Flashback
90 years ago
CAS graduates first students
The College of Arts and Sciences graduated its first three students on June 11, 1920. Photo: UB ARCHIVES
The first graduates of the College of Arts and Sciences—Anna Christina Ulrich, Randolph Soranson Linderman and Annis Elizabeth Fox received their degrees at UB’s 74th commencement on June 11, 1920.
The original idea for a college of liberal arts at UB may date to 1905, with an article in the student yearbook, “The Iris.” The author of “The Proposed Arts Department” presented reasons why such an initiative would flourish at UB: There was an academic “foundation on which to erect a great college,” there are “immense steel and electrical plants for students in the sciences,” “many colleges are insular and difficult to approach, but Buffalo is unique in its situation by water and rail,” and “Its climate will permit the prosecution of study in the summer months with little fatigue.”
It took the visionary Charles P. Norton—attorney, professor in the Law School and UB chancellor—to move the idea of liberal arts study along. In 1909, he called for the establishment of a liberal arts college when the tract of land now known as the South Campus was purchased from Erie County. UB medical faculty and groups of men and women in the community volunteered to teach liberal arts courses. There was a suggestion that temporary quarters for a liberal arts college be established in the YMCA building.
Norton proposed to the City of Buffalo that the city appropriate $75,000 annually to the university to pay the salaries of liberal arts faculty. In return, UB would provide 300 scholarships each year to young men and women in the community, and give the city a seat on the UB Council. Buffalo’s Board of Alderman wanted more control over the funds. The alderman also mistrusted UB’s liberal religious views.
The UB Council responded to the city’s position: “Our only desire has been to place this city where it belongs in matters of education; to give every young man and woman, Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Gentile, an opportunity to obtain in Buffalo an education that will fit them for life as well as any which may today be obtained elsewhere by those who have the wealth to procure it. We have inherited this trust from our predecessors who were inspired by the same ambition, and we will not cease our efforts until we have created such a college.”
The prospects for a liberal arts college were ensured in 1913 when the American Medical Association instituted the requirement that in order for a medical school to retain the highest level of accreditation incoming students must have at least one year of liberal arts study. Not wanting to jeopardize the ranking of its medical program, that same year UB admitted 35 liberal arts students to be taught by two full-time faculty members.
Two years later, the College of Arts and Sciences was offered departmental status and a home when the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Buffalo offered its building on Niagara Square in downtown Buffalo. The future of the new college was secure when Mrs. Seymour R. Knox Sr., and her family contributed $250,000 (This was supplemented by a bequest of another $250,000 in 1920). By 1919, the college was authorized to confer degrees.
When the entire academic structure of the university was revamped in 1967, the original College of Arts and Sciences was replaced by three faculties—Arts and Letters, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and Social Sciences and Administration. The College of Arts and Sciences was re-established in 1998.
—John Edens, University Archives
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