Vanport Extension Center
Founded in the summer of 1946, the Vanport Extension Center (VEC) brought a lower division extension college to the Portland area. Returning veterans who wanted to take advantage of the G.I. Bill found that Oregon colleges were incapable of meeting their housing needs. Stephen E. Epler, a Vanport veterans' college counselor, was intimately aware of this difficult situation and proposed the VEC as an emergency measure to take some of the burden off the state’s colleges. Rather than act as a junior college vocational school, VEC’s primary purpose was as a two-year ‘feeder’ college for the professional and liberal arts schools. As such, it was not until 1951 that it began offering terminal programs.
The city of Vanport was an ideal location for a college. Originally built to address Portland’s housing shortage during World War II, Vanport’s population had fallen since its peak in 1944 of 40,000 to 18,000 in 1946. As such, the city possessed an abundance of housing for the proposed extension college. “Veterans' Village” was established as general veteran housing, but quickly became a dominantly student veteran community offering completely furnished apartments from $30 per month and public/nursery school and day care so that both parents could work or go to school.
The combination of popularity, favorable press, and hard work by administration and alumni allowed the VEC to become a permanent two-year school in 1949. Before this, however, the VEC struggled against established universities to assert its continued relevance in the wake of decreasing veteran admissions. The complete destruction of VEC in the May 30 Columbia River flood of 1948 appeared to settle the argument of its continuation, yet the VEC administration persuaded the State Board to allow it to continue. On June 14th, two weeks after Vanport’s destruction, the VEC re-opened at Grant High School for the summer session. For the 1948-1949 school year, VEC relocated to an abandoned Kaiser Company building called the Oregon Shipbuilding Company at St. Johns. In 1952, the VEC moved again to the old Lincoln High School and its permanent home in the Park blocks of Portland, where its name changed to the Portland State Extension Center. In 1955, it became Portland State College, a four-year school. 1968 saw the approval of PSC’s first doctoral programs and its name changed for a final time to Portland State University.
The VEC 1946 summer session offered thirteen classes in eight basic disciplines taught by twenty-four instructors. Student majors were limited to business administration, prelaw, premedical, and liberal arts. By the 1951-1952 year, it had sixty-eight faculty members teaching three hundred and sixteen classes in forty-three subjects, and offered twenty-nine majors, four of which were terminal: Medical/Dental Secretary, Secretary Science, Merchandising, and Police Training. This growth came with a price hike of four dollars more per term than the $32 paid in 1946.
Between 1946 and 1949 the majority of students were veterans, beginning with the original 220 students in June of 1946, of whom 94% were veterans. It was not until the 1949-1950 school year that veteran enrollment fell below 50%. From the start, however, Vanport was open to anyone interested in beginning a college education, and the administration made efforts to encourage the enrollment of women and minorities through advertising, promotion, and editorials.
Academic interest during the Vanport years was primarily in engineering, business administration, and liberal arts, between 40-50% of the total student population. The top three majors for women were elementary education, liberal arts, and secretarial science, with nursing a distant fourth. As late as 1952, women students were not pursuing engineering majors, and only eight were working on business majors. Between 1948 and 1949 minorities made up only 2.6% of the student body: “14 Negro, 8 Chinese, 12 Japanese, 1 Indian.” While the number of women students continued to grow by leaps (283 in 1949 compared to 74 in 1946), minorities grew only by 0.17%, or 45 of the 1624 total students in 1949-1950.
The VEC’s administration was headed by director Stephen E. Epler; Phil Putnam, assistant director; Jean Black, head librarian; and John F. Cramer, dean of the General Extension Division of the Oregon State System of Higher Education. Dean Cramer recruited Epler as a veterans' educational opportunities counselor. Epler’s daily interaction with veterans interested in Oregon’s increasingly overburdened university system inspired him to found the VEC. Epler managed the internal affairs of the VEC while Phil Putnam managed everything outside of it, from public relations and finding buildings and equipment to gaining political support.
Jean Black was the first librarian at the VEC. She guided the library from its humble beginnings in her office and its destruction in the 1948 flood to its reconstruction, beginning at the Oregon Shipyard campus and finding its final home in the Park Blocks. Dean Cramer became Portland State College’s first president in 1955.
The first department heads were James Price, Head of Mathematics; Eugene Guldemann, Head of Engineering; and Frank Roberts, Head of English, in 1946. The “Departmental Annual Report” of 1947 contains reports by other “department heads,” though they do not appear as such anywhere officially. By summer of 1948, Allan A. Gibb became the Mathematics Head and Raymond Lockwood the Engineering Head. The 1948-1949 year saw the addition of George C. Hoffman as the Head of Social Sciences, and the Head of Engineering switched to Richard E. Smith. 1950-1952 saw the formalization of several additional departments. Erwin F. Lange in the Science Department, James A. Macnab in Biology, Donald D. Parker in Business Administration, and John H. Stehn in Music headed the new departments, while Smith, Hoffman, and Gibb stayed the respective Heads of their departments.
From the guide to the Vanport Records, 1927-1995, (Portland State University Library)
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creatorOf | Vanport Records, 1927-1995 | Portland State University LibrarySpecial Collections & University Archives |
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associatedWith | Epler, Stephen Edward, 1909- | person |
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