The Origins of Higher Education in Oregon
Russell Sadler
Commenting on the suggestion that the Legislature sell off one of its universities, a reader writes, “Why do we have two flagship institutions within 50 miles of each other and an underfunded commuter school in our largest metropolitan area?”
The answer is Harvey Scott, the editor of The Oregonian from 1865-70, then after a stint as U.S. Collector of Customs, from 1877 until his death in 1910. Scott opposed public high schools -- he called them schools for drones -- and he opposed public colleges and universities.
Scott believed the largest number of people needed no more than an eighth-grade education. An aristocracy of “natural leaders” would emerge and get further education at private colleges that offered a “classical” education. This educated elite would govern civic life. Scott believed he was a self-made man -- he came out on the Oregon Trail in 1852 with nothing -- and felt any man should succeed as he had.
Then, as now, The Oregonian was regarded as an influential newspaper -- by Portlanders, at least.
Scott’s Victorian elitism was out of step with most of the Legislature’s egalitarians who felt that private colleges were too few and too sectarian.
When the Legislature finally decided to charter a public, secular university, it had to do so over the considerable opposition of Scott’s newspaper.
Supporters of establishing Oregon public universities succeeded by simply avoiding Portland and Scott’s opposition. It proved a durable strategy.
Matthew Deady, Oregon’s first U.S. District Judge, led the effort to establish Oregon’s first public university, despite Scott’s opposition. Lawmakers eventually chose Eugene, Oregon’s other population center, where the idea of a public university was more welcome. It opened in 1873. Deady was President of the Board of Regents of the State University from 1873-93.
Oregon State University’s origins were also influenced by Portland’s preference for commerce over education.
After the South seceded at the beginning of the Civil War, Congress passed a flourish of legislation encouraging westward expansion. The Morrill Act granted states 30,000 acres of federal land for each member of their congressional delegation to be sold and the cash used to finance a state university specializing in engineering, agriculture and military science.
In the 1860s, Marion, Benton and Linn counties were the heart of Oregon agriculture. In 1868, the Legislature named a teacher training academy in Corvallis as Oregon’s land grant institution and renamed it Corvallis State Agricultural College.
Private colleges, which were the first Oregon institutions to train teachers, suffered from a high rate of financial failure. The Legislature responded by founding the state’s first public normal school in Monmouth in 1882 -- Oregon Normal School.
Those three institutions served the state until the population boom after World War I. In 1926, the Legislature created Southern Oregon Normal School in Ashland to train teachers and added Eastern Oregon Normal School in LaGrande in 1929.
Lawmakers considered it unreasonable to ask teachers who were going to practice their trade in the Rogue Valley or far Eastern Oregon to move to the Willamette Valley to get their education. Oregon’s highway system was rudimentary at best in the 1920s and trains were expensive.
World War II industrialized the American West. Thousands of veterans returned to Oregon and thousands of veterans who had served here, moved here. Oregon’s population grew 50 percent during the 1950s.
The GI bill paid for a college education for everyone who served. The enrollment crush was astonishing. The Legislature turned the normal schools in Monmouth, Ashland and LaGrande into liberal arts colleges to meet the demands of veterans.
In Portland, the crush of veterans was handled by private colleges and the Vanport Extension of the State System of Higher Education.
The Vanport Extension was wiped out by a flood in 1948 and eventually relocated in an abandoned high school in downtown Portland. It was renamed Portland State College in 1955 and authorized to offer four-year degrees.
Through the wheeling and dealing of State Sen. Don Willner, D-Portland, the Legislature grudgingly gave in to Portland’s postwar entreaties and named Portland State a university in 1969. Portland’s modern boosters finally expunged the legacy of Harvey Scott whose stubborn elitism had cost them a state university 100 years earlier.
This tale is not an argument to keep all six universities open because we always have. It is an argument for Abraham Lincoln’s dictum, “We cannot escape history.”
Each of the state’s six universities is deeply woven into the fabric of their communities. To close any one of them will tear the fabric of that community, adversely affecting the economy, property values and culture.
That is a terrible price to pay for the legislative leadership’s benign neglect of the carefully nurtured public patrimony it has inherited from the generations of Oregonians who preceded them.
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10:24 a.m.
Mar 26, '06
Russell,
You are without a doubt, my favorite blogger on Blue Oregon. Thanks for sharing your wealth of knowledge about the history of this state.
Mar 26, '06
Oregonians, Washingtonians, Portlanders, and Seattleites spend a lot of time comparing the states and cities (with a lot of baosting and bashing). At least I do with my friends and family on both sides of the Columbia.
I always bring up these questions: Imagine how Oregon, Washington, Portland and Seattle would all be different if the University of Oregon were founded in Portland, and the Unversity of Washington were founded in, let's say, Chehalis? And if Seattle didn't get it's first public four-year college (let's call it Seattle State College) until after WWII? And if the Washington equivilant of the Oregon State Board of Higher Education for years made decsions to keep SSC-SSU from growing and serving the educational needs of the greater Seattle area to protect the prestige of UDub and Wazzu? And if (as some argree the OUS system still treats PSU), it continued to do so to the present?
11:43 a.m.
Mar 26, '06
I agree, I really liked this piece. Now I understand everything a little better, including why Portland doesn't have a bigger public university.
I'd really like to see that change, as hopefully soon I'll be going back to finish up my degree (starting at Mt. Hood CC), and would likely be going to PSU.
Mar 26, '06
Great column Russell. And wasn't Harvey Scott the brother of Abigail Scott Duniway? As I recall, women did not get the right to vote in Oregon as long as Scott was in public life because he didn't believe in women voting and had the power to stop it.
6:34 p.m.
Mar 26, '06
Rusell,
My kudos also. Wasn't there some sort of deal in place to merge OSU and U of O in the early 1960s? I think I heard about this at some city club presentation on Oregon's system of higher education.
How do you feel about an OHSU/PSU merger? From the perspective of how well U Washington helps Seattle and Washington State, it seems like a smart move to me.
Mar 26, '06
Russell--I know everything in your column is true because you were present for most of it.
I do believe the ghost of Harvey Scott still haunts the editorial board of The Oregonian. How else can one explain some of their benighted editorials?
1:59 a.m.
Mar 27, '06
Not to take things off track here, Paul, but I'm sitting here imagining a lovely tram from OHSU down to PSU [rimshot]. At least the docs would have easy access to Hot Lips Pizza and the Cheerful Tortoise.
3:14 a.m.
Mar 27, '06
It amazes me how often you hear people talking about merging PSU in some fashion. It absoutely makes me sick when this happens. PSU has always been treated like a second class school, especially in comparision to OSU and U of O.
To those who advocate it, I say, HELL NO!
Why don't we talk about elminating one of the bigger schools that are heavily subsidized.
Mar 27, '06
Why don't we talk about elminating one of the bigger schools that are heavily subsidized.
Because they both have major college sports programs.
Portland needs a major university and as long as UofO and OSU are separate schools there is no chance that PSU will be given the resources to develop into a major destination campus for the nation's elite students and intellectual leaders.
That said, making OHSU part of PSU would be step in the right direction and probably attract better leadership to both institutions. As well as saving some money in administrative overhead. It might also infuse some of the entrepeneurial zeal of OSHU with a broader vision from PSU and vice versa.
But the central need of Portland's higher education institutions is a group of advocates as forceful as the alumni and sports fans are for UO and OSU.
Mar 27, '06
Scott believed the largest number of people needed no more than an eighth-grade education. An aristocracy of “natural leaders” would emerge and get further education at private colleges that offered a “classical” education. This educated elite would govern civic life.
Hmm...interesting. Thats not much different than the CIM/CAM system we have now.
Mar 27, '06
You know, I've always thought that Astoria would be a great place for a new institution of higher education. All of this talk of merging the existing institutions sure doesn't bode well for that possibility, however.
As a graduate of PSU, I'm not completely opposed to merging it with OHSU, in order to give it the distinction of having a medical school. It could be more functional than anything -- making OHSU just another school at PSU. Like there is the School of Engineering and the Urban Studies School, there would also be the Oregon Health Sciences University at PSU.
This would allow PSU to further develop its undergraduate medical-school path... and perhaps eliminate a little bit of overhead... but what else would it really accomplish?
Getting back to Astoria, might that not be a great location to start a school along the lines of the Evergreen State College? That is, a public liberal arts university, perhaps with an early admission program to allow students to enroll after completion of the 10th grade if they showed sufficient academic prowess? Though PSU and some of the other state schools already have good liberal arts programs within the larger schools, it would probably be a successful venture to start a wholly new liberal arts campus.
There I go, thinking out of the box again when most people are trying to cut, cut cut.
Mar 28, '06
Garlynn, I completely disagree. Astoria does not have the population base to support a UNIVERSITY. A community college, perhaps, but a university, no. (Does Astoria already has a community college?)
If the funds existed to adequately support higher education in this state, which we know they don't, the state desperately needs to improve PSU. PSU should be the premier university in the state. It has access to museums and libraries and concert venues like no other location in the state. It also has access to local businesses, corportations and organizations that could provide experts in multiple fields as guest lecturers and that could also offer internships. And it is in a beautiful city that will draw great academic scholars to teach and do research, thus providing a better education for PSU's students.
As for closures, EOU is a glorified high school which, as far as I can see, has little academic merit and encourages alcoholism more than scholarship. And I should know, I have a degree from that school. In fact, I am often embarassed to admit to my colleagues that my degree is, in fact, from LaGrande. Every dealing I have had with EOU has been mismanaged and truly a pain. And any student would receive a better education at a school offering more culture, diversity, opportunity, and academic rigor.
A final note -- Hmm...interesting. Thats not much different than the CIM/CAM system we have now. I'm not sure I understand what you mean, Jon. The CIM and CAM actually have the exact opposite goals behind them than Mr. Scott's sentiments on the prospect public education. Their sole purpose is to keep all students in school through grade 12. And in their execution, they end the "classical" education altogether, although I don't think that was a planned result. It is, however, my biggest complaint against them.
Mar 29, '06
I think we're neglesting to consider the changes in expectations that have occurred over time toward higher ed. That is, colleges and universities 100 years ago were assumed to be small, liberal arts institutions and were understood to cater to a very small number of college-bound students.
Nowadays we have come to think of a university as having a large research component and acting as an economic incubator for a community. We also are much more egalitarian in our assumptions about the students who would be attending, and we would expect an effective school to be able to accomodate part-time students, returning students, professionals augmenting their skills, etc.
The frustrating thing is that places like Washington and California have made those adjustments over time, and Oregon is still stuck in the old mode of thinking, operating two lovely country clubs for rich kids while the urban population is underserved. Part of that is the same old urban/rural divide we have, where downstaters seem incapable of grasping that Portland's economic health ought to be important to them too.
So yeah, as a U of O grad, I'm big on PSU. This City needs a real urban research university.
John
Mar 31, '06
John Mulvey puts his finger on the more proximate reason that UO was built in Eugene that Portland when he talks about expectations at the time, rather than primarily the opposition of a newspaper as Russell does. If you look around the country the first/flagship campuses for a state university system seldom was located in the largest commercial/population center of the state for a complex set of reasons associated with those expectations. UW is somewhat of an anomaly in that regard, and the situation of the UC system is more the result of explosive population growth in the locales hosting the schools.
With regard to the need for a research university, while I don't disagree, I think in this state and across the country we actually need to pay a lot more attention to the suggestions of the Clinton administration NSF that state universities actually need to rebalance their focus between research towards a more emphasis on teaching about what we are learning about our world in the high-quality portion of the research being doing. One only has to look at the evolution-creationism debates, and how that came about because academics have been oblivious by choice as to what was building for 30 years to undertand what the NSF is really talking about.
Right now the numbers of researchers competing for grant monies from the traditional non-military funding agencies has increased several fold. And it strains reality to claim that this trend reflects a parallel increase in the number of folks doing quality research, rather than the a trend combined with simple statistics of the baby boom that found the academic life to be attractive one.
The result of has been two far more significant trends: The first is increased funding by the military of academic research since WWII --- that is, liberal academia is actually a major part of the military-industrial complex progress that we all like to rail about. Folks who want to keep military recruiters off campus would actually have a much bigger impact on the militarism of the country if they worked one quarter as hard at just understanding and deciding what should be the proper role of military funding on campus.
The other major trend that began in earnest as baby-boomers entered academia careers has been the rise of professor-entrepreneurs. With the opportunities for so much money to be made, few are focusing on understanding how the fundamental conflicts between the legal and ethical obligations in an entrepreunerial setting conflict with the legal and ethical obligations in an academic setting --- starting with the very idea of sharing knowledge.
<h2>Unfortunately, I haven't been impressed with the discussion in Oregon or across the country amongst academics or non-academics when it comes to these realities.</h2>