Oral History

Rose State College: Its Beginning and the Myth of its Spontaneous Generation

 Introduction by host:

This is the first lecture for this academic year of the Great Issues Lectures Series. As you know, we did have a series of eight lectures that we’ll be presenting to all who are interested in partaking of them. We have, I think, a very interesting groups of lecturers, and our first one, of course, is a guest this particular season – a great kickoff to this particular week, to this particular season, to this particular year. I might, before I introduce our speaker, ask those students who are enrolled in our class – the Great Issues Lecture – if you would, just stay in the lecture hall for a few moments following the lecture, for I do need to visit with you about a little assignment that I have for you. We’ll be needing to discuss the formatting and length and everything else of importance – time to turn it in. 

Our speaker today is, of course, known to nearly all of us who’ve been in education some time and many of you who have not have heard his name and we are deeply honored to have him to serve as our lecturer today. He told me a few moments before this lecture that he received his eighth grade diploma from Rocky Junior High School in Rocky, Oklahoma; earned his bachelor of arts degree in English and History at then, and now, A&M College; his master’s of English degree at University of Oklahoma; and, his Ph.D. in higher education administration from the University of Oklahoma. He served for more than a few years as the executive vice chancellor for the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. His topic today is Rose State College: The Beginnings and the Myth of It’s Spontaneous Generation. If you will, help me welcome Dr. Dan Hobbs. 

Dr. Hobbs: Thank you very much for letting me come and be the first in this Great Issues Lecture. There are two competing theories as to how Rose State College came into existence. The first theory is a product of some political fundamentalists who maintain that Chancellor E. T. Dunlap created this institution in six days, and on the seventh day he rested. (laughter) That theory is called the theory of scientific creationism. The competing theory is put forward by a group of political science gradualists, among them your own Jim Lazalier, who maintained that it took Rose State from eight to ten million years to develop. And this is the theory of natural evolution. (laughter) The truth probably lies somewhere between them.

We have, ah, little evidence of fossilized remains or other archeological artifacts that go back beyond about a have billion years, so the eight million year old theory probably won’t hold water completely. On the other hand, ah, as to the theory of created in six days, ah, we have evidence going back about three decades that there probably were some social and political movements under way which would tend to discredit the six days in 1968 theory. So having stated that both theories are substantially incorrect, let’s get to the theory that probably makes a little more sense to all of us if we can.

The German philosopher Hegel pointed out in 1820 that the Owl of Minerva takes its flight when dusk is falling. Now that means possibly two things to us in the creation theory. First, it probably means that wisdom enters the human condition only when it gets too late in the day to do very much about it. And secondarily, it means – and probably this is the most important point – it means that we really don’t understand human events while they’re going on until we get a perspective on them through history or enough years have passed so that we can look at them objectively. Being existential creatures, human beings can only do one thing at a time. (tape skips) . . . so for any of us to participate in momentous events and at the same (tape skips) . . . corner and take a notebook and watch ourselves doing it objectively. And so we wait, sometimes for many years to get a creditable theory on how institutions develop. I’m going to go into a bit of history now, and I’m going to divide it into two parts. I’m going to look at the national history which helped create the urban community college. Then I’m going to attempt to translate what we’ve learned there back to the local scene and to discuss the evolution of the community junior college in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area.

In retrospect, we now know that there are three forces or streams which combined to help develop the urban community college. Without all three of those streams we would not have had this institution or any others like it to develop during the 1960s and early 1970s. Just like the Allegheny and Monongahela come together at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio, we have the same kind of streams that are coming together to form that river which eventually became a torrent and which was strong enough, really, to turn the turbines to create the hydroelectricity of public policy which helped to develop these institutions. Let me, ah, tell you what the three forces are all about, and then we’ll take them up one at a time. First, we have the demographic force. The one that you’re, perhaps, most familiar with. Second, the democratic force. And thirdly the demonic force. Without all three of those this could not have happened.

First the demographic. You’re familiar with the coming on of the war babies – that great wave in which one year you had three million 18-year-olds and the next year you had four million. That’s because, naturally for you younger people, there were about 3 million soldiers who came back from World War II in 1945 and 46 all at the same time. And there was a good bit of deferred maintenance on their agenda. Among them was the production of families and children. And so, ah, we had in 1946 in Oklahoma about 41,000 children born that year, whereas ten years earlier in 1936 we had about 31,000. So what we had was an increase of 10,000 people. So, in 1945 we had 31,000 18-year-olds in Oklahoma. In 1946 we had 41,000 [sic]. If I calculate that correctly, it’s about 25 percent. And so immediately we have part of our mystery accounted for as to why during the decade of the 60s we had a new junior college in America every single week so that we went from 500 junior colleges to 1000 two-year-colleges, among them a great number of urban comprehensive community colleges such as this one.

As we look at the higher education enrollments beginning about 1900, what we find is that every decade the percentage and the increase of higher education enrollment went up about three times as fast as the population increased. So, from 1900 to 1960, we just kept on increasing higher education enrollments at three times the rate of the population increase. All of a sudden in the 1960s, something happened which was of a quantum level of difference from what had gone on before. During the 1960s we had increased higher education from about, ah, 3.2 million to about 8-point some-odd million. Nine times the percentage of increase of the population in that decade, which was about 14 percent. Something strange is going on here. Of course, the increase in the college-age population has something to do with it, but it doesn’t account for the tremendous number that we later can trace. So, may I say, up to this point, I’ve probably accounted for about 42 percent of the increase in higher education, which was 120 percent for that decade. So, you see, that’s just one force. We still have two more forces to apply.

Another demographic happening during the 19 – the years of 1940 to 1960 – is that we had a movement of people – a vast migration from rural to urban America. In Oklahoma, the 1940 census said that two-thirds of us were rural. The 1960 census, two decades later, said that two-thirds of us nearly were urban. Tremendously fundamental changes in two decades a state goes from being two-thirds rural to two-thirds urban. During that time your own communities developed. You peopled it with rural folks and that makes a great bit of difference that we will talk about in just a little bit.

One further happening of a demographic nature happened in the 60s. About the only thing that went up as fast as the college-aged population was the gross national product, which went from 500 million at the beginning of the decade to a thousand-billion, or a trillion, at the end of the decade. Now, how much money you have makes a great deal of difference as to how much discretionary spending you have in the budget to take care of things that you couldn’t afford before. We used to say at the regents’ office many, many years ago that when times are hard, fathers send their sons to college so they can make a living. When times are good, they send their daughters in order to socialize them and find good husbands out of that college material. Suddenly in the 60s we found both of those things occurring at the same time. We’re through with demographic and we’ve accounted for 42 percent of the increase. Let’s move on to the democratic.

When I went into the military in 1945, I was shipped off to El Paso, Texas at Fort Bliss. At that time the armed services were not integrated. Just a few hundred yards across the way we had black troops training to go get themselves killed for their fellow Americans and a few hundred yards this side, we had white troops training. By 1947, Harry Truman had integrated the armed forces, so that when I came back from Japan to Seattle on a navy ship, we had a black lieutenant who was in charge of our part of the ship. These are profound changes that occurred by Harry Truman’s fight just in two years.

Harry Truman was a great democratizer. He did something else which helped to democratize America, and one was to let the GIs go back to school. Nobody thought that the common man could go to higher education. Higher education up to then was what’s comprised primarily of the elite intellectually and social economically. But we had not at the time the vaguest notion that the ordinary person, and particularly the adult person, could succeed in higher education. Well, Harry Truman’s commission in 1947, even after the GI bill was enacted to allow those three million GIs opportunity to go back to college, I’m not sure that wasn’t primarily economic. We couldn’t absorb 3 million people into higher – into the economy at the same time. We had to go over to peace-time economy, from making tanks to making pick-ups and trucks and plows and tractors and combines. So we had to do something with them. So we stashed them in higher education. I wouldn’t hurt anything.

As it turned out, it was a great democratizing influence. So much so that Harry Truman’s commission, which met in 1947, came up with a very important public policy recommendation. One is that, that the modern world at that time is getting so technical and so complex and everybody needs the equivalent of two years of higher education in order to survive both in the economy and as a citizen. Thos factors coupled with Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education, which further democratized and integrated public schools and higher education, made it possible by the 60s to put two kinds of people into higher education that never had been there before: the common man and racial minorities. So you account for another portion of that quantum increase that went from a level of three to a level of none.

You still have one unexplainable source that you haven’t accounted for all of the 120 percent. And this is what I have characterized as the demonic force. After World War II, we exchanged one demon in the national rhetoric for another. We exchanged the fascist for the communist demon. And we had a cold war that lasted from at least 1945 up into the 70s, after which we had, ah, that was replaced by what we call detent, which was in turn replaced by glasnost, but before that we had what you call a cold war. And so, when Russia, in 1957, put up Sputnik into the atmosphere and further into space, the reaction in America was almost unbelievable. You had to be there to believe it. And I still don’t entirely believe the kinds of rhetoric which we used to use for the USSR, but believe me it was very enlightening. The rhetoric goes something like this: Those people, the evil empire, the forces of darkness, the godless communistic world have brought their science and technology beyond the good guys, the forces of light, the democratic world, and we cannot allow that to happen.

So it was that beginning in 1958 with the National Defense Education Act we began to see a whole spate of legislation come forward to react against that evil empire and to try to overcome it. Now there were a number of educational initiatives that came out of that. Lest you get your hopes up that that was too enlightened, let me remind you of what the first piece of legislation was. We called it not the National Education Act, but the National Defense Education Act. We might as well have called it the National Demonic Education Act, because the people of America probably wouldn’t have stood for increased taxes for anything less. They certainly would have not bought into education. That wasn’t the job of the federal government in the first place. We are still doing exactly the same thing. The latest piece of legislation which doesn’t have a lot of money in it, but it’s designed to improve the economy, and we call it the Education for Economic Activity Law. And so, education as an instrument on the way somewhere else – as a weigh station on the way to further development – the American people will allow, but not necessarily education for education’s sake.

This was followed by the, ah, the National Education Facilities Act in 1963, which the federal government said if any of you states and local municipalities would like to build a new institution or would like to expand your own institution, we’ll match you, dollar for dollar. So now we’ve got new resources pumped in from the federal level to the state and local level. The states never could have made it by themselves and so this stream became necessary.

The same year we had the Vocational Education Act of 1963 which said to this Mid-Del School District if you’ll set up a, ah, vocational-technical school we’ll come in and help you to build it and help you with some program money to get it off the ground so that we can have new people do physical science and engineering and foreign languages and the like. So all of these things came into being with a further civil rights push in 1964 and following which geared us up and made us ready then to put the resources together to build a junior college a week for the next 10 years. End of part one. And like Snoopy, I look out at you, at the audience, and say “you know, in the last chapter, I bring all this together.” (laughter) But not so yet. Let’s bring that to Oklahoma City.

When the founding fathers built the Oklahoma state system of higher education, they did not put a single institution in a city. Cities were evil places and the founding fathers were 90 percent rural. And so, we come up to the 60s and we have not a single public institution in either Oklahoma City or Tulsa. Harkening back to what we said between 1940 and 1960, two-thirds of the people left the farms and the small towns and came, primarily, to these two localities. So you have all these people paying taxes here and they don’t have access to public education. Oklahoma City more than Tulsa [sic]. Tulsa touted itself as the largest municipality in America without access to any public higher education. (laughter). I think that may have even been true for a few days, you know, back in 1971, but so what, it sounded good! Oklahoma City had access to OU and Central State, and so Oklahoma City was a little better off. 

Now the question I would put to you. In Tulsa, where there was a three-phase campus operation, the first campus went downtown in an old oil company office building down there. In El Centro, where they have a similar unit to a local community college system. The first campus went down town. Prey tell me, why the first campus in Oklahoma City metro did not go downtown? Not because Bryce Baggett didn’t want it downtown. They were doing an urban renewal program under the John F. Kennedy Urban Renewal District. Bryce Baggett wanted a store-front down there in the urban renewal area where the Galleria is right now. A store-front community college. Like El Centro. But now the Oklahoma City fathers are long in the habit of looking to the state and the federal governments for everything that they get in the public sector. If the state capitol or Uncle Sam won’t pay for it, the Oklahoma City founding fathers will decide to do without. That was so in this case.

Well, what did they have that they could lean on to take the place of a technical institution? Well in the early 1960s, and this is another saga – it’s probably another lecture – the saga of the M.I.T. of the Plains. Senator Bob Kerr was up there and was head of the space agency, the space committee of the senate, and they had a very bright fellow working for Kerr-McGee about that time whose name was Jim Webb. Bob Kerr talked Dean McGee into letting Jim Webb come up and head up NASA. OK, here we have – here we have a multi-billion pot that we could use – if we had a science and engineering school in Oklahoma City, we could make it the M.I.T. of the Plains. And so the city fathers had in mind to take OCU from the Methodists and make it into another M.I.T. As it turned out, they brought Jack Wilkes in to deliver it over from the Methodists to the city fathers, and then the city fathers left it on the doorstep. They never took it in.

Well, what happened, what happened was that on the way to the forum we had some very unfortunate incidents happen. Bob Kerr died very early in his 60s and was not able to deliver money to OCU. They brought John Olsen in from Boston University to turn OCU into a great – to the great plan, if you remember. It never eventuated. He died of a heart attack suddenly and soon the whole thing fell apart. But the reason I give you just that much of the history is that at that time, in the late 50s, OCU had an industrial arts program which had both a two-year dimension and a four-year dimension. And the citizens in Oklahoma City who didn’t qualify for an academic education could come and take that two-year program and qualify themselves as technicians – as vocational-type workers. Well, when they decided to built OCU into an M.I.T., we could no longer have those kinds of people in our institution. So we needed to replace them. So what did the Oklahoma City fathers do? They came to the state regents and to OSU. And they said please put us a public technical institution in Oklahoma City. And so, in late 1961 or early 1962, the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education let the OSU technical branch come over here in the northwest part of the city, near northwest, in an old elementary school building over there.

So while we were discussing where we would put these junior colleges here – ah, the state regents had recommended doing a study in 1965 – the Oklahoma City fathers thought they could get what they wanted from OSU technical branch. Because you had to pay taxes in order to get your own community junior college and there were no people in downtown Oklahoma City. Mr. Gaylord, Sr. nor Stanley Draper nor the people at First National Bank – those people did not want to pay the taxes. So they didn’t have a junior college. But there were people on the periphery who did want one. If you remember the Shetland pony campaign of 1962 where Mr. Atkinson ran against Mr. Gary and ultimately Henry Bellmon was elected, because Mr. Gary turned against his fellow Democrats and turned toward the Republicans. But if you’ll recall that, it was very bitter between Mr. Atkinson and Mr. Gaylord, Sr.

After that campaign, we find efforts on the part of people in the Midwest City – Del City community to free themselves from control at the skirts of the people in downtown Oklahoma City. We started a newspaper so that we could get our news indigenously, and not have to read the tainted news that came from downtown Oklahoma City. We wanted to put forward a declaration of independence to the people downtown that Tinker Field did not necessarily belong to the crowd down at 4^th and Broadway and at First National Bank. And so ways were sought to free these slaves here from the chains of the domineering forces in downtown Oklahoma City. One of the ways you can do it is with an institution of higher learning. Another way, of course, was through the free press. And so, we tried all the ways that we could possibly get to free ourselves from that kind of domination. Look south of the river at Capitol Hill, that blue collar area which was always looked down upon by the bluebloods who lived in Nichols Hills. And, ah, never could get a hearing. Never could get the kind of streets that they thought they ought to have, or the garbage collection, or the high school. We still had one high school in south Oklahoma City, even after it got large enough to have a two or three. Meanwhile, in north Oklahoma City, you know, we had Northwest Classen and we had John Marshall and we had – we already had Central and, ah, a whole series. And so those kinds of grievances caused the people in south Oklahoma City to think the same kind of thoughts. Let us free ourselves of the people north of the river and establish our own identities. And so it was that the people in these regions were willing to pay their taxes – do whatever it took. Certainly it turned out to be visionary. It turned out to be far greater than they or that I could ever have hoped for.

So from these three streams – nationally the demographic, the democratic, and the demonic – and with these local forces operating to build new institutions beginning, ah, opening in about 1970, we had two community colleges, and now 20 years later people are wondering in official places why is Oklahoma City like Tulsa? Why didn’t we do the proper thing and build a rational system? Well, how can you build a rational system in an irrational climate? (laughter) That’s the reason there are three here instead of one. That should be no – really should not be any mystery. But, lest you think you’ve missed something, it’s taken me two decades to go back over this in my own mind and clarify it. Because the owl of Minerva takes it flight when dusk has fallen.

One last thing, just by way of wrap up. The democratization of higher education did not stop in the 1960s. The greatest democratic force that has come into higher education took place in the 1970s. I’m talking now the women’s movement. In 1970 the ratio of women to men in higher education was 70 to 100 – 70 women, 100 men. By 1980 in America the ratio of women to men in higher education was 106 to 100. What happened? Two things happened. In the first place, we had double digit inflation during the 70s, during the Nixon and Carter administrations particularly. So that during the 1970s, it no longer was possible for a middle-class job to produce a middle-class family income. Women had to go to work.

Secondarily, as a result of the Civil Rights Movement women’s aspirations went up toward the professions and toward the areas where they previously had been excluded. So two things: women’s aspirations, the economy so women had to go to work. And how do you go to work if you’re an untrained woman who hasn’t been back to school in 20 years. You live in a city where most women do in America. How are you going to boot-strap yourself into the economy and into the professions? There’s only one way. The urban community college. Had it not been for this institution and others like it, there could have been no women’s movement. So that further democratizing element you can be very, very proud of. You can be proud of the fact that you lead all institutions in Oklahoma in the desegregation process and the enrollment of minorities. You can take pride in the fact that you’ve broken the age barrier and you have a significant ministry to senior adults. You have made yourselves useful to the business and industry here, and to all the people in this community. I say unto thee congratulations! And keep up the good work! (loud applause)

Conclusion by host: 

Thank you very much, Dr. Hobbs. In commemoration of our 20 years of Oscar Rose Junior College and Rose State College, we want to present to you this commemorative paper weight – desk weight – as a memento of this occasion of your address here today and simply as a way of thanking you for your coming today, of course, for the many years of assistance and help that you provided to us. Thank you very much.  (applause)