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Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
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Beginning Struggle for Industrial Education 9 The commissioners sent one of their number, President Edward Hitchcock of Amherst, to Europe to investigate agricultural schools. In 1851 they had ready a voluminous report to the legislature. I t included the results of President Hitchcock's investigations together with various suggestions of their own. Among other recommendations was one that proposed the appropriation by the legislature of twenty thousand dollars for the purpose of establishing a central agricultural college with a model and experimental farm. The twenty thousand dollars of public money, however, was not to be drawn upon until a similar amount was raised by private donation. At that session the state senate passed a bill to found such an institution but when the matter came up in the house it was defeated. Thus we see that in another state the only progress that had been made by 1851 was in the awakening of the minds of the people. They had learned to accept the idea but not to grant it their money to put into bricks and men. At Harvard a professorship in the application of science to the useful arts had been established; but it did little or nothing for agricultural education, though a worthy future awaited it for it developed into a great scientific school. In Michigan the need of instruction in agriculture was recognized at an early date. The act incorporating the University of Michigan in 1837 made provision for it. But it was an act that did not function. I t proved what Jonathan B. Turner of Illinois contended a little later: that attempting to attach a department of agriculture to an educational institution of the accepted type had no chance of success. Not until the farmers of Michigan about 1847 became acutely conscious of the need of special education was anything done. It was the farmers through their societies and publications that kept the subject of agricultural education vigorously before the public. The Michigan state agricultural society was a powerful force in these early years of agitation, and two men Joseph R. Williams and J. C. Holmes, stand out as prominent in the work of establishing agricultural education. Direct and able, they were tireless in their chosen cause of bringing within |
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