In a meeting on campus a few days ago, along with many of the best and brightest at NDSU, interviewing a candidate for a high position in the university, I asked the question often on my mind these days as a senior dude at our land grant university, the people’s college, as we used to say. Is higher education, college learning, I asked, fundamentally transactional, a matter of contracts and credentials, or is it relational, a matter of mentorships and relationships? I’ll tell you later how that came out.
In the meantime, I went from that meeting directly to the archives to dive into a manuscript collection of the Institute for Regional Studies, which in the 1950s, under the guidance of Professor Leonard Sackett, acquired amazing research collections, great and small. One of the small ones comprises the papers of Dr. Merton Field.
The minutes of the directors of North Dakota Agricultural College record that on 25 June 1895 they approved baccalaureate degrees for five young men, the first graduating class of North Dakota Agricultural College. One of them was the son of homesteaders on Apple Creek, in Burleigh County, a thoughtful lad named Merton Field. He stayed on to attain a master’s in biology with a rather obscure thesis but also authored a bulletin on the medicinal plants of North Dakota. Thence it was on to the medical school at Minnesota. Field practiced in several Minnesota towns and did post-doctoral work at several institutions, including Harvard. He was an eye, ear, nose, and throat guy who practiced until 1951 and died in 1959.
Dr. Field had a sense of history and wrote a 131-page memoir about his youth on Apple Creek, which I’ll get to another time, but given that question still on my mind, I was transfixed by reading his letters, in particular his experiences as a farm boy at the ag college.
As he neared completion of his medical studies at Minnesota Field wrote back to Professor Henry Bolley at NDAC, who was a celebrity scientist by this time, to thank him for teaching and encouraging him, for being, he attested, "steadfast though others were over critical. . . . There have been times,” Field confessed, “when I did not appreciate you as I do now but through all I feel that you have been a generous and steadfast friend.”
I confess when I read Field’s letters to Bolley, I blinked away a tear or two, and then went on to read some of his late-in-life correspondence with another graduate among the first five, Robert Reed. There are intimate details dealing with matters such as the death of Field’s wife on which I here draw a curtain of privacy, but there also are stories about memorable relationships established at college, recalling, he says, “the years when we were classmates in that small Dakota school . . . wonderful days for me as without funds I had to make my way by doing any sort of work that came my way.
“Memory tells me of our great Professor Ladd,” Field continues, and then he tells the story of when he ran out of money and decided to quit school, but Edwin Ladd instead encouraged him to enter an essay contest with a $25 prize. He won, with an essay about his father’s success as a pioneer farmer. Only later did he learn that Ladd was a judge of the essay competition. “And so you and I,” Field closes a letter to his old friend, “are probably the only left of our class.” There’s another tear, dammit.
Possibly because when I asked that question in the interview room, the candidate answered it pretty well, on the one hand this and on the other hand that, but in the presence of Dr. Field, I realized her answer was, itself, transactional. So, ask me, now. I’m ready for that question.
