“City Blood Is No Better than Country Blood”: The Populist Movement and Admissions Policies at Public Universities

The gubernatorial election of 1892 unnerved faculty members at Kansas State Agricultural College (KSAC). Voted into office by a “fusion” of Populists and Democrats, Governor Lorenzo Lewelling filled four vacant seats on the college's seven-member governing board, overturning a Republican Party majority for the first time in the college's history. These new regents included radicals such as Edward Secrest, a farmer who pledged to “change the order of things” at KSAC, and Christian Balzac Hoffman, a miller, banker, and politician who had founded an ill-fated socialist colony in Topolobampo, Mexico. Populist interest in KSAC intensified in 1897, when a different fusionist governing board promoted Professor Thomas E. Will to the college presidency. Born on an Illinois farm, Will attended a normal school before proceeding to Harvard University, where he chaffed within “the citadel of a murderous economic system.” When offered the chair of political economy at KSAC, Will had been lecturing, writing for reform periodicals, and serving as secretary of a Christian socialist organization called The Boston Union for Practical Progress. Although he never formally joined a Populist organization, Will shared the movement's commitment to erasing class distinctions in politics and education. Following Will's inauguration, a Populist regent exulted that the masses had finally “scaled the gilded halls of the universities.”