because I couldn't run the event without being a member. And I always felt like I didn't really earn this because I was a criminal justice undergrad, and I'm not sure if criminal justice would be included now, but it wasn't one of the disciplines that would've been Phi Beta Kappa. And I always felt kind of bad about that. But through the process of working with, through the application process, when I met with the group that came to visit, I mentioned how I always felt kind of guilty about being a member, but not really qualified. And they said, oh no, we treat honorary members as if they're full members. And we have respect for folks who've been brought in through this honorary process as well. So what's next for Phi Beta Kappa and this group? What do they get out of being part of this group?
- I think that one of the important things is that, you know, that difficulty in establishing the reputation of Texas State, you know, also comes to our students.
- Yeah.
- You know, some of them struggle with an imposter syndrome or that, you know, they may not have come, you know, a lot of our students are first generation. And so I think this helps to put a stamp of no, you are the very best in the nation, right? We are acknowledging, you know, we have looked at the standards set by Phi Beta Kappa, and we have invited you because of your high academic achievement. And so I think that helps them to realize, you know, we are the best in the nation. So I think that's, you know, one of the most important reasons we've put it. Phi Beta Kappa chapters and bringing the faculty together to promote, you know, the ideals of the liberal arts and science education. You know, many of the chapters go on to host different kinds of invited speakers or to.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- Having different events that honor Phi Beta Kappa and to bringing that and, you know, continuing to fundraise to make sure that the chapter is successful on campus and can support students joining.
- Yeah, it's not just you join and pay a fee and you get this thing added to resume. There's actually some value added to being a member of the society.
- Supposedly law schools, when they are trying to admit new classes, take the Phi Beta Kappa members, and they put them at the top of the list.
- Oh, wow.
- And that is one of the most important of the admission criteria that they look at, which I didn't even know until I started, until I started looking into this.
- [Kelly] Wow.
- So again, you are with very elite company, but not exclusive.
- Elitist.
- Right, yeah, we're not elitist, exactly. If you want to know what the secret handshake is, just go on YouTube and there's plenty of people showing you what the handshake is. It was a little bit different when I was initiated in 1999. They actually told us that we weren't supposed to share the handshake with anyone else. Our parents weren't allowed to come. And it was in this kind of like dark old building and felt very much like we were in some sort of secret society.
- [Kelly] Yeah.
- But that's not the case now. The families are gonna be invited to attend, which is gonna be, I think just a wonderful event. And it's, you know, it's before graduation. They get to celebrate this milestone, this achievement, which again, as I said, is so rare in academia. It's so rare to be a part of Phi Beta Kappa, that anyone who's invited, I hope that they will listen to this and watch this, and they'll know that they need to accept it. I've been talking to my students in class already, and now they're so excited. Like, am I on the list? Am I on the list?
- [Kelly] That's funny.
- Like I'm not, I'm not revealing any names on the list.
- What a great thing for Texas State. Thank you all for leading the effort for so many years to get us to where we are. And you know, hard things aren't easy on purpose because there's a value to 'em, and it sometimes it just takes a little time to get through, you know, I think people's perception of the university, but also, you know, what we're doing here. So thank you all for leading in that. And I can't wait for the inaugural initiation process. It's gonna be a lot of fun. And to re-remember the secret handshake. So thank you for that.
- It's really been a team effort. I mean the university has been really supportive. And so, you know, we did a lot of work on writing the application and had a great team of people. And we now have a great team of officers planning the initiation. But it's required the support of, you know, multiple university presidents and provosts to get us to this point. So, you know, everybody from athletics to the library has helped, and we appreciate that.
- It's a process, right? You're building on previous applications and so on. So one of the fun things we like to do is have listeners to the podcast submit their questions for me. And so I'm gonna turn the tables and ask you to open these, open this envelope up here. And Heather, I'll ask you to ask me a question that you see there.
- What was your favorite read from 2024? Fiction slash nonfiction slash article? Favorite read.
- Favorite read.
- I guess it says from 2024, but you've had a month in 2025, you know.
- So I'm read, here's a book that I'm reading right now. I actually made my word of the year this year, I picked a word every year that kind of describes what I want to inspire myself to do, is the word "read," to go off and read something. And, you know, I try to put a theme around it. And so I decided to read books that were written as books that then later became movies. And so I'm reading right now, the book is by Upton Sinclair. It's called "Oil!" with an exclamation mark at the end. And it's about the history of the oil industry. And that book was the basis for the movie "There Will Be Blood." And so, so I'm reading that book right now. It's a fascinating story about the history of these guys are literally taking shovels and pickaxes and going down and, you know, pounding holes in the ground without any of the science and the knowledge that we have about geology that we had now, where they're just like literally speculating about where there might be oil, like looking at the land and going, well, maybe this would be a great place. And just digging a hole until they ran into a gusher, and then they didn't have like a process of dealing with it. There's no big refineries out there, so what do you do with all this oil? But it's interesting to learn something about the history of oil because oil is so central to this state and the prosperity of this state, that it's just, I love the fact that it's historic, but also led to a movie that was actually pretty interesting. Daniel Day Lewis is one of the world's greatest actors in it. And so "Oil!"
- "Oil!" And then you can watch "Landman" on Paramount, which is also.
- So, you know,
- From one of our Texas State alumni.
- So Christian Wallace is, was one of our former students, became a writer for Texas Monthly, and he started a podcast called "Boomtown." And based on "Boomtown," they developed this series called "Landman," which is just fascinating. And so my wife and I listened to the "Boomtown" podcast recently, and it's kind of like his family's entrance and existence in living in the Permian Basin area. And about, he worked on oil rigs and then came to Texas State, got a degree, became a writer, and him kind of being very introspective about his life growing up in that area, talking to his family members, his uncles, and his parents, and so on, about the history of oil in that area as well. So thanks so much. I appreciate you all being here today.
- Thank you.