Missouri's Upward Reach

Six Ionic columns, cracked and ivy-covered, remind students at the Colum bia campus of the University of Missouri that they attend the oldest state university west of the Mississippi. The columns are all that remain of the university's first academic hall, opened in 1843 and destroyed by fire in 1892.

Ironically and Ionically, age was almost the only distinction that the university could claim 15 years ago. Now Missouri is making up time vigorously and fast.

Missouri's early growth was hindered first by envious legislators from other counties who refused to appropriate funds for it, later by the belief that the university was a seedbed of rebel sentiment in the Civil War. In 1907 Missouri's medical school was one of many singled out in a study by Education Critic Abraham Flexner as scandalously incompetent, and was cut back to a two-year course.

In the late 1920s, President Stratton Brooks faced a year-long student-faculty revolt, triggered by his suspension of three sociology instructors for having asked 600 students if they thought the low economic status of women had any effect upon sexual relations. By then Missouri had long been caught, as President Elmer Ellis puts it, "between Northern aspirations and Southern methods of taxation."

Tough & Folksy. The university's up ward reach began in 1954 with the promotion of Ellis, a placid history pro fessor and dean, to the presidency. He turned into a tough administrator who managed to excite his faculty even while driving it hard, yet remained folksy enough to coax money out of a rural legislature. A new four-year medical center opened in 1956, now trains 316 students, treats 10,000 hospital patients and 65,000 clinic patients a year. Ellis worked to promote a $75 million state bond issue in 1956, a third of it going to finance 17 new buildings. His energetic lobbying helped boost operating funds from $18 million to $82 million a year. In the same period, money devoted annually to university research multiplied ninefold to nearly $20 million, and enrollment tripled to 30,000 full-time students.

In addition, Missouri changed from a school that had largely served agricultural interests into a many-faceted science-conscious institution trying to meet the needs of the state's urban growth. It took over the impoverished private University of Kansas City in 1963, made it a coequal university campus with schools of dentistry, pharmacy and music. It elevated a St. Louis junior college to similar status, will convert it to a four-year curriculum this fall. Another campus in Rolla, which is about 100 miles southwest of St. Louis in the Ozarks, was created out of a school of mines and metallurgy.

This statewide system now boasts the nation's largest university nuclear reactor (10 megawatts), will offer a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering next fall, has a forward-looking Space Science Research Center exploring the possibilities of creating permanent settlements on the moon. Its pioneering school of journalism, first in the nation when founded in 1908, produces a city-wide daily newspaper and operates the only television station in Columbia. The university is looking for a topflight dean of graduate studies to direct its growing research activities--and is willing to pay $30,000 to get him.

Toward Ferment. Whether Missouri now moves into the top rank of public universities will depend largely on John Carrier Weaver, 50, vice president for academic affairs and dean of faculties at Ohio State, who will succeed Ellis next August. Son of a former speech department chairman at the University of Wisconsin, Weaver holds a Ph.D. in geography from Wisconsin and has spent most of his career in Midwestern public universities, including Minnesota, Kansas State, Nebraska and Iowa. These schools, he insists, represent "the full flowering of the public land-grant concept--education, research and service combined."

Weaver has no doubts about which of these comes first. He contends that "teaching is a university's prime reason for being" and that "what really matters in higher education is individual young people and their individual minds." A teacher's aim, he argues, is "to produce disquiet, make students question dogma. Good education doesn't produce stability. It should produce ferment." Under Weaver, the lowly undergrad is not likely to be forgotten, and the ferment is already going.

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