# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1938_S84
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

84 Action Regarding Individual Institutions

supply in the person of Candidate Otto of Omaha, who for a num-
ber of years has been doing university work, majoring in Professor
Brandt’s main branch, which is English.

The number of students, though below what it was at its
peak in the predepression days, is steadily growing, in fact has just
about doubled in the course of the triennium, and we have every
reason to believe that under God’s blessing it will continue to
grow apace within the next few years, especially if the influx of
the people from the Middle West continues and ‘if Synod grants
our District’s request for coeducation at our institution, and still
more, if Synod gives us just one unit of the new building it has
promised us twice.

Already in 1926 Synod recognized our need of a new plant
in Portland and resolved to give us one. This resolution was re-
peated in 1929, But for well-known reasons few new college build-
ings have been erected by us in recent years. Now we need a new
building badly, and if we cannot have all of it, we should at least
have part of it. So we are asking for one unit of one of the dor-
mitories that Synod resolved to erect. This unit will house the
entire student-body for a number of years to come and house them
comfortably and more respectably than they are now being housed.

At present the boys are living in rooms measuring 10X13 feet,
six boys to a room. The desks are primitive indeed. Also the
steward and his family are living in very crowded quarters in
the lone building. The laboratory is in the basement, in a room
which is very poorly lighted, and the dormitory is in the attic,
all the boys sleeping in one large room. The fire hazard is great.

The enormous size of our District, territorially speaking, the
great distance from our other institutions and from the center of
Synod’s activities, the great influx of people from other sections
of the country, especially from the Middle West, whence tens of
thousands of families, many Lutheran families among them, have
poured into Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, the development of
this section which the National Government is seeking to promote
by building two huge dams in the Columbia River, the Bonneville
Dam near Portland and the Grand Coulee Dam in North Central
Washington, for purposes of power and irrigation, the expansion
of mission-work thus made imperative in this District, and the
chance our Christian people should have to let some of their
boys study for the ministry and for the teaching profession, — all
this calls for the continuance of a college in the Pacific Northwest,
and the above-mentioned conditions prevailing in our present
building call for at least one unit of a new dormitory, a building
more commodious and less primitive than what we now have.