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.