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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 of reading 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.