The University That Almost Closed in Its Fifth Year

When the University of Oregon opened on October sixteenth, eighteen seventy-six, it had one building, five faculty members, and one hundred seventy-seven students. The building was a former wheat field. The university had been built on eighteen acres that the citizens of Eugene had collectively purchased for twenty-five hundred dollars and donated to the state, because they badly wanted the institution and were not confident the legislature would pay for the land without help.

What they got was fragile. By eighteen eighty-one, five years after opening, the university was eight thousand dollars in debt and close to collapse. The state legislature showed no urgency to save it. A German-American railroad magnate named Henry Villard stepped in and donated seven thousand dollars, enough to keep the doors open. Villard had business interests in the region and a genuine interest in education; without his check, the university might have closed before it graduated its second class.

The first graduating class, in eighteen seventy-eight, had five students.

The university survived that precarious first decade and eventually grew into what it is now: a research university of more than twenty thousand students, organized into nine colleges. But the original condition, a civic bet placed by a small town at the end of the Willamette Valley that pooled its money to buy a wheat field and call it higher education, remains the foundation of the institution.

The campus today is known for its Douglas firs, its red-brick academic buildings, and the tradition of wearing green and yellow that Phil Knight helped fund into something that requires its own merchandising operation. The wheat field is long gone. The debt from eighteen eighty-one has been paid.