Larry Faulkner

Graduate Student, Welch Hall

00:00 / 10:20
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Larry Faulkner was a graduate student at UT-Austin between the summer of 1966 and the summer of 1969. He had only been at UT for about two months when the shooting happened. He went by the bursar’s office which was in the Tower around noon and then decided to walk off campus towards home for lunch.

He says he did not hear anything or know what was going on but it was all going on while he was walking near the Tower.

Faulkner went on to become President of UT-Austin. It was under his leadership that UT opened the Tower.

“I came to the conclusion that I needed to work explicitly on getting the Tower reopened,” Faulkner said. “I, of course, had a personal history to when it was open and went through the main chapter that caused it to be closed and I had a firm conclusion that the closed Tower was not healthy for the institution.”

Faulkner also approved recognizing the victims of the shooting with a memorial as part of reopening the Tower.