George Edmonston Jr., former editor of Beaver Eclips and the Oregon Stater, has retired and assumed the title of History and Traditions Editor of the Oregon Stater. He is closing out his involvement with Eclips by sharing a list of the 20 historical events he considers to be the most important in school history. He'll cover one event each week.

#3 The Presidency of Benjamin Lee Arnold

The little plaque is hardly noticed anymore, even by students and faculty who have logged many steps in OSU’s oldest building. It sits high on a wall at the top of the stairwell on the second floor of Benton Hall in the southeast corner.

It's been there for over a hundred years, a bronze "thank you" to a president who served OSU from 1872 to 1892, second in longevity only to William Jasper Kerr, who held the presidency for 25 years.

Chosen to succeed OSU's first president, William Finley, by the bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church-South, Arnold, a Virginia native, was a Confederate veteran of the Civil War. He taught at several colleges in the South after his discharge from military service in 1865. A widower when he moved west, he later married one of his students, Louisiana native Minnie White.

Lacking precedents, it was his task to organize Corvallis College within the vague requirements of the Morrill Act. Limited by meager funds, he set up a cadet corps (with uniforms of Confederate gray) and began courses in agriculture. In his 20-year term, Arnold helped define the role of the land-grant college in the nation’s educational system. He also guided the school through a difficult transition from church to state control.

Arnold’s first step was to reorganize President Finley's school into a more manageable system by dividing the institution into two departments, made up of several "schools."

The "Literary Department" would contain the "schools" of ancient languages, modern languages, history and literature.

The second department, the "Scientific," would include mathematics, engineering, technology, physical science (chemistry, agriculture, biology) and moral science (ethics and logic, political and "social" science).

The fundamental academic skeleton of the modern OSU can still be seen in this primitive curricular structure.

Also under Arnold we see the beginnings of formal instruction in military tactics (later to be known as ROTC); the first residence halls for students; start-ups in engineering and home economics; the birth of the Extension Service, literary societies, a formal library, diversity within the student body; the hiring of the school’s first out-of-state faculty; and the construction of OSU’s first building at the present location, Benton Hall.

Arnold is also first to introduce athletics to the campus, although it's doubtful if competition was at the collegiate level, and there were no leagues or conferences in force at the time. Baseball came first in 1883 and football probably began on the grounds of the original campus (downtown) as early as 1888. It would be Arnold's successor, John Bloss, who would take athletics to the next step. Arnold passed away in 1892.