Wichita Falls Junior College, founded in 1922, shared space in the high school before acquiring a forty-acre campus on the south side of the city in 1937. The school became a four-year college, Hardin College, in 1946. In 1950 the institution’s name was changed to Midwestern University; it joined the Texas state system in 1961 and in 1975 was renamed Midwestern State University. The campus now covers 255 acres.
Hardin Administration Building (1936), the first permanent building on campus, was funded by the Public Works Administration and designed by William B. Ittner of St. Louis with Voelcker and Dixon. The Lombard Romanesque design in orange brick with red tile roofs set the palette that the campus has adhered to over the years. Raking corbel tables are the dominant ornamental detail, and they are applied to new buildings to relate them to Hardin. The square campanile set to one side of the entrance bay has an octagonal lantern with polychrome arches of alternating brick and stone voussoirs. The A. R. Dillard College of Business Administration (2006, Bundy, Young, Sims and Potter) frames the north side of the university’s quadrangle. The building’s large, planar gabled facades have round-arched central windows and raking corbel tables, and projecting wings are joined by arcades of cast-stone columns. Killebrew-Cupit-Rucker and Associates designed the equally imposing D. L. Ligon Coliseum of 1969.
On the south edge of campus is the 9,000-square-foot house designed by Dallas architects Goorwin and Tatum in 1938 for oilman Louis Sikes and his wife, Glenna, on a forty-three-acre site and acquired by the university in 1970 for use as the president’s house. It is an outsized, horizontally elongated Hollywood-Dallas interpretation of Mount Vernon.