There is more than a football game at stake for the University of Massachusetts in the Stadium this afternoon. The visiting team will be fighting not just to win but "to put UMass on the map" and its adherents will be hoping once and for all to convince the people of Boston that their university is not a "cow college."

But whatever the result of today's game, the people of Boston will remain largely unconvinced. For 92 years they have thought of the state university as an exclusively agricultural school, and it will take more than a football game to change their minds.

The fact is, however, that since the end of World War II the stereotype of UMass as a cow college has been quite untrue.

For in the last eight years the University, which is located on a spacious, beautiful campus in the town of Amherst, has evolved from a largely agricultural college of 1,200 students to a diversified state university with a co-educational enrollment of almost 4,000. Of this present student body, less than ten percent majors in agriculture, while half the students concentrate in the Liberal Arts and Science and the rest specialize in such fields as Engineering, Business Administration, Home Economics, Physical Education, and the newly created School of Nursing. Indeed, so far is agriculture from dominating the University's curriculum that it is the only department whose operating budget for next year represents a decrease from this year's appropriation.

But such was not always the case at the U. of Mass.

The school was established in 1862 as one of the many "land grant" colleges authorized to teach agriculture and mechanical arts, and it came very close to being set up as a part of Harvard University. The state legislature finally decided, however, that a more rural location would be preferable for the new college, and thus the 1,000-acre Amherst site was selected.

The Massachusetts Agricultural College, as it was then called, earned an excellent reputation in the early part of the century in the field of soil study, but as time went on it became less and less agriculturally pre-occupied. The Legislature recognized this in 1931 by changing the school's official name to Massachusetts State College, and in 1947 recognized its further growth and diversification by making it finally the University of Massachusetts.

The "Aggie" Stigma

Thus UMass is now, in organization and character, a typical healthy state university. And yet despite its new personality the school still can't seem to escape the stigma of being an "aggie" college. Even the newest Mass. freshman has an inferiority complex regarding this point; one of them was so afraid of being represented as a cow college student, for example, that he asked the Crimson not to take any pictures of the University's agricultural facilities.

These facilities are, incidentally, quite outstanding. They include laboratories and experimental equipment for soil study, animal husbandry, slaughtering, breeding, etc., and feature a particularly renowned department of food technology. Scholars come from all over the world to study this subject at the University of Massachusetts.

But if Massachusetts resembles other state universities in the scope of its curriculum, it differs from most publicly-financed colleges in having its great period of expansion still ahead of it. The University stands now, in the words of Publicity Director Robert McCartney, "about where Michigan State stood in 1934."

Michigan State, as everyone knows, has grown tremendously in the last 20 years, and the expansion job immediately facing the U. of Mass. is at least equally phenomenal.

The present enrollment of 4,000, which represents a growth of over 300 percent since the war, is scheduled to hit 10,000 by the early 1960's. To accommodate this great influx of students, new living quarters dwarfing the nine or ten dormitories built during the last decade will be needed, in addition to expanded classroom, laboratory, and social facilities. A new men's dormitory and several science buildings are now in the process of construction, while next year will see the ground-breaking for a Student Union and a large women's gymnasium. Meanwhile, the next legislature will be asked to appropriate $4,000,000 to expand the University's library and build a new Liberal Arts classroom building.

One need spend only very little time on the Massachusetts campus to be aware of the dynamic growth taking place there. He sees it in the new buildings going up everywhere, in the enthusiasm everyone shows in discussing the University's future, and especially in the words and ideas of President J. Paul Mather, the man whose job it is to get some $10,000,000 in appropriations from the Legislature each year.

Mather is a 39-year-old Ph.D. in Economics who looks slightly old for his age but is described by all his associates as a "fireball" of enthusiasm and "a man who knows how to talk to the Legislature." As provost of the University before he was named president last year, he worked closely with many student leaders, and as president he has tried to preserve this relationship, even though, as he admits, some faculty members think he spends too much time with the students. The students themselves, however, have a sincere liking for their president; they appreciate, among other things, the attitude that led him to cancel all today's classes so that he migh personally lead a 200-car student motorcade from Amherst to Cambridge.