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Scholarship and Public Service Not long after the University opened its doors, several faculty members began offering occasional classes at times and locations convenient to part-time students. As early as 1881, Professor William Pike offered Drawing and Shop Work. By 1884, adults in the community could take classes in literature and language, biology, physical and mathematical sciences, history, economics and political science, philosophy, and pedagogy. By the early 1900s, many University departments were serving the community at large. George Edgar Vincent, the University’s third president, saw the need to consolidate these services. Vincent had grown up in the Chautauqua movement, an experiment in adult education begun by his father in 1874 in New York. At the new University of Chicago, Vincent worked to integrate scholarship and service, and he came to Minnesota with a conviction that a great research university must excel equally in teaching, research, and public service. By 1913, outreach activities were operating under two formally constituted extension services: the Agricultural Extension Division (established in 1909, offering non-credit programs to the state’s rural sectors) and a new General Extension Division, defined as, "all the teaching and informing activities of a university which extend beyond its resident student body." A $40,000 legislative appropriation made it one of the three best-funded general extension divisions in America. Under its first director, Richard Price, General Extension became one of the largest continuing education programs in the nation. The 1913 bulletin listed evening classes (at $5 a semester), lectures and lyceums, correspondence instruction, Municipal Reference Bureau, and University Weeks (traveling programs to communities). Price persuaded the faculty that "legitimate" teaching could be done off campus and at nontraditional times. |