Kays builds Arkansas State University from the ground up

Victor C. Kays was born in Illinois in 1882. Through his efforts, the small agricultural school in Jonesboro would grow to become one of the most important universities in Arkansas and across the South. Kays would become the man who would build Arkansas State University.

Kays was born into a farming family with five brothers and sisters. He would attend Northern Illinois State Teachers College and briefly serve as a football coach before his graduation in 1902. He would later work as a teacher in Illinois and as a chemist in New Mexico, where he would also earn a masters degree. By 1910, he was the head of a small agricultural school in Alabama when a chance meeting with Arkansas State Sen. Charles Busch of White County led him to become the principal at a new agricultural school in Jonesboro that had been established by the state legislature just the year before.

Jonesboro in 1910 was a quiet agricultural community of 7,000. The First District State Agricultural School was still just a promise when Kays arrived in June. At this point, it was designed mostly as a high school and college preparatory program for farmers in the region.

He had no staff and not even a building to hold classes.

Undaunted, Kays dove into the work, quickly hiring eight professors and securing a location for the first classes. While Jonesboro residents had raised $40,000 and donated 200 acres for the site of the school, the buildings would not be ready for months. Kays instead held classes for the first 189 students that fall in a downtown building above a jewelry store.

By 1911, the first dorms and the administration building were complete. In addition, a dairy building was completed to study the latest scientific developments in farming. The school would struggle with funding and enrollments in World War I, like many Arkansas schools; but by fall 1918, it began offering its first college-level courses. The following year, still hampered by limited funding and limited housing for both professors and students, the school began its own housing, with students building most of it themselves, and Kays himself helping with the construction.

Fortunes for the college would continue to rise with the completion of a 74,000 square-foot gymnasium in 1927 and the creation of a four-year degree program at the college in 1930.

The Great Depression and a 1931 fire that destroyed the administration building would slow the college, but Kays was determined to keep up the pace of the college’s growth. The Administration Building would be rebuilt, and in 1932, the spacious R. E. Lee Wilson Hall was completed.

The college would formally become Arkansas State College in 1933, and two new buildings would be completed by 1942.

Kays retired as president in 1943 but continued to work closely with the college, even briefly serving as interim president in 1945 and 1946.

In his later years, the Arkansas State community of students and alumni continued to pay homage to the work that their beloved founding president had put into building the college. In 1965, a year before his passing, Kays was honored with the naming of the college’s newest building after him. Kays Hall would serve as the women’s dorm. The Arkansas State College Foundation, which helped raise funds for building, research, and academics, founded by Kays in 1911, would be renamed in honor of Kays.