Sifting and Winnowing: The Plaque Outside Bascom Hall
Near Madison, Wisconsin
There is a bronze plaque bolted to the outside wall of Bascom Hall, at the top of Bascom Hill, that has been there since nineteen fifteen. It reads: whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state university of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.
Those words were written in eighteen ninety-four. They came out of a fight.
Richard T. Ely was an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, and he was, by the standards of eighteen ninety-four, a radical. He believed in labor unions. He had written favorably about socialism. That summer, Oliver Elwin Wells, the state superintendent of public instruction, filed a formal complaint accusing Ely of harboring and promoting labor agitation and pernicious doctrines, and of personally harboring a striker during a labor dispute.
The university appointed a committee. The committee investigated. In September of eighteen ninety-four it issued its report to the Board of Regents, exonerating Ely on all charges. The language the report used went well beyond clearing one professor's name. It declared that the university should be a place where fearless sifting and winnowing could occur, where inquiry was not limited by what a politician or a superintendent found comfortable.
The Board of Regents adopted the statement.
Ely later called the document the Wisconsin Magna Charta.
The Class of nineteen ten later had the central passage engraved on a bronze plaque and tried to donate it to the university. The regents initially rejected it, then relented, and the plaque was installed on Bascom Hall in nineteen fifteen, where it has remained ever since.
The sifting and winnowing phrase became the university's informal motto, repeated at commencements and in alumni appeals. It appears on merchandise in every campus gift shop. Richard Ely, who survived his trial and stayed at Wisconsin until nineteen twenty-five, might have appreciated the irony: the fight to protect him produced a phrase more enduring than anything he ever wrote.
