UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
N A V I G A T I O N D I G I T A L L I B R A R Y
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Nevins) [PAGE 368]

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346 THE UNIVERSITY AND STATE even while laying all possible emphasis upon its purely academic functions, will have more and more to increase those which extend general benefits to the State. The road of extension service is bound to broaden with great rapidity. To teach a community to look to the University for assistance in one field is to lead it, in time, to require it in many. The State, which had a population of two and a half millions when the University was founded, now numbers more than six million people. With a quarter-million farms, with a production of corn alone approaching $200,000,000 annually, it is one of the three or four most important agricultural States in the Union. The only agricultural courses of any consequence are those given at the University, the chief extension activities to which the two and a quarter-million people resident on the farms can look emanate from Urbana. But the State is also the most important manufacturing commonwealth west of the Alleghenies, producing nearly one-tenth of the manufactured products of the Union. More than a half million persons are actual wage earners in manufacturing establishments. In mining, over 60,000,000 tons of coal have been produced in a single year. The primacy of the State in railway traffic is well known. All these industries, and all the professional activities of the State, have found their reflection in courses of training at the State University, and are certain to find more direct bonds with the institution than through their absorption of its graduates. It will have to undertake new investigations for them, to increase the efficiency of the rank and file who cannot attend college, to become a center for the conventions and conferences of their leaders, and to act as their agents in communication with each other and as their inspiration in new progress.