Second Century

One morning in 1850 the fledgling Deseret News carried the announcement that "Elder Woodruff has arrived [from the East] with two tons of school books." With Mormon Woodruff and his books, formal education came to the three-year-old settlement that was to grow into Salt Lake City.

In the same year Mormon Church President Brigham Young incorporated the University of Deseret (Mormon name for the Utah territory), to "teach all nations all useful arts and sciences" with "instruction . . . brought to the level of the laboring classes."

Sunday Best. Brigham Young, who as a Vermont farm boy got only eleven days of formal schooling in his life, had big plans for his new school. It was to be "prepared to teach more living languages classically than any other university on the face of the earth . . Facilities for acquiring intelligence from every portion of the globe will be more perfectly secured to this institution than to any other of our acquaintance. Correspondence will be kept up with persons in the service of the university living at London, Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, Copenhagen and Calcutta. Whatever is valuable in the laws and usages of nations . . . will be copiously poured into the lap of this institution."

Brigham Young did not live to see that copious pouring. The first classes of the University of Deseret were attended by 25 pioneers in a log cabin. The next year the university admitted a few shy young women clad in their Sunday best, thus became one of the first coeducational state universities in the country. But in 1852 the school had to close down from lack of funds; it did not reopen until 1867. Two years later, a scholarly non-Mormon gold prospector, Dr. John Rocky Park, became president and began to build what was to become the modern University of Utah.

Mines & Medicine. Celebrating its 100th anniversary last week, the University of Utah could forget those of Founder Young's grandiose prophecies that had not been fulfilled, take pride in its present achievements. With 10,000 students, a faculty of 500, 151 buildings dotting a 450-acre campus, it boasts first-rate schools of liberal arts, engineering, mines and medicine. Although 76% of the student body and almost 50% of the faculty are of Mormon faith, it draws students from every state and 33 foreign countries, is nondenominational in its administration.

Soft-pedaling the covered-wagon past, Physicist-President Albert Ray Olpin invited, as a principal centennial guest, fellow Physicist Dr. Lee A. DuBridge, president of CalTech, to talk on "The Crisis in Science." Among the other festivities were the world premiere of Utah-born Composer Leroy Robertson's first

Violin Concerto and a basketball game with the league-leading University of Wyoming (which Utah won, 39-30). Instead of mulling over the past 100 years, quaint and historical though they might be, President Olpin and the University of Utah seemed more interested in celebrating the beginning of the school's "second century of service."

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