The South, the State University and the Regional Promise

3 educational design. Increasingly on the defensive because of slavery, the region staunchly opposed Morrill’s land-grant college measure - of which it would ultimately become a chief beneficiary - and established an "intellectual protective tariff" to keep out non- Southern influences. Although its state universities were trans- formed into instruments of a closed society within the remarkably short span of a single generation, the legacy of that transformation proved to be extraordinarily durable. The devastation and disruption of the Civil War and its af- termath, which endowed the South with such un-American ex- periences as defeat, loss of innocence, and poverty, ended the relative equality in education in the various sections of the country. In the post-Civil War decades, which marked a golden age for state universities in the nation, the expression, “except in the South,” became especially applicable in the realm of higher education. If, as Sidney Lanier noted, “with us of the younger generation in the [post-war] South pretty much the whole of life has been merely not dying,” the same condition characterized the region’s state universities. Just how close such institutions stood to “the ragged edge” is demonstrated by the dimensions of the struggle required merely to keep alive the University of Arkansas in its early years. A century ago, about this date, this university acquired a new president, Daniel H. Hill, an ex-Confederate General, who, though an architect of the legend of the Old South, was also an advocate of the doctrine of the first New South, which envisioned prosperity through greater industrialization. Hill’s experience as president of the University of Arkansas was typical of Southern educators of the era in two respects: first, his was the problem of too much to be done with too few resources; and second, his intellectual ambivalence - an attitude that characterized much of the southern mind in the era of the first New South - revealed a desire to establish a new industrial order without abandoning the values of a society which had ceased to exist - a desire, in short, for progress without change. Burdened with a bifurcated vision and devastating poverty, state universities in the South assumed a passive, rather than a creative, role in the life of the region for a half century. Their economic problems were monumental, to be sure; but more basic was a public attitude which ranged from indifference to overt hostility. If Robert Penn Warren exaggerated in remarking that Southerners developed into a fine art the practice of explaining away all defects of their patria, even to the point of rationalizing ignorance into divine revelation, clearly the notion did [not] take roo