POCATELLO — When Idaho State University opened its doors in September 1902 it had three students.
But by the end of that first term, enrollment had climbed to about 70 — a jump ISU President Robert Wagner joked “for the record, and for our enrollment management team," was a 2,233 percent increase.
That line was one of several that encapsulates the spirit of Wagner's fall address Wednesday at Davis Field, where he traced 125 years of the university's history through a recurring thread: resilience, persistence and courage.
The address opened not with Wagner, but instead with Danella Rose Perry-Murphy — a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Miss Native ISU and a student in the College of Technology. Perry-Murphy offered a land acknowledgment for ISU’s place within the ancestral homelands of the Shoshone and Bannock peoples. Wagner noted Murphy's mother is also an ISU alumna and a former Miss Native ISU, describing the pair's connection across generations a reflection of the university's own story.
"What we know as ISU today did not arrive fully formed," Wagner told the crowd. "Nobody handed us a beautiful campus, a university designation, a research enterprise, a nuclear reactor, a health sciences mission, a College of Technology, a performing arts center and a Dome and said, 'Here you go.' ISU was built over 125 years by countless individuals. They advocated for it. They imagined things that did not yet exist, they convinced others it was possible, and then they found a way to make it happen."
ISU’s founding, Wagner said, was anything but smooth, beginning as early as 1901when the Academy of Idaho was authorized. At the time, Pocatello had no defined campus site, and the debate over whether the school should sit east or west of the railroad tracks grew intense enough that historian Merrill Beal later dubbed it the "Battle of the Blocks,” Wagner said.
Pocatello businessman Theodore Turner helped settle matters, contributing land and resources that eventually included a 160-acre farm on Red Hill.
Wagner walked the crowd through the decades that followed, including students boarding with local families for lack of campus housing, a dining hall nicknamed "the beanery" for its go-to menu item, and a 1906 summer session that drew 250 teachers from seven counties, reportedly the largest gathering of educators in Idaho at the time.
In the 1920s, with no money to outfit a real pharmacy lab, students and faculty mailed nearly 6,000 letters to drug and chemical companies asking for donated equipment.
The institution's name changed repeatedly over the following decades — from the Academy of Idaho to the Idaho Technical Institute in 1915 and to the Southern Branch of the University of Idaho in 1927, a period Wagner said earned the school an unflattering nickname among people in Moscow.
"Apparently, it was common for some people in Moscow to refer to us as the twig," Wagner said. "Now, I've been called a few things in my life, but I do not care for twig."
Students pushed back on their own, Wagner said, recounting how a giant "T" built on Red Hill in 1916 was reshaped a decade later by nearly 100 students who climbed the hill overnight with picks, shovels and whitewash to turn it into a 200-foot-tall "4," as a means of demanding for a four-year degree status.
The Great Depression brought its own test. With space and money scarce, students unable to afford housing built a community of tents, cardboard structures and converted milk wagons at the base of Red Hill they called "Hooverville," Wagner said, while the school held tuition 25 percent below any other college in the West and gave students 10,000 hours of paid campus work in 1933 alone to help them stay enrolled.
World War II brought a 20 to 25 percent cut in state funding and falling enrollment, but students began calling their school "ISU" in the student newspaper years before the name became official.
The Idaho State College name finally arrived in 1947, when Gov. C.A. Robbins signed legislation creating the school as an independent institution — a day Turner, then 46 years into his advocacy, called the greatest of his life, according to Wagner. The university took its current name in 1963.
Wagner also pointed to a lesson in partnership from that era, recalling how Idaho State College President Carl McIntosh and University of Idaho President Jesse Buchanan agreed to submit joint legislative funding requests for building projects rather than compete against each other, even after Buchanan was warned separating the requests might improve U of I's odds. The combined bill failed at first, but succeeded two years later, with both schools ultimately getting their buildings.
"Sometimes strength is fighting for yourself. Sometimes strength is standing behind somebody else," Wagner said, tying the story to the university's current "Contract for Idaho" commitment to partner rather than compete with other institutions.
Turning to the present, Wagner said ISU's School of Nursing marked its 70th anniversary last week, having grown from seven students in its first graduating class in 1956 to more than 5,000 alumni today, with the university's new Doctor of Nurse Anesthesia Practice program completing its inaugural year as Idaho's first program preparing certified registered nurse anesthetists.
He also highlighted the university's partnership with the Idaho National Laboratory, noting ISU holds more joint faculty appointments with INL than any other university, and said the school is now pursuing what he called a second nuclear reactor on campus, an advanced research and test reactor with NuCube Energy through the U.S. Department of Energy's Launchpad USA program.
Wagner also spoke about Sweetcrete, a concrete developed by ISU researchers using waste byproduct from Idaho's sugar beet industry, which moved from the lab into a real-world application in Burley earlier this year.
He also told the story of ISU graduate Angela Garcia, who used research opportunities at the university to land a NASA-funded project that discovered a previously unidentified hydrothermal vent field in the Pacific Ocean.
Garcia now works at NASA's Johnson Space Center, where she serves as an Artemis flight controller and trains astronauts in geology, Wagner said
Wagner didn’t shy away from mentioning how ISU, much like Idaho’s higher education sector at large, is facing new scrutiny over its value and purpose amid ongoing budget pressures.
"We are hearing questions from outside our universities: Is college worth it? Are universities focused on what matters?" Wagner said. "Those are fair questions. Public universities, like ISU, should not be afraid to face questions that draw attention to our very existence. In fact, the very history of this institution provides the answer. We exist for one purpose — to make an impact."
Looking ahead, Wagner said the university remains focused on enrollment growth and student success, its academic and research enterprises, physical infrastructure, external partnerships and employee engagement.
"I don't think Idaho State's greatest contribution is behind us," Wagner said. "I believe the exact opposite. This is Idaho State University's time. So Bengals, let's build, let's build big, and let's go Bengals."