In 1919, state legislators officially recognized the important evolution of our institution’s educational mission; marking the milestone with a somewhat subtle, yet significant, name change: from Southeast Missouri Normal School to Southeast Missouri State Teachers College.
After rebuilding Academic Hall, Southeast experienced two decades of intellectual progress and physical growth under President Washington Dearmont and head Regent Louis Houck.
For its first 46-years, the Normal school’s curriculum and degrees were narrowly defined by the state’s mandate to train elementary and high school teachers and administrators in pedagogy, education, administration, and home economics.
Dearmont and Houck chartered the course toward a broader institutional role beyond just teacher training: a regional four-year college centered on a traditional liberal arts education, more rigorous academic standards, granting academic degrees. For the first time Southeast offered students a breadth and depth of learning by acquainting them with the best that has been thought or written in the fields of language, math, literature, history, business, music and art, physical science, and the social sciences.
As the name change to Southeast Missouri State Teacher’s College in 1919 also suggests, this maturation reflected Houck and Dearmont’s philosophy that education should be accessible to everyone who sought it, and not just academic book learning, but cultural enrichment as well. This meant keeping education affordable and increasing the scope of the school’s role as a service institution in a still relatively impoverished quarter of the state stretching roughly from St. Louis to Arkansas, and from the Mississippi River westward to Springfield.
