HISTORY OF UNH

In the beginning…

When the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (NHC) opened in 1868, it had “great expectations and unlimited possibilities,” and little else. It boasted of no buildings, curriculum, or classes—not even a campus of its own. It had one professor—the gifted and devoted chemist Ezekiel Dimond. It had three students—William Ballard of Concord, Lewis Perkins of North Adams, MA, and Charles Sanders of Penacook. And it had a mandate to reach out to the people of the state: to “educate intelligent men in the broadest sense, worthy citizens of a state in which the people ultimately rule, and of whose dearest interests knowledge and virtue are the only safeguards.”

By the time Ballard, Perkins, and Sanders returned for their 50^th reunion in 1921, they must have been amazed at how far their alma mater had come. The college had a campus in Durham, thousands of acres strong, with academic and dairy buildings, residence hall, athletic field, and a railroad. (Students had helped to dig ditches, grade athletic fields, and plant trees—a tradition of pride and involvement that continued through the 1940s.)

The College’s agricultural experiment station had made the college indispensable to the region’s farming community and state forestry since 1888, providing a rich source of research opportunity for faculty and students as well. The majority of students majored in liberal arts and were more likely to study English or history en route to becoming lawyers, teachers, or business people as they were to study botany or chemistry to prepare themselves to become farmers.

In short, everything had changed—everything except that is, the College’s relentless drive to push itself to greater levels. By the early 1920s, students and faculty were pressing the state legislature to turn NHC into UNH—the University of New Hampshire. The glorious feat was accomplished in 1923. By the decade’s end, the marine laboratory on the Isles of Shoals would offer students the chance to study marine diversity off Portsmouth’s shore. Marine scientists would eventually make the city’s harbor the best surveyed body of water in the world.

To undertake for the state’s Depression-strapped industry what the agricultural experiment station had for its farmers, the University created an “engineering experiment station” in 1933. Here small firms lacking capital for research and development could submit, free of charge, problems for study on everything from learning about raw materials to designing more economical ways to run manufacturing plants.

The University Today…

Today the University of New Hampshire comprises dozens of academic departments, interdisciplinary institutes, and research centers that attract students and faculty from around the world. As state-of-the-art academic buildings are built to support academic growth, and new residence and dining halls are built to meet the growing popularity of our undergraduate programs, the University continues to rest lightly on the Durham landscape, nestling some 13,000 students and hundreds of faculty and staff easily amid the rolling hills and riverbeds of one the most beautiful campuses in the nation.

The University of New Hampshire is lean, strong, and highly responsive to the needs of our public mandate—one that increasingly draws us into productive partnerships not only with the state, but the region and nation. We’ve met our greatest expectations and stand on the threshold of unlimited possibilities.

Look around the University today: what you will see is not one but a great many communities brought together in the process—at once profoundly personal and inextricably social—of discovery and engagement concerning issues of the greatest public importance.

You’ll see a campus in which world class research centers and laboratories, graduate seminars, undergraduate honors classes, service-learning projects, and student internships have mobilized the University’s capacities for teaching, research, and partnership building.

You will see faculty and students from health and human services and liberal arts working at the Carsey Center to undertake applied and policy research on improving the quality of family life. You would see business people gather at the Hamel Center with faculty and students from engineering and physical sciences and the Whittemore School to explore technological solutions to enhancing the vitality of enterprise and business in the knowledge-based economy. You would see researchers come together from across the University to undertake a ground-breaking study of the complexities of improving the region’s air quality in the era of modern industry.

Where the University of New Hampshire has linked teaching and research programs with the practical realities of life, it has set the international gold standard with centers and institutes whose names have become synonymous with excellence in such fields as including computer interoperability, ocean mapping, child study and development, and therapeutic recreation for people with disabilities.

Such research power translates into exceptional educational opportunities for our talented students to challenge themselves. The University prides itself on graduating students who have undertaken significant research, and in recent years hundreds of students from 85 disciplines have experienced the thrill of designing their own research projects, collaborating with faculty, and presenting their findings in a public forum. Our robust undergraduate research programs enable students to conduct research year-round, as freshman and seniors, on campus and as far abroad as Africa.

Our international research opportunities program was the first of its kind and serves as a model for others nation wide. Today the internationalization of UNH is an accomplished fact: our study abroad program and international studies major are strong and growing; our faculty are in demand as visiting professors at universities around the globe (Many have been Fulbright Fellows), and bring their experiences back to Durham.

Today’s UNH student learns that discovery can be sweetest when it serves a public purpose. Such purposes include an honors seminar in which students use statistical surveys to help a youth service agency track the success of its programs; an engineering class in which students learn about electrical systems by refurbishing discarded medical equipment for use in developing countries; a team of faculty and students from occupational therapy, recreation management and policy, and communication sciences and disorders who apply classroom theory to working with disabled students at a local elementary school; a pollution prevention internship with the NH Department of Environmental Services.

Today’s UNH students are honing teamwork, communication, and leadership skills, even as they bring honor to themselves and UNH by designing a prize-winning moon buggy and a water filter system to enhance environmental conservation; winning the laurel for the best student-written dramatic play in the nation; combining talents for math and teamwork to take UNH to the finals of a national accounting championship; blending academics and athletics to produce not only one of the best men’s hockey teams in the nation, but a high overall academic success rate that matched up with the nation’s elite universities.

- by David Moore, University Publications