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The Paper College
Things looked better for the task force with the start
of a new year. CU's bold move into Denver had been stopped
cold by the state constitution, which specifically prohibited
the university from opening a liberal arts and sciences
school outside of Boulder. About the same time, the North
Central Accreditation Association warned the regents
that
CU could lose its accreditation if it attempted to run
a branch under separate admissions standards.
Governor Love, who had opposed opening a new college
anywhere in the state, was modifying his opinions on
the advice
of an Indiana higher education consultant named John
Dale Russell. Russell had read the task force report,
called its enrollment projections conservative, and put
his substantial support behind a new Metropolitan State
College.
On February 18, an alliance of Colorado's senior college
presidents endorsed the proposal, with CU's Quigg Newton
dissenting. It was a major coup for the task force. The
same day, Romer announced: "Never before has there
been such overwhelming agreement among the state's colleges
on the need for an additional state college."
Task force members Palmer Burch, Allen Dines, and Frank
Evans put their names on House Bill 349, creating a new
college in Denver and authorizing $50,000 for the trustees
to draw up a blueprint. The bill squeaked through the
House, only to be tabled by the Senate Finance Committee.
It could have been a sentence of death, but a newly supportive
Governor Love interceded on behalf of the bill. On April
5, 1963, the Senate passed an amended version of the
bill
(cutting the appropriation in half) by one vote. Metropolitan
State College had slipped out of the dreams of a few
people
and into legal reality by the skin of its theoretical
teeth. Or had it?
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The "Green Report"
The trustees took their $25,000
and went to work immediately on creating a plan for a
new
college in Denver. Alamosa trustee Phillip Lorton chaired
a planning committee, which included trustee president
Bernard Houtchens, Joseph Weber from Leadville, and Stuart
McLaughlin from Rangely. Each drew heavily from the staff
of his respective college for project consultants. Deans
all over the state started working out models of what
an urban college must be.
Working out of the State Social Services Building at
1525 Sherman, H. Grant Vest, secretary of the trustees,
compiled the studies as they came in. This unified plan
would be burdened with the cumbersome title: Trustees'
Report on the Plan of Operation for Metropolitan State
College, but no one would ever call it that. When the
printed copies came out, the covers had been printed
in
a deep forest green, and so it came to be known as the
"Green Report."
The report was philosophical as well as practical. Vest
and the trustees took on the formidable task of defining
such concepts as "urban-oriented," "commuter
campus," and "open door," alongside the
prosaic descriptions of what those concepts entailed (building
leases, hours of operation, admissions policies). Pulling
apart the legislative directives, sometimes line-by-line,
the report attempted to outline the soul of the new college:
"Education at Metropolitan State College… faces a dual challenge: to answer the immediate occupational goals of its students so that they may enter the economy at a level related to their potential; and to provide its students with the liberal education necessary for them to function as responsible citizens in a democratic society."
On December 30, 1963, preliminary
copies of the report were submitted to the legislature.
The trustees didn't have to wait long for a response.
The Waiting
On New Year's Day both the News
and the Post reported a prediction by House Speaker John
Vanderhoof that Metropolitan State College wouldn't be funded
in 1964. "I can't see how the state can afford it,"
he said, "Maybe…in five or ten years.
On April 5, 1963, the Colorado Senate passed an amended version of the bill by one vote.
Returning from a holiday ski vacation,
the governor met immediately with Vest, who told him
the
trustees would need $.1.2 million almost immediately
if the college was to open its doors in the fall of 1964,
Love waffled, promising to make up his mind by the time
he got to the legislature, With other important issues
at stake, including a reorganization pf state government,
it began to look as if the college was an expendable
bargaining
chip.
Then, seemingly from out of nowhere, the Denver Chamber
of Commerce announced opposition to Metropolitan State,
favoring a 2-year, vocational-technical college system
for the area. The chamber had surveyed 96 Denver businessmen
and concluded that there was little expressed need for
a city college.
The announcement caught Romer and the trustees by surprise.
A significant portion of the "Green Report"
had been devoted to technical/vocational programs, two-year
and otherwise. Romer lambasted the chamber for not doing
its homework, and Vest made an official announcement outlining
12 of the proposed two-year programs in business, science,
and technical training. But as January wore on, it was
more and more apparent that the college was a bigger commitment
than the state was willing to accept.
“Metro College
Killed”
The death knell came from Governor
Love on January 21, with an announcement that the Metro
concept was "premature." Romer, speaking on
the floor of the House, said it was "a tragedy that
Love has ignored the most critical problem of higher education
in the state." Allen Dines, the House minority leader,
said: "Governor Love has turned his back on the 60
percent of [Colorado's] high school graduates who live
in the Denver metropolitan area."
Bound copies of the "Green Report" did not
arrive in the legislature until February 6, yet it appeared
that
the new college was already dead and buried. At a meeting
of the planning committee, it was decided to capitulate
to a one-year delay, and when Bernard Houtchens submitted
the final 99-page report to the legislature, he asked
for $165,000 to continue the planning process. The request
was denied, and for the remainder of 1964 the fight for
Metropolitan State College went underground.
Winning the War
Romer would remember later,
"It was one hell of a fight." In the legislature,
March of 1965 came in like a lion, and went out like a
lion. It was a session marked by fierce legislative battles,
and the battle for Metropolitan State was among the fiercest.
Dr. Kenneth Oberholtzer, the Denver superintendent of
schools, warned the legislature that it was time to stop
quibbling about whether the new school should be two-year,
four-year, vocational or liberal arts, and do something.
No matter what kind of school was started, Denver needed
it. Denver needed them all.
Most of the legislators agreed, but as Vest complained,
the CU lobby was making it "hard to expedite a vote."
But even CU was pressing for a decision. The uncertainty
was making planning decisions about the extension center
all but impossible.
Rep. Frank Kemp was the first to sponsor a bill that would
fund the new college, but there were immediate efforts
to postpone it, pending a rival bill by Rep. John Mackie
that would have created a state junior college board.
Releasing the bill for debate was the decision of the
House Rules Committee, but one of the committee's members,
Phillip Massari, was out sick, leaving a three-three
deadlock.
It was a stroke of luck for the trustees, since Massari
was a proponent of Mackie's junior college proposal and
would almost certainly have voted to table the Kemp bill.
After a ten-day deadlock, the committee voted to release
the Kemp bill to the floor for debate, giving it at least
a one-day head start on the Mackie proposal.
Debate was hot, but when the smoke cleared, the House
voted 49-15 to appropriate $65,000 for the trustees to
open Metropolitan State College.
The House seemed to have made its decision. By April 20,
two more efforts to squash the college were stopped cold
in voice votes, and the bill went on to the Senate.
But on April 23, the Senate Finance Committee voted to
kill the House bill, and Kemp's fight to start Metropolitan
State was over.
All did not go well in the Colorado Senate in the spring of 1965.
Whether' or not the Kemp bill was
intended as a smoke screen, it had that effect: Quietly,
an appropriation of $859,000 was added to the long bill,
which the house had actually approved before death came
to the Kemp proposal. The money was there. All that was
left was to drive it through the Senate.
The long bill is the last thing the Colorado congress
deals with in the spring session. If all goes well, the
legislators can expect to be home by Easter. But all did
not go well in the Colorado Senate in the spring of 1965.
It was a fiery session, fueled by the debate over the
largest proposed budget in state history. First March
came and went, then April. Heated words were exchanged,
especially between more conservative members of the Republican
majority of the House and Republican "defectors"
who were eager to pass a budget and go home. Finally,
on May 2, a coalition "choked down" the budget
put together by a compromise committee; including a $750,000
appropriation for Metropolitan State College.
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The Days, Nights, and
Weekends College
Two days after the legislature
funded the college, Vest made an announcement to the
press inviting interested students to apply for the fall
quarter. Since the college had no applications of its
own, Vest suggested that students could either pick up
a standard application form from another college, or
they
could come down to the trustees' office in room 223 of
the State Services Building and pick up one of the applications
he had borrowed.
That same day the planning committee held an emergency
meeting. After two years of planning and fighting, Metropolitan
State College was about to become a reality, but there
was scarcely time for a congratulatory handshake or a
pat on the back.
As of that moment, the clock was running. The trustees
now had less than five months to create an entire college
from scratch. The planning committee decided to call on
Harlan Bryant, president of Western State College, to
see if he would agree to act as president of the new institution.
Bryant had helped with the preparation of the "Green
Report" and was an enthusiastic supporter of the
trustees' plan for a new college.
As it turned out, he didn't even have to pack. Bryant
and his wife were virtually on their way out the door
for a camping trip in Monument Valley when the phone
rang.
Would he be interested in presiding over the creation
of the new college? It would be an honor, he said. That
night, Bryant fished his waders and tackle box out of
the trunk, replaced them with a few suits, and the next
morning he and his wife drove to Denver.
It was a far cry from the vacation he had planned. During
the next four months, Bryant worked four days a week
in
Denver, sometimes 14 hours a day, and then he would get
in his car and drive to Gunnison, where he had three
days
to catch up on the administrative duties of his own college
before driving back to Denver. There were no days off.
One of the first people hired to help Bryant was a former
student named Keats McKinney. Years before, Bryant had
sat on McKinney's doctoral review committee at the University
of Oklahoma, and the two men had kept in contact ever
since, Both ended up in Colorado, Bryant at Western State
and McKinney at Adams State, where he spent 13 years as
a teacher of education and as college dean.
McKinney also served on the planning committee for the
new college and was a major contributor to the "Green
Report." The trustees felt they could count on him
to faithfully execute their plans.
Out of a one-room office in the capitol, McKinney interviewed
some 300 applications for the 35 available faculty positions.
The number and quality of the applications was a surprise,
to McKinney and everyone else. There had been some fear
that finding faculty at mid-year, when most teachers
would
already have contracts for the coming fall, would be
difficult if not impossible. But the number of inquiries
the trustees
had already received made McKinney optimistic.
From the beginning, McKinney says, "We tried to
find a quality faculty. The press helped us immensely.
Many
of the applicants had not only read that we were about
to open, but also that we expected to have around 20,000
students within a decade. They saw an opportunity in
the school, and I think many of the faculty from rural
areas were attracted to life in a bigger city."
In the meantime, McKinney had hired a Cornell graduate
named Harold Benn as dean of the summer quarter and college
services, Benn's first job was to assemble a curriculum
and publish a catalog. Without a faculty to consult,
Benn had little to go on besides the classes outlined
sketchily in the "Green Report," so he rounded
up college catalogs from all over the state and had a
look at them.
By this time, the assigned offices at the Capitol were
getting cramped, so Benn took his catalogs and moved into
the vacant offices of the Joint Budget Committee.
From the information he had, he assembled a curriculum
that he described as "more or less representative
of what other schools were doing around the state,"
but with two major differences: Metropolitan State College
had only been given permission to teach the first two
years of a four-year program, so the catalog had little
other than freshman-level classes; and the catalog had
to include courses for technical programs that weren't
being offered anywhere else in the state.
It was time to stop quibbling about whether the new school would be two-year, four-year, vocational, or liberal arts. No matter what kind of school was started, Denver needed it. Denver needed them all.
Benn also had to decide when to
start the quarter, so he could write a calendar. But
that much, at least, was easy: "October 4 was the
last possible day we could open if we didn't want to be
holding classes on Christmas Eve," he remembers.
"The decision made itself."
The next step was to lease a building. There were many
possibilities in the downtown area, including the May
D&F Annex and the Security Life Building on 14th and
Stout. But of the sites looked at, only the brand new
Forum Building at 14th and Cherokee could be used for
classroom space without extensive remodeling.
Sam Hawkins, of the state division of planning, made the
recommendation, and the trustees gave their approval.
But there were some problems, not the least of which was
a liquor license recently granted to a bar called the
Jury Room, which intended to open its doors in the basement
of the Forum Building. The Attorney General's office doubted
that a state college could open with a bar in its basement.
Then an industrious city zoning official mea-sured the
staircases of the building and pronounced them to be too
narrow, by about six inches, for a school. The owners
of the Jury Room filed a lawsuit against the owner of
the Forum Building. A state planning official said no
more than 100 students could be on any floor. Hopeful
landlords who had been bypassed by the trustees accused
them of wasting their money. Metropolitan State College
didn't even have a home, and it was already embroiled
in bitter controversy.
One by one, the problems surrounding the Forum Building
lease were ironed out, and by mid-June the skeleton crew
of the new administration had moved into the building.
While McKinney and Bryant worked to staff and house the
new college, the trustees were searching for a permanent
president. Their criterion was simple: Find someone who
would regard the peculiar circumstances of Metropolitan
State as a challenge and an opportunity rather than a
handicap.
Darrel Holmes, president of UNC in Greeley, had been talking
with trustee Betty Naugle, and he thought he knew just
the man for the job.
An old friend of Holmes, a man by the name of Ken Phillips,
had just finished establishing San Bernadino State College
in California and understood the problems a new college
must face. Moreover, Phillips was personable and gregarious
and would contribute to the early public relations efforts
so crucial to the new school's success.
Holmes called Phillips, who remembers being less than
enthusiastic about the idea.
"I had just finished three years of intensive effort
to establish a new college," he says, "and I
was a little worn out." Besides, he had just bought
a house and was excavating his backyard for a swimming
pool. Moving to Denver didn't have any appeal at all.
As of that moment, the clock was running. The trustees had less than five months to create an entire college from scratch.
Ken Phillips took the reins as Metropolitan State's first permanent president. Phillips remembers that "a great sense of pride and a spirit of adventure" bonded the students, faculty and staff together during the early days of the school. |
But Holmes was persistent, and he
asked trustee Betty Naugle to try and persuade Phillips
to reconsider.
"She was very convincing," Phillips remembers.
"She told me all about the college and sent me a
copy of the 'Green Report'."
Whatever Naugle told him must have worked. Phillips eventually
took a pay cut to take the job and sold his new house
in California at a substantial loss.
When Phillips arrived at Metropolitan State, he went right
to work getting the word out to the Denver community.
Harold Benn, who handled Phillip's scheduling, remembers:
"He went everywhere, met with everybody. There was
still a lot of misunderstanding in the community about
what we were doing, and it was really his job to explain
it to people."
Confusion about the new school was widespread. Hidden
away in office buildings downtown, it was invisible. And
the name was already proving to be a problem. Calls came
in almost every day for the Metropolitan Sewage District.
Phillips met with everyone: Kiwanis, Rotarians, Chambers
of Commerce, neighborhood groups, anyone who would listen.
His schedule quickly filled up with luncheons, dinners,
and breakfasts. Especially breakfasts, Benn recalls.
"Kenneth really liked those breakfasts," he
remembers. "Sometimes he'd have breakfast twice a
day."
While Phillips was making Denver ready for Metropolitan
State, a 34-year-old accountant named Curtis Wright was
making the college ready for Denver.
McKinney stole Wright, who had done much of the financial
work on the "Green Report," from the Colorado
School of Mines.
Wright set up an accounting system and ordered stationery,
typewriters, and adding machines for his staff. And pencils.
In a Denver Post interview that August, he said, "You've
got to requisition a few pencils the first day or you're
really in trouble."
The details were endless. The college needed desks, chalkboards,
chairs, workbenches, everything. And forms. Lots of forms.
The state attorneys doubted that Metropolitan State College could open with a bar in its basement.
Kentucky Life Building, aka the Triple T building, AKA the Three-three-three Building, was the second building rented to house MSC classrooms. |
"Colleges run on paper;' Phillips
says, "and we didn't have any of it. It's one of
those things you take for granted at any other school,
but everything had to be devised at Metro."
Finally, the bustling crew of Metropolitan State got the
college sufficiently together to begin registration on
October 1.
F. D. Lillie, who had been hired away from CU extension
to serve as dean of students, opened the floodgates and
invited the public in to add their applications to the
more than 200 that had been waiting for him when he first
arrived. The entire faculty of 36, including the president
himself, worked the registration tables. No one was quite
sure what to expect.
McKinney had projected enrollment of 750, but it was little
more than an educated guess. If fewer showed up, there
would be questions to answer in the legislature, but if
more showed up, they would have a real mess on their hands.
More showed up. Charles Allbee, an English faculty member
who worked the first registration, remembers: "I
had the strong impression that people who were just walking
by, on their way somewhere else, came in to see what all
the commotion was about, and ended up registering for
classes."
Registration was supposed to end at 7: 30 p. m., but
the crush of students kept everyone there until almost
midnight.
When the dust had settled, Metropolitan State College
had registered 1,189 students. Who were they? Old, young,
bright, remedial? The faculty had the whole weekend to
worry about it. Harry Temmer had quit his job to be among
them.