Southern Oregon University: Ten Names and a Hundred and Fifty Years

Southern Oregon University, which occupies the north end of Ashland's downtown, has been reinventing itself since eighteen seventy two, and in the century and a half since its founding it has operated under ten different names and closed and reopened more than once. The institution began as the Ashland Academy, which opened in November eighteen seventy two after a group of citizens calling themselves the Rogue River Valley Educational Society obtained a mortgage and built a school building under the leadership of the Reverend Joseph Skidmore. The Academy was renamed the Ashland Academy and Commercial College in eighteen seventy eight, then the Ashland College and Normal School in eighteen eighty two, then the Ashland State Normal School in eighteen eighty six, and the Southern Oregon State Normal School in eighteen ninety five.

Each renaming traced a long effort to establish the institution as an officially state-funded teachers' college, called a normal school in the language of the era. Oregon's legislature proved slow to commit real money, however, and the school closed in eighteen ninety due to lack of funding, reopened in eighteen ninety five, then closed again at the end of the following school year and remained shut until state funding was finally reestablished in nineteen twenty five, with classes resuming in nineteen twenty six at the current campus location. Today Southern Oregon University is a fully accredited public institution offering degrees in the liberal arts, sciences, business, and education.

It took the name it carries today in nineteen ninety seven, its tenth and so far final name after a journey that began with a mortgaged building and the Reverend Skidmore's ambitions for a college town in the Rogue Valley.