210 ANNUAL REPORT 



ors. Is it not easy to s^e why students go to an agricultural col- 

 lege under such circumstances'? It is a new process of getting a 

 high education — going to college without the trouble of fitting 

 for college. What is the use of cheating ourselves in this way 

 by calling things by their wrong names ? 



Then there is the agricultural college at Brookings, Dakota. 

 I have heard it repeatedly referred to as a triumphant proof 

 that a separate agricultural college would succeed when one con- 

 nected with a state university would not, because, forsooth, there 

 were two hundred students at Brookings, presumably agricul- 

 tural students, while we had next to none in our college of agri- 

 culture in Minnesota. But I had an interview with one of the 

 gentlemen engaged in managing the so called agricultural col- 

 lege at Brookings, and I received new light on the matter. Of the 

 two hundred students only three or four were studying agricul- 

 ture at all. The rest have rushed into Brookings as they would 

 to any other place where a better school than could be found at 

 home was established, and they are going to school at Brook- 

 ings with no more special thought of agriculture than have the 

 boys and girls of Minnesota when they go to a high school or a 

 normal school, or a college or university not agricultural. The 

 agricultural college of Mississippi, so often referred to as having 

 large numbers of students, has a plenty of students for the same 

 reason — the absence of other desirable institutions of learning. 

 Even at Ames agricultural college, I have been grossly misin- 

 formed if a large majority of the students do not take special 

 pains to emphasize the fact that, though in an agricultural col- 

 lege, they are not agricultural students. 



Now the simj)le fact patent in all this is that just so far as an 

 agricultural college gives a good education in things generally, 

 while at the same time it is easy to enter because the require- 

 ments for admission are low, it will have students. It is not in 

 other words, agriculture, nor the desire to study agriculture, 

 which controls the large majority of students who go to agricul- 

 tural colleges; it is educationinits wide and real sense, the desire 

 to get this education if possible and the feeling that if they get 

 it at all they must go where they can enter. 



Now this education in its fullness, in better form and with 

 more thoroughness than any agricultural college can possibly 

 give it in Minnesota for years to come, we are actually giving 

 all the time in the university. 



We offer it, including instruction in agricultural science, to 



