The history of UNR traces back to 1862, when congressman Justin Morrill introduced the Land Grant College Act. The goal was to enhance higher education in the United States. But Morrill and his fellow Republicans also wanted to expand knowledge in certain areas. So they came up with a deal. Each state would get 30,000 acres of public land per member of Congress. In that case, even the smallest state would have 90,000 acres. They would get the land by taking it from Native Americans. The bill passed and President Abraham Lincoln signed it.
The state could use the land or sell it to create a land-grant college. The law said they would exist, “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.” The first state to go along with the plan was Iowa, which expanded an existing school into what is now Iowa State University. The first totally new college was Kansas State. The land-grant colleges and universities concentrated on teaching technology and new techniques in farming.
Technology included mining, By 1873, the year of the Big Bonanza in Virginia City, Nevada’s governor was Lewis R. Bradley, a rancher from Elko. Bradley and the legislature decided to take advantage of the Morrill Act, and create an institution for Nevada. The mechanical art it would focus on would be mining.
On October 12, 1874, the University Preparatory School opened in Elko with seven students. They had a bell that rang to notify them it was time for class. Today it’s at Elko High School’s old gym. The bell moved to Reno along with the school, which had been renamed Nevada State University in 1881. Classes began in 1886 in Morrill Hall, now the oldest building on the UNR campus, with 35 students. Enrollment wouldn’t pass a thousand until 1936, when Nevada’s population was only about 100,000. By then, it had become the University of Nevada.
In the early years, it was a smaller campus with fewer faculty and students, but it had its share of legendary figures. Its first new faculty member and librarian in Reno was Hannah Clapp, who had founded Nevada’s first private school. Joseph Stubbs was president for 20 years and started extension work in rural areas, and pushed for more high schools to train future university students. James Church taught classics and fine arts, but he became a pioneer in snow science during his association with the university, which spanned more than 60 years. James Scrugham taught engineering and became a dean, which must have been great training for him to become governor, congressman, and senator.
One of the first history professors, Anne Martin, later made history as a woman suffragist and United States Senate candidate. Walter Clark served as president for 20 years and his son joined the English faculty. Walter Van Tilburg Clark wrote The Ox-Bow Incident and the finest novel of Reno, The City of Trembling Leaves, in addition to editing the diaries of Alf Doten, a Comstock journalist.
Sports has been crucial to UNR's history. The university’s football team, the Sagebrushers, started playing in 1896. Three people associated with the football program are in the college football hall of fame: Buck Shaw, who coached with several teams … Frank Hawkins, a running back raised in Las Vegas who went on to an NFL career with the Oakland Raiders … and Chris Ault, a longtime coach and athletic director.
One player is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame: Marion Motley, who starred on offense and defense at Nevada in the 1940s and then for the Cleveland Browns, and one of the first two African Americans to play professional football. Ault’s legendary 2010 team, featuring quarterback Colin Kaepernick, went 13 and 1, and won the school’s first game ever against a top 10 team, Boise State. Some of the university’s star athletes have included Nate Burleson, now a host on CBS Mornings and The NFL Today, and legendary golfer Patty Sheehan.
UNR has had important leaders, and sometimes they were controversial. In the early 1950s, president Minard Stout forced the firing of several tenured faculty, prompting the resignation of their most famous professor, Walter Van Tilburg Clark. After Stout left, Charles Armstrong calmed things down while also getting the Getchell Library built and helping start the University of Nevada Press, whose first director was a reporter, writer, and university staffer, Robert Laxalt, the author of Sweet Promised Land and a shelf of novels and stories about Basque culture. N. Edd Miller succeeded Armstrong and led the school through the protests of the late 1960s. He was so willing to listen and work with students that there was a campus demonstration IN HIS HONOR.
The longest-tenured president was Joe Crowley, a political scientist who served for 22 years. That gave him time to make a lot of important changes, including creating a foundation for fund-raising, making the medical school statewide, and founding the Reynolds School of Journalism. The new student union would be named for him, and he would be a major figure in higher education nationally as well.Today the school is part of the Nevada System of Higher Education.
In 1951, the University of Nevada’s Southern Regional Division opened in Las Vegas High School, and today it is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The system also includes Nevada State University in Henderson, state and community colleges, and the Desert Research Institute.
The University of Nevada, Reno’s fall enrollment a year ago was nearly 22,000 students. at the time of publication. It’s come a long way. The current president is Brian Sandoval, and he has promoted dual enrollment, a merger with Sierra Nevada University, and an affiliation with the Guinn Center think tank. It’s named for a former governor, as Sandoval is. As Richard Bryan is, too. And an alum of the university, and a proud one, with a statue of him up there.
Senator Bryan's college years did a lot to shape him. He ran for student body president, and his campaign advisers told him that it would help my campaign if he took a Kappa Alpha Theta to the Comstock Stomp dance. He ended up with Bonnie Fairchild, and that led to 57 years of marriage and three children. When it comes to the University of Nevada in Reno, Senator Bryan says he has a lot to be thankful for. Well past its 150th birthday, so do we all.
