The Reorganization of 1861

College Hall in 1857, surrounded by tree stumps yet to be cleared.
Photo Credit: M.S.U. Archives.

The earliest years of the Michigan Agricultural College were a constant struggle for its very existence. Since the field of scientific agriculture was quite a new concept in the United States, many doubted whether it was really beneficial for the state’s young men to attend the school. The uncleared land of the experimental farm meant that for the first few years, much of the labor was spent in removing brush, pulling stumps, and digging drainage ditches, rather than actual experimentation. The state Board of Education, which had governed the College since its founding, managed it poorly, tasked with a new charge it scarcely understood and finding “the College’s problems more vexing and less congenial than those of the Normal” (i.e. the State Normal School at Ypsilanti, now Eastern Michigan University). There were political forces at work too, since the land grant that financed the school’s creation and operation was a potentially lucrative pearl that many wanted to grasp.[Kuhn, p. 62]

By 1859, four years after its founding and just two years after classes had commenced, the College was at a difficult juncture. There were three conflicting schools of thought as to its purpose, and its future. One group, led by M.A.C. President Joseph Rickelson Williams, wanted the College to continue on the path it was founded upon, that is a four-year program focused on agriculture but with a strong base of liberal and scientific education. A second group wanted to switch to a two-year program, eliminating all the liberal arts to focus solely on practical studies and turning the College into, essentially, a vocational school. And of course there was the third faction, which wanted the entire enterprise to fold, so that the land grant could be reassigned to the University at Ann Arbor.

Hon. J. R. Williams, M.A.C. President (1857–1859).
Photo Credit: Beal, p. 23.

Adding pressure to the situation, the College was in debt and seriously strapped for cash. It did not help that “the [1859] appropriation made by the Legislature for the support of the College [was] to be paid from taxes which would not be received until February or March of 1860.” This led to “the introduction of the closest economy into all the affairs of the College.” Believing that Joseph Williams’ intentions for the College were extravagant or frivolous, and under pressure from public opinion, the Board of Education forced Williams to resign his position as president.[Beal, p. 40]

With Williams out of the way, Superintendent of Public Instruction John Milton Gregory, ex officio secretary of the board, proposed to switch to a two-year program. On the surface, Gregory’s intent with this plan seemed to have been simply to drum up more interest in the school,

so that it shall be sought not by those who merely wish a general education, but by those who desire to fit themselves for practical and scientific agriculturists. It was considered that the institution was designed not merely for farmers’ sons, but for all who wished to become good and intelligent farmers.[Beal, p. 41]

But underlying Gregory’s proposal was the fact that he was a strict classicist: he believed that education in such areas as English literature, logic, ethics, and psychology were “irrelevant,” that “a liberal education was best obtained through the study of Latin and Greek.” Since the Agricultural College did not require Latin or Greek, which were not often taught in the rural high schools that prepared most of its students, in Gregory’s eyes the College was already no more than a vocational school with extraneous coursework.[Beal, p. 41. Kuhn, p. 56]

In November 1859 the board met at Lansing, and after discussion they voted to adopt the two-year plan. In response, the entire faculty immediately resigned their places, and their resignations were accepted by the board. However this was more formality than protest, because two of those professors were retained even as the faculty was reduced to a mere four positions:

• Lewis Ransom Fiske was retained as Professor of Chemistry and was elected by the faculty as President pro tempore through 1862.
• T. C. Abbot, having resigned as Professor of English Literature and History, was reappointed as Professor of Civil and Rural Engineering.
• George Thurber, a self-taught botanist with a graduate degree in chemistry from Brown University, was appointed Professor of Botany.
• Manly Miles joined the faculty as Professor of Zoology.

Courses in English, mathematics, history, philosophy, and elementary science were eliminated.[Abbot, p. 133. Kuhn, p. 55]

Lewis Ransom Fiske, Professor of Chemistry (1857–1862),
M.A.C. President pro tempore (1859–1862).
Photo Credit: M.S.U. Archives, reprinted in Beal, p. 40.

The results were immediate and nearly disastrous. Students lost confidence in the College, and at the start of the next term in February 1860, only 49 enrolled—down from 137 two years earlier. Many soon left in disillusionment, until the student body numbered just 19. “To prevent further defections, the remaining students were asked to choose between the old and new curricula; all chose the old.” What John Gregory and the Board of Education had failed to understand was that the state’s farmers, and other members of the so-called industrial classes, were not interested in simply raising better farmers; as Widder aptly phrased it, they wanted their children “to be transformed into enlightened citizens,” prepared “to act in any capacity in society which they may be called upon to occupy.”[Abbot, pp. 129, 133. State News, 1 Sep 1966, p. A6. Widder, p. 42]

Meanwhile Gregory’s micromanagement of the school budget was leading it into dire financial straits. He kept such a tight rein that the College failed to spend one fourth of its 1860 appropriation. As a result the Legislature not only took that money back, it also cut the appropriations for 1861 and 1862 to a level below the spend from 1860.[Widder, p. 40. Kuhn, p. 55]

Its coffers were empty, and so were most of its classroom seats. It seemed the pioneer land-grant institution would come to an early end. Saving the day, in stepped the Michigan State Agricultural Society, the same state-sponsored organization whose charter “to promote the improvement of agriculture and its kindred arts throughout the state” had led to the Agricultural College’s original founding act of 1855.

The society proposed to the 1861 Legislature that a new governing board be created whose primary purpose was to manage the College. This proposal quickly turned into legislation since it was backed by Joseph Williams who, after his departure from the College, had been elected to the state Senate and made president pro tempore of that body. Senator Williams made certain that the bill contained language reinstating the four-year program with its balance of liberal arts and practical and scientific agriculture. The bill also specifically declared the College President to be its chief executive officer, something the founding act had omitted which Williams felt had undermined his power to act in that position.

The Reorganization Act of 1861 was approved by Governor Austin Blair on March 15 and took immediate effect. It created the Michigan State Board of Agriculture and put it wholly in charge of the “State Agricultural College”—a name change from the long-winded but more locationally specific “Agricultural College of the State of Michigan.” The board’s first appointees were David Carpenter of Lenawee County; Justus Gage of Cass County; Philo Parsons of Wayne County; Charles Rich of Lapeer County; Hezekiah G. Wells of Kalamazoo County; and Silas A. Yerkes of Kent County.[1st AR (1862), pp. 41–50]

Dr. T. C. Abbot, M.A.C. President (1862–1884).
Photo Credit: Beal, p. 50.

It would take a few years after the Reorganization until the College could regain its footing. The first students at the school should have graduated in 1860, but thanks to the two-year scheme the school lacked any senior-level courses that year, so the seniors scattered to other schools or quit their educations entirely. The seven men of the class of 1861 were not present at graduation, having been dismissed two weeks earlier to enlist in the Union army, as the Civil War was underway. That year saw a student body only two thirds as large as that of 1858. But the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 helped to right the financial ship, and the new board’s appointment that same year of Theophilus Capen Abbot as president put the school’s helm in steady hands. With the 1869 Legislature, and its appropriation for the construction of Williams Hall, the question of closing the school was firmly answered in the negative. By the time President Abbot resigned in 1884 after twenty-two years in office the student body numbered 185, and thereafter only continued to grow.

John M. Gregory left the state of Michigan in 1867 to become the first Regent of the Illinois Industrial University, that state’s land-grant institution. During his thirteen-year tenure he “promoted the establishment of a classical liberal arts education in addition to the anticipated industrial and agricultural education.” Of course he made certain this included Latin and Greek. However, his detractors called him “a man ignorant of agricultural practice and science,” a comment the M.A.C. faculty would likely have seconded, and when he “later turned authoritarian,” it caused “a student rebellion in 1880 to force his resignation.” Nevertheless, for as poorly as he handled the Michigan Agricultural College in its early years, he seems to have given the future University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign a proper start. He was buried in a place of honor on that school’s campus.[UIUC websites 1, 2]