Curtis Ellison - Bicentennial Address
	
>> Hello.  I've been invited to do about oh, a little over 100 years of Miami history in 20 minutes which provides some technological challenges of its own.  So I thought I would give you an experience that's a little bit like what my students in the History of Miami course sometimes encounter when they go to the archives.  They ask a question of Dr. Schmidt down at the archives and others bring out large boxes of materials and they go - all that?  This also happens in special collections.  So I'm just going to flood you with teasers and give you a schematic overview of the answer to the question, the significance of September 17, 1885.  Now, the way a historian would present the answer to that question is probably not directly, although I can answer it directly.  It was a turning point in our history, but a historian would want to give you context so we're going to start by looking at what previous historians have called Old Miami.  You see the dates here 1809-1885.  You can bring it down just a little bit.  Yeah, can you see the screen?  Keep your eyes on the screen.  You can talk to me later.
	 Old Miami was a distinctive place.  But, it was proceeded or preceded by something else.  In this region, as you know, the Miami tribe was - can you see this map at the bottom?  I'm greatly indebted to a large number of people and I hope to have a chance to thank them.  But this map came from Bob Wicks who worked on the project.  That's a map of the Miami tribal lands.  These are the Great Lakes here.  This person here who doesn't look a whole lot like any of our Red Hawk mascots or previous mascots was Chief Brewett.  And here's Little Turtle and Mad Anthony Wayne.  Prior to the opening of Miami University the Indians were pacified, I think the natives, occupants, the white people of the day would say.  And when that occurred, what today is the - today's State of Ohio was divided up for land settlement.  This little area right here, the Symmes Purchase was assigned to this gentleman who was a judge from New Jersey John Cleves Symmes.  You can take the lights down a little bit more.  I can do this in the dark, I'm frequently speaking in the dark.  What's that?
>> (inaudible)
>> Some of these images you can't - all right.  The Northwest Territory from the Ordinance of 1787 set out that we were going to have states in this region of the country as the nation expanded to the west.  John Cleves Symmes was given the land grant charter to sell lands in this area and the provisions were that a university or an academy - not clear they really meant a higher education institution - would be created within that area.  It was hard to get to this area for white folks in this period of time.  This is the mode of travel for much of the Old Miami era.  People came out into the countryside.  The first people who came here walked or they rode small boats down what we think of as Talawanda Creek which was larger then.  Or they came on stagecoach, steamboat system or canals.  But they ended up usually steamboat, canals and then to stage.  This right here (Indicating) that's a tollgate.  Those of you who know about Tollgate Drive and the tollgates were - these were toll roads.
	 The point of this is it was a pretty isolated place.  It got to be an isolated location because Mr. Symmes kept selling off the property where the university was supposed to be located which was initially in what today is Cincinnati.  And the township, Oxford Township, that was created to support the institution, really lay partly outside of the Symmes purchase by the time it was all over.  I will spare you several lectures on how that all came about.  But we were chartered in 1809.  The town of Oxford created in 1810.  Classes did not begin at Miami until 1824.  This is the way in which the town was laid out in the style of a New England township grid with a section reserved for the university.  This is the earliest known photograph from 1858.  Can anybody see anything interesting about these buildings?  They're what?  They're white.  They are brick buildings.  These two are still standing.  This would be today's Elliot Hall and that's Stoddard.  Those days they were north and south halls but the clay - they didn't have a railroad, they didn't have any way to ship in bricks or other building materials so they made local brick from local clay with local kilns and it was a very soft clay.  That's true all through the Miami valley.  Once they put it up, they painted it.  So the university was painted many different colors of wash and whitewash from time to time.  That raises a question when did we become a red brick campus?  That will be in a later era.
	 So we had a very small school here laid out in a sort of classical format in a grid.  This is our first academic president Robert Hamilton Bishop he served from 1824-1841 and what I want you to look at in particular is the curriculum.  This is his announcement of god willing if we have enough students we'll get started with school and remember we're way out in the woods, very small number of people, a kind of remote campus because of this - the way it was sited.  But here's what people were doing.  Look on the left the qualifications to enter the freshman class - common arithmetic, common extraction of roots, two books of the Eniad and as much Greek as may be necessary to get a moderate lesson in the Greek testament - that would be to read the Bible in Greek with tolerable ease.
	 Sophomores, Pike's arithmetic, geography, the whole of Virgil and Sallust and some portions of Horace and Cicero.  And then he goes on to explain all the things that people will be doing in upcoming years and hopes they will be able to finish in four years.  In other words, it's a very heavily constructed curriculum.  The notion of pedagogy was I know what's right and you're going to learn it.  And I'm going to know that you've learned it when you tell it back to me.  So you've got a small group of guys all ages by the way.  We have knowledge of some people entering Miami University in their preteens.  Ok.  And older.  Didn't really have a graded system.  The focus was on learning these things.  This will become important shortly.
	 Another focus was religion.  The State of Ohio did not fund Miami University even though it chartered it.  It essentially turned it over to the Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church came into town.  So in addition to three buildings for the university plus a log cabin built for the president and a small scientific site, we had a growing town but it had plenty of churches.  We don't even have the - there were three Presbyterian churches in the town and others as well as depicted in this slide.  And students were expected to be involved in church life.  There were waves of evangelism that would sweep through town and students would be excused to go to evangelistic services from time to time.  This is how the town looked by 1865.  It's a little bit later but I want to give you a sense that the town grew and flourished.  This is courtesy of the Smith Library original history and Valerie Elliot who could tell you, as perhaps she has in her book, on the emergence of the town, all the different enterprises that occupied these shops.  It was a thriving place because it had to be self-sufficient more or less.  The town square was fenced then.
	 By the 1850's the place had lots of travelers coming through.  There were three hotels, the railroad came in 1859, junction house at the bottom still standing the other two are gone.  The Oxford Hotel was, I believe, on the site of Co-op Bookstore and Cone House is where we have our memorial to Wendy's.  I put in a couple of houses that are still standing David Swing was a prominent Old Miami figure and his home is today a fraternity house on Campus Avenue and the Old Manse, as you know, the home of the Department of Comparative Religion today.  What's this slide about?  Well, because it was an intellectual center and because it was a center for religion because there was a theological seminary here in addition to the university, people came and even though it was hard to get here ideas came through quite frequently in the Old Miami Era.  And ideas that were coming were about lots of issues of conflict running up to the Civil War.
	 In this town, it was often expressed as a conflict between two branches of Presbyterianism - the old school and the new school in brief although my co-editor Peter Williams would explain this much more elaborately.  In brief, old school meant very rigid interpretation of doctrine and the new school was a little more open to new ideas such as discussing the abolition of slavery.  The old school didn't think students should be discussing it.  Ok?
	 So, here's the - here's the first major conflict that emerges in the old Miami Era.  This gentleman on the left George Junkin, when he was named president after the rousting of the more liberal Bishop in 1841, pronounced that the university should be a monarchy and the president should be the head of it.  Mr. McMaster who had the pleasure of succeeding him and lived in what today is recently the home of the recent fraternity on the campus on High Street.  President McMaster was a classicist of great learning who according to Dr. Shriver did not know the names of any of his students.
	 Rigid curriculum, small place, contingency comes into play.  Lots of religious fervor.  In other words, the conditions of potential disorder were all present.  In January of 1848 Oxford had its largest recorded snowfall.  Ok.  We don't know exactly how this got started any more than we know how things got started on High Street this week, but it's a timely moment in our history to think about it because students decided that they would run or roll some snow into Old Main.  Now there had been a long series of encounters between students and administrators over a wide variety of issues prior to this event.  So they push snow into Old Main.  The temperature dropped precipitously, everything froze solid. President McMaster who was at home in the Fiji house - excuse me, it wasn't called the Fiji house. President McMaster was at home in bed with a cold.  He's already a rigid guy.  The next morning he goes into the office and the place is totally frozen shut.  What do you think his reaction was?  The Old Miami reaction, you're out of here.  Ok.  He convened tribunals and expelled almost all the students.  Ok.  Well, that didn't help matters in a tiny place that was tuition dependent and dependent on modest land rent.  And so the next person who got expelled was President McMaster.  Ok.  And his replacement was William C. Anderson and he was a new school Presbyterian, much more liberal and he proved that by he and his son in 1849 joined Phi Delta Theta fraternity.  Most historians attribute the fraternity leadership which had been secret societies opposed by Junkin and banished by the board of trustees as instigators in the snow rebellion.  By the end of this era, the three fraternities Beta Theta Pi, Phi Delta Theta and Sigma Chi had all been founded here in these sites that you can see.  And this one on the left is the Old Union Literary Society Hall and Old Main.  Phi Delta Theta founded in today's Elliot Hall and Sigma Chi in Art Attic uptown.  What's the significance of this?  Students resisted for a variety of reasons the authority of the institution and they won.  After 1849, student initiated activities, co-curricular activities outside the curriculum and outside the sanctioned co-curricular activities were allowed to become an official part of student life.  Now, this was a pattern all across the nation and I can tell you some gruesome stories about the University of North Carolina where students horse whipped the president.  But I'll spare you those stories.  This was our version of the creation of student life in the 19th century as an independent entity but an officially recognized part of the institution which here the new president said - I'm going to be a part of that.
	 Schools for women came into town shortly thereafter.  And that added an ameliorating influence to the town because most of the time in the Old Miami Era after the founding of the first women's school, there were more women students going to town in this small community of - going to college or to higher education institutions in the small town of Oxford than there were men students.  Social interactions were not what we think of today.  But then there was a short period where things were much better, less turmoil, students had organizations, women were in town, the town was thriving.  But then the run up to the Civil War came and at the time of the Civil War students organized volunteer infantry and so did faculty members.  That's Robert White McFarland on the bottom who was a professor of mathematics who got up a company in Oxford that had a large number of students in it.  And Ozra Dodge was a well known student in that day who organized the company and they went off to war.  And the university enrollment was depleted but never depleted to zero.  And, in fact, during the four years of the war university enrollment rose slightly.  After the war, however, Miami was facing a significant problem.  Curricula were changing all the country.  People were professionalizing dramatically.  Robert Stanton became president, brother-in-law of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a famous feminist.  He built a prominent home, what we think of as Bonham house, Stanton/ Bonham's presidential home.  Weren't many houses here, that was a grand mansion.  He entertained students in his home.  What he was trying to do was be nice to students.  Kind of the way the Provost - be nice to students, be flexible, let's make them happy.  He was recruiting heavily.  He gave them oyster dinners and students had extracurricular activities, there was a velocipede club, baseball was the hot sport.  There was no organized football team at Old Miami.  And they had literary activities.  The "Miami Student" was founded right after the Civil War so students began to voice their own opinions to some degree.  So independent student life is growing in this era as well as the enrollment, growing slightly.  But, by 1873, there's a financial panic.  Remember, there was no Federal Reserve.  I think this also has contemporary relevance.  Ok.  The bank - banks were failing.  I won't go into what these economic panic cycles of the 19th century were all about, you can talk to Bill Newel afterward, but in the Panic of 1873, the board cast a cool appraisal upon the institution said we don't have much enrollment, we don't have much income from the land rent, and we're paying all these faculty members.  Sound like an issue of the day?  Well, this is Andrew Hepburn, McGuffy's son-in-law who was an Old Miami faculty member.  He was the last president of Old Miami.  And notice what he did, he liberalized the curriculum.  If you read the first line of entire liberty and the choice of studies he advertised in the catalog of 1873 - there is no prescribed course of studies that is made obligatory upon all.  Any student may enter any school - at that time they organized into eight different schools.  Any school or any class in the school that his special taste, his aims in life or the wishes of his friends may lead him to prefer.  So, they capitulated to the curricular need but it didn't work.  The board said we're going to close the university to save it.  Stayed closed for twelve years 1877-1885.  A classical training school did operate on this campus during that time which was a preparatory school.  But there were no college proper classes.  Quite a number of prominent people graduated from the Miami classical and scientific training school including Luellen Bonham of Bonham house today and Boss Tweed's son from New York and a number of other prominent figures but they were not in college at Miami because the entrepreneurs running it rented the buildings.  At the end of twelve years, some prominent alumni were petitioning the board to reopen but the local merchants got up a big petition, went to the board meeting and said, hey, we're taking a bath here and we need to get this place up and running.  So the board reopened in 1885, as they had always intended to do.
	 This is a break point between Old and New Miami and I'll go through New Miami rather quickly, Jerome.  You're welcome.  This is a chart of the enrollment of the institution here from 1824-2007 and it charts all enrollment in the town.  There were four different institutions here.  You can't see this too well and I won't spend a lot of time on it but the red is women and the blue is men.  So you can see that from the founding of the women's colleges over on the left here all the way up through Old Miami, these are the women going to school in town.  The blue is the men.  Right here is the hiatus in Miami's enrollment.  Women stay in business and then men pick up.  You don't get to - you don't get to significant enrollment gains until this period here and that's what we're going to talk about right now.  This is the new Miami Era.  We've divided Miami into five eras. Following World War II there's a precipitous drop and this right here, that's the national university postwar, and this is today.  So, we see five different eras here of the way the infrastructure is played out.  And I'm talking about two of them.  Ok.  Here are a few images of New Miami and we'll be done, Jerome.
	 Here's Robert White McFarland.  He's hired back, a very businesslike guy and he sets about in an enterprising way to be rebuild the campus.  But they don't admit women yet.  Here's one thing that New Miami has that Old Miami didn't - influential alumni.  This is a railroad financier who built the nickel-plate railroad and gave the first building - Brice Scientific Hall donated by a single individual.  He was a member of the Board of Trustees.  In June of 1888 after the reopening, it's been a few years trying to get the university opened and running but there was a lot of dissension among the faculty still about the old curriculum which was still in place and had been restored.  And so the board came to the graduation ceremony for the first three graduates of New Miami and then they retired to a meeting and they fired the entire faculty and the president.  So, if you think our board is intrusive today, you should think about the past.
	 And here's who they hired - these young people in their 30's on the left were known as Ethelbert Dudley, Warfield, and the dude faculty by local wags and they modernized the faculty.  They brought the first football game in which they played out in front of Stoddard between Stoddard and Alumni Hall.  They were interacting with students.  They all went on to careers elsewhere within a few years.  They were the rudiments of a contemporary faculty member.  Then we got a campus leader, William Oxley Thompson who did such things as create a probationary period for tenure, 128 hours for graduation and recruited students and built the university but he retired to go become the first major president of the Ohio State University.  So, we're modernizing leadership and the faculty and they're beginning to build specialized campuses.  The first regular appropriation of money that President Thompson got he built a student facility.  He built a gymnasium for students - does that have a contemporary ring?  This is Brice Scientific Hall which was much more specialized instruction than had ever happened in Old Miami.
	 Here's Guy Potter Benton, prominent president of the day.  He worked with alumni and Andrew Carnegie to create the library which was for the town and for the campus.  They started campus planning.  This is the first campus plan 1904.  They had great ambition.  This is Old Main.  Elliot and Stoddard would have been torn down.  This is a neo-classic campus, not a Georgian campus, indebted to the world's fair in Chicago in 1892.  It's a wonderful picture.  We have that book, it's also on line.  This is a centennial campus that was built by 1909 as depicted by Richard Rummell.  Hall Auditorium, McGuffy Hall, what is today's McGuffy Hall, Brice Scientific Hall, Hepburn, Old Main, Elliot - Old Main here, Elliot and Stoddard and the library.  This is a very modernist view.  Shortly thereafter the town - oh, my this is a little later in the century but the town becomes much more profitable.  Here's the turning point for New Miami.  The Ohio State Normal College is founded here by the State of Ohio.  First systematic financial assistance to the institution.  It's Miami's first professional school, today the School of Education, Health and Society.  And what does it do?  Well, it brings women and - if you look at the upper right hand corner tuition was free.  Schooling had become a gendered profession and women were brought here at great numbers.  So the first large numbers of women students, first large numbers of women faculty, and in this picture you can see here's an African-American man and here's Nellie Craig, first African-American student.  I believe that's Nellie Craig.  So the campus is beginning to change.  And then the puzzling thing happens when more women come to Miami, more men come.
	 We also get the beginnings of residence life in this period.  Hepburn Hall which stood where King Library is today, named for Andrew Dousa Hepburn, staunch follower of co-education.  They brought Elizabeth Hamilton from Oxford College where she was dean to become the head of Hamilton Hall and for the next up until the end of World War II; she stayed here and helped shape the character of co-curricular life.  Here's Miss Hamilton and students riding horses on campus.  This is before the no horse rule came in.  That was replaced - my wife wanted me to say - by the no car rule in - here are some images from Rod Nimtz's collection that he has in a scrapbook.  Here's women in Hepburn sharing food.  This is the liberal arts club.  We didn't have a liberal arts college until we had a normal college.  So Hepburn became the first dean of the Liberal Arts College.  Here's the Liberal Arts Club with Miss Hamilton.  She taught Greek.  Here's some ladies out on a picnic eating bread.  This is a hayride.  So all sorts of campus interaction is beginning to develop as well as rituals.  Here's a basketball team, here's the May Day ceremony at Hepburn which lasted until 1965 when we changed the calendar and couldn't have it anymore and here's Delta Zeta Sorority.  Guy Potter Benton who believed in scholarship, patriotism, character and virility began inventing male traditions because the women were kind of inventing their own.  Football, centennial football team.
	 And here's one that students invented the flag rush.  They started by rushing the tower.  Sophomores put a flag up, the freshman were supposed to capture it.  And if it captured the flag it would show class solidarity. President Benton abolished that because they were sort of wrecking the building, hurting each other.  Created a greased pole which lasted for a while.  This went on down to 1910 but it evolved into the tug of war.  Now, you have to think about this.  This is something that was a big deal and the faculty refereed it.  Ok, so the faculty are all out there watching it.  This is a tug of war, big rope across Talawanda Creek, sophomores on one side and freshmen on the other and it's the origin of what today?  Greek Week Puddle Pull.
	 Benton believed in loyalty.  I believe in Miami University mother of mighty statesman, great preachers and useful citizens.  I believe in the faculty.  He believed in everybody.  I believe in the old dormitories - every classroom article, piece of crayon to be found in the institution.  When you see stuff like this coming from the president you know you're in a moment of great change.  And this was one of the changes - first president who was truly secular.  He grew up in Oxford, he was a chemist, he was brought back when the first New Miami physics professor died.  He rose to the presidency and he instigated and invented some university traditions.  Men's Glee Club, the artists and residents that he borrowed from western college.  In other words, they tried to create traditions to keep this place together.  But Alfred Upham is the great inventor.  If you look here this little list he had the first written history, he wrote the Alma Mater, he wrote it twice.  He invented homecoming, he invented pageants of Miami history which were performed by Miami students.  He started the first capital campaign, graduate of 1898 and served until 1945 when he died in office.  So there's a long story to be told.  We're going to quit, but if we had more time we would sing the old Alma Mater but we don't have time for a lot of stuff so I'm going to show you here.  
(Singing) Up at Oxford in Ohio stands a college old and grand, mother she of mighty statesman, noblest people in the land.  
What tune am I singing?  "Oh, My Darling Clementine."  Because Alfred Upham wrote this on a train going to Hamilton and he picked up "Oh, My Darling Clementine" because it was a pop song at Western College.  Students sang it for years.  When he came back as a faculty member later he said this is not good.  We need better words and so he wrote - rewrote better ones and then got Burt to write - Old Miami from my hillcrest thou has watched the decades roll.  See the majesty in that?  We are now a really powerful institution.  So I hope you'll all sing that at the next occasion.  And then later on we changed the words again.  By 1934, a student could draw a map of the campus that included sites of Miami traditions.  So I think the argument here is Old Miami was a place of turmoil, sort of came apart, went out of business, was a fine place, it had high standards; it had strong religious principles and convictions about learning.  New Miami is much more flexible, it's the rudiments of the institution we know today.  It created intellectual life, it created professional schools, it created a new kind of faculty and institutional leadership but most of all it created student traditions.  Thank you very much.
	


This text is being provided in a rough draft format.  Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings