History of the University
This brief history of the university was written by James W. Hulse, Griffen Professor of History, Emeritus, who is the author of "The University of Nevada: A Centennial History". He is also author of the widely used textbook on Nevada history, "The Nevada Adventure: A History" and numerous other books and articles.
The University of Nevada, Reno: A Short History
"To create a state university, to build up its various departments and fill it with professors is a work of time," said one of the members of the Nevada constitutional convention of 1864.
Nevada achieved statehood prematurely in that year, because of the politics of the Civil War era. Abraham Lincoln felt he needed the votes of another state loyal to the Union in the later phases of the conflict. Nevada's state university was also born prematurely, before the frontier society was ready for higher education. The history of the University of Nevada in Reno has been greatly influenced by those facts.
The authors of the Nevada Constitution wrote their sections on higher learning under the influence of the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which offered some acreage to every state for the support of colleges offering instruction in agriculture and the mechanical arts. Because Nevada was so thinly populated and its resources so meager, it was not able to offer college-level instruction until more than twenty years later. While the legislature of 1873 authorized the opening of a "university" in Elko (a fledgling railroad town only four years old), it provided money for only one professor; only seven students appeared when it opened its doors in 1874. Designated as a "university preparatory school" by the founding Board of Regents, it struggled for a decade to serve a maximum of thirty students before the legislature voted to close it in 1885.
University moves to Reno
The decision to reopen the institution in Reno, nearer the state's busiest mining district, the Comstock Lode, and the state capital in Carson City was the crucial turning point in its history. The Regents selected a site on "the hill" north of Reno, overlooking the Truckee Meadows. They authorized the construction of Morrill hall, the setting in 1887 for the first college-level classes in Nevada. Within a decade, four mansard-roofed buildings stood in a cluster in the sagebrush about a mile north of the center of Nevada's second largest town. The population of the state in 1890 was about 47,000, about 3,500 of whom lived in Reno. Congressional appropriations for land-grant education was a major source of the financial support.
In those earliest years, the faculty (about ten men and women at the turn of the century) struggled to implement the mandate of the Morrill land-grant legislation. They offered courses related to the mechanic arts, mining, and agriculture as well as in the liberal arts. Under the leadership of President Joseph Edward Stubbs from 1894 to 1914, they tried to extend their services across the state through the Agricultural Experiment Station and the Agricultural Extension Service. The institution received crucial support from Clarence and Mary Louise Mackay, heirs of the Comstock mine owner John Mackay, who provided a series of major gifts for a school of mines building and later for a science building.
The University did not reach a student population of 1,000 until 1927; it attained 2,000 only in 1958. It marked time as a small teaching and service institution for most of its first seven decades, with some individual faculty members who attained distinction but without the resources to aspire to the ranks of the major research institutions. Another twenty-year president, Walter E. Clark, guided the institution through the 1920s and the bleak years of the Great Depression, winning the enduring affection of most Nevadans but playing little part in the academic life of the nation. In 1960, when the state's population stood at 285,000, the enrollment at Reno was 2,500. The young sister institution at Las Vegas, founded in 1954 and not yet granting baccalaureate degrees, had fewer than 1,000 students.
"Dramatic transformation"
The following decade brought a dramatic transformation of higher education in Nevada, with the building of the Desert Research Institute (established by law in 1959). The DRI gradually evolved into an independent scientific unit maintaining ties to the University through joint faculty appointments. The Las Vegas branch, later called Nevada Southern University and then UNLV, likewise assumed independent status and began to grant degrees in 1964. After a troubled period in the mid-1950s when it endured a disruptive struggle over academic freedom and faculty governance, UNR achieved stability in the 1960s under the leadership of President Charles J. Armstrong and Ed Miller.
Because of chronic budget weaknesses, the UNR still could not expand its services to meet the obvious needs of the state in the business and professional fields. The increasingly diversified University System, however, now consisting of the burgeoning UNLV and four community colleges, was developing a framework for future improvement. When the legislature authorized the founding of a medical school at UNR in 1967 after a protracted struggle, it was a sign that Nevada was beginning to embrace more of the traditional responsibilities of a state research institution. UNR accelerated its evolution toward the status of a research institution in the 1980s.
Although the administration of President Joseph N. Crowley (1978-2000) began during another "time of troubles" in state and university politics, it stabilized during the subsequent decade and the university's relationships with its host community, the state, and sister institutions across the nation. The growth of the student population to about 12,000 by 1992 justified the expansion of the faculties and the hiring of energetic new faculty members. In 1989, an energized University of Nevada, Reno Foundation set a goal of attempting to raise $105 million within five years to enhance the university's endowments established from private gifts. The drive was overwhelmingly successful---producing more than $120 million in the designated time and setting a pattern of broad community support that was a new factor in the university's life.
In the meantime, the faculties had demonstrated a high level of support from the federal government and national business and industry by bringing in increasing amounts of research money---more than $100 million in 2000-01. Its physical plant had expanded dramatically and its outreach to the state and nation increased annually. In the second decade of its second century, the "work of time" that the constitution writers of 1864 had anticipated for the University of Nevada was continuing apace in Reno and wherever the founding university of the Silver State could extend its services.
In 2001, Dr. John Lilley assumed the Presidency.