From its beginning as one of the first institutions of higher learning west of the Mississippi to its current role as Oklahoma’s premiere regional university, one thing hasn’t changed at Northeastern State University.

That’s its commitment to turning out graduates with the talents, skills and dedication to serve this community and region, or wherever their careers take them.

For the past year, NSU has celebrated its centennial. The just-published NSU Centennial History book will allow alumni and other supporters of the university to have a glimpse into the past, including some little-known facts. Dr. Brad Agnew, professor of history, has experienced 42 years of NSU’s growth, coming to Tahlequah in 1968.

He brings that personal familiarity, as well as his academic experience writing two previous history books and numerous articles, to the task of writing the centennial book.

“I’ve seen all kinds of changes — name, students. It really is a kaleidoscope,” he said.

A glance from the window of his third-floor office in Seminary Hall reveals the differences. When he came in 1968, coeds wore dresses, male students wore ties and dress slacks. Agnew taught wearing a jacket and tie. Today’s attire, for faculty and students, is far more casual.

“They had a myriad of rules,” Agnew said of his first days on campus. “You couldn’t wear shorts anywhere on campus, except for the gym, or back to your car.”

“Something else that I never saw — it must have ended before I came — was freshman hazing. You had to wear a beanie with a button on top and if a senior said ‘button,’ you had to bow over so he could see the button,” he said.

He told how Jack Dobbins and his late wife, Zula Belle, related stories of their student days shortly after World War II, when the weeknight curfew was 10 p.m.

“They had to be in and registered by 10 p.m. Just a few minutes until 10 an old gentleman would come to the door to lock up. The coeds would come running from the bushes. She [Zula Belle] said, ‘We called him Mr. Birth Control,’” Agnew said.

Back then, students typed their term papers on typewriters and looked up the books they needed at the John Vaughan Library in a card catalog. Today everything is high-tech and digital, from the extensive use of online data to the omnipresent cell phones. Laptops are as much, or more, of a campus staple than the spiral notebook and pen. And who remembers slide rules?

The centennial book features photos and vignettes detailing all those details of campus life and brings back memories.

Even at mid-century, NSU was a far cry from the early days, when students at the Cherokee Female Seminary and Cherokee Female Seminary walked or came in wagons to their institutions of higher learning, which were considered quite modern for their time. The buildings, completed in 1851 at Park Hill and on the south side of Tahlequah, were the largest in Indian Territory at the time and quite a marvel for area residents.

Agnew’s book recounts how the Female Seminary principal and assistant principal were recruited from Mount Holyoke and paid $800 and $600 per year, respectively. Oswald Woodford, a Yale graduate, was unaware of the cultural accomplishments of the Cherokees when he joined the Male Seminary faculty, and brought corn as a gift. He was surprised to learn corn was already a mainstay of the Cherokee diet, and even more surprised when he arrived in Indian Territory and stayed at Rose Cottage, the mansion of Chief John Ross.