UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 334]

Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871
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326 everywhere—other colleges in regard to their success—to see wherein we did not meet the public wants ; why it was that we had lost confidence, and why it was that we could not get students. We had this endowment; the land scrip had been given to us entire. Now what we wanted was students. We had all the material, all the apparatus that was necessary. And the consequence of the whole thing was that this committee, after a great deal of exertion, came to the conclusion that they found two things that the people seemed to need. They seemed to think that the sort of education they wanted was an accurate knowledge of the process of agriculture by actual experiment. They had tired of theories. We had been theorizing on agriculture and doing our best to give the theories in connection with it, and these gentlemen had failed to see that they were of any value. Our experiments that we did carry on—and those we had were carried on by a gentleman who is a chemist, and who is a very careful man—our experiments amounted to nothing; owing to their transient character, they elicited from nature very vague replies. The committee found out another thing: that our best farmers thought we ought to carry on a series of experiments at the college to demonstrate these points in agriculture; that there should be something practical, something that would show to the people where this money that we received did go, that they would get some direct return; that all the citizens of the State should receive benefit from this grant, and not only the boys that came there, but that men everywhere that agriculture men, who had experience in agriculture, could learn from an agricultural college; that it should not only teach boys, but it should teach men; that it should not only teach theories, but it should teach principles in agriculture that had been developed from theory by practice; that these were the things they wished. They were tired of these theories advanced in books—a multitude of which are fruitless— and men of means had experimented until they had given the matter up in disgust. Some men, too, felt that there was a necessity for these experiments being carried on at the college, because the college received money for this purpose, and that private individuals could not afford to carry on a series of experiments from which people could derive much benefit, owing to the cost of the experiment. Another thing was that they could not hope to carry them on for any great length of time, and another matter that affected them was that their farms, changing hands by the death of persons, these things might go for nothing, and nobody would profit by their experience. And so the committee reported to the Board that there seemed to be a