About The People’s School: A History of Oregon State University
Presented
by Bill Robbins
The
presentation will begin with Robbins’ personal connection to Bend and OSU’s
distant delivery programs offered at Central Oregon Community College. He
was among the first three or four professors to offer televised classes that
were transmitted to the COCC campus (if there were no storms in the
mountains)! Robbins continued to participate in the program through the
advent of “smart classrooms” on the Corvallis campus and with simultaneous
two-way video and audio communications with Bend students. The discussion
will offer a brief review of the land-grant tradition and the beginnings to
modern Oregon State University. With its roots in Corvallis College, a
sectarian institution affiliated with the Methodist-Episcopal Church, South, in
1868, the state took control in 1885, and the school became the Agricultural
College of the State of Oregon.
From there, the institution grew
apace, increasing in student numbers, faculty, and the size of its
campus. The presentation will address Robbins’ strategy for organizing
the book, the importance of providing context for the story, OSU’s place in the
history of higher education, curriculum battles with the University of Oregon,
the gradual emergence of OSU as a modern comprehensive university, and events
of the recent past, concluding with a discussion of OSU Cascades.
About the Speaker:
William G. (Bill)
Robbins is emeritus distinguished professor at Oregon State University,
where he taught from 1971 until 2002. Following a four-year stint in the United
States Navy, he immigrated to Oregon from the East Coast and earned a Ph.D.
degree in History at the University of Oregon (1969). During his more than
thirty years at Oregon State University, Robbins taught courses in Western
American, Pacific Northwest, and Environmental history. He is the author
and editor of several books on Oregon and the American West. Among his books
are Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West (1994),
Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800-1940 (1997), Landscapes
of Conflict, 1940-2000 (2004), and Oregon, This Storied Land.
Oregon State University Press published The People’s School: A History of
Oregon State University in the fall of 2017 to commemorate the
institution’s sesquicentennial as a land-grant school. His current project is a
history of the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest.
