LETTERS
All in a name
Chuck Lay’s vitriolic column in your February issue favoring
the name change of SMSU was truly a shocker. What a lot of people seem to miss,
or just ignore, is that the term “state university” has a long and proud
history of designating that state’s land grant university. And the land grant
system was the first in the world to open the gates of higher education to
people other than ministers, lawyers and wealthy families.
I have doubt that MFA would have existed were it not for the
land grant universities, and certainly it would not be able to offer the
services to farmers that it does today. Sad that an editor of your magazine
doesn’t realize that.
The story is told that Abraham
Lincoln, in order to make a point, asked his cabinet
members, “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs will it have?”
“That’s easy, Mr. President,” one replied. “The answer is
five.”
“Wrong,” replied Lincoln. “The answer is four. Simply
calling a dog’s tail a leg doesn’t make it one.”
Calling SMSU the state university won’t make it one, but the
sad thing is that a lot of folks will never know it.
Bruce Florea, Columbia, Mo.
Chuck Lay responds:
If that were really the case, we’d be calling the other
Missouri land grant institution (Lincoln University in Jefferson City) Missouri State University. In fact, the land grant argument doesn’t hold in
other states—some are called state universities, some are not. In some cases,
there are non-land grant schools called state universities.
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