Religious Complaint Over Planned Temple At UTEP

It’s no secret that a lot of the buildings one sees on the University of Texas at El Paso campus look remarkably like those of the small Asian kingdom of Bhutan.

Stored away in the university’s warehouse sits an even more authentic dose of the state’s architecture: a small Bhutanese temple.

Originally constructed as an exhibit at the 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festivtal in Washington, D.C., the temple will soon find a permanent home in the center of the UTEP campus.

That’s a natural fit, if you ask university executive vice president Richard Aduato.

“It’s part of our heritage,” he told ABC-7.

Adauto said UTEP will raise money to reconstruct the temple near the campus geology building. He told ABC-7 he expects it to be erected within the next six to 12 months.

The small temple is designed in the same style as buildings constructed by Buddhist monks in Bhutan in the Seventh Century. The university adopted the architecture more than nine decades ago, at the suggestion of the wife of the university’s first dean.

El Pasoan Cheryl Hernandez said the temple is “just too much,” adding that she worries it promotes Buddhism at UTEP, a public university.

ABC-7 has learned Hernandez sent a letter of complaint to UT Board of Regent Paul Foster and Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

“What it really amounts to is that there is religion being put into the campus,” she told ABC-7. “We’re being forced to separate church and state; we’re being forced to remove prayer from schools and universities, yet they’re going to put a temple of Buddha.”

Adauto said UTEP’s ties to Bhutan are cultural, not religious.

“Nobody is asking (students and staff) to practice anything other than looking at the architecture,” Adauto told KVIA. “And actually, it is quite beautiful.”

Vote in our KVIA online poll: Do the Buddhist symbols at UTEP bother you?