Summary :
IT WAS A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER, except that today the thirty-three-year-old professor was in Agricultural Hall as the first dean for the Purdue University School of Agriculture. As he sat behind the oak desk in 1907, John Harrison Skinner thought about his past for a few moments. He reminisced about managing his father’s grain and livestock farm, the excitement of attending Purdue’s agricultural Winter Short Course in 1893, and how proud he was to be one of only two students to earn a Purdue agriculture degree in 1897. He thought about how lucky he had been to get the job as an agronomy assistant working for one of the school’s first ag professors, William Carroll Latta, before heading off to the University of Illinois for one year as an instructor on livestock.He was surprised that ten years had already passed since he had earned his diploma. Skinner recalled the long hours he had spent during the past five years building up the animal husbandry program. If he wasn’t busy managing the campus farm, he was doing livestock research. If he wasn’t in the animal pens, he was taking a train heading for some far-off Farmers’ Institute to give a presentation on feeding livestock. There were always numerous invitations to judge hogs, sheep, cattle, and horses at county fairs across Indiana and plans to compete at the annual Chicago International Live Stock Exposition. If time wasn’t stretched enough with these activities, he still had to teach the livestock classes to the students majoring in agriculture as well as the intensive eight-week Winter Short Courses and a weeklong corn school to farmers. And there were all of the meetings of the Indiana State Board of Agriculture to attend and the many livestock associations that always needed attention with their annual meetings or their legislative agendas.There was also the endless flow of letters from growers, all with questions that required replies. He was constantly writing up his research in Agricultural Experiment Station bulletins and summarizing the information for the agricultural newspapers. There never seemed to be enough time to get all of the work done during those first years as a faculty member in the School of Agriculture. But through all of the hard work, endless hours, and the trials and tribulations of managing a nascent college livestock program, he had been able to build a rather strong educational and research program at Purdue University. By 1907, he personally—and Purdue’s animal husbandry program slowly—was becoming recognized as noteworthy within the national land-grant university system.

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