PREFATORY NOTENineteen hundred and nineteen is the semi-centennial anniversary of the founding of the University of Nebraska. It is therefore appropriate that some record be published, sketching the history of the institution in the first fifty years of its existence. The articles contained in this anniversary book are the product of no long period of preparation. Most of them were written within a few weeks after the book was planned. Doubtless they omit much that might well have been included, and here and there they may exhibit inaccuracies; and there is probably overlapping material, as always when a work is the product of collaboration. It was not possible in the time available to secure all the contributions wished or to secure contributions from all the persons approached; and it is to make good the defect thereby occasioned that certain articles are supplied by the editor. Nevertheless, for the most part the sketches come from the pens of those best fitted to write them; and it is hoped that the book in some fair measure reflects the growth of the University since its foundation half a century ago.
HERBERT BATES. February 15, 1894.
HISTORICAL SKETCHES OF THE
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For those who read the stirring narrative of life in Nebraska in the early days, an outstanding feature is the wish, so soon defining itself, to care for the mental as well as the material welfare of its citizens—the aspiration to provide as early as possible for their higher education. This is apparent in the expression of pioneer ideals in speeches and in newspapers and in a review of the bills formulated by early legislatures. The region had hardly been penetrated and institutions of civilization had hardly been established when the wish to build for the future found definite voice, and the foundations of a system of higher education were laid on broad and liberal lines.
To particularize, the decade which saw the inception and establishment of the State University was the decade of the 1860's, when Nebraska had but just reached statehood, for Nebraska became a state only in 1867. In the preceding decade the route of the Overland Mail service had passed through the Nebraska prairies, and that interesting and picturesque mode of transportation, the Pony Express, from St. Joseph to Sacramento, routed through Kearney, was given up only in 1861. There was much freighting by oxen in the 1860's, and in the next decades, and many immigrants were still coming in "prairie schooners," or passing through to regions farther west. The only parts of the state at all well settled were the southeastern and the eastern, and some of the chief centers of population were Omaha, Nebraska City, Plattsmouth, Falls City, and Brownville. The total population of the state could hardly have outnumbered 100,000. There were still many thousands of Indians on Nebraska reservations, Sioux, Winne-
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The University was established in the fifteenth year after the admission of Nebraska to territorial government, in the second year after its admission to statehood, four years after the close of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln, and seven years before the centennial of the foundation of the republic of the United States. The city of Lincoln, at which the University was located, had been fixed upon as the state capital hardly two years before. It had few more than a thousand inhabitants, no water except well water, few or no sidewalks; a gas plant was not yet begun, and the campus where the university building was to be built was raw prairie, far out of town. Legislatures had hardly begun to meet at Lincoln, as state legislatures, when the first bills for the establishment of a normal school and for a university were passed. Already in the territorial period many bills of this nature had been introduced but owing to the outbreak of the Civil War they had not borne fruit in tangible results.
It is good to see in retrospect early conditions, for the state and for the city of Lincoln, if we are to realize the expansions of fifty years. In the first moment of its self-consciousness, the state planned for its sons and daughters an institution which, within a half-century, more than realizes the dreams of the pioneers who founded it, and is a monument to their courage and prevision.
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THE FOUNDING OF THE UNIVERSITY
The University of Nebraska was chartered by act of the Nebraska legislature in 1869. The bill providing for its charter, known as S. F. No. 86, "an act to establish the University of Nebraska," was introduced into the senate on February 11, by E. E. Cunningham of Richardson County. It was referred back, on the day of its introduction, to the committee on education, the chairman of which was Charles H. Gere, to be for many years the editor of the Nebraska State Journal, and a future regent of the University. The bill was returned to the senate on February 12 with amendments and on the next day it was passed and sent to the house. It was read in the house a first and second time under suspension of rules, and referred to the committee on schools. The bill was read for the third time two days later February 15, passed, end signed by Governor David Butler. On the last day of the legislative session of 1869, two years and six days from the date of the admission of Nebraska to statehood, the bill chartering the University became a law.
As recorded in The Statutes of Nebraska for 1869, the law enacted That there shall be established in this state an institution under the name and style of "The University of Nebraska." The object of such institution shall be to afford to the inhabitants of the state the means of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the various branches of literature, science, and the arts. The charter of 1868 provided for six departments or colleges: A college of ancient and modern literature, mathematics, and the natural science, i.e., a college of literature, the sciences, the arts; of agriculture; of law; of medicine; of the practical sciences, surveying and mechanics; and of the fine arts. The college of fine arts was to be established when the annual income of the University reached $100,000. Six years later, by an amendment passed in 1875, the college of agriculture was united with the practical sciences, reducing the six colleges to five.
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The government of the University of Nebraska was placed by the original charter in the hands of a board of twelve regents, nine of them to be chosen by the Legislature in joint session, three from each judicial district. The nine regents were divided into three classes by lot, one person from each district to belong in each class. The term of office for the first class was two years, for the second, four years, for the third six years. The remaining three regents, the chancellor, the superintendent of public instruction, and the governor, were members ex officio. The first members of the first board were appointed by the governor.
The present organization of the University was adopted in 1877, after the formation of a new state constitution in 1875. It placed the University under the control of six regents, to be elected, and made provision for its organization and administration. Section 10 of article 8, entitled "Education," in the constitution of 1875 reads as follows, remodeling in several sections the act of 1869.
The general government of the University of Nebraska shall, under direction of the legislature, be vested in a board of six regents, to be styled the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska, who shall be elected by the electors of the state at large, and their terms of office, except those chosen at the first election as hereinafter provided, shall be six years. Their duties and powers shall be prescribed by law, and they shall receive no compensation, but may be reimbursed their actual expenses incurred in discharge of their duties.
The funds of the University are derived from various sources. An act of the United States Confirms of July 22, 1862, provided an endowment of land for the several states for the maintenance in each state of at least one college where branches relating to agriculture and the mechanic arts should be the main subjects of instruction. By the terms of this grant, instruction in military science must be given in these colleges. Nebraska's share in this land endowment amounted to 90,000 acres. These were selected in Antelope, Cedar, Cuming, Dakota, Dixon, L'Eau Qui Court (afterwards Knox), Pierce, and Wayne counties. The enabling act of April 19, 1864, providing for the admission of
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Income is also derived by the University from the money-grant act of Congress, known as the Morrill-Nelson act of August, 1890, in aid of the original land grant fund and to be used in the same way, and from the Hatch-Adams act of 1887, for the establishment of experiment stations. The other revenues of the University are derived from appropriations made by the legislature and from taxation. By an amendment, passed in 1899, of the original act establishing the University, a tax of one mill per dollar on the grand assessment roll of the state is now provided, to be levied annually for the support of the University.
The act establishing the University provided for a model farm. The governor was instructed to set apart two sections of any agricultural college land or saline land belonging to the state, and to notify the state land commissioner of such reservation for laying out a model farm. Land so set apart was not to be used for any other purpose. In his message of 1871, Governor Butler recommended that as there were no such lands in an eligible situation, a section of state lands should be sold and the proceeds applied to the purchase of a farm of not more than 320 acres as near the University campus as possible. Selection was made, and the land so selected was purchased, and converted into the present University experiment station farm.
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When provision was made for the erection of University Hall, the first university building, through an act "providing for the sale of unused lots and blocks on the town site of Lincoln and for the erection of a State University and Agricultural College," it was stipulated that the building was not to exceed in cost $100,000. An account by Professor H. W. Caldwell, in a paper read before the State Historical Society in 1889, of the building of University Hall and of its early history is so interesting as to deserve quotation at length:
On June 5, 1869, the sale of lots began and the first day 105 lots were sold for about $30,000. The next day The commonwealth [the predecessor of The State Journal] remarked that 'now the completion of the State University and Agricultural College is assured.' Eleven days later the paper announced the arrival of Mr. R. D. Silver, who would immediately put in a large plant for manufacturing brick for the university—the capacity of the plant to be 12,000 brick a day. The plans of Mr. J. M. McBird, of Logansport, Indiana, were accepted on June 2, and on August 14, The Commonwealth contained an editorial description of the plans for the now building, classing the style of architecture as Franco-Italian. The same issue of the paper announced that the excavation for the basement of the university was completed.
On August 18, 1869, the contract for the erection of the building was let to Silver and Son for $128,480; soon afterward the troubles which followed the university for so many years began. Even the Brownville Advertiser, a good friend of the university thought the policy of letting a contract for $28,480 more than the appropriation unwise. The State Journal came to the defense of the regents, arguing that it was better policy to begin the erection of a building of sufficient size and well suited to its uses, even if it were necessary to have an additional appropriation, than to spend $100,000 upon a building that would soon have to be torn down because unsuited to the needs of the future. The cornerstone was laid on September 23, 1869; two days after a glowing account appeared in the columns of The State Journal. The exercises were in the hands of the Masons with Major D. H. Wheeler as master of ceremonies. A brass band from Omaha, imported for the occa-
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Just after the reconsideration of the resolution to tear down the building, a committee came from Nebraska City to present a bid for the re-location of the University at that point. This was
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A complete history of the University on its academic side, till 1900, by Professor Caldwell, is published in the Circulars of Information of the United States Educational Bureau for 1902, as part of his article on "Higher Education in Nebraska."
The University opened with the single college of literature, science, and the arts. It offered courses in Latin, Greek, and the sciences. The first faculty consisted of Allen R. Benton, A. M., LL. D., chancellor and professor of intellectual and moral science; A. H. Manley, professor of ancient languages and literature; Henry E. Hitchcock, A. M., professor of mathematics; O. C. Dake, professor of rhetoric and English literature; Samuel Aughey, A. M., professor of chemistry and natural science; George E. Church, A. M., principal of the Latin school; S. R. Thompson, professor in the department of agriculture. The first duty of the professor of agriculture is said to have been to plant trees and to arrange walks on the campus. The first students to attend the University were the following: Freshmen, Frank Hurd, Tecumseh; Uriah M. Malick, Camden; H. Kanaga Metcalf, Rock Creek; W. H. Sheldon, Percival, Iowa; Mary W. Sessions, Lincoln; sophomores, Wallace M. Stephens, Nebraska City; William H. Snell, Lincoln; junior, J. Stuart Dales, East Rochester, Ohio. Mr. Dales and Mr. Snell were the first students to receive degrees, granted them in 1873. In addition to the regular students already named, there were twelve irregular students and 110 students in the preparatory school, making a total of 130 students in attendance during the first year. Fifty Years later, the University has students not only from Nebraska and from every state in the union, but from Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and from many countries of the European continent.
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University Hall, the original home of the University, of late years held together, to ensure its safety from falling, by steel uprights, is still the home of the Arts College, the oldest of the colleges. Its recitation rooms and offices, which house classes in history, language literature, and rhetoric look time-stained and battered, in comparison with the new and attractive quarters of the natural sciences, the technical sciences, the social sciences, and the vocational and agricultural schools. But those who teach in the old building are glad to do so; indeed they take pride in doing so. They feel a deep love for it, for University Hall is the historic building, among those on the campus, and the classes reciting in it are those first desired by the founders of the institution.
The University of Nebraska reflects, in the stages of its development, the shifting conceptions of the province of a state university that characterize the decades since its foundation. The primary purpose of the founders of the University was to provide a liberal or cultural education for the youth of the state, in order to make of them—as it has made of them—more rounded and valuable citizens. With the growth of the institution in scholarship, and the development of its graduate school, came a consciousness of the historic mission of a university, namely to preserve and if possible to add to the learning of the world, that asset of civilization. This may be called the function of the university proper, as distinguished from the secondary school and from the college. Last to be reflected in its development is the present-day conception of a state university as an institution of public usefulness, where training may be had in all lines, cultural, aesthetic, scientific, vocational, commercial, which the people of the state, who are its supporters, may desire.
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ADMISSION AND CURRICULA
'The way to begin is to begin.' This doubtless means that what one does to set about a beginning often breaks inertia and becomes peculiarly and vitally the beginning itself. It is hesitancy over the first step that has kept many a chapter of potential history unwritten.
When a college is opened in a community where there are no students asking or waiting to be admitted, there are evidently other forces than evolutional in control. The great universities were severally the result of need, and not an effort to create it. In 1871 the University of Nebraska was emphatically the seeker and not the sought. Some of its first alumni came to be students through the advice, and indeed, in a sense, the solicitation, of its head.
Thus was the higher education precipitated in Nebraska. There being no secondary education to serve for preparation, the University was forced to administer it to itself. For years in consequence its chief enrollment was in its Latin School. Until the middle eighties the University of Nebraska was spoken of in legislative debates as the Lincoln High School. There was little knowledge of it in the State at large until Chancellor Canfield, in 1891-1895, carried the evangel of opportunity to every considerable town and village. College classes were now filled to repletion, and preparatory courses were discontinued.
Amusing stories of the period thus closed indicate that some of the early students were but feebly 'fitted.' Professor Woodberry, acting as examiner, is said to have astonished applicant by asking merely, 'Can you read,' and by reporting to him, after proof of that accomplishment, 'You pass.' This admission was, of course, to the Latin School. There is evidence that Professor Woodberry found little fault with the quality of the students that reached him eventually in the college. Nowhere was greater promise discovered or developed than under his exacting standards.
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Professor Woodberry's designated subjects were Rhetoric and Anglo-Saxon. Old English was at that time taught as a college subject as far west as Grinnell, then known as Iowa College. In his earlier connection with the University, Professor Woodberry had offered a course in Ancient Law. A graduate of those days was heard of trying to pass along his acquaintance with Sir Henry Maine's text on that subject to a group of farmers at a country schoolhouse. He did not finish his course of lectures or his term of teaching. The same student before graduation sought on a certain occasion to explain a specific function of sight as undoubtedly a survival from the time when there were eyes over the whole surface of the body. He was evidently trying to work Spencer's formula of evolution from homogeneity to heterogeneity backwards as well as forwards.
But it was not often that the wine of knowledge went to the head that way. With sounder and more deliberate preparation came a clearer notion of the values derivable from college training. The University Calendar for 1885-1886, under the subject of "Admissions," included this suggestive sentence:
Candidates from the High Schools of Beatrice, Hastings, Lincoln, Nebraska City, and Plattsmouth will be admitted to the Freshman class without examination.
Ten years later this list had grown to an exhibit of sixty-four names. Chancellor Canfield's success in filling the halls of instruction with college students was due to the plan of accrediting secondary schools, which had been put into effect in 1884. This delay of a dozen years in getting the University into relations with the public school system, of which it was theoretically a part, was not a little fostered from within the faculty. One of its prominent members, who had served previously as State Superintendent of Public Instruction, opposed use of the high school,—"the people's college," as means of preparation for the University. His successor, not at all of the same mind, came enthusiastically to the support of Chancellor Manatt, who, on arrival, had proposed the scheme. Chancellor Canfield following set the whole State agog, as we have seen,
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The specific requirements for admission to the Freshman class were, at this time, except that Virgil was not included for Latin or Xenophon for Greek, essentially the same as now. Two semesters' further study in each of these languages was soon after added. Greek was taught in a considerable number of high schools, Latin in all, Latin through six semesters was prerequisite for all the scientific groups, including the Engineering and the Agricultural. Present standard requirements in science date from the same years. Preparation in French and German was accepted in part fulfillment of language conditions as early as 1900, and allowed in full substitution after 1911. Other optional subjects were later added, finally raising the number of necessary points to thirty.
Research studies were introduced at about the same the time in Botany, Chemistry, and Physics, and what was called "original work" in languages and History. A new member of the teaching force had offered courses, with mistaken perspective, in Sanskrit and Gothic in the Calendar of 1883—an anticipation realized by classes in each subject under another instructor five years later. The first fruits of academic expansion were given to the public in the opening number of University Studies, issued in the summer of 1888. This included an article on "The Eighth Verb-Class in Sanskrit," and a mathematical discussion concerning "The Transparency of the Ether." The latter was reproduced, in an abridged form, in the Annalen der Physik und Chemie of the following year.
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EARLY FACULTY AND EQUIPMENT
The imagination is sometimes kindled by contrasts in the bigness of human achievements. Assuredly the struggling infant of 1871-2 and the bouncing youngster of 1919 offer a sufficiently striking contrast. Then—and for fifteen years thereafter—the "plant" consisted of a single building. Now the city campus has twenty-one buildings; while at the "Farm"—where during the first decade a small frame cottage and a rude barn served to "house" the college of agriculture—there are at present, big and little, thirty-two structures. Then the full faculty list comprised seven names. Now the pay-roll of the University numbers 800 persons, 313 of whom are professors, instructors and others with "fixed stipends." During the first year were registered 130 students, all but 20 of whom were in the two sub-freshman years, called the Latin School. The total sank to 123 in the second year and to 100 in the third. At the close of a decade, in 1882, the entire student body, including 67 pupils in the Latin School, numbered but 284 souls; whereas in 1916-17, at the end of the forty-fifth year of active work, the roster of the University, including "schools" and "extension" students, enrolls a grand total of 5,405 men and women. A like contrast is revealed by the expanding budget. During the first year the total expenditure for all activities of the institution, including repairs and the "beautifying" of grounds, was $26,840.69; in the eight years (1879-1880)it had fallen to $25,197; while during the present biennium, including building, the University is costing sum of $4,000,000. Huge as this figure seems, it should be speedily increased to $6,000,000 per biennium, if salaries and equipment are to be raised to their just level.
Still bigness is not everything. "Mark Hopkins on a log" may not accurately express the modern ideal of a university. The epigram does, however, contain a precious kernel of truth. It exalts the vital quality of the teacher's personality. A very humble habitation in which lives a great soul may mean much for the spiritual life of a com-
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In the little rooms of that old structure were fostered into vigorous life many of the "departments" which now find their homes each in a separate building or even in several buildings; while some of those departments have expanded into "schools" and "colleges." Thus, for a decade and a half, chemistry found a home in 104, the little northeast room on the first floor. Physics, under Professor Collier, was housed in 102 and 103 just opposite. At a later time rooms 103 and 104 became the cradle of the college of Engineering; for there, in the eighties, Professor C. N. Little developed a vigorous department of Civil Engineering, one of whose early products was Dean Stout, now head of the college. History, the first of the social sciences to be organized, got its start in 204, the northeast corner room on the second floor; while in 205, the adjacent room, the office and the collections of the State Historical Society were sheltered for six years, 1885-1891. In that same tiny, ill-lighted cubicle, in 1889-1891, Dr. Amos G. Warner, Professor Howard W. Caldwell, and the writer organized a joint seminar of history and economics; the first graduate seminar to be founded in the University of Nebraska. The genesis of the department of philosophy took place in room 112 on the first floor; and this same room, for may years
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Such were the scanty materials with which the first faculty undertook the hard and delicate task of building a university on the Nebraska plains. They were not men of wide national repute. Several had had experience in small denominational colleges. Not one was of transcendant [sic] ability. Most of them were persons of strong character and high ideals. The dominant conservatism of the group was a real safeguard in undertaking the then bold experiment of determining the methods, planning the curriculum, and starting the traditions of a secular a public, University for a pioneer society.
One naturally turns first to the man at the helm. It was fortunate for the state that Dr. A. R. Benton was called to the high task of organizing and first administering the Chancellor's office. In 1871, when he took charge of the work, public sentiment was not clearly in favor of the state support and control of college education. Many feared that harm would follow from the secularization of higher education. The state university as an institution was still on trial in the United States. Furthermore, as yet, public opinion strongly favored broad cultural courses of instruction. True, there was already a demand for more generous recognition of the sciences as a necessary foundation for the world's work; but the enormous differentiation of the department—subjects which now fill the register was then hardly dreamed of. The traditional belief that higher
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It is with feelings of intense pleasure that I recall the personalities of the little group of teachers constituting the first faculty of the University. The "professor of ancient languages and literature" was A. H. Manley, a refined, gently-speaking scholar of the old regime. S. R. Thompson, "professor of theoretical and practical agriculture," and after 1873, "dean of the college of agriculture," did the best he could at a time when in the United States the college of agriculture as an institution had not yet discovered its right functions nor its proper methods. Samuel Aughey, graduated at Pennsylvania College 1856 and recently (1867-1871) in the employ of the Smithsonian Institution, was placed in charge of a veritable settee of subjects. His professorship of "chemistry and natural sciences" was sufficiently broad, even for pioneer days, embracing all the instruction given in botany, zoology, geology, and chemis-
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H. E. Hitchcock, "professor of mathematics," was for his time an accomplished scholar. He was called from the same chair at Knox College where he graduated in 1846. He was a devoted teacher, a good citizen, a generous neighbor, a strong moral force in the community. "Professor Hitchcock," writes H. W. Caldwell in his excellent history, "was accurate, systematic, and always at his post;" surely a tribute of which a teacher may well be proud.
Perhaps the most interesting, not to say picturesque and eccentric, character in that little band of institution-builders was the Rev. Orsamus C. Dake, the first "professor of rhetoric and English literature" and the first dean of the Arts College. He possessed the scholarly tastes and the refined manners of a typical clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church. He represented the aesthetic element in the teaching force. He loved literature as a fine art; and his lofty ideals, keen sensibilities, and poetic imagination are revealed in his two volumes of verse, the Nebraska Legends and Poems (1871) and the Midland Poems (1873). These little books are the first contribution of the University to genuine literature; and they constitute a worthy monument to the great souled humanist who shed refining influence on the academic life during his brief term of service; for he died in 1875.
A remarkable personality of a quite different type was George E. Church, "principal of the Latin School" and, after 1874, first "professor of Latin language and literature." A man of powerful intellect and commanding presence, Professor Church was easily the most "modern" scholar and the best trained teacher in the University. Under his hand the foundation of the Latin department was solidly laid. After his return from Germany in 1878,
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It remains to offer a tribute of honor and affection to the noble woman who was first of her sex to hold a teaching position in the University of Nebraska. Miss Ellen Smith entered the faculty in the spring of 1877. In various capacities—as "instructor in Latin and Greek," "principal of the Latin School," "custodian of the library," and "registrar"—she served the University for twenty-four years zealously and efficiently (1877-1901). Her toilsome life was consecrated to the conscientious performance of duty. She was the very type of womanly faithfulness and humanism. She was loved by the students, even by those whom she rebuked for their shortcomings; and she was respected by her colleagues, even by those whom as registrar she frankly scolded for laxity in rendering their official reports. Her staunch personality was the very symbol of probity and moral courage. Her example was a precious influence in the academic life. Let us honor the work of Ellen Smith as a rich earnest of the equal share which women shall have in building the future university when the sex-line shall not be drawn in determining either the choice or the rewards of its servants.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES
To the honor of Nebraska, at the very beginning of its life, its citizens were ready to act in full harmony with the rising tide of higher education. The Hon. Augustus F. Harvey, who drafted the University Charter, was interested in a university rather than a college, and with a chancellor rather than a president as its head. His aim was to combine in one organization all lines of higher education, and he planned to include in the University of Nebraska, located at Lincoln, advanced work in the fields of language and literature, law, medicine, art, science, manual training, and agriculture. By this unity he hoped that the educational expenses of the state would be lessened, and that the opportunity for all students to find the fields in which they had the greatest interest and ability would be increased.
The act as it was passed in 1869 provided for six colleges, which indicated the fields of education in mind at that time: "first, a college of ancient and modern literature, mathematics, and the natural sciences; second, a college of agriculture; third, a college of law; fourth, a college of medicine; fifth, a college of practical science, civil engineering, and mechanics; and sixth a college of fine arts." Naturally it took many years to work out the very extensive and complex plans of the charter of 1869. One smiles now as he looks back on the simplicity of the first years of the new institution, but he soon sees in those simple beginnings the promise of greater things.
University Hall, the first building erected, and the only one on the campus until 1886, was practically completed by September, 1871. On Thursday, September 7th, of that year, the University and its preparatory or "Latin" school held their inaugural meetings, and the life of the University of Nebraska began. Only one college—not six—was opened, "the college of ancient and modern literature, mathematics, and natural sciences." The Chancellor and six professors had been selected, but only five of the seven were present during the year 1871-72. The courses of study of-
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The agricultural college, the second college to be organized, was started in 1872 with S. R. Thompson as dean and professor of theoretical and practical agriculture. In 1874 the present agricultural farm was acquired, and during the year 1874-75 its first student body, fifteen in number, entered the University. Again it is interesting to notice that years passed before any significant growth took place. In fact, the number of students in the new college decreased until in later years a reorganization took place. The students the college of agriculture from 1875 to 1881 numbered as follows: 15, 13, 16, 9, 9, 12—thus showing that a purely agricultural state did not as yet afford popular support to a purely agricultural school.
Nebraska formed a new state constitution in 1875. Under its provisions a new board of regents was elected by the people. They had power to make changes in university organization, and this gave to the institution an adaptability that it had not before possessed. Their action in 1877 changed the titles of the colleges and reduced the number to five, as follows: "first, a college of literature, science, and the arts; second, an industrial college embracing architecture, practical science, civil engineering, and the mechanic arts; third, a college of law; fourth, a college of medicine; fifth, a college of fine arts." The main purpose
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Had the union of agriculture with science and mechanics not taken place when it did it is almost certain that the agricultural college would have been removed to some other section of the state. Even after the growth of the industrial college, demands were made for the establishment of an agricultural college away from Lincoln and the University. In 1885 an attempt was made to divide the industrial college and remove the agricultural section. This movement was repeated in 1889, and the plan probably failed of realization in the legislature only from lack of time.
The first important increase in the number of professors took place in 1877 when the total rose to fifteen. Later, with the establishment of the various colleges and with the growth of the student body, a rapid development took place. By 1890 there were nineteen on the academic faculty, twenty-two on the industrial faculty, eight in the Latin school, three in fine arts, and nine on the working staff of the agricultural experiment station. There was a good deal of overlapping, indeed, for there were altogether only thirty-two teachers in the University. By 1912 the faculty had increased to 238 professors and assistants, with ninety others in the pay of the University in various capacities.
The plan adopted 1877 for reorganizing the colleges of the University remained the legal form until 1908-09. During the years 1877 to 1908 all the colleges provided for in the act of 1877 except that of fine arts were founded. In the earlier part of this period the development of the University was mainly in the arts college. After 1883 new departments were organized, and development began to spread to other fields. But it was not until the '90's that any remarkably rapid growth began to take place.
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Though the largest attendance during these years—1877-1908—was in the college of literature, science and the arts, yet the enrollment in the industrial college was relatively large. All the teaching, however, except in certain phases of agriculture, took place on the city campus and not at the Farm; and as a rule a large proportion of the students of the two colleges were in the same classes. These facts led many to hold that the real attendance in the college of agriculture was very slight, and hence that a reorganization ought to be made. This was effected, and since 1909 a remarkable growth and development in the agricultural departments have taken place. The agricultural college was clearly defined, and its students were taught at the Farm by professors and instructors of agriculture. The field was made very broad and included full four-year courses in many branches, all calculated to give preparation for practicing or teaching in matters connected with farm work or home industrial life. The college now had as its head a dean of agriculture, A. E. Burnett, an able man of exceptional merit and great organizing capacity.
The medical college was opened in 1883, and remained an organized college until 1888, when it was closed, in part on account of expense and in part on account of state criticism. In 1902 the medical college was revived under the deanship of Professor H. B. Ward. Under the new arrangement the first two years of the medical course were pursued in the laboratories at Lincoln and the last two in the clinical courses of the Omaha Medical College. In 1913 the whole medical college was removed to Omaha to take advantage of the better hospital facilities of the larger city. At this move, the Omaha Medical College was absorbed and reorganized by the University itself. The medical course at present involves a six-years' curriculum of which the first two, or pre-medical years, are pursued at Lincoln.
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In 1908, with R. A. Lyman as head, a school of pharmacy was established as an adjunct of the medical college. Afterwards, in 1915, the legislature erected this school into an independent college. It is now about to enter a permanent home in the remodeled building which the chemistry department has recently vacated.
The college of law was founded in 1892, and has remained unchanged in form and name to the present time. It attained its effective organization under Dean Roscoe Pound, who served it from 1903 to 1907, and was then called successively to the law colleges at Northwestern, Chicago, and Harvard. He is now dean of Harvard Law School. The present dean, Judge W. G. Hastings, acted as Chancellor of the University during 1918. At America's entry into the war practically all the students of the law college, and at least one of the faculty, entered the military service. With their return the college is again taking up its work with a normally large attendance.
Important changes were made by the state legislature under the advice of the Chancellor and the regents of the University in 1909. By one such change the old "college of literature, science, and the arts" received the title "college of arts and sciences." The province of this college included the ancient and modern languages, history, economics, political science and sociology, rhetoric and English, mathematics, philosophy, and the physical sciences. It will thus be seen that its field was more clearly defined.
The college of engineering was provided for at the same time, and was so constituted as to include all the departments of engineering, drawing, certain phases of mathematics and natural science. It was organized first under Dean C. R. Richards, now of the University of Illinois, and since 1912 has been in charge of Dean O. V. P. Stout.
In 1908 provision was made for a teacher's college, thus adding a new field for the work of the University. A college high school was created, and senior college students were trained as teachers under the principal of the school and his assistants. The registration has been large, and the
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In correlation with all the undergraduate colleges, there was established in 1893 a graduate college under the deanship of Professor A. H. Edgren. Thus the structure of the real university was rounded out before the close of the first quarter century. Since Professor Edgren's departure in 1900 the graduate college has been developed under Dr. L. A. Sherman, head of the department of English.
This brief outline brings out the growth of the University, both in clearness of organization and in development of lines of work. The colleges of its fiftieth year are well arranged, and all are in distinct life, and well attended. It is still true, however, that the college of arts and sciences stands first in numbers both of faculty and of students.
The word school as it has been used in connection with branches of work in the University has varied, and still varies, in meaning. At first, from 1871 to 1895, it was applied to the "Latin school" for preparatory work. In early days—perhaps until 1885—the number of students in the Latin school was greater than in all the colleges of the University proper. In later years the word school has been used to designate collegiate as well as preparatory organizations. A "sugar school" existed from 1896 to 1900, but the failure of the beet sugar work in the eastern part of the state, together with the request of the agricultural college, led to its elimination. A "school of mechanic arts," formed in 1896, became a part of the engineering college in 1909; and a "school of domestic science" created in 1898 was transferred to the state farm in 1906 and included in the agricultural college.
Other schools that have been formed are still in existence, and in process of development. The school of fine arts, established in 1898, is now, under Professor Paul
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The work in commerce and accounting developed under Professor J. E. LeRossignol was given definite standing as a school in 1913, with Professor LeRossignol as its director. Under the new social and educational conditions its work promises to develop and become more and more important, as the years go on. The school of commerce has just been elevated by the regents to a college, as this anniversary book goes to press.
There are, under the control of the board of regents, two schools of preparatory rank, one at the Farm rod one at Curtis, both devoted to the teaching of agricultural subjects.
BUILDINGS AND GROUNDS
The commissioners who located and laid out the capital city and set aside four blocks for the University campus, must have selected the location of these four blocks when blindfolded. No good angel whispered to them of seats of learning set upon the hills. The gentle slopes of the Antelope valley were ignored, and a site bordering on Salt Creek valley and inevitably in the path of railroads, then imminent, was chosen. Next, with money derived from the sale of lots in the new capital city, the commission proceeded to erect a building. The methods of contractors and official boards were genuinely American, however. The legislature had appropriated $100,000 for the erection of a building. In June, 1869, seemingly in anticipation of a contract, R. D. Silver arrived in Lincoln to establish a brickyard, and on August 18, following, his foresight was justified by the award of the contract for the University building for $128,480. Troubles arose very soon afterwards, and their
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In his first report, made in June, 1872, Chancellor Benton said, "Some difficulty has been experienced in making the roof impervious to rain." It may be added in this connection that this difficulty in achieving imperviousness has persisted down to date, and was a matter of common knowledge and comment in the student body through all the earlier college generations. In his first report, the chancellor also called the attention of the regents to the furnaces which failed to heat the building and were costly to operate. In his second report in June, 1873, he stated class rooms had been heated by stoves in the chapel also. Early generations of students remember the ugly and insatiable stoves that made winter use of the old chapel possible, but never comfortable. The old chapel, in the north wing of what is now known as University Hall, occupied the second and third floors, the rostrum being at the north end, with a gallery across the south end. The seats were the traditional pews. With wealth of bleak walls, its stained and perilous ceiling, a more uninspiring room cannot well be imagined; but pioneer spirit was not so easily daunted.
Until the installation of a steam-heated plant in the east side of the north wing of the basement in 1885, the janitor service was performed by students who were remunerated very modestly, one, at least, being permitted to sleep in the building. The care of from twenty-five to thirty hard-coal base burners constituted the moat laborious part of the janitor work. Huge ash-heaps accumulated in the angle west of the north wing. Pioneer children mounted these ash heaps in order to view the skeletons in the museum on the first floor, underneath the chapel.
With the coming of the steam plant, John Green entered the service of the university as head janitor and engineer. Until the removal of the heating plant to the new boiler
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Old "U Hall" has withstood the vicissitudes and calumnies of time, and still is doing good service to the state. Condemned as physically unfit from its beginning, the building has undergone, from time to time, extensive repairs. The original foundation, chiefly of soft brown sandstone, was removed and a limestone foundation substituted. For months the building stood on jack-screws and, be it not forgotten, also on its complete system of inside cross walls, which extend from the basement to the roof. Three years ago its front walls were found to be bulging a few inches. The regents, with a retinue of architects and engineers, filed solemnly through the building, and the result is a series of steel uprights riveted through the building from south to north by steel cables, making it indubitably safe, and giving the exterior what Chancellor Avery describes as a "corduroy effect."
Inside it is much the same as of yore, except that the chapel, after being once remodelled was finally divided into two floors and further remodelled for class room purposes. The same old bell that summoned the first students to morning prayers—a bell now cracked and scarcely audible on the outskirts of the old campus—summons the younger, gayer, better dressed and housed students to convocation, or announces football victories. Dining the war it tolled the eleven o'clock angelus up to November 11, 1918.
The original campus covered four city blocks. Until 1886 University Hall was the sole edifice. The campus
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During the administration of Chancellor Canfield the legislature made a special appropriation for the iron fence which now surrounds the original campus.
The old University building was filled to overflowing with faculty, students, equipment, when the chemistry building was first occupied by the natural science departments in 1886. The University then entered on a period of rapid expansion, and every legislature since that of 1885, with the exception of those of 1893 and 1901, has made special appropriations for University buildings to the total amount of over three million dollars. The difficulty of securing the building appropriations was so great in the earlier period that success was the signal for student demonstrations on the campus and around the town. A bon fire, some soap-box oratory, a march to the chancellor's house, or to the capitol were in order.
The cornerstone of Nebraska Hall was laid on Commencement Day of 1888 and impressive ceremonies were
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The farm campus of 320 acres was purchased from Moses Culver and his wife on June 25, 1874, as the original lands located nearer the main campus were found to be unsuitable. Until 1918 the old home of the Culvers was in use as a dwelling, but the march of building-progress called for its removal. Many of the beautiful old trees planted by Mr. Culver still adorn the farm campus. In the early days the farm was separated from the town by an almost unbroken stretch of prairie, so that it was regarded as being at a great distance. Agricultural college students, living at the farm, rode to the campus in a wagon. These students were supposed to work for their board, and to absorb agricultural wisdom while they worked. A cartoon in the first edition of the Sombrero in 1884 represents them as engaging in mumble-ty-peg behind the barn.
The development at the University farm was greatly retarded, and the farm campus received little attention until about 1899. It has become the most attractive place in the city—which reaches out to, and surrounds it. It is connected with the city campus by an eighteen-minute car service and may be reached over paved streets. It has buildings and improvements to the value of over half a million dollars. Hundreds of students attend classes at the farm. The original 320 acres have long been inadequate for the purposes of the college and school of agriculture and the experiment station. Considerable additional land is rented, and some additional acres, most of which are at some distance from the farm, have been purchased. The students of the college of agriculture pursue most of their
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Chancellor Benton must be regarded as a prophet, for he said in his first Commencement address in June, 1872: "In view of what may be developed within the next ten years, with new and commodious buildings for law and medical schools, and with a building for engineering and the mechanic arts, I have sometimes feared that our plans have not been sufficiently enlarged, and especially that our grounds may become too contracted for our growth."
While the march of events was not quite as rapid as the Chancellor's prediction suggested, it came to pass that even the state legislature was convinced that the downtown campus was too small. A growing agitation for the removal of the entire institution to the farm campus was the subject of much fierce debate in two sessions of the legislature. The decision in the matter was put to a vote of the people in 1915, and the proposed removal was defeated. The legislature of 1913 made a levy of three-fourths of a mill on the grand assessment roll of the state for campus extension and for buildings on the two campuses. This levy has been made for the past six years and has resulted in the addition of more than six blocks to the city campus, and in the erection of six or more new buildings. One of the large residences on the new campus has recently been set aside as a woman's building, to be used for social purposes—a welcome recognition of the needs of University women. Another residence was converted into an infirmary as a military necessity for the S. A. T. C. The Temple building was erected on ground immediately adjacent to the city campus in 1906-7 with money given by John D. Rockefeller, and by citizens of Nebraska. It is devoted to religious and social purposes.
In addition to the city and farm campuses, the University has a medical college at Omaha with a well located campus and splendid new buildings, an agricultural school at Curtis in Frontier county, and experiment sub-stations at North Platte, Scottsbluff, and Valentine.
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Envoi: Old U. Hall—in spite of your Franco-Italian-Hoosier architecture, plus the "corduroy effect," in spite of all the disadvantages of primitive building which no amount of repairing and altering can entirely mitigate, the alumni and students, 1871-1919, salute you! Every brick, every stone, every worn step and threshold, the old cracked bell, the red roof, the useless old tower, with the flag of our country flying against the incomparable blueness of Nebraska sky—all these are inseparable from our intellectual and spiritual inheritance. The storied past speaks to us from your walls, the lingering memories of youth's brightness cluster about you!
UNDERGRADUATE LIFE IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES
When I entered the University in 1880, the preparatory school was still in existence and it was no uncommon thing for students to spend six years on the campus. My participation in undergraduate life lasted until 1886. At the first date, the official registration in all departments was 348. Six years later, the Latin school having been sloughed off, the annual enrollment reached 381.
I saw the University in its first raw stages. While it had been in operation eight years when I arrived, the faculty numbered only seven or eight, and the one red brick building in the center of the prairie-grassed campus was so much too large for the needs of the classes that parts of the third floor and attic were still used as a men's dormitory. My introduction to student life was effected at Mrs. Swisher's boarding house just north of campus, where twelve boys were well cared for at $3.50 and $4.00 a week. This was about the standard cost of good board during the six years. Any number of students cut it in half by boarding in groups or by "batching." A few paid little more. In my day Clem Chase and Dan Wheeler were wide-
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After a student had provided for his basic living, had scraped together a few books, and had turned over his matriculation fee of five dollars, which had to be paid only once, he did not feel uncomfortable if he had nothing left. Life in the University was so simple and poverty was so common that it seemed a perfectly normal condition. Social distractions in the early part of my experience were found mostly in the Friday meetings of the literary societies; in an occasional play at the old Centennial Opera House and in a perfect orgy of church attendance on Sunday. I can name student after student who went to two preaching services, two Sunday schools, a Y. M. C. A. session, and the Red Ribbon club every Sunday, from September till June. The young people of the little city were bubbling over with social gaiety all the time, but aside from the small "town set", the students had no time for frivolity. We indeed were a serious bunch of youngsters. We studied mathematics, the classics, history, and a little science, and then read solid magazine articles for relaxation. I remember that I cut my first debating teeth over an article by a British writer who undertook to show that morality has no scientific basis. At Mrs. Swisher's and later at Mrs. Park's on Q street, we curried civilization up one side and down another at the dinner table every day, and then gave it a few extra wipes on Sunday. Society was so simple that George McLane, who received fifty dollars a month for janitoring the University building, was treated as equal by the professors and as a little more than the rest of us and wore better clothes, and the fact that he was making himself round shouldered carrying hods of coal to fill the base burners that stood in each recitation room did not interfere at all with his social eligibility.
Athletics had not appeared on the campus in the early eighties. The only all-university interest was the college paper, The Hesperian Student, which was the center of
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The elective system had not been established in 1880. One could not hop from course to course or from class to class. As a freshman, I recited at 9:00 o'clock every morning except Saturday in mathematics, at 10:00 in history and at 11:00 in languages. No afternoon classes were scheduled. With three hours of recitation, we were expected to give six hours in preparation. That meant nine hours of steady work every day for five days each week. Usually the studying was done at specified hours. The result was that students systematized their work in a way that is not possible in the modern hit or miss elective system. This orderly arrangement of time made it possible do the outside work that was regularly done among the more prominent students. A man who did not have a horse to curry or a church to sweep out, or a newspaper route to carry, felt that he could take an extra study or two and thus shorten up his course and perhaps spend a term now and then in teaching school, in order to acquire a little ready cash.
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A glance at my old student scrap book shows that a steady development took place during the entire six years, but that the University was still a small and provincial and old fashioned college at the end of this period. Public affairs consisted almost exclusively of literary society meetings, oratorical and debating contests and commencement exercises and "exhibitions." Two or three fraternities were finally established, leading to the famous fight which culminated in the fall of 1884 in the action denying membership in the literary societies to the Greek letter brethren. In the forty years in which I have watched the University no student battle was fought with greater bitterness or with more public spirit or ability than this effort to stem the tide of modernity in the social life of the college. It resulted in the retirement of the Greeks from the Palladian and Union societies and their organization of the Philodocean, where they made good the "barbarian" charge that fraternities and literary societies could not flourish with an identical membership.
For a few years after this battle the old fashioned societies held their own. During this era the state was growing fast. Boys with spending money above their bare necessities were no longer rare on the campus. We managed to organize a baseball team, to acquire a college yell, to take on the elective system of studies, and to start a second building, the old chemical laboratory. While everything in the state had a forward look in those years, the change to modern state university conditions did not begin to come in earnest until the close of the decade. In my days we were still poor but honest. Our clothes may have been patched but they were scrupulously clean. We prided ourselves on having true hearts, even if our manners must have been frightfully crude. The number of successful marriages growing out of the simple social customs of the early times is worthy of remark. The "slate" may have had something to do with this condition. In each literary society a list of the young lady members was made out weekly and every man was given an opportunity to sign his initials after the one of his choice. This "scratching of
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No college can too young to be infected by student mischief and lawlessness. It began here in the revolt against military drill and in The Hesperian Student type-stealing riots for several years before and after 1880. These were political affairs, undertaken with solemn and deadly earnestness. This cannot be said of the countless orthodox student escapades that marked the whole period, most of them silly, but quite devoid of malice. It was in the interests of the college paper that we collected a fee at the door of the chapel one memorable night and then slid down a rope and decamped, leaving an expectant audience to fry in its own indignation. The sort of cameraderie [sic] existing between students and faculty was shown by the fact that Chancellor Manatt received a hint not to be president while Professor L. A. Sherman, the ambassador in the business, came early enjoy the anger of the audience, and Professor Nicholson, also in the secret, did his laughing outside as the members of the troupe swarmed down the
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It is interesting to recall what the boys looked forward to after leaving the University in the early eighties—professional life, mainly, it seems to me. School teaching was still considered a worthy and attractive profession. The very pinnacle of success was a college professorship. Law invited many of the more vigorous, and a few of the boys were thinking of medicine, business, newspapering, or the new occupation of writing insurance. The ministry called a few. Nobody wanted to go back to the farm. Farm products were almost given away at this time, and land was so cheap and abundant that even eastern Nebraska it sold at from five to ten dollars an acre. So the beginnings of the agricultural college were held in contempt. We could not see that Nebraska was to become a great horn of plenty, smothering the next generation with wealth. A few of the boys had begun to pioneer in the sciences, but we had no hint of the great prizes that were to come to men like Bion J. Arnold, who was then breaking into engineering, or J. G. White, who soon went from an instructorship in the University to an electrical business encircling the globe. What we were getting then seemed the most beautiful and the most desirable things in the world. The habits of industry we formed, the affections we nourished, the visions we enjoyed, and the memories we cherish, make the pioneers of the early eighties refuse to be pitied by students who enjoy the splendid facilities of the University at the close of the first half century of its history.
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THE LIBRARY
The statute passed by the Nebraska legislature February 15, 1869, which provided for the founding of the University of Nebraska, contained a clause providing for the establishment of a library, through the appropriation for that purpose of certain regularly received University fees. While the amount in the beginning was small it was constant, and growing with the growth of the school it has been the chief source of library income, though for many years added appropriations from the general University funds have been made by the regents.
The successive catalogs of the University refer to the carefully selected collection of books which constitute the library, show its growth. In 1878 there were 2,000 volumes, in 1882, 4,000, in 1886, 7,000, and by 1890, 12,000 volumes. The growth from this time onward has been increasingly rapid. By 1901, 50,000 volumes were recorded, in 1907, 75,000, and accessioning of the 100,000th book in 1912 was made a ceremony. Since then the growth averaged over 6,000 volumes a year, so that at the end of 1918, the library numbers 140,000 volumes.
The original small library was housed first in one room, then in two, in the southeast corner of the second floor of University Hall. In 1888 it was moved to the first floor of the north wing of the same building, the rooms now occupied by the department of rhetoric. In the fall of 1895 the library moved into its present location, the second floor of the then new library building. It had been planned that the remainder of this building should be turned over to the library as it was needed, but there has been absolutely no expansion of space for library use since that time. In fact the space for readers has been much decreased, as the tables which were originally placed in the alcoves in the book room had to be withdrawn in order to make space for the new stacks demanded by the increasing number of books. For several years students have constantly been turned away from the reading room by lack of space to seat them
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The administration of the library divides itself into two distinct periods, that preceding and that following 1892. In the early days, the direction and management of the library was in the hands of a library committee whose chairman performed to some extent the duties of a librarian. For the first ten years no regular hours of opening were observed and very little use of the library was made by students. In the fall of 1878, Dr. George E. Howard returned to the University as an instructor. The professor who was chairman of the library committee was absent on leave and Dr. Howard was asked to assume some of his duties, among them to take charge of the library. He immediately opened the library from two to six each afternoon. This was very popular with the students. January 1, 1879, Dr. Howard was made instructor in English and history and librarian, with full power of administration over the library, though there was still a library committee of the faculty. Later the power was again vested in the committee, but with Dr. Howard always a member, frequently as chairman. From 1888 to 1891 Miss Ellen Smith was "Registrar and Custodian of the Library," and for 1891-92 Professor George MacMillan was "Custodian of the Library." During this early period all members of the faculty carried keys to the library, and Dr. Bessey has told, in the Cornhusker for 1908, how it was impossible to secure their consent to give up this privilege until Chancellor Canfield, after presenting the matter in faculty meeting and setting forth the reasons why all keys should be turned in, added the information that the lock on the library door had just been changed by the University carpenter so the keys would be of no further use; and as Dr. Bessey adds, "The keys were turned in." There was no catalog of the library during these years except a sort of accessions list of the books as they were received, and such classification
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In 1892 Chancellor Canfield realizing the part which the library should be taking in the development of the University, and the importance of having it carefully organized before its increasing growth should make reorganization more difficult, appointed as librarian Miss Mary L. Jones, of the class of 1885, who had just completed the two years' course of training in the New York State Library School. Miss Jones found the task before her no light one. The library was already so large that a classification of the books by subject and by some form of a catalog was imperative if the constantly increasing use of the library was to be made satisfactory. During the summer of 1892 Miss Jones reclassified roughly by the Dewey decimal system a large proportion of the books, rearranged them on the shelves, and made plans for the card catalog which was to follow. During the five years that she remained at the head of the library she personally classified and supervised the cataloging of nearly all the books she found her upon her arrival, in addition to all those purchased during the period. She gave several short courses in cataloging in order to train assistants who could help in carrying on the work, and she started the organization of the library upon the lines which it has since followed.
The University has been very fortunate in its librarians. Miss Jones has been followed by three other graduates of the New York State Library School who, except for short intervals, have been continuously in charge of the library. Mr. J. I. Wyer, Jr., and Dr. Walter K Jewett, each held the position of librarian for approximately seven years, and Mr. Malcolm G. Wyer has been librarian since 1913. Each has brought to the library special gifts of organization, and special knowledge of books that, with the continuity of standards provided by the New York State Library School as a background, has meant much in its development. Miss Jones has since been librarian of the Los Angeles public library, of the Bryn Mawr College library, and is now assistant librarian of the Los Angeles
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From the first the University library has been primarily a reference library. Most of the books have been bought on the recommendation of professors who were interested in securing the best material in print in their own fields. Occasionally this has resulted in an extreme specialization, the forming of a valuable collection of books on a single line while the library might be comparatively weak in the other lines and in the more general works of the same subject. But these special collections are so extremely valuable, and particularly for research work, that it has been felt to be the wisest thing, often, to allow the library to develop somewhat unevenly in places, trusting that in the future the weaker places may be strengthened. Generally, with several professors in a department working on various subdivisions of their subject, the library receives requests for most books of value in the different lines of work and so is building a well-rounded collection of the best material on many subjects. To the librarian belongs the part of choosing the books that do not fall to any department and the general works that are used by all. Often, too, as book catalogs and announcements are received by the librarian, future requests from professors are foreseen and books am ordered to be ready when wanted.
While the library is, as has been said, primarily a reference library built up for the use of the faculty and students of the University in their university work, this statement must not be taken to mean that there are no books to interest the general reader or to tempt him to browse among the shelves. Most of the best literature of all the world in all ages is here, poetry, drama, fiction and essays; large collections of biography and history; travel and exploration; books on all the sociologic and economic problems of the day. Students are prone to confine their college reading to the work assigned by their professors, and professors often find little time for books not on their own particular subject, so that a certain type of excursive read-
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On the other hand the use of the library as a working and reference collection of books has always been most gratifying. Many departments make a real laboratory of the library. The main part of the students' work in many courses in history, philosophy, education, literature, economics and sociology is done in the library. In the scientific and technical courses large use is also made of the literature of these subjects as it is found in the collections of books which, in most cases, are placed in departmental libraries. The engineering and mathematics books, in the Mechanic Arts library, the books on agriculture and all its allied subjects, with those on home economics, in the University Farm library, and the smaller collections on botany and zoology, shelved together in Bessey Hall, on chemistry, physics, and entomology in small departmental libraries, are all extremely valuable and most of them are constantly used. The Law library is also separate, occupying the whole of the third floor of the law building, and a valuable medical collection is being formed at the College of Medicine in Omaha. In addition to assigned and required reading, there is a very large use of the library by students in preparing papers and debates in looking up all sorts of subjects of momentary or permanent interest, while from outside the University come many requests for information and assistance.
Probably few people even in the University itself realize the worth of this library to the University and to the state. It is the largest and by far the most valuable collection of books in Nebraska. The books have been most carefully chosen for their value as a working collection, and there are few subjects upon which it does not contain good material. The library serves the whole University as does no other single department, coming in touch at some point with every student and every professor. Much more of service that it would like to give, must be withheld in its present inadequate quarters and with its small staff of
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THE MILITARY DEPARTMENT
The outstanding feature in the history of the Military Department of the University is, it need hardly be said, General Pershing's four years' service as commanding officer of the battalion. The personality of the young lieutenant, then fresh from the Indian wars, found immediate expression in a stricter discipline and an infectious professional enthusiasm. It cannot be averred that discipline was then, nor is it now, a conspicuous quality of Nebraska life. Lieutenant Dudley, our first commandant, had provoked a downright mutiny by an "arbitrary and unreasonable" insistence upon the wearing of uniforms at drill! Upon the advent of Lieutenant Pershing in 1891, the young men found that the nameless tyrannies of his predecessors, Lieutenants Dudley, Webster, Townley and Griffith, were but faint adumbrations of what they were now facing. But there was no mutiny. On the contrary, it was the beginning of whatever spontaneous enthusiasm the students have since shown in military studies. In 1893, Pershing received his bachelor's degree from the University in the College Of Law. In the same year, the Pershing Rifles were organized for voluntary additional drill. They are still in existence, destined apparently to remain a permanent part of our military organization. It may be said in general that this period of Pershing's life, with its profound impression upon the student body, foreshadowed upon a small stage his later achievements in the great field of the world's history. His name became a legendary one among successive generations of undergraduates, whose memories are usually so short. No one has ever been heard to express surprise at the prom-
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It would be impossible to mention all the cadet officers of Pershing's time who have since attained distinction, and it would be invidious to attempt a selected list; but it may perhaps be permitted to record in meagre chronicle what has recently happened to a very few who are for the moment in the public eye.
Col. W. H. Hayward, '97, in command of the 15th N. Y. Infantry (coloured), has received the American D. S. O., the French croix de guerre, and has been nominated a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honueur. His regiment was under fire for one hundred ninety-one days and suffered possibly more casualties than any other American regiment. He himself was wounded in action. One hundred and fifty of his officers and men were awarded the croix de guerre and his regimental colours were similarly decorated, being one of six American regimental colours thus honoured. Professor W. L. Westermann, '94, is in Paris with the President's party as member of Col. House's Inquiry and expert adviser on Turkey. General Pershing recognized him after twenty-three years. Lieutenant Colonel L. V. Patch, '98, recently commanded an American regiment in action and in addition two batteries of heavy French artillery. Lest we be accused of favoritism in selecting these few from among so many, let us hasten to explain that they are merely specimens, as it were, of a greater glory! Even so worthy citizens of Worms said deprecatingly when the old Kaiser praised their proffered wines "We have better ones."
While General Pershing's name is the most famous one to be connected with the Department, it is but one of many to be recalled with pride. Captain Guilfoyle, his successor, will long be remembered for a delightful retort, which in its combination of chivalry and defiance one likes to think might have fallen from the lips of Sir Walter Raleigh in
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The story of Col. Storsenburg, who came in 1897, is more tragic. Before his first year had passed, the Spanish War was upon us and he was in command of the First Nebraska regiment. Then occurred a shabby incident over which it were better to allow ever kind Oblivion to cast her veil, were it not that it involves a lesson of too great value to be lost. Loud and shrill outcries were raised by the political and bolshevik element in the regiment at Col. Stotsenburg's exacting standards of discipline. Outrageous letters of complaint were written to the newspapers—in war time! There were mutterings in the legislature leading to an investigation from Washington and to Col. Stotsenburg's complete exoneration. Meanwhile the regiment went into action in the Philippines. The value of discipline at once became apparent. Complaints suddenly ceased, and the Colonel found himself transformed into a hero overnight. In 1899, he fell in action at the head of his regiment, leaving a name precious in the military annals not only of the University but of the State.
Few of our commandants are remembered with deeper affection than Captain (afterwards Major) Workizer, who was in charge from 1905 to 1909. He had an almost boyish directness and alertness of manner, and a capacity for enjoyment that were most winning. The Workizer Rifles at the Farm are a lasting testimony to his activity and popularity. After leaving the University he was invalided for injuries received in the performance of his duty. He was utterly devoid of fear. At one time alone he entered the hold of a Pacific transport to quell a mutiny among the prisoners under his charge, and received a blow from which he never fully recovered. He died in 1918, partly of his injuries and partly of a broken heart at not being able to serve his country in the great crisis for which he had spent
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It is curious now to recall that almost exactly two years ago, in the days immediately preceding our plunge into the maelstrom of the Great War, there was a formidable movement in the legislature to abolish military instruction in the University. So belligerent and influential were the pacifists of that day that the outcome of the agitation could not be foretold. Notwithstanding the loss of Federal revenue the abolition would have involved, they seemed to have an even chance.
The agitation was short-lived, but it was not without disagreeable echoes on the campus. Undisciplined youths, many of whom doubtless have since died gloriously for their country, conceived it to be their duty to revile the Military Department and to undermine its morale. It was a bad quarter an hour Captain Parker, whose three years' period of service was approaching its close. Never were trials less deserved. In truth, they did not last long, nor would they be worth recording were it not to chronicle a moral victory of discipline and self-control which, to those who care for such things, will remain undimmed even in the presence of imperishable deeds on the fields of France. Not once was Captain Parker betrayed by impatience under extreme provocation into saying or doing anything unworthy of his profession which he would afterwards have wished unsaid or undone. He was the soul of courtesy and of honor. He set the men an example of single-minded devotion to duty that was much appreciated, not the least because it was wholly unconscious and unintended. In 1817, Captain Parker was transferred to Fort Snelling, and he is now at Stanford University. His successor was Col. Roberts, who has since died.
The roll of West Pointers who have been among us is an imperishable one. They have left behind the delightful memories, and, let us hope, something of the best traditions
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ORGANIZATIONS
In the early days of the University, the "literary societies" were the chief centers of life outside the class-rooms. Their weekly meetings on Friday night had no rival save a rare "show" at the old Centennial theatre, or later at the old Oliver. The manifold attractions which now compete for the presence of the student a Friday evening were non-existent. The literary societies have never lost their vitality and they still fill definite niches in college life; but neither they nor any other organizations of a single type could again have anything like their, old-time monopoly.
The earliest literary society to be organized on the campus was the Palladian, founded in the autumn of 1871, soon after the University opened. Its purpose, in the quaint phraseology of the preamble of its first constitution, was "to help build up and perfect the moral and intellectual capacities and in like manner the social qualities." Only the first and part of the second story of University Hall were in use for a time, and the Palladians held their meet-
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Both the Palladian and the Adelphian societies were at first men's organizations, but in the autumn of 1873 the Adelphian admitted women to membership, and the Palladians followed their example during the next term, with "consequent gain," says their chronicler, "in decorum and in spirit." The meetings of the Adelphians were held on the third floor, which was to be for so many years, until the erection of the Temple building, the home of the literary societies. The Adelphian society went out of existence in 1876. In that year it was reorganized, joined by a second element seceding from the Palladian, under the name of the "University Union." Among those who helped to draft the charter organizing the new society was Charles E. Magoon, Governor of the Canal Zone, 1905-1906, and Provisional Governor of Cuba, 1906-1909. At first the new society restricted its membership to regular college students, excluding students of the "Prep" (Preparatory) school. The eligible members of the Palladian and most members of the Adelphian made up its first membership. Since few students attended the University who did not enter by way of the preparatory school, this restriction handicapped the new society and was soon given up. It became the custom to buttonhole new students, almost as soon as they entered the institution, and to ask them to join one or the other literary society. When the stage was reached
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The programs of the literary societies consisted of varied features. Staple were the "essay", the "oration", the "recitation", with such musical numbers as were available interspersed, and the program closed normally with a "debate." Social sessions followed, sometimes varied by the serving of "light refreshments", such as doughnuts, apples, popcorn, or more rarely, ice cream; and there were promenades through the long corridors. In the '80's and '90's, the height of elegance was thought to be attained when the more prodigal members went to a local restaurant after the program for oysters. The recreation of dancing was frowned upon in those days, and was not to be thought of after society meetings. Auxiliary organizations which played conspicuous roles in the life of the literary societies were the P. B. D. C. (Palladian Boys' Debating Club),
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The old-time literary societies gave to their members valuable experience. Not only did they provide social diversion but they gave to the students almost their only training in conducting public meetings, in self-government, and in acquiring self-possession before an audience. The training which they afforded in practical politics assisted many a future leader, like A. W. Field, H. H. Wilson, United States Congressman Ernest Pollard, Governor George Sheldon, Regent E. P. Brown. A glance at old-time topics for debate shows that abstract question debated was (the original spelling retained): "Resolved That the Signs of the Times Indicate that We Are Advancing Moraly and Spiritualy." This type of question gave way later to subjects like "The Negro Question", "Foreign Immigration", "The Advisability of Adopting the Initiative and Referendum."
A classic institution of the early literary society was the "slate," without which some young women might have had many invitations to attend meetings while others might have found themselves without escorts. The official "slate-bearer" passed about a small book listing the names of the girl members, to be duly "scratched" for Friday evening by the men members. Professor H. H. Wilson sometimes tells, when indulging in reminiscences, of a new recruit who furnished an example of polite correspondence. Having been urged by his professor of rhetoric to write with studied exactness, he asked a woman member "for the pleasure of her company to and from the Union society on next Friday evening." Not to be outdone in exactitude, she accepted his proffered escort "for the round trip." On leap-years the women members had their turn at carrying and "scratching" the slate and at extending invitations.
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As the number of students increased and membership rolls lengthened, the literary societies became no longer open societies but restricted more and more their elections to membership. They now afford membership to but a small proportion of the students. Following the expansion of the University, most of the functions of the literary societies inevitably were taken over by a variety of new agencies. On the literary side, the old need for the societies was replaced by class-room instruction in public speaking, in debating, in essay-writing, and in oral expression, while old-time "oratory" became extinct. The more serious work of the societies was assumed by departmental clubs, linguistic, literary, scientific, or technical.
On the social side, to meet the needs of those wishing greater social opportunities, or special affiliations, arose the system of Greek-letter fraternities. These contrast with the literary societies in that their membership is limited to one sex. They now play a large part the undergraduate activities of all types. The first men's fraternity to announce its entry was Sigma chi, in January, 1883, followed by Phi Delta Theta in December of the same year. The first women's organization to enter was Kappa Kappa Gamma in 1884, followed by Delta Gamma in 1887. For many years after the introduction of the first fraternities there was strong rivalry, and what were long spoken of as "frat-barb" feuds often added zest to undergraduate politics. At one stage members of fraternities were barred from membership in the literary societies, and "Greeks" already within the societies were expelled. This rivalry has long since ended, as Greek-letter societies of all types, honorary as well as social, have multiplied; and many members of fraternities are enrolled at the present time as members of one, at least, of the literary societies. The two types of organizations afford different types of experiences, and while the function of the literary societies is now mainly social, their "co-educational" character enables them to fill a special and permanent place in undergraduate life and they continue flourish. The complaint is sometimes heard that there are too many student organizations on the
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Another conspicuous early organization was the "Sem Bot", in full, the Botanical Seminar, formed by enthusiastic students under Dr. C. E. Bessey. It was restricted at first to men members but afterward admitted women. Prominent among its early members were H. C. Peterson, now of Chicago, Roscoe Pound, now of Harvard, Herbert Webber, Professor at the University of California, and Albert F. Woods, President of the Maryland Agricultural College.
In these days when social conventions permit college girls to go everywhere together without the "escorts" that earlier times deemed imperative, one organization which played a conspicuous role for a time in university life may seem anomalous. This was the "G. O. I." or order of "Go Out Independents." The members of this organization were pioneers in looking forward to the changed conditions of the present, and they had the encouragement of Chancellor Canfield, who was always forward-looking and anxious to promote the welfare of the girl students. The G. O. I. demonstrated that girls could attend football games, evening lectures, society programs, and other public functions, without first having to acquire individual escorts; and their stand possibly hastened conditions of the present, when college girls seem to feel free to go anywhere or to do anything, whether singly or in groups.
In 1883, through the encouragement and enthusiasm of Mr. B. L. Paine, a religious organization consisting of sixteen young men and nine young ladies was completed. It took to itself the name appropriate to the majority of its membership and called itself the Young Men's Christian Association. In 1884, the young women formed a compan-
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Among honorary scholarship organizations, the first to enter was Phi Beta Kappa, which was granted a charter from the national organization in 1896, through efforts instituted by Chancellor Canfield. Its list of faculty members has included such men as Professors E. A. Ross, H. B. Ward, C. E. Bessey, Roscoe Pound, F. E. Clements, E. B. Andrews, E. W. Davis; often it was an enviable privilege to hear the discussions at its meetings. Of late years its brilliant faculty roll has been thinned by deaths and by losses to other institutions. The corresponding scientific society, Sigma Xi, entered in 1897. There are now honorary scholarship societies in nearly all departmental lines, membership in which is based on definite achievement.
By this time there are too many organizations associated with the life of the University for detailed enumeration. There are clubs based on nationality, like the Komensky (Bohemian), or the Tegner (Swedish); denominational clubs, like the Catholic or the Christian Science clubs; class societies, social organizations; military, athletic, musical, and dramatic societies; and there are departmental societies, ranging in their interests from linguistics and journalism to engineering and home economics. Beginning with the old centers of undergraduate life, the literary societies, which involved small groups of students, there have come to be innumerable social centers which involve thousands
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THE ALUMNI
In 1873 two men went forth from University Hall, the first two graduates of the University of Nebraska. Both men are living and active today—the one, J. S. Dales, as secretary of the board of regents and of the University senate, is still devoting his services to his Alma Mater; the other, Judge William H. Snell, is a practicing attorney at Tacoma, Washington. From two, the roster of alumni has grown into the thousands, until today they are scattered in all parts of the world and all lines of activities.
Some seven thousand men and women are graduates, and many more as non-graduates, are doing their bit in the world's work the better for their training at the University. "By their fruits ye shall know them." The strongest argument that can be adduced in support of a state loyal and generous to its university is the fact that the leaders among its citizenship, whether it he on the farm or in the city, very often are University men and women, serving in turn the state that has so well served them.
It is impossible in a short article to pay individual tribute to all the men and women who have reflected honor on their Alma Mater. Parenthetically, and speaking of men and women, it ought to be noted that the first woman graduate, Alice May Frost, '76, married one of her classmates, George Elliot Howard, thereby, as it were ab initio, setting such example as many another has followed. In truth, it is no negligible feature of coeducation, and hence of the interest of the alumni life of a coeducational institution,
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Several years ago an alumnus, in his Alumni Day address, in undertaking to recount what the men and women who have reflected honor on their Alma Mater are doing in world, apologized for the shortcomings of his account in words which the present writer must borrow. "No catalogue of names," he said, "no selection of a few, can give any adequate idea of the broad and general usefulness of our fellow alumni and fellow students within these walls to the world." Agreeing with this statement, and advancing it as my own caution, I shall none the less attempt to record a few names of alumni who eminently represent their Alma Mater in the world of men.
Since the University of Nebraska is a state institution I shall mention first those who have remained to serve within their state. A one-time governor, George L. Sheldon, class of 1892, a United States senator, Elmer J. Burkett, '93, three congressmen, the late David H. Mercer, '80, Omaha, E. M. Pollard, '93, Nehawka, and J. A. Maguire, '98, Lincoln, the present police commissioner of the city of Omaha, J. Dean Ringer, '03, scores of members in both houses of the state legislatures, and scores of city and county officials, are men all of whom honorably served in public life their state and their community. In our public school system, in all of its branches, are alumni. We have first of all our own chancellor, Dr. Samuel Avery, '92, the first alumnus to serve in that capacity. We rejoice that among the faculty there are still with us alumni who began more than twenty-five years ago to serve their Alma Mater; Dr. G. E. Howard, '76; Professor H. H. Wilson, '78; Professor H. W. Caldwell, '80; Professor Laurence Fossler, '81; and Dean O. V. P. Stout, '88. The staffs of our normal schools, high schools, city and rural schools, are largely made up of men and women who have attended if not graduated from the University.
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But Nebraska is an agricultural state; and if its highest institution of learning did not serve its greatest number of constituents there would be just ground for public criticism. There have gone back to their farms hundreds of men and women who because of their scientific training in the college of agriculture and their broadening training in the other colleges are today among best farmers and most progressive citizens in the. communities. Of these there comes first to mind, Regent E. P. Brown, '92, of Davey, farmer, leader in various rural movements, and president of the board of regents of the University. Prominent among the horticulturists of the state is E. M. Pollard, '93, of Nehawka, owner of the famous Pollard orchards, started by his father, the late Isaac Pollard, in 1856. The editor of The Nebraska Farmer, a weekly which has the largest circulation of any farm paper in the state, is C. W. Pugsley, '06, formerly director of the extension service of the college of agriculture. Of the many women who are working side by side with their husbands on the farm perhaps none is more deserving of mention that Mrs. Fred Deweese (Alice C. Towne, '05) of Hilaire Farm, Dawson. Both Mrs. and Mr. Deweese, '02, are workers in many activities. As state chairman of the food production department of the woman's committee of the State Council of Defense, Mrs. Deweese accomplished one of the most constructive pieces of war work done in Nebraska.
But even an agricultural state needs more than its farmers. And so are found in its newspaper work men like Clement Chase, '83, president of the Chase Publishing Company, Omaha, Harvey E. Newbranch, '96, editor of the Omaha World-Herald, and Will Owen Jones, '86, editor of The Nebraska State Journal, Lincoln. In industrial lines N. Z. Snell, '82, presidents of the Mid-West Life Insurance Company, Lincoln; Charles F. Schwarz, '96, president of the Schwarz Paper Company, Lincoln; C. Louis Meyer, '07, president of the Concrete Engineering Company of Omaha, who has patented a system of reinforced concrete floors, are but a few of the men who have built up enterprises within our state. In the legal profession are men like
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As the alumni who remained within the state have done credit to their University, so likewise have those who have ventured forth, whether it be in this country or in other lands. And difficult as it seemed to select the men most worthy of mention within the state, it is far more difficult to do so among those who went elsewhere. For there seems to be no country or no line of work in which there are not several, if not many, pre-eminent Nebraskans.
In public service arise names like Charles S. Lobingier, '88, Judge of the United States court for China at Shanghai, and Charles S. Allen, '86, former president of the board of regents, now a public spirited citizen of the city of San Jose, California. In education appear the names of Dean Roscoe Pound, '88, of Harvard Law School; President A. F. Woods, '90, of the College of Agriculture, Maryland; and Chancellor Edward C. Elliott, '95, of the University of Montana. Innumerable are the students of Dr. Bessey who are doing noteworthy research along botanical lines—as Dr. and Mrs. Frederic E. Clements (Edith Schwartz, '98) of the Carnegie Institution of Washington; Dr. P. J. O'Gara, '02, of the American Smelting and Refining Company, Salt Lake City; C. A. Fisher, '98, consulting geologist and fuel engineer of Denver who has just been appointed by the War Department one of seven commissioners who are to determine the available oil and gas resources of the nation. In medicine, Dr. Charles A. Elliott, '95, of Northwestern University, is a member of a recently appointed commission of five men who will devote their scientific knowledge to a study of the yellow fever scourge in South America. In engineering may be mentioned J. W. McCrosky, '91, recently of the Bureau of Enemy Trade, Washington, who for
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What should be said about the thousands of women graduates of the University of Nebraska? Their highest contribution is that of home-builder. They are the mothers of the many sons and daughters who have come and will continue to come to the Alma Mater of their parents. As the wives of alumni, their contributions are interwoven with those of their husbands. They have followed their husbands into the missionary fields of China and Japan. They have worked side by side with them in their research and their publications; while those who have not trained their own sons and daughters, have helped to train others. As teachers, social workers, in business, and in the professions, their record is a constantly growing one. Dr. Edith Abbott, '01, of Chicago, social worker and writer, has a national reputation. Her first book, published in 1910, on Women in Industry, is a classic on that subject. She is a member of the faculty of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy and of Chicago University. Willa Cather, '95, of New York City, one-time associate editor of McClure's Magazine, and author of several highly ranked books of fiction, is perhaps our best known alumna in the literary field. Leta Stetter Hollingworth, '06, a member of the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University, has won distinction alongside her husband, H. L. Hollingworth, '06, who is a professor of psychology at Columbia. Grace Coppock, '05, executive secretary of the Young Women's Christian Association for China, has been an inspiration to many other Nebraska women who have entered similar fields.
For men and women who have passed on but are not forgotten no tribute seems adequate acknowledgement of their services. The latest loss the alumni suffered was in the death of Dr. Harry Kirke Wolfe, '80, head of the department of philosophy. Others to be mentioned are Professor George W. Botsford, '84, of Columbia, distinguished historian; Edward J. Robinson, '84, engineer with the Bur-
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As we emerge from the great world conflict into an age of peace and reconstruction, the alumni find themselves represented by two men at the peace gatherings at Versailles,—General John J. Pershing, '93, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary forces, and Dr. William Linn Westermann, '94, of the University of Wisconsin, historian.
I realize that I have but barely touched here and there the records of the thousands of alumni who represent our Alma Mater. To the many deserving, yet unmentioned, there still remains the satisfaction of service well done. With every alumnus there rests the duty of building up an alumni association that will more fully reflect the work accomplished by our great alumni body.
Secretary of the Alumni Association.
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THE UNIVERSITY AND THE COMMUNITY
The degree to which a university may be an asset to a community varies with the size of the town. In some instances it is completely subordinated, owing to overwhelming industrial, commercial, and social interests. Again, in a small town, it may dominate the life of the community without making any distinct contribution to it. In such a case, class consciousness develops within the institution which causes a sharp line of cleavage between the townspeople and the university group. Faculty and citizens do not mingle socially, and often intense dislike for the student body springs up, chiefly on account of their pranks, which get beyond control through lack of adequate police force.
The relationship between Lincoln and the University has been most happy in this respect. Both were located on the open prairie at the edge of civilization, and they have grown up together to a prosperous middle age. In 1873, the University granted two degrees; in 1910, 343 degrees. In 1870, Lincoln was a village of something less than 2,500 people; in 1910, a careful census gave it a population of 44,000. Both Lincoln and the University now lack, within themselves, the intimate relationships of the early days, but the challenge of the commercial and social forces of the city is still met by the educational forces of the University. Lincoln is more widely known for its schools than for its business enterprises, and this tends toward a selective process in its population. Families are drawn to the city to educate their children, and teachers and librarians often seek employment in Lincoln for the advantages which the University offers.
Citizens and faculty mingle freely in social intercourse, while personal contact between the student body and the townspeople is increased on account of the lack of dormitories. Instead of being segregated within their own group, the students are scattered over the city,—many in their own homes, some in homes temporarily established for the period of their college residence, others with friends or
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In the early days, when the social and recreational life, of the city was much more simple than it is now, the literary societies of the University were an important factor. Their programs, more serious than they are today, were advertised in the newspapers and the public was invited to attend. Many townspeople were regularly present and contributed, chiefly in the way of music, to the evening's entertainment.
The development of art and music has been stimulated in the community by the presence of the University; while institutions such as the annual art exhibit, which depend for their permanent financial support upon a large body of citizens, could not be maintained easily in a small town even though it had a large university.
One of the earliest definite efforts of the school to make its contribution to the solution of community problems was the establishment of the University Settlement during the school year, 1895-1896. It was known as the Graham Taylor House, in honor of the founder of Chicago Commons, who came to Lincoln in that year to help in starting the project. The House was located, during the greater part of its existence, at Eighth and X streets, in the foreign district in Northwest Lincoln. The board of control was made up of faculty members; the residents and assistants were students, or wives of University professors. In 1900, the Settlement was moved to Twentieth and N streets, and some years later, the property, was turned over to the Charity Organization Society. In spite of the short life of the institution, it registered its influence in the broadening and democratizing of the students who served in it, some of
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The community has benefited by the assistance of university instructors in a wide range of activities. From early days to the present, the board of education of the city has usually numbered faculty members upon its staff. In the early period, the shaping of the general policy of public school education, and the building program of recent years have been due in no small part to them. The library board and various departments of the city government, as the engineering department, the park board and the water board, have made use of their expert services. They have been active in the City Improvement and Social Welfare societies, in anti-tuberculosis and other public health work, while enthusiastic support has been given to the prohibition and suffrage movements. University professors have sponsored legislation relating to child labor, mothers' pensions, women in industry, and juvenile courts; while the city charter and problems of local government have received their earnest attention. The community draws largely upon the university faculty for help in forming public opinion on social questions, and in contributing to the cultural life by lectures before parent-teacher associations and the great variety of men's and women's clubs the city. In addition to such specific contributions, there can be little question that the presence of the University has imparted a more serious tone to the life and thought of the community, accounting in part for the relative freedom of the city from social extravagances.
The community, in turn, through its various agencies, furnishes a laboratory for training students in social and civic leadership. No doubt the history of the student vote, in city politics, would make an interesting, and not always savory, tale; for it, together with the foreign vote, has been the uncertain element, which could be handled more or less en masse, and hence, in the "old days", was an important consideration. Anxious politicians always advised that it "be watched"; it was frequently subjected to challenge at the polls; a supreme court decision has been rendered upon
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Not only has the city furnished practice in politics and chance for observation of courts and legislatures, but opportunity for social work as well. Investigations of a great variety of social problems, ranging in importance from class and seminar papers to doctoral theses, have been based on local data. Students carry on their field work in the social sciences through numerous community agencies—charitable, penal, educational, industrial, recreational, health, and religious.
To a great degree the city recognizes the responsibility laid upon it through the presence of a large student body. There is a conspicuous absence of any desire to exploit it on the part of the city at large. Its tastes are catered to—perhaps too largely but at least indulgently—in amusements; and the program of the churches is shaped with the students in mind. Their presence has always furnished a talking point for civic reform, and on their account various agencies which might contribute to their demoralization have undoubtedly been more easily disposed of, or have received stricter supervision.
The University justifies its existence best by the service it renders. This consists primarily in the training for leadership; but its second service is the practical help given by men and women of broad study to the problems of the community. More and more must this latter function be exercised, and the community served be enlarged from the locality in which the University is situated to include every town and open country district in the state.
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THE REGENTS
The act of the legislature approved February 15, 1869, which established "The University of Nebraska" provided that The general government of the university shall be vested in a board of regents, which shall consist of the governor, the superintendent of public instruction, the chancellor of the university, all of whom shall be members by virtue of their offices, and three persons from each judicial district, who shall be appointed by the legislature in joint session.
The governor was ex officio president of the board. The term of service then fixed at six years has never been changed. This plan was doubtless adapted from Iowa, just as the first territorial assembly had adopted the Iowa civil and criminal code. The English deprecatingly admit that they "muddled through" the war. The records disclose that the experimentation in government of our state universities is scarcely entitled to the English faint praise. It has merely muddled along. The case of our Iowa examplar is typical—though in some other states the fumbling has been more frequent and effusive.
The act of the first general assembly, passed February 25, 1847, which established the State University of Iowa, provided that it should be governed and managed by fifteen trustees, to be appointed by the first general assembly for a term of six years, the superintendent of public instruction to be the presiding officer of the board. After an unfortunate experiment, permitted by the constitution of 1857, with a "Board of Education" elected by the people, but having incongruous legislative powers, an act of March 21, 1864, provided for a board of nine regents, of which the governor was president ex officio, the president of the university a member ex officio, and the other seven members were chosen by the general assembly, as before. This method of choosing the regents continued until the separate governing body was abolished by the act of 1909, which placed the university, the College of Agriculture and
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Of the five states which started their universities with governing boards chosen by their respective legislatures, namely, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin and Nebraska, Iowa alone brought that method into the present period of university development. I have examined the experiments of thirteen states, besides Nebraska, with the governing boards of their universities, but space permits only a skeleton outline of the main changes they have made. The University of Michigan began, in 1837, with the appointive system, but the constitution of 1850 fixed the elective method beyond practicable recall. Indiana University, established in 1838, was governed by a board of trustees named by the legislature. Until 1855 vacancies were filled by the board itself; then, until 1891, by the state board of education. Since 1891 the board of education has appointed five trustees and the alumni resident in the state have appointed three of their own number. The governing hoard of the University of Missouri was appointed from 1839 till 1868 by the legislature; since then it has been appointed by the governor and the senate. The regents of the University of Wisconsin were elected by the legislature from 1848 to 1866; since then they have been appointed by the governor alone. The regents of the University of Minnesota have been appointed, from 1851 to the present time, by the governor and the senate. At the University of Kansas, the regents were appointed from 1864 to 1913 by the governor and the senate; then all educational institutions were placed under the control of a "State Board of Administration," consisting of three members appointed by the governor and the senate and the governor as ex officio member and chairman; in 1917 this method was spread over all state institutions. At the University of Illinois, the regents were appointed from 1867 to 1887 by the governor and the senate; since then they have been elected by pop-
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The act to establish the University of Nebraska authorized the governor to appoint the members of the first board of regents, and he announced his choice as follows: From the first judicial district, Rev. John C. Elliott, Otoe county, two years; Robert W. Furnas, of Nemaha, four years; Rev. D. R. Dungan, Pawnee, six years; from the second judicial district, Rev. John B. Maxfield of Cass, two years; Abel B. Fuller, of Saunders, four years; Champion S. Chase, of Douglas, six years; from the third judicial district, William B. Dale, of Platte, two years; Rev. William G. Olinger, of Burt, four years; Dr. Fyfield H. Longley, of Washington, six years.
The board was organized at a meeting held in Lincoln on June 3, 1869, when August F. Hervey, uncommonly intelligent and virile, was elected secretary and John L. McConnell treasurer. Mr. Harvey was a protegé of the capital commissioners, functioning as surveyor of the site of Lincoln, and as editor or the peripatetic Statesman, he was a stout defender of the fiercely assaulted acts of his patrons. Mr. McConnell afterward became a well known merchant in Lincoln. At this meeting, the regents approved the plans and specifications for the first building which had
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Aside from the pan-sectarian aspect of their aggregate, the members of the first board of regents were pretty well assorted. The governors choice of clergymen for four of the nine appointive members—perhaps five, for it is said that Fuller had taken Episcopalian orders—and the election by the board itself of a reverend chancellor and a reverend secretary gave the infant institution a distinctively clerical cast. This virtual stamping of the principal state school as protegé and ward of the church was doubtless due in part to the still surviving belief or concession that the inculcation of religion was the most important part of even public education. Probably, however, the politic governor was mainly intent on procuring the active co-operation of the churches in the difficult and even doubtful experiment upon which the state, whose people were chiefly experienced in a sense of poverty, was entering.
Rev. John C. Elliott was pastor of the Presbyterian church at Nebraska City from 1866 to 1869, and he is still living—at Seville, Ohio. Delineation of the character and career of Robert W. Furnas is accessible to the not numerous citizens of the state who are unfamiliar with them. At the time of his appointment, Rev. David Roberts Dungan was a resident of Lincoln and had been engaged for about five years in missionary work in Nebraska for the sect called the Church of Christ. After 1874 he was for many years a member of the faculty of Drake University, at Des Moines; and he was president of Cotner University
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Three members of the board, Governor Butler, Furnas, soon to be governor (the ambitious political aspirations both soon to be cut down, never to rise again), and Champion S. Chase, belonged to the class commonly called professional politicians; and it is but doing Elder Maxfield justice to observe that he also seems to have shone in that class with native distinction. In his public aspect and activities Regent Chase was a ubiquitous and picturesque personage, and forceful withal. He was a paymaster in the Union
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In 1865, William B. Dale came from the state of New York to Columbus, Nebraska, where he engaged in the sale of lumber and in storekeeping. At the third meeting of the board of regents, begun December 22, 1870, according to a provision of the act for establishing the University which authorized the board to fill vacancies occurring when the legislature was not in session, Uriah Bruner, of Cuming county, was appointed a successor to Mr. Dale for the reason, as alleged in the record, that he had removed from the state. It appears, however, that he remained a resident of Columbus for many years after this occurrence. Mr. Bruner had settled at West Point in 1856 and in 1869 became the first receiver of the land office there. Rev. William G. Olinger came with his parents from Virginia to Tekamah in 1855. On October 24, 1862, the boy of 19 was mustered as a private in company B Second Regiment Nebraska Cavalry, of which Furnas, his colleague on the board of regents, was colonel. He served until September 4, 1863. He was afterward treasurer of Burt county and a member of the House of Representatives in the sixth legislature, of 1875. When he was appointed a regent he was pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Tekamah, for which he personally provided the meeting house. He subsequently became a preacher in the Congregational church, in Oregon. His neighbors of Tekamah speak in high praise of his spirit and character. Dr. Fyfield H. Longley was a member of the first board of trustees of Blair, in 1869, and was a reputable physician there.
Rev. Allen R. Benton became ex officio regent by his election as first chancellor of the university, which occurred at the fourth meeting of the board on January 6, 1871. The two other ex officio regents were Governor David Butler
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On February 28, 1871, the two houses of the legislature, in joint convention, elected Dwight J. McCann, of Otoe county, in place of Elliot; Maxfield (still credited to Cass county) and Bruner, each as his own successor; all for the full term of six years from March 1, 1871. Similarly, on the 29th of January, 1873, the legislature elected William D. Scott, of Rulo, Richardson county; James W. Savage, of Omaha; and William Adair, of Dakota City, regents for the full term from March 1, 1873.
On the 16th day of February, 1875, the legislature passed a joint resolution declaring that the office of regent from the first judicial district was vacant because McCann, the nominal incumbent, had removed from the state and had not attended any meeting of the board during the last eighteen months. On the same day and in like manner, the place to which Maxfield had been elected, from the second district, was declared vacant because he had moved to the first district—from Plattsmouth to Beatrice. On the same day the legislature elected Edgar M. Hungerford, of Orleans Sentinel, Harlan county, in the first district, in McCann's place, and Samuel J. Tuttle, of Lincoln, Lancaster county, in the second district, in Maxfield's place. Charles A. Holmes, of Tecumseh, Johnson county, in the first dis-
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McCann was president of the Nebraska City National Bank and otherwise prominent; but he wrote compromising political letters, and, drifting to Wyoming, then a Mecca for superfluous politicians of Nebraska, he crippled his career by getting caught in fraudulent transactions in the United States revenue service. Maxfield aspired to re-election in 1875, but he also unwarily wrote a letter to McConnell, treasurer of the university, admonishing him that "we ought to have two or three thousand in Griggs and Webb's bank here [Beatrice] at the opening of the session. If so they cannot move the money into the state treasury during the session. We will then have a man at court. This will guarantee our continuance." For "there will not be a more influential member in the senate"—than Griggs, who was slated for its president. It appears that the letter guaranteed Maxfield's discontinuance; and McConnell's office was abolished by that legislature.
Hungerford was found dead in his bed on the morning of January 3, 1876, three days before the beginning of his elective term. By common appraisement the young man—of only twenty-seven years—was of a high type of both character and accomplishment. On January 7, Governor Garber appointed Rev. Lebbius Fifield, of Kearney, to fill
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Considering the character of the pioneer population and the paucity of numbers to choose from, the legislatures were clearly more discriminating than the people at large have been in their choice of regents. Of those well adapted to the delicate and difficult task of establishing the university, Dungan, Fuller, Chase, Longley, Savage, Hungerford, Barrows, Bear, and Tuttle deserve mention. All were marked by more than ordinary character, education, and intelligence. That by the legislative plan two democrats could be chosen and that two such democrats as Savage and Bear were chosen is highly to its credit. I knew them, Horatio,—both "of most excellent fancy." Judge Savage was a man of that peculiar cast which inspires, holds, and deserves public confidence. Moreover, at the time in question his profession had not become for the most part the mere handmaid of business, and, in some sort, it still lived up to its reputation as the learned profession, as Judge Savage did. Dr. Bear was the Virginian gentleman. Speech came mended from his tongue with the soft touch and melodious cadence of the South. He took part of the college course of the University of Virginia and his medical degree, in 1860, at the University of Maryland. He had begun to practice when he was caught in the vortex of the war serving—on the Confederate side of course—the full four years, three of them as surgeon—prime preparation for his very successful medical career, which he resumed in Nebraska in 1866, settling permanently at Norfolk in 1872. Not long ago he retired with a handsome competence to Richmond, Virginia, his boyhood home.
Judge Tuttle, now working out, hale and hearty, his fiftieth year of continuous practice at the Lincoln bar, had been college bred in Michigan and was encouraged for the
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The present constitution of Nebraska, which was adopted at the general election of 1875, provided that "the general government of the University of Nebraska shall, under the direction of the legislature, be vested in a board of six regents....who shall be elected by the electors of the state at large" for a term of six years, except that the regents chosen at the next succeeding election—of 1875—should be classified by lot so that the tenure of two of them should be two years, of two others four years, and of two others six years. Anticipating the adoption of constitution at the same election, the Republicans nominated a partisan ticket, comprising four of the incumbents—Adair, Holmes, Hungerford, and Tuttle—and Joseph W. Gannett, of Douglas county and Seth P. Mobley, of Hall. Dr. Bear met inevitable defeat with his companions on the democratic ticket, and thereafter none but republicans were permitted to participate in the government of this principal educational institution until, in 1891, Edwin A. Hadley, of Greeley county, slipped in on the Independent People's ticket. By 1900 "fusionists" dominated the board, and they thereupon elected E. Benjamin Andrews chancellor by a strict party vote, four to two! The nominally nonpartisan method of electing regents provided by the act of 1917 may measurably improve their fitness, but they will still be commonly either self-nominated or, rather worse, nominated by coteries. In the year 1890, President Thomas C. Chamberlain, of the University of Wisconsin, gave the charter-day address at Nebraska. In discussing with him the affairs of the two institutions, I said my chief regret was that our regents were not appointed as in Wisconsin, and he promptly replied that his chief regret was that they were
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Yet this is not a momentous matter; for as the universities grow and become more complex, their control, both as to initiative and management, tends to fall more and more into the hands of the specialists—the chief executive and the faculty. The regents' functions, in detail, are chiefly of a regulatory sort, and in general, mediatorial between specialists and the people. They are handy adjuncts. On occasion, their very differentiation prompts them to open the blinders of the specialists to a broader outlook. On the other hand, an omniscient, or single-minded, or self-sufficient board of regents would surely be embarrassing and might be positively troublesome.
It is a corollary that the regents should not be of one kind—as at least five out of our present six are—but that their pristine variety should be restored. Doubt obscures the educational outlook as chaos confronts political order. Says Professor Coe, of the Badger State university: "For this period of remarkable outer achievement has been also a period of skepticism and even of despair. We have fallen of late into a deep discontent with the college." And thus Professor Canby, of Yale: "I am not writing a treatise on education after the war, for the excellent reason that neither I nor any one else knows the terms upon which it will be conducted." But the melting blow-pipe of Professor Veblen's A Memorandum of the Conduct of Universities by Business Men pales other ineffectual fires.
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In some important aspects at least, our present "Red-blood" board is stronger than any of its predecessors. But, the Red-blood "neither looks back nor looks ahead. He lives in present action. The Red-blood sees nothing; but the Mollycoddle sees through everything." Though "all the building is done by Red-bloods," yet "the whole structure of civilization rests on foundations laid by Mollycoddles," and "in the long run the Red-blood does what the Mollycoddle tells him." Says the strenuous Oswald—in Joan and Peter—"Don't you know that education is building up an imagination? Everybody knows that." A temerarious critic of the supreme American mollycoddle settles it in a sentence: "And if Lincoln had been a good executive, we should have had no Lincoln."
PUBLICATIONS
Except for official bulletins or catalogues, the earliest regular publication issuing from the campus was The Hesperian Student, established about 1871 or 1872. The paper was managed entirely by students, but received little financial aid from the regents. The first editors of the paper lodged on the attic-like top floor of the building, as did the janitor; and they helped to keep up the fires in the stoves by which the building was heated. The contents of The Hesperian were varied. It ran a few original serial stories, and contained an article on "The Beautiful in Art," and one entitled "Nature and Art and Intellect." As a specimen of style, the following gem, concerning the graduates of 1877, unearthed from a local column by Mr. J. A. Barrett, in 1894, may be quoted:
The hour when these young men departed from here fostering care, was one of deep interest and earnest solicitude, as well as pride, to their alma mater in her young maternity. An hour of joy and pride, because her progeny, rejoicing in the full vigor, elasticity, lofty aspiration and hope of intelligent, cultured young
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The following, also gleaned by Mr. Barrett, was from a later column and concerns the high school:
In the taste and beautiful arrangement the exercises were not excelled by any entertainment of the university. The graduating class consisted of three beautiful and talented young ladies and one young gentleman. The productions of the ladies.....were surprisingly excellent in thought, and couched in splendidly beautiful language. Every sentence seemed to sparkle with word-gems and sentences of pearls. The address of the young gentleman....., on "The Manias of the Age," was a worthy production. It lacked the glitter and music with which the young ladies adorned their thoughts, but we liked it equally as well. He showed the elements of manly thought in grappling with the knotty practical problems of the day, and evinced a conception of the follies and fantasies of the age.
In the early nineties the management of The Hesperian became largely a matter of school politics. Alumni will recall the rather ornate cover designed by Miss Sarah Wool Moore of the art department. It represented a huge sunflower supported by two "Hesperian students." Across the face of the sunflower ran a ribbon bearing the letters "Hesperian Student." The typography of the paper became so careless that it was not unusual for the paper to appear with all the s's, or some other letters, in italics. These strange freaks of the printer became such a joke among the students that one day a fake edition of The Hesperian appeared. It was made up largely of the most absurd items from the real Hesperian. The following is an extract from the mock Hesperian and is said to be almost a reproduction of an article in a real issue:
Hair-Breadth Escape of J. H. Hooper
At the close of last term a brutal and cowardly attack was made upon J. H. Hooper by a band of nine sneaking thugs and assassius who attempted to bind and gag him; boubt less with the intention of robbing him and leaving him a Mutilated corpse by the roadside. But Hooper proved too much for them. Summoning all his resolution he hurled the villians [sic] from him—knocking down five and dragging the
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In 1892 Willa Cather became a literary editor of The Hesperian, and a few years later editor-in-chief; and it was under her vigorous leadership that the paper reached its maximum of excellence. The following passage is excerpted from the quarter-centennial number and suggests by its virile dash or composition Miss Cather's authorship:
Along in '84 and '85 THE HESPERIAN had a literary column in which it felt in duty bound to review current literature. In reading this column we learned among other new and startling things that The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, that it is very immoral and should be carefully kept from the young. Furthermore, we learned that War and Peace was a novel by Count Tolstoi, and that it was very good, though somewhat voluminous. Of Sordello the literary editor merely says that it is a poem by Robert Browning. It is a case in which silence speaks, apparently. In the local column we find a casual mention that Bismarck has been ill for a few days, and that Tennyson dined at Windsor Castle last week, and that the Queen of Spain has a new dress. In the editorial columns we find inspiring quotations from Faust, Hamlet, and Lucile. In the files we scanned we found thirteen essays on the inevitable Thomas Carlyle. It is a great temptation to reprint some of the literary productions of the olden times, for some of them are very good stuff indeed, but after all these years it would be cruel to treat our amiable librarian to her essay on the Founders of the Modern English Race, or to thrust upon the managing editor of The State Journal his own essay on Mahomet, and it would be little short of inhuman cruelty to expose Mr. Saunders by republishing the awful poetry he used to write under the graceful nom de plume of "Ivy."
From time to time there were rival publications. A class paper, The Sophomorian, containing literary and journalistic matter, was conducted in 1889-90 by the enterprise of one student. In the two succeeding years, the same student, associated with a few classmates, published successfully The Lasso, "for the promotion of college spirit." There was a design of a cowboy on the front, and for some reason all of its early numbers were in black covers.
The Nebraskan, founded about 1894, was a rival of The Hesperian. This paper was nicknamed "Riley's Rag" after
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As to humorous publications, the earliest, according to tradition, was The Button Buster, issued in the early '80's by members of the Palladian society. This paper went through several issues at irregular intervals. Though copies have failed of preservation, a few gems illustrating its type of humor have been handed down.
"May your life glide down The stream of time Like a bobbed-tailed chicken On a sweet potato vine." |
"She's a tall, slim girl without bang or curl But garbed in becoming apparel. She can give you askance a withering glance, As sour as a vinegar barrel.' |
A high-class humorous paper, The Arrow-Head, was published about 1899-1901 with Herbert Johnson, now a celebrated cartoonist, as managing editor. This publication showed unusual originality for a student production. Awgwan, the present student comic paper, was established in 1912-13, largely through the efforts of Ralph Northrup. Its drawings, and cover designs furnish an avenue of ex-
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The first annual, The Sombrero, appeared in 1884. Copies are not now to be found. The second volume was issued in 1892, and the third in 1894. This last contained a cut of the Sombrero board of 1884. Underneath the cut is the legend "The docile donkey, recently found anchored in a recitation room on the third floor is an honorary member of this board. He refused to compromise himself by appearing in the engraving." It is said that the donkey referred to was a quaint little animal which the professor of French used to ride to school.
Numbers of The Sombrero continued to be issued until 1907, when the name was changed to The Cornhusker. The Cornhusker is an amalgamation of the junior annual and the senior class-books which used to be issued by the seniors alongside the junior annuals. Classic among the senior books were that of 1905 with Alice Town Deweese as editor and moving spirit, and that of 1906 with Leta Stetter Hollingworth as a leading editor and contributor. The university annual is now an official or semi-official publication of the souvenir type, issued under the supervision and censorship of the publication board.
On the literary or non-journalistic side, it is to be regretted that there is now no avenue of expression for the University students. News gatherers and humorists have opportunities but not so the writers proper. The Nebraska Literary Magazine, a quarterly, ran in 1895-96, under the encouragement of the department of rhetoric and of the English Club of the University; and, beginning in February, 1898, The Kiote, a monthly publication of the English Club, went through three or four volumes. The interest in writing that led to the publication of these magazines was, for the most part, due to the stimulus of Instructor Herbert Bates, and later to that of Professor Clark Fisher Ansley, of the department of rhetoric. Formerly there was much of a literary nature in the Sombrero. This material now
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Some of the former contributors to University publications, all members of the English Club, who have since become distinguished, are Keene Abott of Omaha; Harvey Newbranch, editor of the Omaha World-Herald; Willa Cather, the novelist; Norris Huse, who was lately called to New York City for newspaper work; H. B. Alexander: D. N. Lehmer, now of the University of California; A. S. Johnson, sociologist, novelist, and one of the editors of The New Republic; Edith Abbott of Chicago, sociologist and author; George C. Shedd, novelist; Sara Birchall, now with Vogue, author of a book of verse; Ruth Bryan Owen; Margaret Lynn, essayist and short story writer; Leonard H. Robbins, of The Newark News; Leta Stetter Hollingworth of Columbia University; J. A. Sargent, a well known engineer; Emory R. Buckner, attorney; Fred Ballard, the playwright; Louise Pound; and Edwin Ford Piper, author of a newly published book of verse entitled Barbed-Wire and Other Poems.
For faculty and graduate publications the University compares to great advantage with similar state institutions. The oldest publication, University Studies, includes studies of all kinds. It gained perhaps its greatest recognition by its publication of some of Professor C. W. Wallace's Shakespearian researches. The University Journal, a journalistic and educational bulletin, is edited by A. A. Reed, and it alternates with The Alumni Journal, edited by the alumni secretary, Miss Annis Chaiken. The publications of The Nebraska State Historical Society and of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences are issued from the campus. There are many departmental series, like Studies from the Zoological Laboratory, established by Professor H. B. Ward; Reports of the Botanical Survey of Nebraska, founded by Dr. C. E. Bessey; Reports of the Nebraska Geological Sur-
vey, edited by Professor E. H. Barbour, and the recently established Studies in Language, Literature, and Criticism, edited by Louise Pound, H. B. Alexander, and F. B. Sanford. Finally deserving of mention is The Mid-West Quarterly, established in 1913-14 during the administration of Chancellor Avery, with Professor P. H. Frye as editor. According to its prospectus it was "established by the University of Nebraska the belief that there exists in this country a quantity of excellent writing for which there is no adequate medium of publication. While exact scholarship, the discovery and verification of fact, has received any amount of encouragement and stimulation, the cultivation of general ideas, the free play of intelligence, what Matthew Arnold
would broadly call criticism, has met of late years with neglect if not with actual disfavor . . . . it is the hope of enlarging the opportunities of those who are interested in this manifestation of mental activity, irrespective of territorial limitations, which has led to the establishment of The Mid-West Quarterly." The Quarterly has contained
contributions from writers and scholars of note, and has received much commendation from savants in many parts of the United States.—————————— 
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ATHLETICS
No brief survey of the history of athletics at Nebraska can possibly seem adequate. Unrecorded history after all is much more interesting than the statistics of victories and defeats. If a composite picture could be drawn which would mirror the individual heroisms, then only could we appreciate the records which the University of Nebraska has made on the courts, diamond, track, field, and gridiron since embarking in intercollegiate contests in the late '80's and early '90's.
The students of the University confined themselves in the early days to intra-mural athletics. It has been said that if Professor G. E. Howard, who was among the first students, had matriculated at a later time he would have been one of the most famous of our all-round athletes. Though one would scarcely picture Professor Caldwell as a plunging fullback, it is well known that he was a baseball player of a great deal of ability.
FOOTBALL
Football has been the major sport since its very beginning. From a desire to beat Doane and thus win the state championship, the goal of our first football teams, we have passed to the ambition revealed in the schedule for 1919, which includes Iowa, Minnesota, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Kansas, Ames, Missouri, and Syracuse. In 1890 with the aid of the football fans from among the faculty, the first football team was organized. The great rival for 1890 and 1801 was Doane; but in 1892 gridiron warriors tackled Kansas and were defeated by the score of 12 to 10. Their only other game that season was with Iowa, which resulted in a tie. The next year a professional coach was employed in the person of an old Michigan star by the name of Crawford, who piloted Nebraska through the season without a defeat. The 1894 team was the first team which was recognized as the champion of the Missouri Valley colleges.
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From 1894 to 1900 Nebraska did not win another championship, although she was always represented by creditable teams which lost by nip and tuck battles. Following Crawford, Thomas, also of Michigan, Robinson of Brown, Yost of Lafayette, and Branch of Williams were employed as professional coaches, until the advent of "Bummy" Booth in 1900. From the beginning of his career as football coach until he left after the season of 1905, Nebraska had an unbroken string of championships of the Missouri Valley. In 1902 our opponents were held scoreless and we gained national recognition by defeating, for the first time, the strong Minnesota team. In 1903 Nebraska was again undefeated. In 1904 and 1905, though we were defeated by Western Conference schools, the Missouri Valley colleges succumbed to our attack.
Foster of Dartmouth succeeded Booth in 1906, and though the team played well, it lost to Kansas, Minnesota, and Chicago. "King" Cole of Michigan as the football mentor in 1907, won another Missouri Valley championship. In 1908 and 1909, we lost the championship to Kansas. However, in "King's" last year, 1910, we came to our own by going through the season with only a single defeat and that at the hands of Minnesota.
The preceding year the faculty representatives of the Missouri Valley Conference laid down the rule that coaches must henceforth be members of the faculty and elected for the entire year. This rule went into effect for the year 1911-12. Ewald O. Stiehm was our first all-year coach. He was the product of Wisconsin University, with several years of successful minor college coaching experience. His first football team, though falling a victim to Minnesota, made a clean sweep of the Missouri Valley and tied the University of Michigan in the last game of the season, after clearly outplaying its antagonist during the greater part of the game. In 1912 and 1913 the Cornhuskers won all games except that with Minnesota.
After a series of defeats at the hands of Minnesota since 1902, Nebraska triumphed at last in 1914, by a score of 7 to 0, on the home field in a most exciting contest. The
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Dr. E. J. Stewart became director of athletics in the fall of 1916. His first team lost the championship to Kansas, though it made a very creditable record. In 1917 another Missouri Valley championship was annexed, making a total of fifteen years of championship out of a possible twenty-seven. W. G. Kline acted as coach of the 1918 football team in the absence of Director Stewart. It was a team made up of the members of the Students' Army Training Corps, with no eligibility rules and playing only hit and miss games throughout the season. Most of the veterans of former years had gone to war and as a consequence 1918 was not a successful season, though we defeated Kansas by a good score and we can all recall the time when that was the only essential to success.
A roll call of the captains of the years reveals the names of men who perhaps during their college days were the best known men on the campus.
| 1891 | E. E. Mockett | 1898 | W. C. Melford | ||||
| 1892 | E. E. Mockett | 1899 | C. E. Williams | ||||
| 1898 | G. H. Dern | 1900 | F. H. Brew | ||||
| 1894 | E. O. Pace | 1901 | John Westover | ||||
| 1895 | W. W. Wilson | 1902 | John Westover | ||||
| 1896 | O. E. Thorpe | 1908 | J. R. Bender | ||||
| 1897 | G. C. Shedd | 1904 | M. A. Benedict | ||||
| 1905 | C. T. Borg | 1913 | L. R. Purdy | ||||
| 1906 | Glen Mason | 1914 | Victor Halligan | ||||
| 1907 | John Weller | 1915 | R. B. Rutherford | ||||
| 1908 | J. B. Harvey | 1916 | H. H. Corey | ||||
| 1909 | O. A. Beltzer | 1917 | Edson Shaw | ||||
| 1910 | John Temple | 1918 | *Ernest Hubka | ||||
| 1911 | S. V. Shonka | 1919 | Paul Dobson, Captain | ||||
| 1912 | E. E. Frank | Elect. | |||||
BASEBALL
Baseball is the oldest of Nebraska's sports. From the very beginning of the University, baseball contests were held between the various classes. An intercollegiate game with Doane in 1882 is the first outside contest recorded. Nebraska was victor by a decisive score, probably on account of the fact that Frederick Shepard now a judge of the district court a Lancaster County, had mastered the curve ball and had the opposing batsmen absolutely at his mercy.
A great many creditable teams have represented Nebraska. Especially during the late '90's and early 1900's did we have excellent baseball teams, some of whose stars were Eddie Gordon, J. R. Bender, J. M. Bell, George Fenton, Robert Carroll. The coming of Western League Baseball in 1905 brought a decline of interest. The baseball teams began to be controlled by university factions, and though they made extended trips to the East and South, baseball became a liability from the manager's point of view. No more than a handful a spectators would be on hand to witness an important battle. In 1911 the sport was abandoned.
Since that time, baseball has had several revivals but only a few games were played each season. Coach Stewart is now planning a real resurrection of baseball, to take place just as soon as conditions within the University return to *Roscoe Rhodes, Captain Elect for 1918, was killed in action in France.
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TRACK ATHLETICS
Though contests within the University had been held in track events almost since the beginning, the late '80's and early '90's record some track meets with Doane College. The first meet with Kansas was in 1897 and resulted in a victory for Nebraska. After Dr. R. G. Clapp came to Nebraska in 1902, Nebraska began to develop track stars of the first magnitude, though, as the accompanying records show, even before that time there were many notable performances. Nebraska has been first among Missouri Valley colleges in the annual conference meet but two times since its organization in 1907, but has won sixty percent of her dual meets with Kansas. She has lost only three meets in twelve years of competition with Minnesota and has divided honors with Ames. Louis R. Anderson, Nebraska's greatest miler, was a member of the last Olympic team, which represented the United States at the Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden.
A comparison of the track records of 1896-97 with those today shows the development of the sport in the last twenty-five years.
CROSS COUNTRY
Cross country running was introduced by Dr. R. G. Clapp, and for six years after the competition of our first team in 1904, Nebraska was the Cornell of the West, winning four out of six championships in competition against Minnesota, Wisconsin, Chicago, Ohio, Ames, Iowa, and other middle western schools. Because of a lack of attention, cross country running has not flourished since 1910 and it was finally abandoned in 1915. Plans are now under way for a revival.
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| EVENT | Records in 1896, 1897 | Year Made | HOLDER | Present Record | Year Made | HOLDER | |
| 100-yd dash | 10 1/2 sec. | '91, '91, '92 | L. E. Troyer, C. E. Tefft, E. A. Gerrard | 10 sec. | '98, '10, '13, '13 | R. D. Andreson, Guy E. Reed, E. B. Scott, George Irwin | |
| 220-yd. dash | 23 4-5 sec. | '94 | Hancock | 21 4-5 sec. | '11 | Guy E. Reed | |
| 440-yd. dash | 55 1-5 sec. | '95 | J. E. Shue | 50 sec. | '11 | Guy E. Reed | |
| 880-yd. run | 2 min. 10 sec. | '94 | W. Sawyer | 2 min 4-5 sec. | '10 | W. I. McGowan | |
| Mile run | 4 min. 57 1-5 s. | '94 | W. Sawyer | 4 min. 26 sec. | '11 | L. R. Anderson | |
| 2-mile run | None | 9 min. 51 sec. | '17 | Glen Graff | |||
| High hurdles | 20 1-5 sec. | '95 | C. R. Spooner | 15 3-5 sec. | '17 | L. R. Finney | |
| Low hurdles | None | 25 3-5 sec. | '09 | D. F. McDonald | |||
| High jump | 5 ft. 4 3/4 in. | '97 | W. E. Andreson | 5 ft. 11 3/4 in. | '13 | C. B. Meyers | |
| Broad jump | 19 feet | '96 | R. E. Benedict | 22 ft. 7 in. | '16 | W. W. Wiley | |
| Pole vault | 9 feet | '97 | R. E. Benedict | 11 ft. 11 3/4 in. | '13 | D. D. Reavis | |
| 16-lb. shot put | 35 ft. 6 in. | '96 | John Martz | 42 ft. 9 in | '16 | Edson Shaw | |
| 16-lb. hammer throw | 78 feet | '95 | E. F. Turner | 151 ft. 7 in. | '09 | Sidney Collins | |
| Discus throw | None | 125 ft. 6 in. | '13 | C. B. Meyers | |||
| Javelin | None | 158 feet | '17 | T. E. Riddell | |||
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TENNIS
The tennis association of the University of Nebraska was organized in 1890, with Charles D. Chandler as first president. Two courts, soon increased to three, were laid out directly west of University Hall. Later they were moved to the site of the present Law building. The first holder of the University championship was Miss Louise Pound, who was on the team which played Doane College in the early '90's. She was Nebraska's representative for two years in singles, and with Emory C. Hardy made up our team in doubles. The tennis association has had many excellent players on its membership roll. Earl E. Farnsworth, champion in 1902, became state champion in singles, and with I. M. Raymond, Jr., won the state championship in doubles. He was collegiate champion of Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska in the fall of 1903. H. V. Failor, '02, became a tri-state champion. Other men holding 'varsity firsts in singles or doubles were Arthur Scribner, Fred Wright, Ralph Cassady, '05, and C. M. Mathewson, '06. In 1905, competitions with Iowa and Minnesota were held.
The tennis teams were never under the jurisdiction of the athletic department until 1912. The association ran as an independent association and made its own engagements for dual meets. In 1909, R. E. Weaverling and Harry Smith were our representatives against Kansas. In 1911 the first Missouri Valley conference meet was held, and Nebraska was victorious. John T. Tate won first place in singles, and with M. F. Goodbody as partner, won the doubles. Guy Williams, '14, was a leading player till his graduation, and so was E. F. Meyer. Last should be mentioned Lieutenant Harry Ellis, '16, recently wounded in the Argonne in France, who beside being college champion was three times a state champion in doubles, mad Lieutenant Edward Geeson, who won the title of state champion in 1917.
In the fall of 1917 the game was abandoned at the University because of war conditions, but it will be resumed
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BASKETBALL
Basketball was introduced into the University in the winter of 1895-96 by Dr. Clark, who was at that time director of the gymnasium. In those days there were seven men on a team. The very earliest games were played with the Y. M. C. A. and other local organizations. Basketball has grown greatly in popular favor until it is now one of the most popular of the sports. Nebraska succeeded in the early years in winning most of the games played with other Missouri Valley colleges. In the early 1900's, Nebraska began to play with the Western Conference colleges and as a whole was generally on the short end of the score. Dr. Clapp became director of the gymnasium and professor of physical education in 1902. Basketball flourished under his guidance, and, though still losing to Western Conference teams, our boys made excellent records in the Missouri Valley competitions. Our small court in Grant Memorial Hall always proved a handicap, when our basketball teams journeyed to the larger courts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Chicago. After "Jumbo" Stiehm took charge of the team, we won two successive Missouri Valley championships and in 1915 gave Minnesota a double drubbing. The lack of a suitable gymnasium is alone responsible for the fact that Nebraska has not made a record in basketball as good as that made in football.
The largest High School basketball tournament in America is held under the auspices of the University of Nebraska. As many as 130 teams have competed in a single tournament. As a consequence, good material is very plentiful and as soon as a good gymnasium is supplied, we will take our rightful plane in basketball among the colleges of the middle west.
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OTHER MINOR SPORTS
Gymnastics have been maintained since the early 1900's. Our teams have been among the winners consistently, competing against all the largest colleges of the Western Conference. Wrestling was introduced in 1908 and meets with Ames and Iowa have been held in addition to the Western Conference meet. In 1916, our wrestlers succeeded in carrying off premier honors at the conference meet in Minnesota. There has not been a year in which we have not won at least one of the weights, even though our teams did not always carry off first honors.
PHYSICAL EQUIPMENT
Until 1908, the northwest corner of the old campus always served as an athletic field. It was either as hard as a pavement or was a sea of mud, and it is to be wondered how early football warriors ever survived a season. In 1908 a movement was started by the athletic board, headed by Graduate Manager Earl Eager, to acquire a block and one-half just north of the old campus, bordering on Tenth and T streets. This was acquired but was not ready for use until 1909-10, and in the meantime the Antelope baseball park was used for football and the state fair grounds track for track and field athletics. The present athletic field is as inadequate now as the old one was in 1907.
When Grant Memorial Hall was built in 1887-8 it was one of the best gymnasiums in the Missouri Valley. Though it has outlived its early reputation, some very excellent basketball and gymnastic teams have been trained within its four walls.
THE NAME "CORNHUSKER"
The name "Cornhusker" was first applied to Nebraska athletic teams by Charles S. Sherman, then the sporting editor of The Nebraska State Journal. Before that time our athletes were known as Bug-Eaters, Tree-Planters, or
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JACK BEST
No history of Nebraska athletics would be half complete without some tribute to the service of our beloved trainer, Jack Best. For almost forty years, he has been rubbing the sore spots out of stiff muscles, giving solace to discouraged candidates for athletic honors, and putting fight and the spirit of fair play into our athletes. His pleasant smile, whole-hearted sympathy, and unswerving loyalty have been the inspiration of the wearers of the Scarlet and the Cream. Jack will live in our hearts as long as there is life within us. The following couplets which are often sung on the campus nowadays will be sung by our great grandchildren.
Old Jack Best from England came Best in heart, Best in name. Always there with a hearty laugh "Don't forget to turn off the bath."
Inter-collegiate athletics have justified themselves at Nebraska. The critics say that competitive athletics develop only the few, while a proper system should develop the many. Around the Cornhusker athletes has grown that academic patriotism known as "college spirit" without which no large university can have an attractive college life. Isn't it true that a Cornhusker becomes the hero of every Nebraska boy as soon as begins to read the sporting page, and that he becomes zealous to develop his physique in order to emulate the deeds of his hero?
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THE UNIVERSITY AND THE WAR
When the call to the colors came in the great world war, the University of Nebraska "went over the top" in every form of service she might possibly render. Faculty, alumni, students, buildings, and equipment, all were at the disposal of the United States government.
Immediately upon the declaration of war more than a thousand young men withdrew for military, naval, or industrial service. And these numbers have been steadily growing with records still incomplete. The 2,300 stars upon the University service flag bear silent witness to her men, young and old, who entered camp and trench, ready if need be to die for their country. Forty-four of these stars are already known to have turned to gold, twenty-six of them among the American Expeditionary Forces. They represent privates and officers; a Lieutenant Colonel: an army chaplain; a Red Cross nurse; a physician; men killed in the thick of action; and men who gave their lives in the training camps.
Faculty as well as students joined the colors. Fifty members of faculty and administrative officers entered military service, while others were called to Washington for important services in their specialized lines. Chancellor Avery was called to Washington because of his special knowledge of chemistry and was later commissioned a major in the chemical warfare service. Dean O. V. P. Stout of the college of engineering and Dean Irving Cutter of the college of medicine were granted leaves of absence by the University when commissioned a major and captain, respectively. Major L. W. Chase of the ordnance department, engaged in responsible work in the crating of gun carriages; Major Stokes of the medical corps in the organization of Base Hospital Unit 49; Major F. M. Fling in the historical section; Major Sturdevant of the Base Hospital at Camp Cody; Major Amos Thomas of the eighty-eighth division serving overseas; Captains P. M. Buck, A. R. Davis, C. J. Frankforter, and C. W. Taylor, are but a few of the faculty members who are serving as officers.
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The department of physics was almost depleted of its faculty for a time, the head a the department and a number of his associates being called to Washington for special service. Prof. M. M. Fogg as state director for the department of public information developed a corps of four-minute men, many of them former University men, who attracted national attention because of their number and effectiveness. And even our famous football players gave up their coach, Dr. E. J. Stewart, who enlisted as a physical director under the Y. M. C. A. Other members of the faculty co-operated with the food and fuel administrators. In fact there was no member of the faculty or of the administrative force who did not lend his services in some form or another.
Not only the faculty but the entire University plant was put at the disposal of the United States government. A national army training school was opened at Nebraska in July, 1918, which with one or two exceptions, handled a larger number of soldiers than any other state institution. This was under the supervision of Prof. O. J. Ferguson, acting dean of the college of engineering, who had as his assistants a number of the faculty. And when, at the beginning of the school year, the government decided to make use of the educational institutions of the country, the University of Nebraska opened its doors to a student's army training corps which numbered 1,730 men. All this was in addition to the special war courses, including a school in radio telegraphy, which were established at the very beginning of the war.
The military department of the University furnished continually a large quota of men both from its alumni and its student body for the officers' training camps. But many men preferred to enlist as privates and to play their humble part in the great army of democratization. The fact that General Pershing, in command of the American Expeditionary Forces, was a former commandant at the University and also an alumnus drew many of his former boys to him. Six hundred of the 2,300 stars upon the service flag are known to represent men in France or other countries
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Base Hospital No. 49, now serving overseas, was organized under the auspices of the college of medicine, and is manned largely both in its officers and its privates by University men. Two University women also are in its corps. There are many Nebraska men in the medical and ambulance corps of both army and navy. Many members of the faculty of the college of medicine are serving as commissioned officers in the medical corps.
The women, too, of the University of Nebraska have contributed their share. Miss Alice Howell and Miss Blanche Grant of the faculty have gone overseas as canteen workers. An alumna, Miss Helen Sargent, gave up her life as a Red Cross nurse. Alumnae and students have furnished a large number of workers in the food conservation work, Red Cross, Y. W. C. A., canteen service, student nurses, dietitians, reconstruction workers, and other important branches of service.
Campus life itself was transformed by the war. The student body in large measure gave up their social life in order to contribute their money to war funds and their time to war work. In every war drive the University went over the top. The department of athletics alone contributed $7,000 to Red Cross. Both men and women worked in the Red Cross rooms where surgical dressings were made daily. Members of the faculty added to their already heavy schedules of class-room work when members of their department were called into service granted leaves of absence. They went out over the state freely to give lectures upon the meaning and significance of the war. They served on numerous and varied war committees.
Much more might be said of the University and its part in the war. Those who have come in contact with its faculty, alumni, and student body, know of their share. After the armistice was signed three men represented the University of Nebraska at the peace conferences at Versailles—General John J. Pershing, Major F. M. Fling, and
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THE UNIVERSITY TODAY
The fiftieth birthday of the University of Nebraska is a kind of family holiday—not quite a day of rest, as it has proved, but one of a good deal of good feeling. The external relations of the University are peculiarly happy at the moment, for its record in the war just ended has been such as to bring it the touch of pride necessary to a pleasant sense of self-satisfaction. And its internal relations are more than usually harmonious. We may be forgiven, therefore, for a little more complacency than might be appropriate at another time and outside the family, and a little more frankness of self-examination than would be palatable from outsiders.
The moment ought to be thoughtful as well as festive for the University may be felt to have come of age at its fiftieth year. It is no longer an experiment. It has gone through its time of gangling growth, has had its periods of stagnation and its spurts of expansion, and has emerged into maturity with the complete organization of the typical American university. For the typical American university is the state university. Whether it is a finer product than the endowed or the denominational school is a matter of opinion, but it has the distinction of having arisen out of the direct impulse of the people themselves, and of having expanded, college by college and department by department, in response to their immediate demand. Its support has been not the inertia of an endowment, but the appropriation moment by moment of what they have wanted to afford for that kind of thing, and its attendance has been
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The University has, indeed, repeatedly outgrown its own house. Its colleges are now spread over three campuses. The newest of these, the one for the College of Medicine, at Omaha, is on a hillside not quite at the edge of town, overlooking a broad valley and the open prairies beyond. By situation it is open to indefinite expansion. Already it has a large, well equipped hospital, a laboratory building of modern style and equipment, and another laboratory building under construction. The campus of the College of Agriculture, the Farm, is, on the whole, the pride of the institution. Its half-section of land at the outskirts of the city, with its thirty-two buildings, its well kept lawns, and its model fields, is the show place of Lincoln. Further building is in progress there also. The city campus, where more than two-thirds of the five thousand students go to their classes, is not so fortunate in its site or equipment. But though at the moment the uninitiated visitor will gain an impression of chaos from the jumble of buildings there and the diversity of architecture, yet there is a plan slowly emerging, of which the newer buildings—Bessey Hall, Chemistry Hall, the Social Science Building, and the Teachers' College High School—are the earnest, and which promises to bring the city campus into more than fair comparison with the others.
What the University has come to in the course of its minority—colleges, schools, and extra-mural activities—may best be seen in a table adapted from the regents' report to the legislature for the biennium that has brought the institution to its majority. The table is a little forbidding, but it presents an array of just those services that
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The table is worth another glance. It reveals other things besides the bare proportions of the University. Looked at reflectively it speaks of the various ambitions which animate the youth of the state and which in the end are directed back into the general life—so many engineers, so many doctors, so many trained in law, so many in agriculture or domestic economy, and so on. For the most part these numbers reflect, not the relative popularity of school or college as such, but, more largely, the general needs of the community. For choice of profession goes, by and large, with the social demand.
Another thing to be observed is the degree to which the University has developed in its technical and professional branches. More than two-thirds of the men and more than half the women students of the year 1916-17 were registered in the professional course. And it may be added that many of those not so registered were underclassmen, freshmen and sophomores, still undecided to which profession to enter, but taking meantime such courses in the general curriculum as would give them the chance to try their aptitudes.
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| REGISTRATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF STUDENTS | |||||||
| Year 1916-17 | Year 1917-18 | ||||||
| Men | Women | Total | Men | Women | Total | ||
| Graduate college | 189 | 142 | 331 | 127 | 175 | 302 | |
| Graduate school of education | 55 | 37 | 92 | 45 | 41 | 86 | |
| College of arts and sciences | 1227 | 1357 | 2584 | 895 | 1260 | 2155 | |
| Teachers' college | 51 | 391 | 442 | 19 | 397 | 416 | |
| College of engineering | 346 | ... | 346 | 251 | 1 | 252 | |
| College of agriculture | 310 | 282 | 592 | 221 | 253 | 474 | |
| College of law | 176 | 2 | 178 | 113 | 2 | 115 | |
| College of medicine | 263 | 11 | 274 | 276 | 9 | 285 | |
| College of pharmacy | 62 | 6 | 68 | 31 | 9 | 40 | |
| School of commerce | 275 | 9 | 284 | 142 | 16 | 158 | |
| School of fine arts | 8 | 125 | 133 | 16 | 110 | 126 | |
| Mechanical engineering (short course) | 15 | ... | 15 | ... | ... | 15 | |
| School of agriculture | 324 | 151 | 475 | 243 | 118 | 361 | |
| School of agriculture (short course) | 155 | 2 | 157 | 164 | 1 | 165 | |
| Nebraska school of agriculture | 75 | 86 | 161 | 55 | 86 | 141 | |
| Teachers' college high school | 98 | 189 | 287 | 132 | 308 | 440 | |
| University extension | 164 | 167 | 331 | 317 | 274 | 591 | |
| Grand total | 3793 | 2957 | 6750 | 3047 | 3060 | 6107 | |
| Deduct repeated names | 652 | 693 | 1345 | 592 | 991 | 1583 | |
| Total registration | 3141 | 2264 | 5405 | 2455 | 2069 | 4524 | |
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None the less it is observable that the only striking disproportion in the enrollment is in the case of the wholly general and non-professional College of Arts and Sciences. The figures for that college, indeed, are somewhat deceptive, for the Teachers' College and some of the schools are organized within it and demand certain deductions from its totals. Still, after all deductions are made, the numbers enrolled there are greater than those of any other division of the University, and show a persistent vitality in this oldest of all the colleges.
The problem of the arts college is today the principal problem of higher education in America and especially in the state universities of the Middle West. The keying up of the economic life and the growing disrepute of leisure have tended to put a pressure upon the student to make every moment of his training count—in almost a Prussian degree— toward his efficiency in some demonstrably useful activity. Out of this shift of emphasis there has grown a corresponding vagueness as to the exact values for which the arts college is to stand. But however much technical training may become the chief function of the state university, it can not wholly displace the pursuit of those other studies whose aim is to inform the mind broadly in the thoughts and experience of the past, and put the present into its just perspective by widening the student's outlook. How vitally this purpose clings to the prevailing idea of education is to be seen in the enrollment in those courses that have no other reason for being. And the problem of the arts college lies in the proper correlation of those studies to that end.
To return to the general condition of the University, perhaps the best survey of the range of subjects of study offered by its colleges in its fiftieth year, and of the teaching done in them, may be had in a glance at the list of its separate departments and the numbers of students registered in them in a recent typical semester.
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| DEPARTMENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY | |||||||
| Agricultural chemistry | 257 | Entomology | 96 | ||||
| Agricultural extension | 17 | European history | 177 | ||||
| Agronomy | 17 | Farm management | 84 | ||||
| American history | 369 | Fine arts | 981 | ||||
| Animal husbandry | 252 | Geography | 165 | ||||
| Animal pathology | 51 | Geology | 120 | ||||
| Astronomy and meteorology | 76 | German | 731 | ||||
| Bacteriology and pathology | 32 | Greek history and literature | 37 | ||||
| Botany | 347 | Home economics | 393 | ||||
| Chemistry | 812 | Horticulture | 115 | ||||
| Dairy husbandry | 166 | Mathematics | 651 | ||||
| Economics and commerce | 1023 | Military science | 614 | ||||
| Education | 372 | Philosophy | 444 | ||||
| Education, sciences in secondary | 37 | Physical education | 1087 | ||||
| Education, secondary | 34 | Physics | 415 | ||||
| Educational theory and practice | 313 | Physiology | 320 | ||||
| Engineering, agricultural | 228 | Plant pathology and physiology | 63 | ||||
| Engineering, civil | 155 | Political science and sociology | 655 | ||||
| Engineering, electrical | 132 | Rhetoric | 1762 | ||||
| Engineering, mechanical | 276 | Roman history and literature | 143 | ||||
| Applied mechanics | 283 | Romance languages | 790 | ||||
| English history | 141 | School administration | 33 | ||||
| English literature | 1038 | Slavonic | 88 | ||||
| Zoology, anatomy, histology | 561 | ||||||
If this glance at the condition of the University today may be taken to include a survey of the past decade under the chancellorship of Dr. Avery, another set of tables may be of interest as showing the growth of the University plant during that period. The comparison is striking.
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| Degrees granted before 1909 | 3674 | ||||||
| Degrees granted since 1909 | 4124 | ||||||
| Size of City Campus, 1909 | 11.9 acres | ||||||
| Size of City Campus, 1919 | 36 acres | ||||||
| Value of University Bldgs., 1909 | $ 685,000} | ||||||
| Value of Equipment, 1909 | $ 500,000} | $1,185,000 | |||||
| Value of University Bldgs., 1919 | $1,101,760} | ||||||
| Value of Equipment, 1919 | $1,145,000} | $2,246,760 | |||||
| VALUE OF IMPORTANT BUILDINGS ERECTED SINCE 1909—CITY CAMPUS | |||||||
| Bessey Hall | $170,000 | ||||||
| Chemistry Hall | 189,000 | ||||||
| Law Building | 92,000 | ||||||
| Boiler House | 32,000 | ||||||
| Social Science Building | 275,000 | ||||||
| Teachers' College | 140,000 | ||||||
| $898,000 | |||||||
| FARM CAMPUS | |||||||
| New Diary Building | $175,000 | ||||||
| Agricultural Engineering Hall | 165,000 | ||||||
| Plant Industry Building | 84,235 | ||||||
| Horse Barn | 33,500 | ||||||
| Boiler House and Equipment | 41,000 | ||||||
| Hog Cholera Serum Laboratory | 7,500 | ||||||
| Machine Shed | 6,275 | ||||||
| $512,510 | |||||||
| OMAHA CAMPUS | |||||||
| Laboratory Building | $104,500 | ||||||
| Hospital | 147,800 | ||||||
| New Laboratory Building | 120,000 | ||||||
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| COMPARISON OF THE VALUES OF UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS, 1909 AND 1919 | |||||||
| CITY CAMPUS | |||||||
| 1909 | 1919 | ||||||
| University Hall | $ 50,000 | $ 44,000 | |||||
| Administration Building | 34,000 | 31,000 | |||||
| Temple | 100,000 | 91,000 | |||||
| Bessey Hall | ....... | 170,000 | |||||
| Chemistry Hall | ....... | 189,000 | |||||
| Mechanical Engineering Building | 115,000 | 110,000 | |||||
| Law Building | ....... | 92,000 | |||||
| Nebraska Hall | 21,000 | 15,000 | |||||
| Brace Laboratory | 72,000 | 66,000 | |||||
| Pharmacy Building | 40,000 | 30,000 | |||||
| Library Building | 95,000 | 85,000 | |||||
| Grant Memorial Hall | 20,000 | 17,500 | |||||
| Soldiers' Memorial Hall | 28,000 | 24,000 | |||||
| Museum | 48,000 | 45,000 | |||||
| Mechanic Arts Hall | 26,000 | 24,000 | |||||
| Electrical Laboratory | 7,000 | 6,000 | |||||
| Boiler House and Equipment | 29,000 | 61,000 | |||||
| Social Science Building | ....... | 275,000 | |||||
| Teachers' College | ....... | 140,000 | |||||
| $685,000 | $1,516,000 | ||||||
| FARM CAMPUS | |||||||
| 1909 | 1919 | ||||||
| Agricultural Hall | $ 60,000 | $ 55,550 | |||||
| Women's Building | 65,000 | 59,000 | |||||
| New Diary Building | ....... | 175,000 | |||||
| Agricultural Engineering | ....... | 165,000 | |||||
| Plant Industry Building | ....... | 84,000 | |||||
| Experiment Station | 25,000 | 20,000 | |||||
| Judging Pavilion | 30,000 | 27,000 | |||||
| Veterinary Building | 12,500 | 11,000 | |||||
| Machinery Hall and Shops | 10,000 | 8,500 | |||||
| Hog Cholera Serum Laboratory | ....... | 7,500 | |||||
| Horse Barn | ....... | 33,500 | |||||
| Boiler House and Equipment | ....... | 41,000 | |||||
| Old Boiler House | 11,000 | 10,720 | |||||
| Machine Shed | ....... | 6,275 | |||||
| $213,500 | $704,280 | ||||||
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THE FUTURE
The future is always in a certain sense prophesied by the past; and this is most of all true of an institution which, having lived through a certain period of historic formation, has, as it were, settled itself in a course defined by its own conscious tradition. The University of Nebraska has reached such a stage of development. During its fifty years of history it has passed from the state of eager hope, which attended its first seasons, to a state of conscious possession, with attainments recognized and promise assured. It has ceased to be a college of the raw prairies, with breadths of empty space, expanses of future time, and the changing winds of its aspirations for its natural atmosphere; it has become a powerful university, with a world-wide name, and, in a true sense, an Alma Mater whose children are to be found in all the quarters where men dwell, there carrying her memory in their affections and preserving her spirit in their lives. Nebraska is not institutionally old, even in the sense in which the great universities of the Atlantic states are old, but she is institutionally mature, and she has a right to the throne of maturity and to the honors of a mother of learning. Which so being, she possesses an image and a character—the throned and laurelled Alma Mater—whose proper reading is her future.
The fundamental in that character, the great note to which all others ring, is hers by gift of that spirit in which she first came into being. Those ugly but dear bricks that form the old main building which, now cherishingly enclosed by finer halls, first stood so bleak and upstarting on the treeless campus, embodied no material shape merely in those early days of the seventies when hands that had but just broken the virgin sod turned to their piling. Rather, they embodied an idea and a faith, each so luminous that the halo of them still lingers about and redeems the physical ugliness. For the University was founded and the building was built out of a conception of learning and a faith
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Afterwards came the technical schools. Civilization is never of simple design; and the growing needs of a growing state—farmstead after farmstead taking form on the rolling plains, and town and city rising yearly to make firm the social structure—steadily complexified the demands for training made upon the state's great central institution. There must be physicians, lawyers, teachers, engineers, scientists, agriculturists, economists, artists,—all these and others with special preparation for the specialized needs of a civilized state; and year by year the University has been called upon to build housings and create colleges to meet the needs of expanding social life. Today the old college hall is but one unit in a maze of structures, and the old curriculum but a tracing in the rich variety announced by the annual catalogue. To not a few, who recall the fresher days, the change brings with it a pang of regret: for there was something eternally charming in that simple faith in learning, untempered by thought of vocation. Nevertheless, seen from the great vantage of a whole society, we all know that any institution of learning which
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Nebraska's past, then, is the prophecy of her future, and in it her future is to read. In a material sense it means continued years of building—which, indeed, is one of the noblest of human activities, for there is no truer index of the greatness of human civilization than is the greatness of architecture. Today most of the sciences are well housed on the several campuses, but there are still to come the housing for the library (whose free use is us life-giving respiration to the institution), the erection of a museum to preserve both the natural history treasures in which Nebraska is rich and the treasures of art which with encouragement and devotion she will yet create, the assembly hall which shall give a place for the University's formal dignities, and the dormitories which should give comfort and esprit to the crowding generations of students. All these must come in time, and with them, we may hope, broad-branched campus trees and grassy plots, remindful of scholastic revery [sic]. But inwardly and truly these can be only an outward symbol of the one genuine and lasting Spirit of the University, through which, while it lives, the University will continue to live and to grow in greatness, and which itself is neither more nor less than that love of learning and that faith in the natural devotion of Nebraska boys and girls to unselfish knowledge in which the first
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February 15, 1894.
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PERSONAL SKETCHES
ALLEN RICHARDSON BENTON
CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA 1871-1876
The first chancellor of the University of Nebraska was Allen Richardson Benton. Chancellor Benton remained at Nebraska five years, during which he equipped University Hall, planned the campus, and increased interest in the institution by speech-making tours over the state. The period of Chancellor Benton's administration was the period of the grasshopper pague [sic], of drouths, and of consequent financial depression, but he remained long enough to see the institution well launched. During its early years the University had a hard struggle for its existence. A considerable portion of the inhabitants of the state were housed in dugouts and sod houses, and yet with an unusual vision of the future, they loyally sustained the University. It was during an especially distressing year that Chancellor Benton asked the regents to take about one-third from his salary and give it to an assistant professor.
I entered the University in September, 1873, attracted to the institution by an address delivered by the Chancellor at a teachers' institute in Sarpy county in the previous winter. Chancellor Benton took a keen interest in the young people who came under his influence. According to the custom of those days the Chancellor also performed the ordinary functions of a professor and regularly taught a considerable number of classes. Bred to the ministry, yet he was for that time very broad in his sympathies and liberal in his toleration. He had a peculiar faculty of making his students feel quite at home, and many appreciated an intimate friendship with him. The number of students was not large, and the classes, especially those doing university work, as distinguished from work in the preparatory school,
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To Chancellor Benton and his occasional addresses over the state was due in no small degree the confidence of the people in the ultimate success of their University. He made them feel that the young men and women of the state were fortunate to come under his influence, and were sure to receive inspiration from contact with him.
Chancellor Benton was born in Cayuga County, New York, in 1822. His father Allen Benton, was a descendant of the Ethan Allen family in Vermont. He attended Fulton Academy, Oswego, New York, thence went to Bethany College, Virginia, now in West Virginia, where he was graduated with first honors in mathematics and languages in 1847. Following graduation, he conducted an academy in Rush county, Indiana, for six years. At the end of this time, declining a professorship of mathematics at his alma mater, Bethany, he accepted a professorship of ancient languages at Northwestern Christian University, which opened in 1855 at Indianapolis. He served there as president and professor for many years. In January, 1871, he was elected as the first chancellor of the University of Nebraska. In 1876, he returned to Northwestern Christian University, now Butler College, as professor of philosophy, and was soon elected its president. Dr. Benton resigned in 1900, and retired from educational work, having taught in academy and college for more than fifty consecutive years. He left three children, Grace Benton Dales, wife of J. Stuart Dales, the first graduate of the University of Nebraska and present secretary of the board of regents, Mattie Benton Stewart, wife of Judge W. E. Stewart of Lincoln, and Howard Benton of Indianapolis. His grandson, Benton Dales, was professor of chemistry at the University from 1903 till 1917, when he left academic work to enter commercial life.
It was my good fortune to renew my acquaintance with Chancellor Benton after he returned to Lincoln to spend
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I have know somewhat intimately all the chancellors of the University, and to each and all of them the state is indebted for a peculiar service rendered to the University, and certainly not the least of these debts it owes to chancellor A. R. Benton.
EDMUND BURKE FAIRFIELD
CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA, 1876-1882
Edmund Burke Fairfield was born in Virginia, August 7, 1821. His ancestors came from France to America in 1639, bearing the family name of Beauchamp. He was graduated from Oberlin College in 1842, and from Oberlin Theological seminary in 1845, and became pastor of the Ruggles Street Baptist Church in Boston in 1847. In 1849 he became president of Hillsdale College, Michigan, and remained there until 1870. During his residence in Michigan he was a state senator and lieutenant governor of Michigan. After an interval of five years during which he served as pastor of the First Congregational Church at Mansfield, Ohio, he returned to educational work, in 1875, as president of a Pennsylvania state normal college, and
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The administration of Chancellor Fairfield at Nebraska was a somewhat tempestuous period in the history of the University. It was characterized by a factional struggle in the faculty, accounts of which may be read in the Omaha and Lincoln papers of the day. On the one side were the head of the institution and his supporters, largely of denominational school training, and on the other side were the young and vigorous champions of non-sectarianism in the conduct of the institution and of new and liberal views in education. Those of the radical faction who were chiefly involved were three men of unusual brilliance, namely George E. Woodberry, of the department of English literature, later the noted poet and critic; Harrington Emerson of the department of foreign languages, to whom is chiefly due the nation-wide "efficiency" movement and slogan of the last decade; and George E. Church of the chair of Latin. The upshot of the factional struggle was that all four men, the chancellor and the three brilliant young professors, left the service of the institution.
After leaving Nebraska, Dr. Fairfield became pastor of the Congregational Church at Manistee, Michigan, until 1889, when he was appointed by President Harrison as United States Consul at Lyons, France. He returned from France in 1893, and made his home at Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he lectured and wrote until 1896. In 1896 he returned to preach for a few years at his old church in Mansfield, Ohio, and then retired to Oberlin, where he died, November 17, 1904, after an active and useful life of eighty-three years.
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J. IRVING MANATT
CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA 1884-1889
The American state university is a nineteenth century innovation in higher education. Some foreshadowings of it appeared much earlier. In 1619 Virginia proposed a land grant for the establishment of a university. The state of Massachusetts gave some aid to Harvard University. The constitutions of Pennsylvania and of North Carolina in 1776 provided for a secular support of state education. It was not until the legislature of Michigan in 1837 granted a charter for a university, supported and controlled by the state that the modern state university came into being. Prior to its advent higher education was in the hands of the church, through the different denominational colleges and universities. They prepared men for the ministry and the other learned professions. The new university was to be supported and controlled by the state. Its aim was not to supplant the private college, but to add to it a new element, as is shown by the fact that two classes of institutions were provided for: one modelled after the former college, to educate for the learned professions, and the other to provide instruction in the varied industries.
Other northwestern states promptly followed Michigan's example. Nebraska under the leadership of Thomas B. Cuming, territorial governor from 1854 to 1858, made numerous attempts to provide for higher education. Governor Cuming, himself a college man, in his first message urged that careful provision be made for education. During his administration twenty-five charters were granted for higher education, and others followed, none of which have survived. The state legislature on February 15th, 1869, granted a charter for the organization of our present state university and industrial college.
A safe model for the innovation did not exist. Neither the American college nor the German university fitted well into the conditions. It is in no wise strange that men brought into the faculty and chancellorship from the older
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| CHANCELLOR J. IRVING MANATT |
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Professor J. Irving Manatt was called to the chancellorship of our University January 1, 1884, at a time when the echoes of the former conflict had not entirely died away. He was born in Millersburg, Ohio, February 17, 1845. In the last year of the civil war he served as a private in the 46th Iowa regiment. He was graduated from Grinnell College in 1869, and received the A. M. degree from Brown University in 1872, and the degree of Ph. D. from Yale University in 1873 and from Leipzig in 1877. He was professor of Greek in Dennison University 1874-1876 and held the same professorship in Marietta college 1877-1884. His four years of administration here were marked by considerable unrest in the University, owing partly to the survival of former conditions, partly to his poor health, and partly to the fact that the qualifications required of a chancellor in the early eighties were of a kind for which previous experience in private colleges had not prepared him. He was primarily a great scholar and temperamentally a strong and inspiring teacher—qualities not at that time demanded of a chancellor. What was needed was a masterful man who could mould new and restless community, direct a legislature, hold all manner of interests in check, and particularly one who could harmonize a faculty of divergent ideals and contrary theories on the new education. To find the right man then was largely a matter of chance. The regents had to grope their way for twenty years. It was not until the state institutions had developed their aims and crystallized their ideals that a man was found that fitted into the conditions. From that time on the work of selection was greatly simplified.
However the early administrations should not be considered failures. A certain amount of administrative
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In his use of English Chancellor Manatt had few equals. His language was clear, chaste, strong, stripped of conscious adornment and thus adorned the most—a rare gift. His Phi Beta Kappa address delivered here in 1902 upon Our Hellenic Heritage, while readily lending itself to abstrusities, was easily comprehensible by the lay mind. His choice of words, his phrasing, and arrangement of sentences were not colored by the language of his life study, but they all stood forth in the purest English. He was
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His scholarly attainments brought Dr. Manatt a distinguished career after leaving the University. He was United States consul at Athens in 1889-1893, was called to the professorship of Greek history and literature in Brown University in 1892, was manager of the committee of the American school at Athens, a delegate to the first international congress of archaeology at Athens in 1905, member of the American Philological Association, the American Social Science Association, and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic studies. As an author he published Xenophon's Hellenica in 1888, the Mycenean Age in 1897, and Aegean Days in 1914. The last is the best known of his publications. It seems to have been a veritable labor of love, the outgrowth of his intimacy with Greece during his consulate in Athens and his three subsequent visits. The pages are full of literary and historical lore and reveal the author's thorough appreciation and understanding of Greek culture. He was a frequent contributor to reviews and magazines. His career closed as doubtless he would have wished it, in laying aside the duties of his professorship at Brown and his life at the same time, February 14, 1915.
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JAMES HULME CANFIELD
CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA 1891-1895
It is related that Themistocles once excused himself from participating in the gayety of a feast, but declared that though unable to sing a song or tune the lyre, he could take a poor and mean city and make it rich and famous. He had in mind the phenomenal prosperity of Athens after the Persian wars, and in part, at least, his boast was true; for during his lifetime and largely through his counsel the insignificant Attic town rose from her ruins to be the mistress of Greece.
So far as such results can be compassed by one man, an analogous success attended Chancellor Canfield's efforts when he set about to transform a local institution of small reputation into a great university. And the parallel between him and the Athenian statesman further holds in the untoward conditions under which this transformation was achieved. The outlook in the early '90's, when the new chancellor assumed charge, was far from roseate. The industries of the country at large were prostrate and hard times were general. In addition, Nebraska was suffering from a series of drouths; farmers were in debt; prices were low; trade languished. What chance for growth and expansion in those years of depression! Nevertheless the University did grow and expand, and so marked were the changes wrought, so great the accession of students, so enlarged the scope and reputation of the University under the leadership of Dr. Canfield that the four years of his administration truly marked the beginning of a new epoch in the history of the institution.
That he was a man of inexhaustible energy and a tire-less worker is the testimony of all who knew him. It was chiefly this dynamic quality of his mind that enabled him to surmount the difficulties of the times. He possessed in exceptional measure many of the best characteristics of a successful man of business,—prompt initiative, organizing ability, habits of order and precision, power to grasp large
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| CHANCELLOR J. H. CANFIELD |
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The career of scholar and educator had not originally been contemplated by Dr. Canfield, but a genuine interest in young people and a deep concern for their welfare,—characteristic traits of his generous nature,—plainly pointed the way he was to go. His educational ideals were such as would naturally develop from his strongly practical and active temperament. For pure scholarship and scientific attainments he had profound esteem, but he left to others prolonged research in the laboratory and the writing of learned monographs. In fact, though master of compact and trenchant English, he wrote comparatively little. It was on the spoken word that he placed his chief reliance and in countless addresses he spread abroad the gospel of sound education as a basis for sane living, never failing to present the University as the best place to attain that end. This broad-cast seeding brought abundant harvest. His ardent enthusiasm awakened in many a Nebraska boy and girl a desire for higher education, and his practical counsel often helped to clear the way to the realization of this desire. The statistics of registration are eloquent of his zeal and success. Prior to 1891 the annual enrollment in the University had never exceeded five hundred students, and was often less; four years later it exceeded fifteen hundred.
Chancellor Canfield by happy fortune came to the University just when the special problems of the time required such special talents as were his. There was particular need of buoyant optimism and glowing prophecy during
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Dr. Canfield on leaving Nebraska assumed the presidency of State University of Ohio, and he subsequently became Librarian of Columbia University. He remained to the end of his life the practical man of affairs, the keen observer of current life and tendencies, the wise and helpful counsellor to aspiring youth. His little book of advice to university students, published some years before his decease, embodies his view of education and contains much that could profit the reader, be he young or old.
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E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS
CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA 1900-1908
Among the men who have built and served the University of Nebraska, one of the most dynamic personalities was Elisha Benjamin Andrews. A man of wide and rich personal experience, he had also a breadth and depth of scholarly training, a literary productivity, a range of interest, a wealth of imagination and of humor, a devotion to duty and vision, and a genius in moving and leading men which made him an outstanding figure in the educational life of the nation.
Born at Hinsdale, New Hampshire, on January 10, 1844, he came into a family whose heads for two generations had been Baptist ministers of prominence. His brother, Charles B. Andrews, became governor of Connecticut in 1879-81. E. Benjamin began to prepare for college at the Connecticut Literary Institute. Interrupted, however, by the outbreak of the Civil War, he enlisted as a private in the First Connecticut Heavy Artillery. In two years he had risen to the rank of second lieutenant. He was wounded during the siege of Petersburg, in 1864, losing the left eye. Mustered out, he resumed his studies, graduating at Brown in 1870, and at the Newton Theological Institute in 1874.
After a year in the pastorate at Beverly, Mass., he was called to the presidency of Denison University, at Granville, Ohio, and served there until 1879. Transferring back to Newton, he was for three years professor of homiletics. In 1882 he was appointed to the chair of history and political economy in Brown University. He spent the next year in preparatory studies in Europe. In his work at Brown his reputation was quickly established. The University of Nebraska gave him the degree of LL. D. in 1884. In 1888 he went to Cornell University, returning, however, in 1889 as president of Brown.
The leadership of Dr. Andrews at Brown during the ensuing nine years gave new life and power to the institution. Attendance of undergraduate men rose from 276 to
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| CHANCELLOR E. B. ANDREWS |
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Dr. Andrews had long been a believer in bimetallism. In 1897 a committee of the trustees requested of him, "not a renunciation of these views, as honestly entertained by him, but a forbearance, out of regard to the interests of the University, to promulgate them." While he had in fact always used due discretion, he took the ground that he could not meet the understood wishes of the Corporation "without surrendering that reasonable liberty of utterance . . . in the absence of which the most ample endowment for an educational institution would have but little worth." He immediately resigned. But the Corporation had not purposed this result. At a subsequent meeting the trustees adopted an explanatory letter, declaring that "It was not in our minds to prescribe the path in which you should tread, or to administer to you any official rebuke, or to restrain your freedom of opinion or 'reasonable liberty of utterance;'" and expressing the hope that he would withdraw his resignation. President Andrews did so, and remained at Brown until, in 1898, he resigned to accept the superintendency of the Chicago public schools. He made this transfer, however, mainly to facilitate Brown's, quest of much-needed endowments.
Summoned to the chancellorship of the University of Nebraska on April 11, 1900, Dr. Andrews entered upon the functions of that office August 1. His great hearted spirit quickly dissipated any forebodings that partisan politics might conceivably at this juncture affect university management. It was recognized at once that the new leadership was clear in purpose, resolute in decision, academic in its standards, and influential in its popular appeal—a strong administration.
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At Nebraska also Chancellor Andrews' headship was a period of marked growth. The student total advanced from 2,256 to 3,611. On the faculty, with some sort of professorial rank, were 56 persons in 1900, and 390 eight years later. The total appropriations for his last biennium ($1,330,067) were nearly three times that of his first ($475,000). Even so, the supply of funds did not keep pace with his sense of the University's needs; and when the regents once added a thousand dollars to his salary, he begged that, "so long as the University is compelled to the rigid economy it now exercises," he "continue to be paid at the present rate."
Among the main decisions of Chancellor Andrews' administration were, the establishment of the Medical College, under Dean Ward; of the Teachers' College, under Dean Fordyce; the construction of the physics building, museum, administration building, the Temple, and many others; and the bringing into our faculty of such men as Professors E. A. Ross, G. E. Howard, M. M. Fogg, Roscoe Pound, H. H. Waite, H. K. Wolfe, A. S. Johnson, Hutton Webster, and H. B. Alexander.
The splendid personality of Dr. Andrews made itself widely felt through constant lecturing and public activity, as well as through steady literary production. For several years he maintained also a course in practical ethics to which the students came in throngs. Here he displayed that remarkable skill in exposition and virility in discussion, that wonderful blending of high ideals, horse sense, humor, and racy anecdote, which had earlier established his eminence as a teacher.
Compelled by ill health to lay down the chancellorship, December 31, 1908, Dr. Andrews, accompanied by Mrs. Andrews, spent some years abroad. They even went around the world in 1909-10. Later they retired to Interlachen, Florida, where his death occurred October 30, 1917. He is buried on the campus of Denison University.
A selection from the writings of Dr. Andrews, omitting many sermons and articles and minor works, yields the
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AUGUST HJALMAR EDGREN
PROFESSOR OF MODERN LANGUAGES 1885-91; ROMANCE
LANGUAGES 1893-1900.
During the half century of her existence the University of Nebraska has had a goodly share of eminent teachers and scholars in her service. From the first, good, able men were attracted by the opportunities the new state university offered. And still more was this the case when the pioneer days were passed, say in the '80's. It was in '85 that Professor Edgren came to us from the University of Lund, Sweden, to fill the chair of modern languages.
Dr. Edgren was a man of large caliber, both mentally and physically. A markedly strong yet fine-featured, intellectual face, expressive of the scholar's keen interest in the field of inquiry and research; keen, kindly eyes set under an ample, broad brow; broad-shouldered, erect, soldierly, dignified, commanding attention and respect,—thus Dr. Edgren rises before those who knew him.
Dr. Edgren had lived in America before he came to Nebraska. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War he, a lover of freedom and of freedom's cause, had asked for and obtained leave of absence from his regiment in Sweden, and had offered his services to the Union. He enlisted in the
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At the expiration of his leave of absence in October, 1863, Lieutenant Edgren returned to his native land to follow,—as he then supposed and planned,—his army career there. Nevertheless, some aspects of such a career must have irked the young lieutenant, for a few years later he again obtained leave of absence; this time to pursue his studies in France and Germany (1867-68). As a matter of fact, this absence from the army proved to be the preliminary step to his changing his entire life-work.
In 1870 Edgren returned to America to enter Cornell University, which had then been lately organized. At that date, however, he had not yet discovered his very special talent and predilection for linguistic and literary studies. At Cornell he pursued chiefly the study of physical sciences. Not until he came under the instruction and guidance of Professor Whitney of Yale (1872) was young Edgren to enter upon preparation for his real career. At that time Professor Whitney was easily the foremost linguistic scholar in America. His courses Comparative Philology, Indo-European, Sanskrit, Gothic, etc., appealed strongly to young Edgren though, confessedly, his previous lack of training along linguistic lines made great demands both upon his iron will and his rugged physical constitution. A well-earned Ph. D. degree in '74 rewarded long years of intensive application.
Soon Edgren proved by his independent researches in his chosen field how well he had laid the foundations. Now began a singularly active and long career of linguistic and literary labors—translations from his favorite authors—Longfellow and Tennyson,—from Kalisada, and other Indian classic writers, into his native Swedish or into English. His researches into Sanskrit verbal-roots involved
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| DEAN A. H. EDGREN |
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When Edgren came to Nebraska in '85, the modern languages soon became a favorite study with our student body. His classes were crowded. Graduate work was gradually being encouraged and developed. The opportunities to lay broad and deep foundations for linguistic and humanistic studies were taken full advantage of.
Nevertheless, when, in 1891, the newly opened University of Gothenburg recalled Professor Edgren to his homeland he accepted the call. He served as its first Rector Magnificus.
But some way the lure of the far West, the opportunities in new lands, were too strong for him. The spell of America's future, her comparative freedom from social conventionalities, and her young but vigorous institutions, could not be thrown off. So, once more, he turned his face towards Nebraska. This time he became head of the Romance department and, a little later, the first dean of the Graduate School (1893). No doubt Dr. Edgren would have labored and ended his days in our midst, if Sweden had not for the third time given him an urgent invitation to give her his strength and ripe scholarship.
As it was, the Nobel Institute, a Foundation created by Baron Alfred Nobel in 1900 for the purpose of giving due recognition and appropriate awards to certain lines of investigation and scholarship or other signal humanitarian service,—elected Edgren as one of its directors. There were, according to the terms of the Foundation, awards to be made in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, international peace and understanding, and, final-
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Thus passed one of our most gifted friends and colleagues. We, who gathered in the University chapel on that bleak Sunday afternoon, February 14, 1904, to recall to our minds our departed Dr. Edgren and to do honors to his memory, knew whereof we were speaking. Fitting were the words spoken, recognizing and doing homage to a rare spirit that had for many years dwelt in our midst. The University Chorus, led by Mrs. Carrie B. Raymond, rendered Newman's beautiful "Lead, Kindly Light;" Mrs. R. A. Holyoke sang Handel's "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth." Then followed some inspiring selections, read by Chancellor Andrews, and tributes by Dr. L. A. Sherman, Dr. Charles E. Bessey, Mr. Charles H. Gere and myself on "The Scholar," "The University Teacher," "The American Citizen" and "The Man," respectively.
I cannot do better, in summing up this short sketch of Dr. Edgren's personality and the place he held among us. than to quote a few sentiments from my tribute to him given on that occasion. I then said:
"It was my good fortune to learn to know Professor Edgren intimately, to learn to know and love him as a friend, to receive his hospitality, to offer him mine, to ramble over hillside and plain with him when he could be induced to tear himself away from his desk, and 'to have a talk,' as he used to express it, as we meandered along. I do not mean to say that I alone enjoyed this privilege, but merely that I always regarded this informal touching of elbows as a treat and a privilege. The giving was usually
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CHARLES EDWIN BESSEY
PROFESSOR OF BOTANY AND DEAN OF THE INDUSTRIAL
COLLEGE 1884-1915.
Professor Bessey was notified in June, 1884, that he had been elected professor of botany in the University of Nebraska. He was then at Ames College, Iowa. The selection had been made by the regents of the University without his knowledge, but he was sufficiently interested in the incident to come to Lincoln "to look the place over." During that first visit to the University he found that nothing had been done along botanical lines and he was quite naturally reluctant to have the accumulation of his fifteen years' labor at Ames to go to a new state to build up a new department from the very beginning. So he told the regents that they were not ready for him and declined the offer of the professorship. A second offer, extended in August of the same year, included the deanship of the industrial faculty or college as well as the professorship of botany. After another trip to Lincoln and a consultation with the board of regents Professor Bessey accepted the second call and his inaugural address was delivered at the University in September, 1884. He began his active class work at the University in January, 1885. His first thought was always with the work of his classes in lecture room and laboratory and except for a few brief interruptions he continued that work to the beginning of his final illness.
Much of Dr. Bessey's energy was devoted during the earlier years of his work in Nebraska to the collection of the grasses and other economic plants of the state. He made many talks on grasses, weeds, plant diseases, the methods of improving plants and the possibilities of a better agriculture. He soon became acquainted with Governor Furnas and with him organized the first series of Farmers' Institutes which were thereafter periodically enlivened by his presence. His first address to the Farmers' Alliance was in December, 1884, and to the State Historical Society in January, 1885. Then followed years of pleasant and
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| DEAN C. E. BESSEY |
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During the later years of his life Dr. Bessey was particularly delighted to observe the rapid progress that his adopted state was making along the various branches of agricultural endeavor. This was interpreted in a modest way as a result, in part at least, of the labors he bestowed in that direction in his earlier years in Nebraska. No more fitting tribute could have been rendered, nor one more gratifying to him, than was done in January, 1913, when hundreds of people representing all of the agricultural and many other activities of the state gathered in his honor and when numerous speakers helped to recall the incidents of his long period of service which was then in its twenty-ninth year.
The state of Nebraska loved Professor Bessey and he reciprocated that affection to the fullest, but that was merely one of the many directions toward which an overflowing measure of devotion and enthusiasm carried him. His broad-mindedness and the many-sidedness of his personality made him a valuable citizen of the state because his intellectual horizon was broad enough to include the great and the small affairs of the state and the nation and to stimulate the highest scientific achievement as well. That his sterling qualities were esteemed by his associates was strikingly illustrated by the great number of important offices to which he was elected, both at home and abroad. The highest scientific honor of this kind which came to him was probably the presidency of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His name occurs in the list of presidents of that famous organization along with such names as Agassiz, Gray, Dana, Torrey, Le Conte, Mendenhall, Newcombe, Remsen, and Jordan.
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Professor Bessey always took a great interest in the development and progress of the agricultural colleges and experiment stations. During the early eighties he had considerable to do in connection with the plans of the federal Department of Agriculture looking toward the establishment of state agricultural experiment stations supported in a measure by federal aid. He finally defined the duties of such experiment stations in a paragraph which was later adopted verbatim as a part of the law known as the Hatch Act. It is also of local interest that he wrote the first and second annual reports of the Nebraska Agricultural Experiment Station in 1888 and 1889.
At about that same time there was considerable agitation in the state to sell the Experimental Farm or "State Farm," but Dr. Bessey threw the full weight of his influence against that movement and after a vigorous campaign the agitation ceased and the movement was defeated.
Professor Bessey was the author of many technical and semi-popular books and papers. Besides his books and numerous technical papers he wrote much for the agricultural press and for the more or less popular audience. For considerable periods of time he was associated editorially with a number of botanical and other scientific journals. In this capacity he was often called upon to review the published work of others. He held very decided opinions as to what constitutes a review of a scientific book or paper. He felt that what the botanical world wanted was a glimpse of what such a book or paper contained rather than criticism of the bad points which h might have indicated. He very seldom wrote an adverse note. Enthusiastic in his praise of good work he was occasionally somewhat harsh in the condemnation of obviously worthless or grossly misleading material. Even this infrequent tendency was not altogether unpleasant for the victim, however, because everyone knew the kindly spirit which Professor Bessey issued even his criticisms. He always sought to temper criticism wherever possible and he seldom spoke or wrote an unkind word. He tried to do the good and the pleasant
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But Bessey was best known to Nebraskans and to those in the University as "Professor" Bessey, the vigorous enthusiastic and devoted exponent of the cause of education and the fatherly friend of the student. Except for a few hundred dried specimens, many of which indeed were poorly prepared and even incorrectly named, there was no botanical equipment in the University when he entered upon his second and last professorship in this institution. Truly, Professor Bessey was all that there was of the department of botany in the University of Nebraska in 1884. But it was not long until there were students, laboratories, library, microscopes, herbarium and other equipment abundance. As a result of his labors and the stimulus of his teaching the herbarium has grown until now there are more than 35,000 specimens in the herbarium of the Botanical Survey of Nebraska and the general collection contains more than 300,000 additional specimens which represent nearly all of the floras of the world. The botanical library has grown from nothing in the beginning to a very useful collection containing several thousand botanical books, thousands of pamphlets, and nearly all of the leading botanical periodicals of home and foreign publication in complete files. The laboratories have grown from a room or two in University Hall or in the Old Chemical Laboratory and later to several rooms in Nebraska Hall. His department was always crowded and it is especially sad that he did not live to enjoy more commodious quarters in the new building which bears his name.
Bessey's students were numbered by the thousands. One of his keenest delights was to page over the lists of former students of his department and to picture their lives and their labors, often in distant lands, all contributing of their thought and effort to the advancement of science and the
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As a teacher Professor Bessey had no superiors. His methods in the class room and laboratory were so full of boyish enthusiasm, he was so companionable, that the students were simply "infected" with the matter with which he dealt. It was the personality of the man which made his teaching such a strong factor in student life for nearly a half century. The quaint paternal cordiality, so marked during the last decade of his life, won the admiration of many students who really cared little for botany but who took his courses merely to come to know the man, or because their father or mother had had work with him and they wanted their sons and daughters to come under the same benign influence regardless of what they might learn of the wonders and beauties of plant life.
The stimulating methods of the man and the esprit de corps that were always conspicuous about his department were reflected in a particularly interesting and important form in the institution of the Botanical Seminar by a few of his advanced students in 1886. The "Sem. Bot." soon became and has always been one of the most enthusiastic and useful departmental clubs in the land. The organization was largely apart from his supervision but yet his was guiding spirit from which the members drew their enthusiasm whether that factor led them out on a dark night to attack the "Lits and Philistines" or sent them into a remote section of the state in search of some new element of the flora.
Doctor Bessey was deeply religious, as all understand who knew him best. This fact is beautifully portrayed in
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Dr. Bessey's last illness covered a period of four weeks, beginning during the last week of January and culminating in his death on the evening of February 25, 1915. Yes, he is gone, but to have met him was to honor him; to have been taught by him was a priceless privilege; to have been intimately associated with him was a benediction; to have walked with him into the fields and woods and to have received from him a glorious view of the realm of which he was master was to have been led very close to the great throbbing heart whose pulsations will never cease in the breasts of those who sat at his feet until they too shall have passed into that "other room."
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Source:
University, General
RG 00/03
Periodical: Box: 1
Folder: 3
Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska—Lincoln Libraries
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