University of Idaho President's Office records, 1893-1965

The final physical arrangement of this record group reflects two previous efforts at sorting the material. The 1953 librarian Rodney Waldron went through the pre-1931 material and in the process interfiled correspondence from the Bursar's office. Then, in 1974, Rosemary Shull, secretary to retiring president Ernest Hartung, went through the earlier material and added the later papers. With the exception of the cumulative files which are now placed at the end of the papers, the material retains Mrs. Shull's arrangement and folder headings.

Files from the years 1893 to 1914 are in chronological order. The early incoming correspondence, 1893-1897, is addressed to the Secretary of the Board of Regents; the corresponding letterbooks containing the outgoing responses are in University Group 9. The bulk of this material relates to financial matters and matters concerning the agricultural experiment stations. The work of the Secretary of the Board was under the direction of the president's office, but it was not until 1897 that President Franklin B. Gault took over the financial aspect of this work, which accounts for the late date for the beginning of his files. However, the letters accepting academic appointments were still addressed to the Secretary of the Board.

It was under President James MacLean that carbon copies of outgoing letters were first retained. He also began adding subject files after each year in the chronological file, and each year these subject folders became more and more numerous. When Melvin Brannon became president in 1914 he began an alphabetical filing system by calendar year and separated the files into general correspondence, administrative offices, academic departments, and Board of Regents.

When Ernest Lindley became president in 1917 he retained the alphabetical arrangements, but changed the filing system to reflect the academic year; therefore many of Brannon's 1917 files run from January 1917 through June 1918. The number of special subject folders which were interfiled with the general "A-Z" folders continued to increase, so, when Buchanan became president in 1946 he abandoned the general folders and assigned topical headings to all correspondence files. This system continued through the administration of Theophilus.

The 1928/1929 segment of these papers contains a separate alphabet of Comptroller's files.

During the 1934/1935 academic year President Neal was also president of the Inland Empire Education Association and his papers reflecting his activities in this office are placed after the 1934/19 university files.

The final series contains several non-correspondence cumulative files such as accountant's reports, budgets, enrollment statistics, and faculty teaching loads, and cumulative correspondence files which include information on campus building projects, athletic material, and Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) files.

Duplicate copies of mimeographed material was discarded. Copies of faculty or other university publications were transferred to the vertical file in Special Collections. Other published material in this record group was removed and offered to the appropriate subject library. In all, a total of 28 c.f. was removed from the original collection.

As mentioned above, letterbooks used in conjunction with the early incoming correspondence are in University Group 9. Some of President MacLean's 1906-1909 correspondence was stored in a letterbox not connected to this record group. These letters were processed as University Group 10. Additional building and property reports, 1889-1949, were processed as University Group 11.