library Commemorates History Professor’s Devotion to Excellence

The Dick Smith Library continues to serve Tarleton’s students as a major academic resource.

The campus library, resting in the same spot for nearly 60 years, is named for a colorful history instructor and one of Tarleton’s most celebrated long-time academicians.

Dr. Dick Smith was characterized by Tarleton historian Chris Guthrie as being imbued with a “devotion to excellence and impatience with mediocrity, sterile pedantry and bureaucratic nitpicking” in John Tarleton and His Legacy; The History of Tarleton State University, 1899-1999.

Smith brought his Breckenridge High School diploma to Tarleton in 1926, finished his undergraduate studies in Austin at the University of Texas, where he also studied for his master’s before achieving his doctorate at Harvard.

Becoming a history instructor at Tarleton in 1933, he became an associate professor just a year later. He enlisted during World War II, serving as an artillery corporal in Europe.

After the war, Smith returned as Tarleton’s head of the Department of History and Government, which later became the Department of Social Sciences.

According to Guthrie, Smith was among Tarleton’s most active scholars, writing two Texas government textbooks, numerous articles and two well-regarded booklets on government in the Lone Star State. He stepped down from department leadership in 1967 to return to full-time teaching.

His last six years at Tarleton saw Smith honored as Outstanding Educator in America (1971), Distinguished Faculty Member (1972), and finally Professor Emeritus following his retirement in 1973.

Upon his death in 1974, Smith directed his inheritance of more than a half-million dollars to go toward scholarships to help prospective students of Tarleton’s College of Arts and Sciences. The Dick Smith Scholarships still help educate English, mathematics, science and social science majors.

The Dick Smith Library, built in 1957 with additions in the late 1960s and in 1985, went through extensive renovations in 2004. The latest expansion into the old math building in 2014, added a student lounge, coffee bar, a dozen group study rooms and a classroom. The renovation supported the library’s role as a major resource for student study, team work and research as well as in providing access to technology, including a 3-D printer.