Education

The University of Nebraska at Omaha, inaugurated in 1968, emerged from the Municipal University of Omaha established in 1931, which grew out of the University of Omaha founded in 1908. In each of the school's three lives, the faculty sought to provide quality education for recent high school graduates and adults returning to school in a well-rounded learning environment. The commuter college moved from relying on charitable donations and tuition to a city tax base and ultimately state revenues. The campus grew numerically and spatially. Accommodating students and faculty, setting priorities and funding initiatives is a continuous challenge not always met expeditiously. The exciting visual cavalcade and text captures a century of public higher education in America's urban heartland and the role of graduates in American society.

The dream of York College involved hundreds of people—its reality has touched the lives of thousands. Born in a small town on the rolling plains of Nebraska in 1890, the United Brethren Church and citizens of York established York College on an empty expanse of prairie called East Hill. Its earliest classes, offered in rented rooms above a dry goods store on the town square, established the foundations of a Christian college. The institution grew as buildings arrived with each passing decade. These brick-and-mortar symbols of the college's progress include Old Main, Hulitt Conservatory of Music, Alumni Library, and Middlebrook Hall. When a tragic fire engulfed the school's venerable Old Main in 1951, York College was pulled from the ashes as a second group of believers took the institution's reins. The Churches of Christ determined to continue the dream, standing on the shoulders of those who had come before them.