William Marion Jardine was an American administrator and educator. Throughout his career Jardine served on various committees, boards, and commissions.
Background
Jardine was born on January 16, 1879, in Oneida County, Idaho, the son of William and Rebecca Jardine. His father, who was of Scotch-Welsh ancestry, came to the United States after the potato famine in 1848 and worked as a rancher and farmer in Idaho and Montana, where Jardine also lived and worked for the first twenty years of his life.
Education
Jardine earned a B. S. degree in 1904 at the Agricultural College of Utah, where he was captain of the football team. He remained there as an assistant in agronomy and an instructor and professor in 1905 and 1906.
Career
From 1907 to 1910 Jardine served as an assistant cerealist in the U. S. Department of Agriculture in charge of problems relating to grain production in the Great Plains. He worked to develop new methods of cultivation and to introduce wheats that could resist drought. In 1910 he became an agronomist at Kansas State Agricultural College in Manhattan, Kansas, and in 1912 he lectured at the Michigan Graduate School of Agriculture. He returned to Kansas State to serve first as the acting director of the experiment station and professor of agronomy and then as the permanent director and dean of agriculture until he became president in 1918.
Jardine contributed greatly to the college by helping develop a unified faculty, a self-governing student association, a campus free from fraternity influences and antifraternity discord, and a curriculum that displayed a balance between technical and academic offerings. He made no significant administrative changes at Kansas State, but the courses introduced during his presidency became the basis for future programs. Those dealing with the business side of agriculture laid the foundation for the later business curriculum and those in engineering and biochemistry became the nucleus for the departments of economics and nursing. As President Calvin Coolidge's Secretary of Agriculture from 1925 to 1929, Jardine believed that farming was a business and that agricultural cooperatives could offer farmers a way out of their financial dilemma. When it became apparent that the cooperative leaders supported his position, his staff prepared a bill to be presented to Congress. The Jardine proposal was favorably received, even among those who preferred the McNary-Hughes plan, which called for the establishment of a large governmental corporation to administer a two-price system for farmers - a subsidized domestic price and a floating price on the world market. Jardine's plan was particularly welcome to those who believed that strengthening the cooperatives would bring relief to agriculture and weaken the pressure for more government subsidies.
It was only after a number of other bills failed to pass, however, that the Jardine proposal was formally presented to Congress; the plan was ratified as the Cooperative Marketing Act of 1926. When the act was finally passed, many in Congress were critical of it, viewing it as a compromise of little real significance. Jardine also advocated the formation of a federal farm board that would provide farmers with facts needed to conduct their businesses and that would administer public loans. The loans would enable the farmers to hold back part of their crop from season to season in order to help reduce price fluctuations. In 1930 President Hoover appointed Jardine minister to Egypt, a post he held until 1933. In 1933-1934 he served temporarily as the state treasurer of Kansas before accepting the presidency of the Municipal University of Wichita (now Wichita State University). As president of the University of Wichita, Jardine was condemned by the American Association of University Professors because of the dismissal of three professors from the University. Jardine's presidency did, however, also benefit the school since he also gave strong support to the Institute of Logopedics, which gained a worldwide reputation, and he approved the building of a new library as well as the establishment of both a police training school and a nursing school affiliated with a local hospital. During World War II he aided the war effort in various capacities related to his expertise in agronomy. He retired in 1949.
Jardine was very active in education and government services until his death on January 17, 1955 in San Antonio, Texas. He is interred at the Logan City Cemetery in Logan, Utah.
Achievements
Membership
Jardine served as President of the Calvin Coolidge's Secretary of Agriculture (1925-1929), and president of the Wichita State University. He was also a Mason.
Connections
On September 6, 1905, Jardine married Effie Nebecker; they had three children.