Edgar L. Harden
President of Northern Michigan University from 1956 to 1967
Edgar Harden was the President of Northern Michigan University from 1956 to 1967. During his tenure as President, enrollment at the university swelled from a little under nine hundred students to over seven thousand students. This rapid increase led to problems of overcrowding in the dorms and insufficient teaching space. These problems would spark many protests about living conditions at Northern.
Harden instituted a policy at Northern known as the “Right to Try”—any student could come to Northern to get an education regardless of their past academic record. Some disagreed with the policy as dumbing down Northern. When a Board of Control member, Lincoln Frazier, disagreed with Harden over the Right to Try, Harden resigned. The combination of the urging of the governor and a student protest convinced Harden to return.
When Harden actually did resign two years later, one of his last acts as President was to fire a history professor named Robert McClellan. The firing of McClellan led to some of the largest protests at Northern.
Under Harden, the Job Corps, a federal job training program for high school dropouts, also came to campus. Some believe that Harden brought the program to campus for purely financial gains without thought to how it would affect the already overcrowded campus or how the younger (sixteen to twenty-one), predominantly Southern and African American population would mesh with Northern’s student population.
