Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Ag Building [PAGE 39]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

3. Science had not been adjusted to the elucidation of the complex problems involved. The complexity and difficulty of these problems were rarely recognized. It had been proclaimed and believed that a chemical analysis of soil would infallibly indicate what crops would succeed thereon, or what definite substance or substances must be added to make certain crops a certain success. Almost no attention had been given the biological factors. As is the case with all those partially informed the men of science were over confident. Their emphatic statements did not find support in practice, and science itself was discredited. The idea that a professor could teach agriculture was often held to be ridiculous, and there was some basis for this holding*. In a word science and practice were too far apart and each esteemed the other too little. 4. There was woeful want of understanding* in regard to what one man could and could not do. For a score of years only one department was thought of by either trustees or by professors. Each institution had filled its complement of officers with one professor of agriculture. He and his superiors thought it was his duty to develop and teach the whole subject, or rather all the subjects suggested by the name. Superficiality prevailed but no one recognised it. We see it now well enough, but through advantages not then enjoyed. We will do well if with all our helps the agricultural departments are not too open still to this criticism. 5. No one beiran to realize the unavoidable cost of agricultural education given in anything like a truly sensible way. A lecture room with a desk, some chairs or settees (not very many), a few charts and pictures hung" upon the walls,—these constituted a professor's equipment aside from the things to be found in the barn or in the fields. Is it a wonder that students were few and that enthusiasm was at a low ebb? Chemical and physical laboratories were known to need large and varied supplies of apparatus and materials, but that equivalent facilities should be furnished the teacher of agriculture no one, not even the latter surmised. v 6. Without further enumeration it may be said that the agricultural education of the first quarter of a century in our land-grant colleges was poor and halting because it was before its time. The inertia of the ages was upon i t There was no