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Reviewed by:
  • Miami University, 1809–2009: Bicentennial Perspectives, and: A Most Noble Enterprise: The Story of Kent State University, 1910–1920
  • Brian Ingrassia
Miami University, 1809–2009: Bicentennial Perspectives. Edited by Curtis W. Ellison. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. 470 pp. Paper $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8214-1827-7.)
A Most Noble Enterprise: The Story of Kent State University, 1910–1920. By William H. Hildebrand. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2009. 360 pp. Cloth $39.00, ISBN 978-1-60635-030-0.)

Miami University celebrated its bicentennial in 2009, and 2010 marks Kent State University’s centennial. Both universities have published books commemorating their respective milestones. Each handsome, illustrated folio volume makes a contribution to Ohio history, yet each is as different from the other as the two public universities they chronicle.

Curtis Ellison, a history and American studies professor who teaches a [End Page 137] course in Miami history, has compiled an elegant volume—including contributions from over fifty individuals—that presents a panoramic view of the university and town. The audience for this large tome is clearly Miami’s alumni and friends, yet it is an exceptional institutional history that contains important historical insights. Chartered in 1809, classes began at Miami’s Oxford campus in 1824. In the mid-1800s, Miami was one of the largest and most significant institutions of learning in the western United States. Most notably, William Holmes McGuffey, author of the famous readers, taught there in the 1820s and 1830s; future U.S. president Benjamin Harrison graduated in 1852. Miami closed in 1873 due to a lack of students and funds but reopened in 1885. Ellison’s clear narrative breaks Miami’s story into five sensible, if somewhat arbitrary, eras: Old Miami, New Miami, National University, Public Ivy, and Corporate University. Each section includes a timeline of significant events and is embellished with numerous photographs, sidebars, text boxes, reminiscences, and primary sources.

It is impossible to recount in detail all the significant aspects of this volume, yet there are several major themes and contributions. First, Ellison admirably dedicates room to the Miami Tribe, which shares both a name and common historical moments with the university. An important chapter tells the story of the shift from the university’s Redskins mascot (which debuted in the 1920s) to the current Redhawks name, adopted in the 1990s. Another tells the fascinating story of Miami’s Georgian campus, designed in large part by Ohio architect Charles Cellarius from 1928 to 1970. Ellison successfully incorporates the history of Oxford’s several women’s colleges, especially Western College for Women, which Miami absorbed in 1974. Latter chapters include important insights on student culture, the rise of research departments, anti–Vietnam War protests, racial tensions, the decline of state funding, and the competitive nature of “corporate” higher education. This is a thoughtful, yet critical volume. One could easily learn much just by reading its captions, but the patient reader who digests the whole book will be richly rewarded. The portrait that emerges is that of a confident and poised state university that has strived to balance undergraduate and graduate education with community outreach.

A different picture, of a different kind of institution, is painted in William Hildebrand’s centennial history of Kent State University. This is a stormy tale of a university with a turbulent past. Founded in 1910 as the Kent State Normal School, this teacher training institution near Akron fought Ohio’s educational establishment to gain and retain full college status. Founding president John McGilvrey, who pioneered Kent’s extension courses, was opposed by Ohio State University president William Oxley Thompson, who did not want challengers in his attempt to make OSU the [End Page 138] state’s premier university. For decades, Kent struggled to secure appropriations. This changed after World War II, when the 1944 GI Bill (formally the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, a name Hildebrand fails to invoke) provided tuition for millions of American veterans. Regional state universities like Kent (and Miami) were some of the main beneficiaries, hiring research faculty and adding graduate programs in the 1950s and 1960s.

Kent State’s overnight transformation into a fragmented, impersonal research university with many first-generation...

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