The Mid-West Quarterly was owned and operated by the University of Nebraska from 1913 through 1918. P. H. Frye, Editor; Hartley B. Alexander & Philo M. Buck, Associate Editors; Samuel Avery (Chancellor of the University) & Charles Sumner Allen (President of the Board of Regents), Advisory Committee. The following is its editorial statement from 1913:
The Mid-West Quarterly has been established by the University of Nebraska in the belief that there exists in this country a quantity of excellent writing for which there is no adequate medium of publication. While exact scholarship, the discovery and verification of fact, has received any amount of encouragement and stimulation, the cultivation of general ideas, the free play of the intelligence, what Matthew Arnold would broadly call criticism, has met of late years with neglect if not with actual disfavor. The results of "scientific" investigation and research, if valuable at all, are pretty sure of being taken up by some of the journals devoted to the application of special methods to special subjects. For the intellectual essay of a critical character, however, there is small opening. The general public takes but little more interest in it than in exact scholarship. Indeed, it looks as though the former, like the latter, would finally become the exclusive charge of the university. Even now there are a few journals, maintained by such institutions or in connection with them, which undertake to care for matters of this kind, but the provision is still very limited; and it is the hope of enlarging the opportunities of those who are interested in this manifestation of mental activity, irrespective of territorial limitations, which has led to the establishment of The Mid-West Quarterly.