13 Where Curiosity Took Root On a fall morning in 1902, just weeks after Northern Normal and Industrial School opened its doors, a group of students boarded the 7 a.m. Milwaukee train for a day of fieldwork along the James River. “The classes in elementary science and zoology enjoyed an excursion to the James River the first of this month,” the first issue of the school’s newspaper The Exponent reported. “They went out on the 7 a.m. Milwaukee train and returned at 8 o’clock in the evening. The party was chaperoned by Mrs. Koehler and Mrs. Squire. The day was spent collecting zoological specimens and in the study of the biological features of the vicinity.” It is a scene that would feel surprisingly familiar to Northern State University students nearly 125 years later. Today, Wolves still head into the field to gather specimens, only now they return not to simple classrooms, but to state-of-the-art laboratories filled with modern equipment and technology undreamed of by those first students. The tools have changed. The questions have grown more complex. But the spirit, learning by doing, discovering by observing, remains exactly the same. Cultivating from the Start From its very first month, Northern was never meant to be only a place where future teachers memorized lessons, but rather it should be a place to cultivate historians, scientists, thinkers, writers and artists. Students prepared not just for classrooms, but for the wider world. The College of Arts and Sciences, as it is known today, would not be formally established until 1973. But in many ways, it had been taking shape since Northern’s earliest days. Evidence of that is found in a Course of Study published in 1904, just a few years after the school opened. Listed among the offerings were courses that would be recognizable in a modern Arts and Sciences curriculum: Composition and Rhetoric; Algebra; Zoology; Civil Government; Reading and Literature; General History; Geometry; Latin; Arithmetic; Chemistry; Social Science; Virgil; Cicero; Physics; Advanced Geography; and Grammar and Composition. Long before there was a College of Arts and Sciences in name, Northern was already teaching its substance. These were not simply supporting courses for future teachers; they were the building blocks of a broader education in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. In that sense, the field trips to the James River, the early laboratories and classrooms, and the ambitious curriculum of the first decades all point to the same truth: while the College of Arts and Sciences would wait until 1973 to be formally named, its roots reach all the way back to Northern’s first years, planted by faculty and students who were already living out the idea that education should be as wide, deep and practical as life itself. Names such as Russell Brock and Richard Chuang, the first deans of Arts and Science, along with Arthur Buntin, Jeremy Rosonke, Dayton Cook and William Haigh, represent faculty whose leadership and scholarship were instrumental to the development of the College.
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