Augustus Meader Ryon (1862–1949) was an American mining engineer who served as the founding president of Montana State University.
Short on funds, lacking a campus, and with Montana still mostly wilderness without many professionals, the Agricultural College found it difficult to hire faculty.
Where the trustees (mostly businessmen from Bozeman, Montana) wanted the college to focus on agriculture, Ryon pointed out that few of its students intended to go back to farming.
While the rapidly expanding faculty wanted to establish a remedial education program to assist unprepared undergraduates (Montana's elementary and secondary public education system was in dire shape at the time), Ryon refused.
Dr. James R. Reid, a Presbyterian minister who had been president of the Montana College at Deer Lodge since 1890.
He'd spent much of 1894 working on new irrigation systems and methods, and he continued to teach agricultural and mining engineering at the college.
But in 1897, the Board of Regents was again growing frustrated with the focus of the college, and demanded the resignation of all faculty.