History
Dickinson State was start as a normal school. It started to help get more teachers in rural western North Dakota. In that area, fewer than one-quarter of the people working as teachers in the early 1900s were certified as teachers. The university considers June 24, 1918, to be its start date. This was the first day of classes for the Dickinson Normal School. The school was free. They held classes at Dickinson High School. The first campus building, May Hall, was built in 1924.
During World War II, Dickinson State Teachers College was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program.This program gave students a path to a Navy commission.
Enrollment and graduation problems
In 2011 and 2012, Dickinson State had negative news for some of its academic and business procedures. In 2011, the university was discovered to have said it had more students than it actually had. It was counting counting people as students who had only went to conferences on the campus. This situation resulted in the firing of the university president, Richard J. McCallum.
A North Dakota University System report released in February 2012 found that the school made it really easy for foreign students to become students there. Over a period of several years, they school gave degrees to 584 foreign students who had not completed the required coursework. Most of the university's foreign students came from China. The university hired recruiting agents to work in China to get more students. The agents sometimes lied about the school. News media accounts described the report as showing Dickinson State as a degree mill. The report had been asked for by the university's president, Douglas Coston, who took office as Interim President in August 2011. Coston asked for it because some university international agreements were found not to meet requirements of the North Dakota State Board of Higher Education and the Higher Learning Commission. On the day of the report release, the Dean of Education committed suicide. Six months later, in July, Dickinson's regional accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC), placed the university "on notice." The university had to give detailed responses to concerns found in the accreditor's site visit. That status was removed three years later when HLC renewed DSU's accreditation for ten years.
Money problems
In 2023, the university ended seven degree programs. This was because of money problems at the school. They fired tenured teachers in those programs. The university's decisions and actions were met with protests from faculty and others. University leaders also reorganized parts of the university and ended other positions. The next year, the university changed its academic policies to increase class sizes and require faculty to teach more students. All seven teachers in the university's nursing program resigned. They were protesting that the new policies are unworkable in their program. The university was already under scrutiny by the program's accreditor, the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing. The state's board of nursing did not approve president Eaton's plan for hiring new faculty. He subsequently announced his plans to resign. Dickinson's nursing program partnered with Mayville State University to continue Dickinson's nursing program.
Sports
The Dickinson State sports teams are called the Blue Hawks. The university is a member of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA). They mostly play in the North Star Athletic Association (NSAA) for most of its sports since the 2014–15 year. Its men's and women’s wrestling team competes in the Heart of America Athletic Conference (HAAC). The Blue Hawks previously competed in the Frontier Conference from 2012–13 to 2013–14 and became a member again in 2025; an NAIA Independent within the Association of Independent Institutions (AII) during the 2011–12 school year; and in these defunct conferences: the Dakota Athletic Conference (DAC) from 2000–01 to 2010–11; and the North Dakota College Athletic Conference (NDCAC) from 1931–32 to 1999–2000. The team was known as the Savages until 1972 when they changed their name to the Blue Hawks.
Dickinson State has 16 sports: Men's sports include baseball, basketball, cross country, football, golf, track & field and wrestling; while women's sports include basketball, cross country, golf, softball, track & field, wrestling, and volleyball; and co-ed sports include cheerleading, eSports and rodeo.
