Emporia State: The Teachers' University

In eighteen sixty-three, while the Civil War was still grinding forward, the Kansas Legislature did something that spoke directly to what the state intended to become. They chartered a normal school at Emporia, a small river town in the Flint Hills, whose mission was singular: teach teachers.

The Kansas State Normal School opened in eighteen sixty-five with a single building and a founding principle that rippled outward for generations. Unlike the land-grant universities being established around the same time to teach agriculture and the mechanic arts, a normal school existed to train the people who would staff the common schools spreading across the plains. In a region where homesteaders were arriving faster than any educational infrastructure could follow, the supply of qualified teachers was the single greatest limiting factor in building a civil society on the grassland.

The school grew steadily through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, adding programs in the arts, sciences, and eventually business. In nineteen twenty-three it was renamed Kansas State Teachers College, formalizing a mission it had always held. A second rename came in nineteen seventy-seven: Emporia State University, signaling that the institution had expanded well beyond its normal-school roots while retaining its core commitment to education.

Emporia State today houses the School of Library and Information Management, one of the top-ranked library science programs in the country, which traces its roots back to nineteen oh two. The William Allen White Library, named for Emporia's most famous citizen, anchors the campus. White was a newspaper editor whose eighteen ninety-six editorial What's the Matter with Kansas became one of the most famous pieces of American political writing, a Republican's attack on agrarian radicalism that turned into a classic of civic prose.

The university sits in a town of about twenty-four thousand people, surrounded by the rolling limestone hills of the Flint Hills, the largest remaining tract of tall-grass prairie in the world. It has sent teachers into every corner of Kansas and far beyond for a hundred and sixty years.