Missouri S&T history

Classes began on November 23, 1871, in a new building that the city of Rolla had just built.

Late in the summer of 1874, Gustavus A. Duncan, John H. Gill and John W. Pack, the first three graduates of the University of Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy, held the first meeting of MSM alumni.

The college bought what is now called the "Rolla Building" for $25,000 in January 1875.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, MSM faced the repeated challenge of students seeking to immediately enlist to help the war effort as had occurred in 1917.

In 1920, the college started its Reserve Officer Training Corps.

The MSM Alumnus (now called Missouri S&T Magazine), the official publication of the association, was first printed in September 1926 and edited by then registrar Noel Hubbard.

In 1946, the MSM Alumni Association was incorporated and the campus office was established, with Francis C. "Ike" Edwards acting as executive secretary.

Graduate education and research began to assume greater emphasis on the campus during the 1950's, resulting from the nation's emerging from the Second World War as the economic and scientific leader of the free world.

The school became home to Missouri's first operational nuclear reactor in 1961.

In 1964, recognizing its expanded nature and role, the name of the institution was changed to the University of Missouri at Rolla, soon to be altered to University of Missouri-Rolla.

In 1968, the campus name was slightly altered to the University of Missouri–Rolla, thus conforming to the naming scheme of the other three campuses.

Darlene Ramsay, past–president of the association and a 1984 graduate of Missouri S&T, is the current director and executive vice president.

Donald G. Brackhahn, came to Rolla in 1985 as director of alumni and constituent relations.

Prior to her service to the association, she served as a member of University Advancement, beginning in 1992.

That building is now used as the Mathematics and Statistics Department's library, chair's office, part of the main office, and other faculty offices following a $2 million renovation in 1995.

He noted, "Of the 1.1 million seniors in the nation who took the ACT in 2006, only 551 non-Missouri seniors – or .05 percent – sent their scores to UMR." He also noted that the school's acronym of UMR got it confused with the University of Minnesota Rochester.

On January 1, 2008, UMR became known as Missouri University of Science and Technology or Missouri S&T for short.

In June 2018, the school was approved by the state's Coordinating Board for Higher Education for designation as "highly selective" in its undergraduate admission criteria, joining only Truman State University among the state's public universities at that level.

In May 2019, Mohammad Dehghani of Stevens Institute of Technology was announced as the next Missouri S&T chancellor, to begin service in August 2019.

In October 2020, the university received the largest single gift to any university, public or private, in the state of Missouri.