Education: THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA

IT was a solemn occasion for the distinguished group of lowans who met on that day in 1847, under the oak trees just beyond the muddy main street of the pioneer Iowa City. Less than a year had passed since the state of Iowa had been admitted to the Union, but by order of the First General Assembly, the distinguished group of citizens were already looking over a site for the state university. “On that day,” reported one of them later, “we met out-of-doors in a clearing in the hazel brush . . . Before the meeting, we got down on our knees in a circle, and we asked God for the wisdom to build a university that would turn out the kind of men this Common wealth will need.” The group’s prayers were apparently answered, for when the university finally opened its doors in 1855, it began a career that even its founders could never have suspected.

Of all the nation’s public institutions, few have played a livelier role than the State University of Iowa. Sprawled over both banks of the Iowa River, it stands in the very heart of the U.S. corn belt. It deals out culture in huge, generous doses, turns out novelists, geologists and hydraulic engineers of a quality almost any campus would envy. As much as any place, S.U.I. has become a symbol of a whole region’s growing up. The nickname sometimes given it: the Athens of the West.

Clear the Yard. Like Rome, of course, Athens was not built in a day. During its first years, S.U.I.’s entire faculty consisted of three professors. Its course ran only 16 weeks, and its tuition was set at the ludicrous figure of $4. Even after it inherited the state capitol building when the government moved to Des Moines, it barely managed to scrape along. In 1858 it closed its doors for two years because of lack of funds, and in 1862 it was still facing such financial problems as authorizing the janitor to “purchase a dog at a cost not exceeding the sum of $5 to assist him in keeping the yard clear of stock.” Finally, in 1878, S.U.I, got its first regular appropriation ($20,000). After that, it slowly began to grow.

In spite of its youthful struggles, it was able to collect a strong faculty almost from the start. It was true that the can tankerous Gustavus Hinrichs of Copenhagen, dismissed as head of the School of Science because of his “hasty, angry conduct,” caused a major scandal by bombarding the legislature with pamphlets attacking the university (Corruption in the University of Darkest America, Rotten to the Core, Stop That Leak!). But S.U.I. survived. Historian Benjamin Shambaugh helped make the entire state history-conscious; Paleontologist Samuel Calvin became the ranking U.S. authority on the Pleistocene age of North America; bearded Thomas H. Macbride became the “Father of Iowa Conservation”; and Geologist Bohumil Shimek won international fame for his theory on the origin of loess (loam) fossils.

As the decades passed, colleges of law, medicine, dentistry, engineering and pharmacy began to rise along the Iowa River. Starting with the presidency of Walter A. Jessup (1916-34), S.U.I, gradually embarked on a whole new tack. Under Ed ward Mabie, the aramatic art department and University Theater started turning out such alumni as Playwright Tennessee Williams, Producer Richard (The Big Clock) Maibaum, Actor Macdonald Carey and Stage Designer Lemuel (Oklahoma!, Kiss Me, Kate) Ayers. Onto the prairie, meanwhile, came poets, novelists and painters (among them: Iowa-born Grant Wood). The university began a representative collection of modern American canvases, and its auditoriums began to echo with new music. Largely through the influence of Psychologist Carl Seashore, S.U.I, took on the arts wholesale, and with typical Midwestern hospitality proceeded to make them right at home. It was one of the first universities to hit upon the idea that a novel, poem or painting could be as worthy of an advanced degree as even the most scholarly thesis.

No Need to Worry. Today, under mild-mannered President Virgil Rancher, the university’s 8,200 students follow their pursuit of culture with the same openhandedness. Though S.U.I, must by law take in all applicants, it needs to worry very little about the quality of its students. For one thing, Iowa itself is the most literate state in the union (i.e., has the lowest percentage—3.9%—of illiterates), and those of its citizens who want only a practical education are either drained off to Iowa State College in Ames, or simply stay down on the farm. S.U.I, is thoroughly committed to the liberal arts; students who cannot make the grade are gently but firmly dropped.

Those who remain lapse only occasionally into the rambunctious sort of hoopla that plagues other state campuses. There was at least one panty raid two years ago, and now and then a crisis on the gridiron will turn the whole town upside down. But though S.U.I.’s field house is big enough for an entire indoor football field and though its football team is rapidly rising to the top of the Big Ten, the university’s interests on the whole lie elsewhere. “Unless there is a spirit of learning here,” said President Jessup, “unless there is a genuine thirst for knowledge, unless there is a hunger for education, nothing worthwhile will happen.”

Rockets to Godfrey. The sort of things that happen range from Physicist James Van Allen’s experiments with high-altitude research rockets to Psychologist Wendell Johnson’s pioneering work with stutterers, from Zoologist Harold Beam’s studies on the organization of cells to the Institute of Gerontology’s “clearing house” on the problems of old age. The medical school, with its three affiliated hospitals, is a major center for the treatment of handicapped children, rightfully boasts such names as Surgeon Arthur Steindler, Ophthalmologist Alson Braley, Heart Specialist William Bean, and Carroll Larson, authority on arthroplasty of the hip (Arthur Godfrey’s operation).

At the heart of the university’s intellectual life stands the University Library, with 375,000 volumes. But this modernistic building with its coffee-serving lounge is more than just a collection of volumes; it is also an educational tool. Instead of keeping its books buried in closed stacks, the library has them arranged on open shelves. Thus, a student in search of one particular title finds himself confronted with hundreds of others in the same field. One book therefore inevitably leads to another, until the unwary student is finally sucked into a whole mass ofreading he probably never intended.

Cooperation without Compromise. In its 14 years. Poet Paul Engle’s Writers’ Workshop has become one of the most flourishing in the U.S. It has attracted such students as Novelist Wallace Stegner, such teachers as Pulitzer Prizewinning Poet Robert Lowell. Its staff helps edit Poetry magazine and the annual O. Henry Prize Stories collection, in one year managed to turn out six published novels.* But S.U.I.’s zest for experiment seems to extend through the humanities.

Its School of Religion includes four Protestants, one Jew, one Roman Catholic, is perhaps the outstanding example of “cooperation without compromise” to be found on any state campus. “The basic idea,” says M. Willard Lampe, its first director, “is this: religion, theoretically and practically, is inseparable from education; hence it should be taught, even in a tax-supported institution . . . not indirectly or surreptitiously, but unapologetically, comprehensively, and in line with the best educational practice.”

All in all, says President Hancher, the State University of Iowa has more than lived up to the hopes of its founders who knelt that day in 1847 to pray for wisdom. It has turned out governors (Archie Alexander of the Virgin Islands), senators (Bourke Hickenlooper), scholars (Political Scientist Charles Edward Merriam), explorers (Vilhjalmur Stefansson), editors (Bruce and Beatrice Gould), and columnists (Marquis Childs); 34 of its alumni and former professors have become heads of other colleges and universities (e.g., George Stoddard, former president of the University of Illinois; H. K. Newburn. former president of the University of Oregon; T. R. McConnell, former chancellor of the University of Buffalo). But more important than its products, says Hancher, is the lesson that S.U.I, has taught—”that culture is not limited to the Eastern seaboard or to a social elite, that Iowa is no longer an isolated pioneer prairie state, but that we are in the stream of Western culture and civilization, and all that is good in it should be a part of us.”

* Delmar Jackson’s The Cut of the Axe; Rocco Fumento’s Devil by the Tail; S. Leonard Rubenstein’s World, Barbed Wire; Eugene Brown’s Trespass; Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood; and Oakley Hall’s Corpus of Joe Bailey.