University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana The University of Montana: Institutional Mythology and Historical Reality George M. Dennison 2017 The University of Montana: Institutional Mythology and Historical Reality George M. Dennison Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/theuniversityofmontana Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Dennison, George M., "The University of Montana: Institutional Mythology and Historical Reality" (2017). The University of Montana: Institutional Mythology and Historical Reality. 1. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/theuniversityofmontana/1 This Manuscript is brought to you for free and open access by the George M. Dennison at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in The University of Montana: Institutional Mythology and Historical Reality by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA: INSTITUTIONAL MYTHOLOGY AND HISTORICAL REALITY by George M. Dennison President and Professor Emeritus Senior Fellow The Carroll and Nancy O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West The University of Montana 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..P. 3 VOLUME I INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………………………..P. 12 CHAPTER I: THE FORMATIVE YEARS, 1893-1916..……………………………………………P. 41 CHAPTER II: LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS FOR THE FUTURE, 1916-1920………..….P. 136 CHAPTER III: THE MULTI-CAMPUS UNIVERSITY, 1921-1935…………….………………..P. 230 VOLUME II CHAPTER IV: THE INSTITUTIONAL CRISIS, WORLD WAR II, AND THE ABORTIVE EFFORT TO RE-INVENT THE MULTI-CAMPUS UNIVERSITY…….………….P. 1 CHAPTER V: MODERNIZATION AND GRADUATE EXPANSION, 1946-1972……………P. CHAPTER VI: THE UNIVERSITY OF MONTANA AND THE MONTANA UNIVERSITY SYSTEM, 1972-1995………………………………………………………………………….P. EPILOGUE: THE RESEARCH UNIVERSITY, 1995-2015……………………………………………P. GUIDE TO PRIMARY SOURCES…………………………………………………………………………………..P. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………………..P. END NOTES……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….P. INDEX……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….P. 2 PREFACE The history of The University of Montana entails much more than celebrating great leaders, reconnecting with old friends and mentors, or debunking the myths that helped to shape the campus culture and reified the intellectual ambience. It also involves more than celebrating the "Harvard in Missoula" or invoking first President John Oscar Craig's famous epigram: "The University of Montana -- It Shall Prosper."1 Institutional leaders embody the institutional persona, old friends and mentors exert a very strong appeal for universal reasons, and campus myths persist because of the human desire for explanations of developments otherwise seemingly inexplicable . As examples, most people know of the myth about The University of Montana as a "graveyard of presidents;" or the one concerning the malevolent influence of the Anaconda Copper Company; or still another detailing the consequences of a distributed higher education system rather than one consolidated university. Others, less general but still quite influential, abounded. In a real way, the University shared and shares with the state a seemingly irresistible attraction to the "commemoration of myth and not of fact," as K. Ross Toole commented.2 Because the truth is that the average Montanan, even if he is perceptive and well read, knows very little about his real heritage. He has, rather, created one for himself. He idealizes the unfortunate Thomas Francis Meagher by placing a heroic equestrian statute of him on the Capitol lawn; as Walter Prescott Webb pointed out, he makes the cowboy into a noble knight of the prairies, and makes a Titian out of Charles M. Russell. From tragedy and hardship of the era of the open range he somehow makes romance. He makes a national monument of the Big Hole battlefield and somehow ignores the 3 incompatibility in the fact that the descendants of Chief Joseph today huddle in misery on their reservations. Why have people succumbed to this emotional tendency? In that regard, Toole argued, "It is easier to ignore the past, or to deny that it has meaning for the present and the future, than to be confronted with the unclear composite in which an approximation of the truth shifts and moves in time." Be that as it may, the University community and the people of the state must eventually come to grips with a "real heritage." Persistent myths invariably exert a dynamic if always changing influence in historical development, revealing themselves in full only gradually as constituent elements of the living history identified through scholarly analysis and explication. In Requiem for a Nun, published in 1951, William Faulkner reminded us that "The past is never dead. It's not even past;" and, even earlier, in The Sound and the Fury (1929), that "A man never gets anywhere if his facts and his ledgers don't square." When I first wrote these words, the presidential campaign of 2016 brought squarely before the public the imperative for historical truth and fact checking in what has become the "post-truth" era when only personal perception counts.3 An attempt to understand and explore the interrelationships of institutional mythology and historical reality, while paying some attention to the fond memories of old and new friends, the perspectives of mentors, and the ambitions of former leaders, shaped this study of the development of The University of Montana. Along the way, some occasional excursions seek "The Road to Character," as David Brooks so elegantly put it.4 4 I The history of the University breaks naturally into seven distinct periods. The first, from 1893 to about 1916, encompassed the frontier or formative years, culminating in the dramatic act of the State Board of Education that unified the four semi-autonomous campuses into one University for a time. 5 This last development contradicted or rather finessed the voters' overwhelming rejection of consolidation of the four institutions in the 1914 election. During the second period from 1916 to about 1921, a Chancellor of the multi-campus University of Montana established the structure, policies, and procedures necessary to sustain it and tested them in operation. The third period, 1921 to 1935, focused on the emergence of a mature undergraduate university in Missoula and the sporadic if futile efforts at reform and reinvention. It ended in the chaotic disarray caused by the Great Depression and the abrupt termination of the lengthy and remarkably successful administration of Charles H. Clapp.6 The fourth, from 1935 to 1945, bracketed the most traumatic period in the University's history. The period began with the bitterly divisive tenure of George Finlay Simmons and ended with the resignation of Ernest O. Melby after a brilliant if futile effort to heal the conflict and distrust of the Simmons years, manage the impact of WW II, and rationalize Montana higher education by imposing new functional missions on the six separate and virtually autonomous campuses for the post-war world. The fifth, from 1945 when Melby resigned in frustration to 1972, marked the modernization of the campus organizational, administrative, and academic structures. During these years, the State Board of Education assigned equal status to the State University, once again named The University of Montana, and the State College, renamed Montana State University. The period witnessed the expansion of graduate education 5 generating a host of conflicts about franchises and missions and culminated in the establishment of the Montana University System under the state's new Constitution in 1972.7 The sixth, from 1972 to 1995, centered on the clarification of campus roles and missions, the balance between campus programs and budgets in view of declining state support, the maturation of shared governance on the Missoula campus, and the implementation of strategic planning for the prudent use of scarce resources.8 The period closed with the unification of the several campuses into two multi-campus Universities, The University of Montana and Montana State University, within the Montana University System in 1994. During the seventh period, from 1995 to the present, the mature research university took shape in Missoula. Harry Fritz, Emeritus Professor of History who has served the University for the better part of five decades, wrote the "Epilogue" covering this period of the University's history, including some consultation with the author. Annual expenditure of externally generated funds for research increased from less than $6 million to more than $80 million, with a corresponding increase in the number of doctoral and first professional degrees awarded in the sciences and selected professions. The undergraduate enrolment initially diversified, with an ever larger presence of nonresident students combined with a larger market share of the annual graduates from Montana high schools, followed by steep enrolment declines after 2010. Most of this study focuses on the first six distinctive periods, exploring the convoluted pathway to mature university status. Each of the periods exhibits unique characteristics, four of growth and maturation, one of laying new foundations, and one of repairing damage that threatened the very existence of the University and an abortive effort to shore up the multi-campus 6 University. At four natural break points,