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Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
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University Organizes 275 a time a teacher and an editor of an educational journal, then for three terms state superintendent of public instruction for Michigan and Was president of Kalamazoo college, a Baptist institution, when called to the regency of the new Illinois industrial university. He was a fine, virile, definite man, who knew what was in his own mind and was able to give it expression. It may be true that he had come to the task of organizing the new industrial university with a deeper reverence for the classics than was precisely necessary for that section of the corn belt. If true it was a reverence that was susceptible of modification. But Dr. Gregory had received special training and experience for his new work, of which those who have written of him apparently have been unaware or else have ignored. From 1859 to 1865 Dr. Gregory was a member of the board of education that controlled and managed the State Agricultural College of Michigan. As secretary of that board and as state superintendent he was an influential member and upon him devolved much of the labor of direction of the affairs of the college. In his first report as state superintendent of public instruction in Michigan is found an expression of his ideas of agricultural education. "No department of human industry," he said, V seems to furnish a wider field for professional education, than that of agriculture, and none more urgently demands the aid of such education." 4 He thought the project of building an agricultural college was eminently wise and farsighted and he did not consider it premature as some claimed. He had a hand in remodelling the organization and the courses of instruction of the state college for the purpose of making it "more purely a professional school, so that it shall be sought not by those who merely wish a general education, but by those who desire to fit themselves for practical and scientific agriculturists." 5 The difficulty of accomplishing these things he understood even then for he wrote: ? ? The real obstacles that have lain in the way of its (the agricultural college) success have been the immature condition of the farm, and the great difficulty of obtaining in this country men of competent scholarship, united Beport of the superintendent of public instruction, Miohigai 1859, p. 13-15. •IMcL 126. 4
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