SENATE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION NO. 1

        A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION, Honoring the University of South Dakota on its one hundred fiftieth anniversary.

    WHEREAS, the first Dakota Territorial Legislature, which convened in Yankton in the early months of 1862, and whose members, recognizing quality education would be vital to the development of Dakota Territory, approved legislation authorizing, though not funding, what would become the University of South Dakota in the town of Vermillion located along the Missouri River in Clay County, to which Territorial Governor William Jayne, who had been Abraham Lincoln's personal physician in Springfield, Illinois, affixed his signature on April 21,
1862; and

    WHEREAS, despite the financial challenges and natural disasters afflicting the region, prairie optimism persisted and territorial settlers, led by Darwin Inman, Justice Jefferson Kidder, Dr. F.N. Burdick, and Civil War veteran Colonel John Jolley, raised private funds to build the first facilities on the budding campus, beginning a private/public partnership that continues today; and

    WHEREAS, on the crisp morning of October 16, 1882, with Principal Epstein leading them, thirty-five young men and women began their studies; this three dozen students would be the nucleus of a University that would grow to include more than 9,900 enrolled students and more than 75,000 alumni one hundred fifty years hence; and

    WHEREAS, academics flourished under the tutelage of knowledgeable, respected, and beloved faculty and administrators and grew to include the establishment of a comprehensive College of Arts and Sciences, a College of Fine Arts, Schools of Education, Health Sciences, and Business, and the state's only Schools of Law and Medicine, each serving to prepare students to be critical thinkers, life-long learners and productive citizens, and whose alumni have become leaders, healers, innovators, heroes, researchers, and nationally recognized scholars, including nine Rhodes Scholars and Nobel Laureate E. O. Lawrence; and

    WHEREAS, the University's commitment to fostering better state government is exemplified in the contributions of renowned political science professor, W.O. Farber, the founder and first director of the Legislative Research Council and stellar member of the Constitutional Revision Commission;

and

    WHEREAS, the University has excelled in the gallery and on the gridiron, in the arena and on the stage producing celebrated artists and athletes alike; and

    WHEREAS, the University of South Dakota gave rise to a newspaper, the Volante, that students have published since 1887, making it one of the nation's oldest continuously published newspapers, the renowned National Music Museum, the Oscar Howe Gallery, and the South Dakota Oral History Center that serves by preserving voices of all peoples of the Northern Plains; and

    WHEREAS, the University of South Dakota has a long tradition of celebrating diversity, from including women in its first classes to the success of many Native American students, to its current student body that is global in scope and contrast; and

    WHEREAS, the University of South Dakota has dutifully executed its mission as the state's comprehensive liberal arts university, offering undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs within the South Dakota system of higher education and it continues onward as the state's flagship university, pursuing academic, research and creative excellence with a growing number of extraordinary students:

    NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the Senate of the Eighty-seventh Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the House of Representatives concurring therein, that the Legislature commend and congratulate the University of South Dakota as it celebrates its sesquicentennial year.

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Adopted by the Senate,

Concurred in by the House of Representatives,

Matt Michels President of the Senate	Fee Jacobsen Secretary of the Senate
Val Rausch Speaker of the House	Karen Gerdes Chief Clerk of the House