There’s a marvelous photograph of the first dormitory at Michigan State, a building mischievously named “Saints’ Rest.”
The students are grinning and striking funny poses and attitudes. This was the fall of 1858, and except for their frock coats, they could be a bunch of MSU students today. Off in the wider world, Abraham Lincoln was running for the U.S. Senate, and tensions over slavery in Kansas and Nebraska were reaching a boil.
When some of those boys formed the first graduating class, they all marched straight off to join the Union Army, where one would die at Gettysburg. Back in those days, the students knew why they were there. Those who founded and ran the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan knew what their mission was, too.
The school was founded to increase knowledge, but also to bring it out of the ivory tower and to help the state’s citizens put it to practical use. Later, it was actually renamed the Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science.
What’s remarkable is that it has largely kept that mission. During World War II, John Hannah, who had been a professor of poultry science, took over what was still a small agricultural college and built a major league college football team.
As an afterthought, as the joke went, he created a major university. After he left in 1969, my impression was that the place drifted. At times, it appeared that MSU was trying to be U of M lite.
But I think that changed when Peter McPherson arrived as president a dozen years ago.
He had sort of a mystic connection with the place. His uncle had been a trustee who helped choose Hannah as president, McPherson himself, a lawyer and a banker, had been a student under Hannah. Early on, he told me the key was to know what you really are. “You have to first decide who you are going to serve, and what your mission is,” he told me. After that, decisions come a lot easier.
Seems to me that’s not bad advice for any organization.
Or any human being.
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