This story is the first in a two-part series examining Texas A&M’s growth in Fort Worth, looking at how A&M Law’s rise helped shape the new downtown building. Part 2 will explore what job and workforce opportunities the campus could bring to Fort Worth and Tarrant County.
Dean Robert Ahdieh arrived at Texas A&M University School of Law in 2018 caught between two ideas of growth.
Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price wanted to know when the law school would break ground on a new building, a vision imagined by Ahdieh’s predecessor.
The provost who hired him had a different message.
“Bobby, if you say the word ‘building,’ I will fire you on the spot,” Ahdieh recalled her telling him.
Ahdieh said he didn’t come to Fort Worth to plan a building. He wanted to strengthen the law school’s faculty, students, programs and ties to the city. But on the drive back from College Station, he began wondering whether Price and the provost were asking the wrong question.
Eight years later, a new A&M building is rising in downtown Fort Worth — and it will serve more than law students. The Law and Education Building is set to welcome classes this fall, anchoring the first phase of a larger downtown vision that city leaders and university officials say could reshape the southeast edge of downtown.
For Ahdieh, chief operating officer of Texas A&M-Fort Worth, the building is both a milestone and a test. It reflects A&M Law’s rise from regional program to national competitor — and an attempt to extend his success formula beyond the law school.
“It’s not a modest vision, but it’s not a pie-in-the-sky vision either,” Ahdieh said. “We have all the ingredients. It’s just a question of whether we can either choose to capitalize on them or not.”
Robert Ahdieh, Texas A&M-Fort Worth chief operating officer, listens during a Candid Conversation panel on Aug. 19, 2025, at Tarleton State University’s Fort Worth campus. (Mary Abby Goss | Fort Worth Report)
Law growth
When the Texas A&M University System acquired Texas Wesleyan University’s law school in 2013, the school sat outside the national rankings. By the time Ahdieh arrived, it cracked the top 100, hovering in the 80s.
How U.S. News ranks law schools
U.S. News & World Report’s Best Law Schools rankings offer one measure of law school’s standings, with nearly 60% of the methodology tied to employment outcomes. The remaining weight is given to factors such as faculty resources, student credentials and professional assessments. Schools are also ranked by specialty areas and provide data on admissions, costs, curriculum, employment and salaries.
His agreement with Texas A&M was simple: If the university invested in the law school, he would try to move it into the 50s within seven years.
The school got there in about three years.
Then it kept climbing — to No. 29 in 2023, No. 26 the next year and No. 22 by 2026, behind only the University of Texas at Austin compared to other Texas law schools.
“If someone had said within seven years we would be in the low 20s, I would have said ‘That’s ridiculous. It’s not possible to do it,’” Ahdieh said. “But that combination of hard work and good people really got us there.”
Success formula
Ahdieh attributes A&M Law’s growth to stronger faculty, more scholarships, smaller incoming classes, expanded career services, academic support and admissions capacity.
“The investments have been all about people and getting good people in the door,” Ahdieh said.
Timothy Mulvaney, law professor and holder of A&M’s Hank & Anne Paup Chair in Law, joined before the acquisition. The school has since hired more than 50 faculty members, an expansion that he said reshaped its research profile, academic reputation and classroom experience.
“To be a top law school requires many things,” he said. “But an indispensable piece is, of course, a collection of faculty members who are at the top of their fields.”
Mulvaney teaches land-use law. With A&M Law’s smaller class size, he can walk students from campus to zoning commission and historic preservation hearings, then introduce them to policymakers.
The student profile also shifted. Applications have climbed from about 1,600 a year to more than 5,000, Mulvaney said. The median LSAT score rose from 152 to 169. Median undergraduate GPA rose from 3.13 to 4.0. Bar exam passage rose from 74% to 95%.
The faculty growth also changed the student experience because A&M Law kept classes small, he said.
“A Texas A&M Law student knows that he or she will have the opportunity to form close relationships with their professors,” Mulvaney said.
Interdisciplinary fields
When Ahdieh arrived, A&M Law enrolled about 450 students. It now has more than 2,000.
Much of that growth, he said, did not come from future lawyers.
The school enrolls doctors, bankers, journalists, hospital administrators and other professionals whose work intersects with the law. Gary Lucas, A&M Law’s senior associate dean, called the Master of Legal Studies program one of the school’s success stories. It gives nonlawyers legal training in fields such as human resources, compliance and healthcare administration.
Texas A&M-Fort Worth will be a 3.5-acre campus in downtown Fort Worth. The Law and Education Building is under construction, and the Research and Innovation Building is being designed. (Courtesy | Texas A&M University System)
That shift made the A&M Law and Education Building a natural extension for Ahdieh. If law touches many industries, he said, why not place it beside engineering, business, health, pharmacy and other fields in downtown Fort Worth?
Roughly half the new building will serve the law school, Ahdieh said. The rest will bring other programs from Texas A&M and Tarleton State University into the same downtown space. Lucas said that proximity could deepen cross-field work, especially in areas such as intellectual property, where patent law often overlaps with engineering.
Fort Worth buy-in
The law school also pushed outward.
Early on, Ahdieh told staff to let community organizations use the law school’s downtown space without charge because he wanted the school woven into Fort Worth’s civic life.
That presence extended into the legal community, said Brian Newby, managing partner at Cantey & Hanger LLC. As A&M Law improved under the new system, local firms gained access to more highly trained graduates educated in Fort Worth.
“We don’t necessarily always have to go to Austin or Waco or Lubbock or SMU in Dallas to find talent,” Newby said. “There’s talent right here locally in Fort Worth.”
Newby said Ahdieh also became a civic presence through groups such as Downtown Fort Worth Inc. and Visit Fort Worth, which mattered as the building vision took shape.
A&M officials set a $40 million fundraising goal for the first phase of the downtown campus. About $28 million has been raised, Ahdieh said, including roughly $22 million from Fort Worth donors rather than traditional Texas A&M supporters.
Mayor Mattie Parker, who graduated from Texas Wesleyan’s law school shortly before it became Texas A&M Law, said the A&M system delivered on its promise to invest in the program and raise its stature.
“He recognized from the beginning that he had to get the law school right,” Parker said of Ahdieh. “Pretend as if he hadn’t been successful in that, we wouldn’t be opening this building in August.”
The eight-story, $185 million Law and Education Building is the first of five buildings under construction on the new Texas A&M-Fort Worth campus and is planned to open in August 2026. (Courtesy | Texas A&M University System)
The project also matters because of where it is rising, Newby said. The southeast side of downtown, near the convention center, has long been defined by surface parking lots. The Texas A&M campus is taking shape near the convention center expansion, a planned hotel, new apartments, Trinity Metro’s downtown transit hub and the Fort Worth Water Gardens.
“It’s just going to make the southeast quadrant of downtown explode,” he said.
The next phase
In an April speech at the Downtown Fort Worth Inc. annual meeting, Ahdieh outlined to business leaders, donors and those investing in downtown Fort Worth that cities and universities have long shaped each other. He pointed to Boston, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Austin, Dallas and Houston — cities where higher education helps define identity and drive growth.
Fort Worth, he said, should aim higher than becoming bigger. It should become what he calls a “leading city,” one that shapes attitudes, inspires vision and sets direction.
The downtown campus is part of that larger ambition. But for A&M Law, the next phase brings a more immediate test: how to grow without losing what made its rise possible.
The new building does not mean the law school will immediately enroll more students, Ahdieh said.
For now, it gives A&M Law room to bring together programs, faculty and staff now spread across leased spaces. The challenge is to preserve the close-knit culture that helped the law school rise while sharing a broader campus with engineering, nursing and other programs.
The law school has become a “fine-tuned machine,” Ahdieh said, and leaders have to be careful not to lose what made it work. He thinks it’s manageable.
“I’m less interested in buildings than I am in, not just the contents of those buildings but, what they activate and what they make possible,” he said, carefully using the former fireable word.
Dang Le is the higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at dang.le@fortworthreport.org.
The Fort Worth Report partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.
The Report’s higher education coverage is supported in part by major higher education institutions in Tarrant County, including Tarleton State University, Tarrant County College, Texas A&M-Fort Worth, Texas Christian University, Texas Wesleyan University, the University of Texas at Arlington and UNT Health Fort Worth.
At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
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