Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 259]

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Struggle for Location 1865-1867

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whole of the educational forces of the state. I t will agriculturize education and educationize agriculture. If we have one single Agricultural College fixed like a plant to one particular spot, it must be like West Point, essentially aristocratic. Three or four farmers' sons taken perhaps, by favoritism from each of our hundred counties would fill the institution, and thus educate only ten where the diffused plan would educate hundreds and thousands. For most of the existing colleges have academic or miscellaneous departments where a majority of the neighboring youth attend during some part of their school life. All these multitudes would therefore, hear lectures if not recite lessons in agriculture. "And then if we have but one institution and that filled with young men, why should our daughters, who had their representative by the side of Adam in the first garden ever cultivated by human hands, why should our daughters be counted out when fields and fruits and flowers are the lessons of the school? Many of our colleges are mixed, educating the sexes together, and if our State will bless this institution with Agricultural teachings, both sexes will get the benefit of it, and our State will be the mother of our daughters as well as our sons. "And why should our noble State by setting up another college and taking our text-books of botany, chemistry, geology, and mathematics (for no one supposes that new books are to be written throughout for a single Agricultural College) why should our State take our text-books and set up another college in rivalship of existing colleges, and thus become their declared rival instead of their mother and nurse? Forgetting the hundreds and hundreds of both sexes in their preparatory and academic as well as higher departments, some have sneered at our colleges as making only "doctors'! and "lawyers" and so call them professional colleges. "But supposing it were so; is that a good reason for keeping agriculture out of them? If our colleges are already monastic and professional is that a good reason for making them more so by sending our farmers to one school and everybody else to others? It seems to me this complaint, if true, should lead the eomplainers to our conclusion instead of theirs, to wit: that the