IU professor was Purdue's first president

By Rose McIlveen

Many fans at tomorrow's (Nov. 22) Indiana-Purdue football game probably don't know that Purdue's first president was an Indiana University professor named Richard Owen.

The year was 1872, and the Purdue trustees were looking for a president for the fledgling agricultural and mechanical engineering college. When their first choice, Massachusetts Agricultural College President William S. Clark, turned down the appointment, they decided on Owen, the son of the founder of a utopian community that had been located in New Harmony.

Owen was considered one of those well-rounded and versatile professors capable of teaching a variety of subjects at IU, including German, French and Spanish; military science and the natural sciences. With the addition of a medical degree to his credentials, attained while teaching at the Western Military Institute, Owen appeared a natural choice for the Purdue presidency.

And the Purdue trustees agreed. The appointment in hand, Owen returned to Bloomington to finish out his teaching obligation.

It was at that point that Owen's relationship with the Purdue trustees began to deteriorate.

In 1873, he put together a report that promoted a regimen of physical and moral training, and self-government that went well beyond what was permitted at other universities of the time. His long treatise contained details about fire protection, heating, lighting and ventilation, sewage and sanitation, water supply and living quarters for the faculty, but little about course offerings or organization of the curricula in departments and schools.

According to Purdue historians, Owen's report "was printed and distributed, but afterward recalled as far as possible in the interest of the writer's reputation. It is now a very rare document."

The document also included a plan in which students would be assigned numbers, to be affixed to their clothing, dinner napkins and their places at table in the dining areas. They were not to be served pork, fried meats, pastries and other such foods. They were to eat "corn meal and unbolted flour for bread and mush in order to avoid the great evils incident to a sedentary life." Students would also be expected to "cut, saw, split and carry" logs that would be transported to campus. Such work, he thought, would forestall homesickness.

The long document, historians have noted, paid meticulous attention to detail. But its absurdities were severely criticized in newspapers and educational journals.

And his plans did not sit well with the folks or the trustees in West Lafayette. In March 1874, Owen gracefully resigned, returning to Bloomington to teach until his retirement to New Harmony.