Nearly 1,800 students will receive diplomas this weekend at the University’s 118th commencement exercises.
Yet, the statewide, world-class institution we know today as the University of Nevada, Reno was something else entirely at its birth.
The University was founded in 1874 in Elko, Nev., about 300 miles northeast of Reno. The regents appointed to oversee the launch of Nevada’s first institution of higher learning had their pick of several sites in and around the state’s population centers, Reno and Carson City. But intense lobbying from those areas succeeded only in creating confusion. Elko, a remote railroad town only four years old, was not an obvious alternative. But no state institutions had yet been established in the eastern part of the state — Nevada having gained statehood only 10 years earlier, in 1864. So some sentiment existed that it was the eastern half of the state’s “turn.” Weighing more heavily in Elko’s favor was the fact that it was in the home county of the governor.
Officially, Elko had been set up as the Preparatory Department of the State University of Nevada, and classes commenced in fall 1874. With one professor and seven students, it was a fledgling enterprise in a state that was, itself, fledgling.
The Civil War-era Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 had offered every state that remained within the Union a huge tract of federal land. The states would be allowed to sell the land, provided they used the money to endow at least one college offering courses in agriculture and the mechanical arts. These practical subjects weren’t widely taught at 19th-century colleges.
The supporters of the Morrill Act hoped the land-grant colleges would spur economic development. Nevada, which as late as 1890 had fewer than 50,000 people clustered in a few pockets over its 110,000 square miles, lacked the population and tax base to launch a university. The legislature hoped the Elko school would suffice as a demonstration to Congress of more substantial future plans.
The state eventually did receive its land grant, thanks to an extension of the Morrill Act’s original deadline. But it wasn’t enough. Minuscule enrollments at Elko (never more than 30 students) and meager state appropriations led the legislature to close the facility in 1885.
The Nevada State University, as the regents had begun calling it in 1881, was dead, at least for the next few years.
After accumulating additional funds, the regents selected a new site, on a hill above the north end of Reno. The first building, Morrill Hall — named for Vermont Sen. Justin Morrill, who, while a congressman, wrote the land-grant act — was completed in 1886. That structure still anchors the south end of the quadrangle where today’s ceremony is taking place.
The move to Reno meant a fresh start. A normal school or teacher training academy was soon added, and the school officially took on the name the University of Nevada in 1906. But the institution continued to struggle to build enrollment, and state appropriations remained scarce. The state was experiencing an economic downturn and the bonanza years of silver and gold mining on the Comstock Lode of Virginia City were over. In 1886 there were only seven high schools in Nevada, and it would be many years before Nevada high schools were geared to prepare future college students.
In the early years of the 20th century, private support helped sustain the fledgling university. A series of gifts from the heirs of mine owner John Mackay, one of the Comstock silver barons, paid for a school of mines building and, later, one for science education.
The University settled into life as a small teaching and service institution with a campus atmosphere resembling that of the small private colleges tucked away in rural areas in the East. Upperclassmen strictly enforced arbitrary rules of dress for freshmen by throwing violators into Manzanita Lake. For some time, only seniors were allowed to walk on the grass of the elm-lined quadrangle in front of Morrill, a space modeled after the quad at the University of Virginia, laid out by Thomas Jefferson. A statue of silver baron Mackay — by Gutzon Borglum of Mount Rushmore fame — was added to the north end of the Quad in 1908.
The campus so closely resembled the traditional colleges of the East that by the 1940s Hollywood producers were using it as a stand-in location for universities such as Harvard. In 1944’s Andy Hardy’s Blonde Trouble, starring Mickey Rooney, Nevada played the part of traditional-looking, if fictional, Wainwright College.
One of the longtime traditions on campus involved commencement. Upon graduation, students would sign their names in an ornate Book of the Oath. The flowery Oath pledged each graduate to uphold the highest standards of morality and citizenship. The signing tradition continued into the 1960s, when, presumably, the pledge fell victim to changing cultural sensitivities. Among other provisions, the Oath required each graduate to acknowledge the “great debt to the race, which has made me heir to civilization.”
In its early years the University’s tiny faculty struggled to fulfill the mandates of the Morrill Act. That meant not only offering courses in fields such as mining and agriculture but also extending the University’s expertise and services across the state. James E. Church, a classics professor who dabbled in meteorology, became an unlikely scientific pioneer. After spending time observing weather on Mount Rose above Lake Tahoe, he eventually devised a method and the equipment to measure the water content of snow. The method is still used today to forecast spring water runoff.
With the state’s population increasing more slowly than other parts of the country — by 1960, Nevada still had fewer than 300,000 residents — demand for higher education barely budged. In 1960 the University’s enrollment stood at 2,500 and the institution was still the state’s only independent university. The only other place offering college courses was the University’s own branch campus in Las Vegas.
Three years earlier an extension division had been created to begin offering classes in Las Vegas, an emerging population center. Originally housed in a high school, the Las Vegas campus awarded its first degree in 1964 and went independent a year later as Nevada Southern University. In 1969 the regents approved a name change and Nevada Southern became the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
During the same meeting at which UNLV was born, a proposal passed changing the name of the state’s original university to the University of Nevada, Reno, giving the two schools equal status.
In the middle part of the 20th century, the University continued to grow academically, adding colleges of education and business in the 1950s followed by medicine in the 1960s. As the number of faculty increased, so did research. In the 1960s and ’70s, anthropologist Don Fowler’s research in southeastern Nevada on the Numic people gained national attention and developed new evidence of Great Basin and Southwestern prehistory, building on the work of famed scientist-explorer John Wesley Powell.
In more recent years the University has enjoyed healthy growth in both size and stature. Total enrollment now surpasses 16,000. Besides the campus in Reno, the Redfield Campus south of town, the Fire Science Academy in Carlin, and medical school operations and Cooperative Extension in Las Vegas, the University has more than 65 locations serving every county through agricultural experiment stations, laboratories, medical facilities, centers, institutes and extension offices. In the center of the Reno campus are a $64 million student union, which opened in fall 2007, and the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center, a high-tech library and the most ambitious construction project in Nevada’s history. The Knowledge Center is scheduled for completion this fall.
Among other indicators of its standing in academia, the University ranks among the top 150 U.S. universities in terms of outside funding for research programs. The Reynolds School of Journalism, established in 1983, has produced six Pulitzer Prize winners. The University’s graduate program in hydrologic sciences has been rated among the 10 best nationally. And a study-abroad program born 25 years ago in the University’s Center for Basque Studies has blossomed into one of the country’s largest overseas study programs.
Among faculty, English professor Eric Rasmussen has been chosen by the Royal Shakespeare Company to edit a special edition of the complete works of the Bard. Faculty working at the Nevada Seismological Laboratory are using Global Positioning System data to find faster ways to determine if an earthquake is large enough to create an ocean-wide tsunami.
As much as the University has grown and developed in recent decades, however, it is clear that in many ways that the institution’s best days are still to come. Several historians have observed that Nevada experienced a premature birth, rushed into statehood by President Lincoln, who was eager to have another state loyal to the Union in the later years of the Civil War. Likewise, the potential land grants from the Morrill Act prompted early legislators to try to launch a university before the state needed or could appropriately afford one.
In some respects, therefore, the state’s granddaddy of higher education is still youthful, with a vibrant future. This can only mean that, similar to the situation facing this weekend’s graduates, the prime of its life is yet to come.