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1. Introduction and OverviewJohn S. Jackson I do not think I am being over-optimistic in believing that Southern Illinois University has within it the seeds of greatness even though that greatness will be only partly of the same kind of greatness of Harvard or the rest of the Ivy League or the Big Ten or the major universities of England or the Continent. —President Delyte W. Morris, in an opening-day speech to the faculty early in his tenure, quoted in Plochmann, The Ordeal of Southern Illinois University The purpose of this book is to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the founding of Southern Illinois University (SIU). The university was chartered in 1869, and the first class started in 1874. That class consisted of thirty- five “ladies” and sixteen “gentleman” students taught by twelve faculty members (Lentz 1955, 24; Plochmann 1959, 555). The twenty-fifth anniversary was celebrated in 1899; the seventy- fifth anniversary was celebrated in 1949, and the one hundredth anniversary was celebrated in 1969. All of those anniversaries resulted in books being published in celebration of those milestones (SINU Alumni Association 1899; Lentz 1955; Sandifer 1969). Those books essentially took the history of SIU up through the era when Delyte W. Morris was president, the period of greatest growth for the university. The centennial year 1969 was near the end of the Morris era which so profoundly shaped the university and concluded in August 1970. The Morris era was the adolescent period of the school’s history and its growth and development as a university in fact as well as name. There is much to celebrate in the record of the past fifty years of SIU’s development. It is an astonishing success story in many ways. The chapters that follow will provide much detail on the growth of the university in size, scope, programs offered, degrees granted, buildings built, and national and international recognition attained. It is the narrative of a once small and struggling teachers college, which began life as little beyond a good high school of that day being transformed over decades of struggle into a modern research university prepared for the twenty-first century. To make the challenge greater, this growth and development was achieved in a predominantly rural and small-town region of the state far removed from the urban centers of power in Illinois. This book will document and extol the accomplishments of that earlier era, but the emphasis here will be on the period of 1969-2019, when the modern university matured into the form it presently takes. So it is most appropriate that at the 150th anniversary milestone, the university and the community should also pause and take stock of where we have been, celebrate all that has already been accomplished, and wrestle with the difficult questions of where the university may be going. Anniversaries are also good times to consider plans for the future, building on the past but aspirational and optimistic for the future. This book adopts the perspective of looking toward the future but keenly mindful of the past, which profoundly conditions the present. We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us and did the spade work necessary for building a realistic bridge to the future. It is a worthwhile endeavor to commemorate the founders and the many generations of faculty, students, and staff who came after and built SIU into the outstanding institution it is at the century-and-a-half marker in its long history. This is the story of the challenges encountered during this era of fully developing into a significant graduate re-search university based in a comprehensive undergraduate and professional curriculum while serving the most diverse student population in the state and situated in one of the most thinly populated and poorest sections of Illinois. The Early Years and the Defining Morris Era From a very humble beginning sprang, or better put, evolved, in fits and starts, a major comprehensive research university that still sits on the small slice of land along US 51 south of down-town Carbondale where SIU started, although it has now expanded to a main campus of 243 buildings on 1,136 acres dominating much of the southern and western reaches of the city (Institutional Research and Studies 2015). We were granted “Limited University Status” by the State Teachers College Board in 1943. This was one important landmark in the transition from a regional teachers’ prep institution to a major university. Under this new status the university was permitted to grant degrees in liberal arts and some sciences and up through the master’s degree in education. It was barred from granting degrees in agriculture, engineering, law, dentistry, medicine, and pharmacy (Lentz 1955, 99). Uncommon for that day, SIU admitted African Americans in the 1880s and 1890s, and produced many distinguished black graduates well before other universities in Illinois had desegregated, thus cementing the university’s early commitment to diversity. For example, Alexander Lane, the university’s first black male graduate, was born in slavery in Mississippi. He went on to graduate from SIU and become the principal at the forerunner to At-tucks School, on Carbondale’s northeast side, where he was a very successful educator. After several years there he moved to Chicago, where he became a prominent medical doctor and one of the earliest African American members of the Illinois General Assembly (Smoot 2012). President Morris was a champion of recruiting a diverse student body, and he was especially instrumental in attracting and keeping African American students (see Dick Gregory’s preface to Mitchell 1988). Since the beginning, inclusivity has been one of SIU’s hallmarks. Lane was just the first in a long line of minority students who came to the university, got an education, and left to achieve productive and distinguished careers in Illinois and the world. They include, at minimum, Roland Burris, former attorney general and US senator, who was the first African American to win statewide office; Bill Norwood, the first African American captain for United Airlines; Joan Higginbotham, the first African American woman astronaut; Kimberly Foxx, the first African American woman to be elected to the office of state’s attorney in Cook County; Donald McHenry, US ambassador to the United Nations; Howard Peters, the first African American director of the Illinois Department of Corrections and later executive director of the Illinois Hospital Association; Dick Gregory, comedian and civil rights activist; James Rosser, longtime president of California State University; Harvey Welch, Seymour Bryson, Harold Bardo, Norma Ewing, and Elizabeth Lewin, all distinguished educators at SIU; and four-star general Larry O. Spencer, who rose to the position of vice chief of staff of the US Air Force before he retired. Anyone even casually familiar with the his-tory of SIU knows that the era when Delyte Morris was president (1948-70) was the halcyon years, the era of great growth and expansion of the mission of the university. No history of the university can ignore that important time, when the university’s land holdings, physical plant, faculty, staff and student size, and curriculum grew to essentially what it is today. It was the crucial era when the university got its own board separate from the former state-wide Teachers College Board and its name was changed from “Southern Illinois Normal University” to Southern Illinois University. One of the first changes after Morris became president was attaining the separate governing board, which came in 1949, less than a year after he arrived on campus (Harper 1998, 95-96). That governing board guided a tumultuous era of growth during Morris’s tenure. The board’s successors presided over, sometimes actively and sometimes passively, five decades of growth and development since Morris left the presidency in August 1970. This was the era when the university’s curriculum grew from its teachers’ college foundation into a modern comprehensive university with a full complement of graduate programs at the master’s and doctoral level and with both a law school and a medical school. It grew from approximately 3,000 students to almost 25,000 students on the Carbondale campus before retrenching to the almost 14,500 students enrolled today in Carbondale and the approximately 14,000 enrolled at the Edwardsville campus, which did not exist when Morris became president. The high-water mark in our story begins with the Morris era. This was an era of great growth in both the academic programs offered and the buildings and grounds necessary to support a constantly expanding university. For example, in spite of the initial prohibition, Morris always had engineering high on his immediate agenda of new degree programs, and he got degree pro-grams in engineering approved before he left the presidency. When he left the office there were aggressive plans in place for adding both a school of law and a school of medicine, both of which were subsequently added in the mid-1970s. (See chapters 9 and 10.) During the Morris era, students poured in because of pent-up demand at the end of World War II and again after the Korean War. Veterans were funded in part by the G.I. Bill, one of the most successful governmental programs in American history. This was a period when higher education in the United States was fundamentally transformed from the predominantly elite model that existed before the war to a truly mass-based educational system that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. The number of college students enrolled nationally expanded massively by 1970. SIU was a prominent ex-ample of that growth and transformation into a university that has always celebrated its at-traction to a broad range of students. SIU was never an elite-dominant student body, and it was never segregated by race. SIU started life in the 1870s as a vehicle for teaching regional youth what was needed to make a living or enter a profession, especially in teaching. It was easy to get in, and it did not cost much, a crucial consideration for the residents of southern Illinois. Two of the definitive books on this era pro-vide the following statistical details to document the results of the growth of the Morris years: “Proof of the maturity of the Carbondale campus and the growth of Edwardsville came in 1969 graduation figures. In that year Carbondale awarded 109 PhD’s, 728 master’s degrees, 3,079 bachelor’s degrees, 364 associate degrees, and 51 advanced certificates in education. Edwardsville granted 337 master’s degrees, 989 bachelor’s degrees, 27 associate degrees, and 20 certificates” (Harper 1998, 244). “From 1948 to 1969, the budget increased from $2,700,134 to $112,186,493. Enrollment climbed from 3,316 to 35,514 (including both campuses). The number of degrees granted rose from 609 to 5,900 annually. The faculty grew from 285 to 3,645. The number of academic programs grew from 27 to 60. Research project funds went from $16,856 to $9,094,956” (Mitchell 1993, 83). By comparison, in 2016 for SIU Carbon-dale alone, the number of students was 15,378 on campus and 1,914 off campus, for a total of 17,292. The total operating revenues were $406,209,383 in 2015, and the total faculty and staff in fall 2015 was 5,057, with 1,381 holding faculty rank. Research expenditures were $47,961,689 for 2015 (Institutional Research and Studies 2015). The transition from the relatively small teacher’s college in Carbondale to a major research institution with campuses also in Edwardsville, Alton, and Springfield, and an online footprint that extends across the nation and around the world, is the backdrop for this book. The Impact of the Morris Era The present book starts at 1969-70 in the waning days of the Morris era, because that is when some of the president’s most important personal and professional decisions were made. Some of those decisions led to his replacement in the presidency and produced precedents and conflicts that are still important influences on the university and its personnel today. The building of the Stone Center house, especially the way it was financed; the opening of the Vietnam Studies Center; the subsequent demonstrations on campus and then the riots that broke out and resulted in the university’s closing temporarily on May 12, 1970; the resulting backlash from some state officials and the loss of rapport with the southern Illinois area: all have profound implications for the position of the university in the state and the region even today. One of the book’s themes is that the university’s identity as a major comprehensive university was essentially set by 1969-70, when the Morris era came to a conclusion. The challenge SIU then faced was to make the transition to a major research university in fact as well as in name while at the same time maintaining its original identity as a fine undergraduate institution where a deep commitment to successful teaching and learning was guaranteed to a student body that was the most diverse demographically and academically of the twelve state universities in Illinois. The challenge of being a major research university as well as a university of ”second chance” for its under-prepared white and minority students alike has remained an unresolved and divisive issue among and between faculty, staff, and various administrations. Ideally those two fundamental identities and institutional missions can exist together, complement each other, and with the best synergistic effect strengthen the whole university and region; however, they also necessarily entail some trade-offs and inherent tensions and conflicts that must be negotiated and which produce challenges that are still with us. Building a modern comprehensive research university in a rural and small-city setting in a section of the state that not only is remote from the centers of political and economic power but also has suffered from declines in population, jobs, and political clout is even more challenging than it would have been if SIU were located in a more populous and prosperous part of Illinois. The tensions between educating and serving the region, while expanding the mission to educating and serving the entire state, the nation, and the world were embedded in President Morris’s vision and ambitious plans. He probably thought he could have it all, and given the era of rapid growth he presided over, the divisions and conflicts could largely be papered over and subsumed under his ambitious growth agenda and paid for by state and federal funds that were steadily expanding for higher education in the fifties and sixties. However, that era came to an abrupt end, and the challenge to fulfill a wide programmatic ambition and to address needs for expansive capital improvements produced further challenges to define the mission realistically and then acquire and deploy the increasingly scarce resources in a way that addresses a more focused institutional mission. They remain perhaps the most daunting issues the university faces currently. In the Morris era, we massively expanded the size and scope of the curriculum and the degree programs offered at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Much of this expansion was guided by a “target of opportunities” strategy. That is, if there was a perceived demand SIU could fill, if we had some faculty or plant capacity, or the faculty could be hired and temporary buildings would suffice for the moment, and if we could attract some funds from the state or from the federal government, we would create a program and start teaching the courses. The build-out of faculty, staff, and physical plant could come later. [End of excerpt]
