Elson Floyd died June 20. He was 59. Complications from colon cancer.

A lot of people have recalled his four years as University of Missouri System President as a progressive administration at a time when the legislature was deciding higher education wasn’t worth the financial support it had been getting. The economy was in bad shape after the 2001 terrorist attacks, you might remember.

The student newspaper at the University of Missouri-Columbia, The Maneater, takes credit for giving Floyd his nickname, E-Flo. Floyd was a personable president who enjoyed his relationships with students. He left in 2007 to become the President of Washington State University.

He took over at Missouri when the legislature was cutting the university budget by $200 million. Floyd made painful cuts and worked hard to keep tuition as affordable as possible under the circumstances but the university still increased tuition by twenty percent in his first year in office.

Floyd is remembered by many because he tried to get Northwest Missouri State into the University of Missouri System. He convinced the university system to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Two university research parks were started while he was there. Scholarships were increased for disadvantaged students. Enrollment increased. He elevated the university’s image as a significant part of state economic development.

His tenure was blemished by basketball player Ricky Clemons, who left a Columbia halfway house to attend a July 4^th party at the Floyd house. He had to deal with a faculty mutiny at UMKC because of the behavior of the campus chancellor.

But I remember him because he made a phone call real early one morning.

Southwest Missouri State University for years had wanted to change its name to Missouri State University and the push intensified in 2005. The University of Missouri quickly adopted a bunker mentality and started forecasting that the sky would fall if the second-largest university in the state were allowed to change its name. Forget that most other states have a ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­”­­­­­________ State.” Forget that Southwest Missouri State had long ago outgrown its regional name. Columbia campus partisans were convinced the University of Missouri would be devastated if not destroyed if Southwest Missouri State changed its name. Mizzou was the state’s foremost research university and its status would be threatened if that bunch in Springfield were allowed to change the school name and keep growing in influence.

The Mizzou Alumni Association tried to mobilize the alumni to overwhelm lawmakers with opposition. Heck, ten members of the Senate in 2005 had degrees from the Columbia campus. Five more had degrees from UMKC or UMSL. Only four were graduates of Southwest Missouri State. If all of the Missouri system graduates in the Senate opposed the idea, it wouldn’t fly.  But not all of them did.

The Alumni Association showed no interest in rational discussion of the issues. It became an accelerator-to-the-firewall opposition organ for UMC. This MU grad who got the fevered letters and the alumni magazine with its over-the-top condemnation of the very idea of a name change for Southwest Missouri State wondered if the folks in Columbia were suffering a worrying decline in rationality. Some pointed letters to the association went back from an address that coincides with the house where I live or from my email address in response to the “fire in the theatre” emails I was getting.

Those exchanges are probably in a file somewhere. In one of them I suggested it would be more proper for the state’s leading university to support the efforts of all institutions of higher education to lift themselves to a higher standing and standard instead of trying to pound one growing university back into its place.   I thought Southwest Missouri State president Charles Keiser had a good point when he said, “The name doesn’t describe something the University wants to become; it describes what we are,”  Keiser and Elson Floyd had been discussing the issue for some time.

Late in the game, UMC partisans came up with the most outlandish claim of all. UMC’s status is carved in stone and cannot be changed, they claimed. They pointed to the words “State University” carved into part of the stone wall of the resources museum at the capitol to mean that the University of Missouri is THE state university and therefore no other school can call itself Missouri State University.

The words were carved about 1915 when Missouri had one state university and a series of regional normal schools, or teachers colleges. It was not important in 2005 that Missouri’s normal school were or had been re-named (Region) STATE UNIVERSITY. I pointed out that the words were carved in the same wing of the state museum that listed the state’s other resources then, some of which had lost their status as primary resources in the years since. The folks in Columbia also didn’t take too kindly to the idea that if opponents of Southwest Missouri State’s name change wanted things to stay as they had been in 1915 they should be glad for the legislature to cut funding for UMC to 1915 levels, including salaries of faculty and administrators.

All of the alarms UMC was sounding didn’t keep the House from passing the name change bill, overwhelmingly, 120-35. When it got to the Senate, Columbia Senator Chuck Graham (a University of Illinois graduate representing the University of Missouri) launched a filibuster, hoping to kill the bill. He seized the floor about 7:30 on a February night.

While Graham and a few friends rattled on and on about what a terrible thing this would be, negotiations were going on behind the scenes. SMS had a couple of people trying to find some language that would make sure SMS would not gobble up the Columbia campus if the bill passed. I was at the press table watching all of this play out, hoping the talkathon would end before I had to drag myself to the Missourinet newsroom to do my morning newscasts.

About 3:30 a.m., Graham or one of his cohorts—I think it was Graham—said he’d relinquish the floor if Floyd asked him to. That led one of the SMS negotiators to call Floyd, who called the University curators. That’s when he called the capitol and said it was time to end all of this. Stop the filibuster. Let the bill come to a vote. I was in the newsroom by then, listening to the ongoing debate on the internet while preparing the morning’s newscasts.

But Mizzou wanted a pound or two of flesh. About 5:30 a.m., Graham—as I recall—met with one of the SMS folks and demanded some protective wording be added to the bill that limited what Missouri State University could do. SMS could never become a land-grant university, which meant that the school could not get federal funding that goes with the designation. It couldn’t offer professional programs duplicating those in Columbia. It can’t call itself a research institution. In retrospect, the changes appear to be more about saving some face for the Columbia interests than burdening Missouri State University.

So the bill was passed at about 7 a.m.  The House approved the amendment and sent the bill to Governor Matt Blunt who signed it on March 17, saying “There was a real spirit of cooperation on this. President Keiser and Dr. Floyd were able to understand that they could work together to provide the degree programs that will be beneficial to Missouri students.”

I don’t recall the University Alumni Association making any such graceful statements afterward.

That was ten years ago this year.   And what do we see this decade later?

Well, the columns are still standing in Columbia. Jesse Hall has not collapsed. The University of Missouri-Columbia has built a lot of new buildings and is fixing up old ones and the student population has boomed so much that student apartments are being thrown up all over the place, and there are no pieces of the sky laying on the ground.

Claudette Riley looked at what has happened to Missouri State in the decade since that long night and the months of overwrought rhetoric coming out of the Columbia campus in an article in the Springfield News-Leader on June 22, two days after Elson Floyd’s death. “The new moniker is widely credited with raising the profile of Springfield’s largest education institution. It has also been credited with fueling the university’s ongoing ush to grow and diversity enrollment, expand academic offerings, and increase private giving—which, in turn, helps pay for better buildings,” she wrote.

Today’s school president, Clif Smart, is quoted as saying, “It would be hard for you to pick a factor that the name change didn’t impact.” And the VP for research and economic development and international programs, jim Baker, told her, “There is a status attached to the name. There is a pride that goes with it. I don’t think we’d have 24,000 students now if we didn’t change the name.”

One result that Columbia partisans would have shuddered at the thought of a decade ago is what Riley calls “MSU’s strong, collaborative relationship with the University of Missouri system.”   Smart says MSU and UMC are now closer to being partners, noting, “We are a statewide university and they’re much more comfortable interacting with us.”

At a time when the University of Missouri was at its blustering, intimidating best, its president said it was time to stop, and let another school call itself what it already was.

The tributes to E-Flo that this scribe has seen haven’t mentioned what might be his greatest and still growing legacy. He was the man who made a phone call early one morning that changed higher education in Missouri. A statesman called a politician one day and generations will benefit from the opportunities they will have because he did.

Sixteen days before Christmas when I was a high school freshman, I dashed out the front door of my central Illinois farmhouse, avoided falling over Mac the dog who liked to run alongside of me when I ran for the school bus, and headed to Sullivan High School for the day’s class.  

I was called out of PE class that afternoon and taken to the principal’s office where Augie Adams, a family friend who rented our pasture for his horses, met me. “Do you know where your mother is?” he asked. “She’s driving my dad around on his territory,” I said. Dad had had a heart attack the previous summer and was not yet cleared to drive to visit the farm equipment dealers in his territory. A relieved look came over Augie’s face. “Well, your house just burned down and we found your mother’s car in the garage but we couldn’t find her,” he said.      

That was how I learned that the only things I had left in the world were my parents, the clothes I was wearing, and the things I had in the gym bag I had carried to the bus that morning.  

As I grow older and consider the things I want my grandchildren to know about the family, I think of all that was lost in that fire. Pictures mostly, but also letters and trinkets that meant something to the family. My father built C-54s at the Douglas Aircraft factory near Chicago during World War II and I remember some of the keepsakes he had of those days (the factory is now O’Hare Field). I think of my great-grandfather’s little Civil War pistol that he carried when he was a fifer at Vicksburg for the 126^th Illinois Infantry. I think of a baseball card collection. People think of all kinds of little things as well as the big things when there’s nothing left after a disaster.

This life experience is why I have anxiously followed the several-year effort of the State Historical Society to get a legislative appropriation for a new Center for Missouri Studies that the society wants to build in Columbia. Executive Director Gary Kremer has led that effort through a lot of disappointments until this year when the legislature included $35 million in a bond issue bill for the center. During the time it took Gary and others working closely with him to convince the legislature and the governor to pass and sign the bill, the estimated costs have gone up a few million dollars. The society trustees have voted to contribute and help raise the amount needed to fill the gap. If things go smoothly, the new facility will open in 2018 on some land between the University of Missouri-Columbia and the downtown area of the city. It will be on Elm Street, across from Peace Park.

(Truth in advertising moment: I am a vice-president of the society)

The State Historical Society of Missouri has been housed in the Elmer Ellis Library at the University of Missouri-Columbia since the library was opened 99 years ago. It has been a resource for tens of thousands of students from dozens of disciplines, not just those majoring in history, and for thousands of other researchers looking for stories and lessons that the past can tell. The Center for Missouri Studies will be an even more important resource giving all who seek to put their careers, their lives, their communities, in context.

We have lived in fear for some time that something would happen in that library basement that is the society’s home that would damage or destroy records that tell us how we came to be the state—and the people of the state—that we are. A broken steam pipe, a water leak, a fire—we have experienced these things in recent years which adds to the urgency of this project. A few years ago, you might recall, a disenchanted young man set several fires in the library in the middle of the night. Although the fires caused no damage in our quarters, the water used to put them out caused extensive damage to our facilities. A few pages of important old documents were damaged but somehow our archives escaped the flow that made our administrative offices unusable for months. Thankfully the water did not pour into the storage area where we have more than $100-milion in art works by Bingham, Benton, and others. The bullet missed us, but just barely. We have lived with elevated fear since then.

The society headquarters, and thus Missouri history, now are tucked away at the end of a shaded sidewalk, almost unnoticeable to the thousands of people who walk through the area. Our history deserves better than a precarious existence in an obscure location. And Missouri history finally is getting that something better.                                         

This isn’t just a building. It’s a statement. It says history isn’t just a bunch of musty, dusty records; it’s life. The society is not a storehouse, a place in a basement where we keep old stuff that’s no longer used. It is, instead, a place of discovery, of adventure, and learning who we are and how we got to be who we are.   The building will be US. It says Missouri history has value. It says Missouri history is a dynamic story still being written. It says Missouri history is central to understanding who we are as a people, as a state, as a nation. This is the state that was the opening door to everything that is the American West.

Missouri history is American history. The Revolution? Records of the people who lived in what became Missouri in those years will be here. War of 1812? It wasn’t all fought in the east and the northeast. It was here in Missouri, too. The words of Lewis and Clark will be here. The personal passion and tragedy of the Civil War are in the letters, journals, diaries, and other records that will be here. Records of the cruelty of slavery will be preserved here as will be the cruelty of Reconstruction.

The growth of our towns, the highways that connect them, and the businesses that gave and give us jobs will be in this building. The world wars, the depression, the civil rights movements—all of them will be here. Missouri in all of its nobility and narrowness, in all of its heroism and its cowardice, in its compassion and its hate will be in this building.

Dedicated staff guide visitors to that information in today’s inadequate quarters, hoping nothing bad happens until that great moving day into the Center for Missouri Studies. No other building in the state will be able to tell the stories of the state and its people as emphatically as this one will be able to tell them.  

Our history deserves to come out of the shadows and into the sunlight. And the sunlight will be bright for the future of our past with this new building.