Turner Inaugurated

With pomp unusual to West Virginia, which has very few colleges, John Roscoe Turner, last week, was inaugurated President of the University of West Virginia. He had been Dean of New York University's Washington Square College in Manhattan. From a huge commercial community, he went to a small industrial one (Morgantown). From merely purveying education (economics is his specialty), he went to set a state's educational pace.

West Virginia expects much from its land grant university. The state covers the twisted knot of Appalachian mountain ridges. Soft coal constitutes its great wealth. Its coal, petroleum and natural gas sales approximate a third of a billion dollars a year. Those minerals West Virginians want to conserve and at the same time get more money for each year's output. They expect their state university to tell them how.

The state produces more hardwood lumber than any other except Arkansas. And it has on its mountains great wealth in yellow poplar, birch, ash, oak, spruce, hemlock, walnut. They too must be wisely utilized.

In the Morgantown hills around the University is fine glass sand. The state's glass and glassware industry, with $50,000,000 production yearly, looks to the laboratories for pure research in glassmaking.

Not so seeking is the $100,000,000 iron & steel business. Pittsburgh's schools are available enough for them.

Agriculture is the preoccupation of practically all state universities, but not of West Virginia, although its corn, hay, tobacco, potatoes and fruits are worth $100,000,000 each year. Its hillbilly farmers are too difficult to reach with farming information.*

An immediate dependency upon the University is the state legislature's. The senators and representatives expect the law school professors to draft laws and even to guarantee their authority.

These leanings upon the University, President Turner knows. He was born and partially educated in the state. So, astutely he gave his inaugural address last week a utilitarian tone: "This institution is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Like an industrial agent, it is evaluated in terms of its yield. It deserves and can rightfully claim the .united support of thoughtful citizens on the ground of its educational service. . . . Build the University into the life of the state." That was a parody of Cornell's byword, where President Turner once taught: "Build yourself into Cornell."

* West Virginia's illiteracy percentage is 6.4. That is better, however, than the percentage of any southern state, except Maryland.