forestry school in the United States. - ScholarsArchive at Oregon ...

The Beginnings 21
expressed a desire to enter the profession of forestry. One graduate, Mr.
Ernest G. Dudley [the professor's nephew] is now in the Yale School of
Forestry, and others are prepared to follow unless a professorship of
Forestry is established here. We have laid down a course preparatory to
forestry, but we cannot train men properly for the profession itself without
the aid of technical foresters as instructors, who could well be attached
to this department [botany]. With such addition a considerable number of
students, alert and ambitious men would come to Stanford; and in the
establishment of such instruction, we should be fulfilling our highest function,
namely our duty toward the State and the United States. The graduates
of the eastern schools are no doubt well trained in eastern conditions, and
know eastern trees. When coming here, they must inevitably and do make
mistakes concerning western tree life and in dealing with western lumber
and grazing interests. The great forest reserves are all in the west, and if
we had a forest school at Stanford, beside our men to the manner trained,
we should also draw here for further study, eastern forest school graduates.
The demand for trained foresters is far greater than our University authorities
realize - .
Dudley's plea almost got results, as these excerpts from the Greeley
diary reveal:
"...Dr. Jordan of Stanford University writes suggesting Assistant
Professorship in forestry in charge of new department which he proposes
to organize."34
". . - Wrote Dr. Jordan again declining the Chair of Forestry at
Stanford."35
These offers preceded by several months those of Wheeler in 1909. Had
Greeley been inclined to head a forest school, Dudley's fervent hope of having
one at Stanford first might have been realized. And then, perhaps, a school
would never have been established at Berkeley.
Stanford-Berkeley agreement
Greeley suggested other possibilities but nothing came of them. Jordan's
hand was stayed by a "gentlemen's agreement" with Wheeler: the University
of California would stay out of Icthyology and Fisheries (Jordan's specialities)
provided Stanford would stay out of Ornithology, Mammals, Agriculture,
and Forestry.36 It must have been a reluctant Jordan who had made
such an agreement. A few days before his death he said to Mrs. E. G. Dudley
"with tears in his eyes" that the great disappointment of his presidency
was failing to get a forestry school.37' 38
°'Greeley diary January 30, 1909.
°tihid February 19, 1909.
°°Interviews with Ira L. Wiggins and George S. Myers, Stanford University, in November, 1963, and
again with Wiggins in June, 1964. All of the details of the Wheeler-Jordan agreement had been related to
Wiggins by LeRoy Abrams and George J. Peirce, associates of Dudley in the Botany Department Wiggins had
also seen the pertinent Dudley letters among which was one to Pinchot. To Dudlry, dedicated as he was to
getting a forestry school, this agreement had been heartbreaking. Everything about the agreement except the
inclusion of Agriculture and Forestry, had bern handed dawn to Myers. present head of Ictbyology at Stanford
but lie said, "If Abrams had said it was so, it was so."
aoIote,iew with Mrs. E. G. Dudley, January, 1963.
°°In 1926, Stanford planned to establish a graduate school of forestry provided the federal government
located its forest experiment station there as it was invited to do.