Eric Allen: In his own words
The founding of the School and the University Press
When President Campbell conceived the idea of establishing a School of Journalism he had the advantage of personal training under one of the best masters of constructive journalism the profession has produced, W.R. Nelson of the Kansas City Star. In addition to this, he had been for years in close contact with the press, experiencing at times the benefits of good reporting of University affairs, and time and again suffering from the bungling on the part of reporters and editors that occasionally added to his difficulties as University president.
When I came to the University in 19 12 it was with the understanding that I was to develop if possible a high grade professional school. I found myself in an atmosphere of misunderstanding and ignorance in all that regards newspaper principles, practices and ideals.
When I came to the University in 19 12 it was with the understanding that I was to develop if possible a high grade professional school. I found myself in an atmosphere of misunderstanding and ignorance in all that regards newspaper principles, practices and ideals.
In all the University circle only the president understood what was implied in the undertaking. A few quickly apperceptive persons ... caught the notion that something valid, authentic, and self-respecting might be done and a real service rendered to the profession and the state, but most people on the campus thought that a press agent had been hired under a clever camouflage and that his function was going to be to outwit and cozen the Fourth Estate into printing laudatory accounts of University affairs. It was very discouraging.
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That was at an early stage in the development of Schools of Journalism. The department at Oregon was founded simultaneously with the School at Columbia. Mr. Pulitzer had announced his purpose of endowing Columbia some years before, but years passed while the plans were maturing. While the Pulitzer project was under discussion in the press and in the magazines, several institutions had anticipated Columbia. Willard G. Bleyer, a young English professor who had had some newspaper experience in Milwaukee, gave his English course at Wisconsin a journalistic content in 1905 and this was organized into a course in 1906.
The School at the University of Missouri, which claims in its catalogue to be "the oldest School of Journalism in the world" began instruction in 1908. In 1907 President Thomas Kane of the University of Washington had asked me to join his faculty and start a department there, but I was tied up with the management of the Seattle Engraving Company at the time and could not, though I was interested. Courses were started there in that year under Merle Thorpe, now editor of Nation's Business, who had been my successor as Northwest Editor of the Post Intelligencer. So far as my memory goes, there were no other schools, though there were probably rudimentary attempts here and there. The whole movement was rather a joke among newspaper-men -- they ridiculed the word "journalist."
I came down rather in the spirit of willingness to "try anything once" and thought it might be pretty temporary. But both my wife and I preferred country to city -- and she liked University surroundings both for ourselves and the children. But the President had something big in mind; there was very little of the provincial in his plans and he was thinking of a school which should ultimately have a national appeal and be a clean cut professional school with standards equal to those in medicine and law. I started with three courses taught by myself: Reporting, Technique (later divided into Copyreading, Proofreading, Advertising, Printing, and Business Management) and Editing (including History, Ethics, and Practices).
The School at the University of Missouri, which claims in its catalogue to be "the oldest School of Journalism in the world" began instruction in 1908. In 1907 President Thomas Kane of the University of Washington had asked me to join his faculty and start a department there, but I was tied up with the management of the Seattle Engraving Company at the time and could not, though I was interested. Courses were started there in that year under Merle Thorpe, now editor of Nation's Business, who had been my successor as Northwest Editor of the Post Intelligencer. So far as my memory goes, there were no other schools, though there were probably rudimentary attempts here and there. The whole movement was rather a joke among newspaper-men -- they ridiculed the word "journalist."
I came down rather in the spirit of willingness to "try anything once" and thought it might be pretty temporary. But both my wife and I preferred country to city -- and she liked University surroundings both for ourselves and the children. But the President had something big in mind; there was very little of the provincial in his plans and he was thinking of a school which should ultimately have a national appeal and be a clean cut professional school with standards equal to those in medicine and law. I started with three courses taught by myself: Reporting, Technique (later divided into Copyreading, Proofreading, Advertising, Printing, and Business Management) and Editing (including History, Ethics, and Practices).
The President told me to get an assistant for the next year (Mable Holmes Parsons and Arthur M. Geary had helped me a little the first year) and I got Colin V. Dyment, who was Northwest Editor of the Oregon Journal -- a fortunate selection.
As the president and I kept hammering at policies for development we soon saw that in this Western environment the rural and small city paper was our problem. Not for us to train exclusively writing men for the metropolitan papers, especially as a study of paths of promotion showed that the city reporter, trained for writing alone, had little chance of getting control of any paper, while the country editor, owning his sheet, selling it and buying a larger one, would be the Pulitzer, the Ochs, the Whitelaw Reid, the Sam Jackson of the future (all these men came up this way). So we needed a laboratory. |
I went downtown and asked Webster Kincaid to his face to give us without consideration the idle plant of the old State Journal and to all our surprise he consented. This was the strangest aggregation of out-of-date Mid-Victorian junk I ever saw, but there was some good type in the mixture and what the movies call a "practicable" press. It had come around the Horn to Honolulu, had printed the first paper in Oregon ... and had made H.R. Kincaid's fortune by printing land office notices. I hired a printer named A. J. DeLay to work by the hour (only such hours as we wanted him) to be paid after the job was paid for. So we started, dumping all this junk into our class room and doing our printing between classes and in the evening. We had no capital whatever.
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DeLay waited until the money came in from the jobs, and we bought our paper and ink on 30 days credit a few hundred sheets at a time and tried to collect for the jobs by the 10th of the month, so as to pay the paper house. I went down to the Court House and filed under the Assumption of Business Name Law on the magniloquent name "University Press." This name appertains to me as head of the department of journalism and my successors. Our University Press records begin with job number 2. I don't remember what job number one was. Job number two was billed out to the University on September 25, 1915. It consisted of 500 "news bulletins" printed on news stock, and for this we charged the University $9.00 -- less that what it would have cost on the open market. Yet we were able to pay DeLay and the paper house and have something left to grow on. (See the boxed item below)
These proceedings used to amuse the President, yet he always encouraged them and used to come over to watch us print. ... If there ever was a good man to do business with it was President Campbell. He understood figures and remembered them. He knew how much to expect and when to expect it. He always came to bat with surprising bits of knowledge that enabled him to understand situations well out of his own field. As worker he set a tremendous pace himself and succeeded in speeding things up by force of example without ever expressing the slightest dissatisfaction with anybody else. Continue to Part 3.
These proceedings used to amuse the President, yet he always encouraged them and used to come over to watch us print. ... If there ever was a good man to do business with it was President Campbell. He understood figures and remembered them. He knew how much to expect and when to expect it. He always came to bat with surprising bits of knowledge that enabled him to understand situations well out of his own field. As worker he set a tremendous pace himself and succeeded in speeding things up by force of example without ever expressing the slightest dissatisfaction with anybody else. Continue to Part 3.