It was early 1964 when Lois Schoemehl enrolled at the University of Missouri-ºüÀêÊÓƵ. It was an unlikely landing spot for someone who’d just six months earlier passed up Washington University in favor of a smaller private college in Springfield.
The fledgling UMSL was just a few years removed from its life as the Bellerive Country Club golf course. The school touted a small selection of degrees, 26 faculty members, fewer than 700 students and a single building.
But Schoemehl, then 18, was a refugee of sorts. She’d started her college life at Drury College only to realize she wasn’t ready to be so far from ºüÀêÊÓƵ.
“It was in the fall that John Kennedy was assassinated,†Schoemehl said. “I just wanted to be home.â€
So she parked herself at UMSL, thinking she’d stay for a semester and then switch to Washington U. to start her sophomore year.
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But she quickly became attached to the makeshift school.
The book, “The Emerging University†by former UMSL Chancellor Blanche Touhill describes the early years encountered by Schoemehl and her classmates.
Classrooms and office spaces were carved here and there out of the golf course’s former club house. A ballroom dance floor was covered with carpet and converted to a library, featuring a meager offering of some 3,000 books. A cafeteria in the basement was lined with vending machines along the walls. Off to one side, a cold-storage room was converted to a conference room. Tennis courts and volleyball courts sat off in the distance.
The first-floor hallway was lined with hooks, for students to store their jackets and lunch bags. Faculty offices had steam pipes overhead. One still had the drain left from its days as a shower stall.
Schoemehl, who would later serve as the school’s first alumni association director, remembers the quirkiness of those early days: “One classroom had a fireplace and French doors.â€
Nearly 50 years after UMSL’s birth, it may seem strange to think of ºüÀêÊÓƵ without a major public university. But it wasn’t until the late 1950s and early 1960s — as the leading edge of the post-war baby boom reached college-age — that higher education demands created a need for urban schools such as UMSL.
A UNIVERSITY IS BORN
The university traces its origins to the Normandy School District, which bought the old country club after voters approved a 1958 bond issue, raising $625,000, to buy the land and turn it into a junior college.
Among those who drove the plan was Jim Westbury, the lone surviving member of the so-called Group of 28, a committee of school administrators and citizens.
The action was not entirely about higher education. Had the land fallen into the hands of developers, the resulting housing subdivisions would have forced the Normandy district to build at least one more school.
“It was going to cost, one way or another,†said Westbury, who retired in 1987 as the district’s superintendent.
Yet education leaders also saw a need to offer some form of advanced education for the growing number of students who couldn’t afford four years in Columbia and didn’t want to attend one of the region’s pricier private schools.
“There was no public higher education in ºüÀêÊÓƵ,†Westbury said. “It didn’t make sense.â€
(Harris Teachers College — now Harris-Stowe State University — was in operation at the time, but offered only education degrees.)
The new school opened in the fall of 1960 as the University of Missouri-Normandy Residence Center. The local district was in charge of maintaining the property, while Mizzou agreed to handle the academics.
With 200 students and a lengthy waiting list, that first class forced administrators here and in Columbia to reconsider the junior college designation. A plan was soon hatched to give the property to the university, which would expand into a four-campus system by also absorbing a private school in Kansas City and turning its Rolla extension into a free-standing campus.
To make the plan work, they had to work with the Legislature to get an exemption from state laws forbidding the transfer of school property without putting it up for sale. Freshman legislator Wayne Goode, now chairman of the University of Missouri Board of Curators, wrote the bill in 1962.
And there were those at the Columbia campus who worried about what another campus might mean for funding and academic programs.
“I think there was a feeling they would lose both,†Goode said. “I don’t think it’s there anymore. But it lasted through a generation or more of people.â€
With the legal obstacle removed, the land was transferred to the University of Missouri on Sept. 15, 1963.
NO BARRIERS
Since then, UMSL has grown into a major educational presence in the region. The original 128-acre campus has expanded to 350 acres, with half a dozen branch campuses. Enrollment is approaching 17,000, with some 1,500 faculty members.
“I used to know all the faculty on campus. Now I don’t even know all the faculty in the business college,†said David Ganz, a retired business professor who joined the school in 1966, drawn by the idea of being part of something fresh.
“People knew they were at the front end of something with a lot of potential,†said Ganz, who now serves as an alumni relations coordinator for the business school.
The school has nearly 85,000 alumni spread around the world, with the vast majority — nearly 61,000 — in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region. Mizzou, in comparison, has nearly 52,000 alumni in the region.
Originally envisioned as an undergraduate liberal arts campus, the school has grown well beyond that. Administrators have added dozens of degrees, in wide ranging fields. They built a school of optometry and a nursing program. UMSL consistently ranks highly among its peer group of schools with fewer than 15 doctoral programs (UMSL has 14 of them). Its criminology and business offerings receive high rankings nationally.
And the school just wrapped up its largest capital campaign, bringing in more than $150 million. It’s not on the level of the money raised by schools like Mizzou or Washington University. But it does mark a significant change for the school, where students also recently voted to fund a $36 million recreation and wellness center.
Still, like other commuter schools that emerged from the 1950s and 1960s, UMSL had to work to find its place in the higher education landscape. The school faces intense competition for students both at home and from the Mizzou campus.
One of the challenges facing a school such as UMSL is that it was born into a hierarchy that’s difficult to change, particularly without a medical school, said John Rury, an education professor at the University of Kansas who studies commuter colleges.
“It basically meant that UMSL was not going to develop as a first-class research institution,†Rury said. “Columbia was not going to give that up.â€
Indeed, it seems unlikely that Mizzou will ever surrender its position as the state’s flagship campus — a term that drives a small thorn into the sides of UMSL supporters like Ganz.
They don’t see their campus as anything less than the one in Columbia. Yet, at the same time, they acknowledge the schools have different missions and resources available to them.
UMSL’s chancellor, Thomas George, prefers not to dwell on comparisons between his campus and its sisters in Columbia, Rolla or Kansas City. Instead, he talks of UMSL’s role in the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region.
“We have our special niche here,†George said. “I see us as part of the mosaic of higher education in ºüÀêÊÓƵ. We all complement each other.â€
And given those surroundings, George quickly dismisses talk of adding a medical school or law school, saying Washington and ºüÀêÊÓƵ universities have that covered. He fields more frequent requests for an architecture school and isn’t ruling it out, though nothing is in the works. There are, however, talks about opening a branch of UMKC’s dental school on the ºüÀêÊÓƵ campus.
What about football?
“That’s just not us,†George said.
But there are those who see no limits for the school.
Among them is former chancellor Touhill, who scoffed when a reporter suggested UMSL would never have a medical school.
“Says who?†she asked. “I don’t believe there are any barriers to what this university can be, in time.â€