Service to All

One day in 1862, Congressman Justin James Morrill of Vermont rose in the House of Representatives to propose a bill that was destined to add a whole new dimension to U.S. education. The Gover ment, said he, should grant to each state enough land to start at least one college "where the leading object shall be ... to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts." For those who questioned the practicability of such a school, Morrill had a ready answer. Out in Michigan, the first state school to teach agriculture was "in the full tide of successful experiment."

This week, at the age of 100, Michigan State University at East Lansing was still operating at full tide. As part of its year-long birthday celebration, it assembled a giant farm-machinery exposition of some $30 million worth of equipment. There were corn pickers and cotton pickers, weeders, tractors, and combines of every type. By week's end, 250,000 people, including the touring Soviet farmers, are expected to have seen the show. But more impressive than the machinery on display was Michigan State itself.

Not for Bigness Alone. Stretched over 570 acres along the Red Cedar River, the university has less than $5,000,000 to go to complete a $50 million building program, begun by President John Hannah in 1946. Along Harrison Road, a row of brick and glass dormitories costing $8,000,000 is now near completion. A $4,000,000 library and $2,500,000 housing development for married students will be finished by fall, and a $4,000,000 Animal Industries Building will go up some time next winter. All this is not done in the name of bigness alone. It is rather, says President Hannah, "a recognition of the basic philosophy of a land-grant college, which after all was the first college for the people." Michigan State's mission is nothing less than "service to all."

When M.S.U. first opened as the Michigan Agricultural College, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor was already on its way to becoming the famed institution it is today. But since the Ann Arbor school was modeled upon the universities of the East, its flavor and purpose were bound to differ from those of M.S.U. While Ann Arbor attracted such scholars as Philosopher John Dewey and Historian Andrew D. White, later president of Cornell, East Lansing's foremost teachers were men who spent as much time helping farmers as lecturing to students. William J. Beal unlocked some of the secrets of hybrid corn; Liberty Hyde Bailey began the career that was to make him one of the foremost U.S. horticulturists. Entomologist Albert Cook developed a kerosene emulsion that became a standard insecticide for Michigan fruit.

In 1885, the college recognized industrial growth by adding mechanical arts to its curriculum. In 1894, it held its first six-week course for dairymen, the starting point of its present vast Continuing Education Service. By 1901, the college had grown into such an essential contributor to the state's welfare that the legislature enacted a special tax to guarantee it up to $100,000 a year.

Peaches & Pickles. Today, Michigan State's budget is $17 million. Its student body of 15,500 makes it the ninth largest of U.S. universities. In 1944, its two-year Basic College, courses which all undergraduates must take, introduced to the campus the now widely followed idea of general education. It has first-rate schools of agriculture and veterinary medicine, less famous but flourishing schools of education, engineering, arts and science, business and public service, and graduate studies. Through all of this growth, however, M.S.U. has never abandoned the traditional role of the land-grant college.

The campus is open to all comers. Last year 45,731 men and women attended conferences and clinics at the $1,500,000 Kellogg Center for Continuing Education on such subjects as making pickles and selling coal. Some 30,000 to 40,000 usually attend M.S.U.'s annual "Farmers' Week," and 75,000 come for other special exhibitions. The university prints 1,000,000 copies of various pamphlets and bulletins a year; its home demonstrations reach some 39,000 people; its own TV station, WKAR-TV, delivers lectures and courses to thousands more. To a large extent, says President Hannah, "we concentrate on people we've never seen before."

Big already, M.S.U. expects to expand far more. The university picked as its centennial theme Lincoln's words: "It is for us the living . . . to be dedicated here to the unfinished work . . ."In the next 15 years, says Hannah, the university may double in size; its beyond-the-campus services will double, too. As M.S.U. sees it, the work of a land-grant campus, like that of a farmer, is never done.

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