Not only is the cost to the student low at the University of Kansas, but the cost of operating the university is slight. In the year 1909-10 (the last year on which I have figures) the cost of operating sixteen leading colleges in the United States averaged $232 per student. The cost per student at the University of Kansas is $175. One reason for this low per capita cost is the fact that the salaries of professors at the University of Kansas are unusually small. They are too small. It is one of the reproaches of this rich country of ours that, though we are always ready to spend vast sums on college buildings, we pay small salaries to instructors; although it is the faculty, much more than the buildings, which make a college. So far as I have been able to ascertain, Harvard pays the highest maximum salaries to professors, of any American university—$5,500 is the Harvard maximum. California, Cornell, and Yale have a $5,000 maximum. Kansas has the lowest maximum I know of, the greatest salary paid to a professor there, according to last year's figures, having been $2,500.
Before leaving New York I was told by a distinguished professor in an eastern university that the students he got from the West had, almost invariably, more initiative and energy than those from the region of the Atlantic seaboard.
The campus seems to have "just growed."... Nevertheless there is a sort of homely charm about the place, with its unimposing, helter-skelter piles of brick and stone
"Just what do you mean by the West?" I asked.
"In general," he replied, "I mean students from north and west of Chicago. If I show an eastern boy a machine which he does not understand, the chances are that he will put his hands in his pockets and shake his head dubiously. But if I show the same machine to a western boy, he will go right at it, unafraid. Western boys usually have more 'gumption,' as they call it."
Brief as was my visit to the University of Kansas, I felt that there, indeed, was "gumption." And it is easy to account for. The breed of men and women who are being raised in the Western States is a sturdier breed than is being produced in the East. They have just as much fun in their college life as any other students do, but practically none of them go to college just "to have a good time," or with the even less creditable purpose of improving their social position. Kansas is still too near to first principles to be concerned with superficialities. It goes to college to work and learn, and its reason for wishing to learn are, for the most part, practical. One does not feel, in the University of Kansas, the aspiration for a vague culture for the sake of culture only. It is, above all, a practical university, and its graduates are notably free from the cultural affectations which mark graduates of some eastern colleges, enveloping them in a fog of pedantry which they mistake for an aura of erudition, and from which many of them never emerge.
Directness, sincerity, strength, thoughtfulness, and practicality are Kansas qualities. Even the very young men and women of Kansas are not far removed from pioneer forefathers, and it must be remembered that the Kansas pioneer differed from some others in that he possessed a strain of that Puritan love of freedom which not only brought his forefathers to Plymouth, but brought him overland to Kansas, as has been said, to cast his vote for abolition. Naturally, then, the zeal which fired him and his ancestors is reflected in his children and his grandchildren. And that, I think, is one reason why Kansas has developed "cranks."
Contrasting curiously with Kansas practicality, however, there must be among the people of that State another quality of a very different kind, which I might have overlooked had I not chanced to see a copy of the "Graduate Magazine," and had I not happened to read the list of names of graduates who returned to the university for the last commencement. The list was not a very long one, yet from it I culled the following collection of given names for women: Ava, Alverna, Angie, Ora, Amida, Lalia, Nadine, Edetha, Violetta, Flo, Claudia, Evadne, Nelle, Ola, Lanora, Amarette, Bernese, Minta, Juanita, Babetta, Lenore, Letha, Leta, Neva, Tekla, Delpha, Oreta, Opal, Flaude, Iva, Lola, Leora, and Zippa.