So in came this email from the Penn Stater, digging into aspects of Penn State’s 1 millionth degree. Looking deep into the historical record, the editors had found a year—just one—in which Penn State produced no graduates whatsoever: 1867. “How is it that more than a decade after its founding,” they wondered, “Penn State had a graduating class with no graduates?”
“Things were different back then,” I said. “A lot of it had to do with presidential leadership—or the lack of it.”
Penn State was an overnight success. When it opened to students in 1859, the trustees hired a brilliant young scientist as president: Evan Pugh, a native Pennsylvanian with a Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen in Germany. Pugh’s goal was simple: “to develop upon the soil of Penna. the best Ag. College in the world for the ag. student of America.” In 4½ years, he did exactly that, creating America’s model agricultural college and securing its designation as the commonwealth’s sole land-grant university. And then he died, in April 1864, at age 36.
Instituting a rigorous scientific curriculum, Pugh graduated his first class of 11 young men in 1861—the first in America to earn the Bachelor of Scientific Agriculture degree. The class of 1861 had started with 55 students, but only 1 in 5 managed to graduate. In 1862, 16 graduated; in 1863, seven; in 1864, two. In all, Pugh produced 36 graduates.
It would take seven more years and four more presidents to double that number. And it would take Penn State 20 years to produce another double-digit graduation year. After Pugh, Penn State endured an “era of drift,” a great retrogression for 18 years. Things went from bad to worse under five presidents (Allen, Fraser, Burrowes, Calder, Shortlidge)—men unsuited to the task of building a new land-grant college in which agriculture and engineering were to be the “leading objects.” In addition to that graduateless class of ’67, the classes of 1869 and ’72 had just one graduate each. By 1880-81, the school had foundered to the point of almost being closed for good.
Supposed enrollment growth in the 1870s was bolstered by the college’s “Preparatory Department.” Many colleges established their own prep schools (elementary and secondary grades) as a “grow-your-own” stratagem to boost collegiate enrollments. At Penn State, however, the opposite happened. By 1882-83, enrollment had shrunk to 76 students, 26 of them collegiate but 50 preparatory.
Then came George Atherton. Over his 24-year presidency, he grew enrollments to 898. In 1905, Penn State crossed the 100-graduates-per-year threshold and, a year later, reached a cumulative total of 1,039 graduates.
In terms of student success, the history of Penn State’s first half-century boils down to two words, personified by Presidents Pugh and Atherton: Leadership matters.
Roger Williams served as executive director of the Alumni Association from 2003 to 2015. He is the author of three books on the university’s formative years.
