The Hugo Wall School of Urban and Public Affairs at Wichita State University will celebrate its 50th anniversary Friday and Saturday, April 18-19, with activities for alumni, students, faculty/staff and the Wichita community.

The weekend will celebrate Hugo Wall’s achievements and set the course of the school for the next 50 years. Wall is the former director of WSU's Center for Urban Studies, which is now named after him.

A dedication and reception will be held at 4:30 p.m. Friday, April 18, for the Hugo Wall Iris Garden, south of Hubbard Hall. The dedication includes a plaque and reference to Hugo Wall’s iris passion.

Participating in the program will be President Don Beggs; Gary L. Miller, provost and vice president for academic affairs and research; and John Wall, Hugo Wall’s son.

Hugo Wall was one of a group of pioneering educators in the central United States who championed professionalism in public administration. Colleges and universities, he believed, should and could educate young people to become better citizens, train people to be qualified public servants, and have a direct impact on the quality of life in communities by working closely with local governments.

Wall was a frequent speaker at the International City/County Management Association and led many initiatives to improve local government.

He was instrumental in having home rule legislation passed in Kansas, allowing cities to have greater self-governing authority, and he advocated 50 years ago for professional county management, long before it was acceptable.

Wall joined the faculty of the Municipal University of Wichita in 1929, where he spent more than four decades as professor of political science, dean of the graduate school, vice president for academic affairs, and director of the Center for Urban Studies.

The Center for Urban Studies at Wichita University in 1958 stands as one of the major achievements in Hugo Wall’s career in higher education.

The center’s focus was providing service to local governments in south-central Kansas, but it later expanded its interests to state government, and when graduate education was added in the 1970s, students entered the federal service as well.

In 1983, the center was rededicated as the Hugo Wall Center for Urban Studies and, 10 years later in 1993, Wall’s vision of an “honest-to-God school” was realized with the renaming of the center to the Hugo Wall School of Urban and Public Affairs.

The Hugo Wall School has more than 400 graduates scattered across the country in local, state, federal, nonprofit and the private sector. Many graduates serve as the backbone of local governments throughout the state.