the University of Arizona. The university was to be under a board of seven regents made up of the governor, the judges of the supreme court, and three other members chosen by the legislature. The main support of the institution was to be derived from the lands granted to the territory for that purpose. The university, when organized, was to consist of (1) a department of literature, science, and the arts; (2) a department of natural history, including a history of the Territory; and (3) such other departments to be added as the regents should deem necessary and the university funds allow. The regents were directed to select a site for the university before January 1, 1866. In the meantime, university moneys accruing were to be kept in the hands of the State treasurer.
Under this law nothing was accomplished toward the organization of the proposed university. As McCrea has pertinently said, for the next 10 years the best energies of the people were to be devoted to a desolating Indian war; and the University of Arizona, the dream of this Michigan jurist and of his friend, the governor, was forgotten for a generation in the fierce struggle to hold the land for civilization.[1]
In the matter of common schools it was provided that—
as soon as there shall have accumulated sufficient funds and a necessity therefor exists the legislature shall provide for a system of common-school education at the public expense and may at any time authorize a tax to be levied by school districts for the support of schools until such system of common-school education shall be established.
The proceeds of lands granted by Congress for this purpose, appropriations made by the Territory, and the proceeds of gifts, grants, and donations “shall be and remain a perpetual fund, the interest, rents, and proceeds thereof to be inviolably applied to the object of the original grant or gift, and to no other use or purpose whatsoever”; and until such system was established by law all moneys were to accumulate and remain in the Territorial treasury as a distinct fund, to be known as the common-school fund.[2]
The remaining phases of the Howell code were supplementary to the above. They provided for the establishment of a Territorial library supported by moneys out of the Territorial treasury and in charge of a Territorial librarian. And in addition to the above it was provided that—
- ↑ McCrea, Samuel Pressly: Establishment of the Arizona School System, in Report Supt. Public Instruction, 1907–8, p. 79 et seq. Mr. McCrea was educated at Muskingum College and at the Indiana State Normal School. He has taught in various sections of the Territory and was in 1897–98 principal of the Tucson public schools.
- ↑ On the income from Territorial lands McCrea remarks (p. 78): “As was true elsewhere, the Arizona legislators had an exaggerated idea of the amount of income likely to arise from the grants of land made by Congress for education. Until 1898 Arizona derived no income from the school lands within her borders, and then and since only a small amount from leasing sections 16 and 36 in the farming regions of the Territory.”
