 |
Oregon State University Alumni Association |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|
||||||||||||||||
Carry Me Back |
||
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. #2 The Great Depression Seven months before the start of what we know as The Great Depression, Oregon created the Oregon State Board of Higher Education. The date was March 1, 1929. The new board was charged with numerous oversight responsibilities. Two of the most important were to study curricula to eliminate duplication and to reorganize the state’s six publicly-sanctioned schools into a unified system. Even without the stock market crash in October of that year, it would have been a painful process for everyone. The Depression, and the money crunch that followed, made it that much worse. There were simply not enough resources to go around to keep everyone happy and operating at full academic tilt. By March 1932, after a two-year study, the board delivered its bombshell. Degree programs were to be dropped at both the UO and OSU (known at the time as Oregon State Agricultural College or OSAC), and colleges and departments would be transferred from one institution to the other. Hard feelings between the two schools, never peachy to begin with, became thick enough to cut with a knife. Law, social sciences, fine arts, physical education, literature and languages, and commerce would be based in Eugene. Corvallis would have the sciences, home economics, agriculture, engineering, forestry and pharmacy. Lower divisions were established at both schools for the purpose of providing the rudimentary training necessary to give degree programs enough academic credibility to pass muster with accrediting agencies. Cursed at the time, these "junior" divisions did bring with them a blessing in disguise: no longer would freshmen be required to declare a major the first year. Students could now attend a full two years before making a commitment, and subjects taken at either school automatically transferred to any school within the system at full credit. Several colleges and degree programs ...among them commerce, science, and physical education ...shared administrators, as the UO and Oregon State began in many ways to operate as one giant university. At OSU, the College of Mines ceased to exist. Ditto industrial journalism. Surviving academic units had to take drastic budget cuts and completely retrench. In essence, the actions of the board served to tear apart the college OSAC President William Jasper Kerr had spent the best years of his career building to national prominence. Taking commerce away from OSAC had the effect of cutting off one of his arms. Coursework in business and commerce floated across virtually every degree program, serving as the bedrock of Kerr’s belief that a land-grant institution should, above all else, provide business, industry and agriculture with college-educated men and women well-versed in the free enterprise system and capable of making significant contributions to the economic well-being of the country. His response to board's action was to retire. He was quickly hired to serve as the state of Oregon's first chancellor of higher education. In a very real sense, the academic and research specialties enjoyed by both the UO and OSU today can be traced to the Great Depression and the changes in higher education the State Board of Higher Education mandated at that time.
|
