No Longer an "academically inferior, church-controlled southern school": How Transylvania College Found Success After World War II

Abstract

No Longer an "academically inferior, church-controlled southern school"How Transylvania College Found Success After World War II Jonathan Tyler Baker (bio) The growth of colleges and universities—as well as their enrollments—in the decade after World War II, due largely to the G.I. Bill, is well documented.1 While students poured into college classrooms to receive an education suited to their occupational aspirations, in the 1950s, the purpose of a college education in the United States had a new requirement. The federal government and leading universities declared a need for students to use their education to uphold the economy, be good citizens, and produce knowledge to fight the Cold War.2 Despite the fact that students had more control over their academic experience, the purpose of American higher education was [End Page 33] educating students with professional skills so they could enter the workforce and be productive members of the U.S. economy.3 Most public colleges and universities in the United States reacted to the revised purpose of higher education by introducing new subjects in the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences through required general education courses. A number of these changes stemmed directly from Harvard University's 1945 "Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society" report about the need for required general education courses. The report's author, Harvard President James Bryant Conant, argued that "general education," is an "education in a common heritage and toward a common citizenship" that creates an "increased skill in analysis and expression, in the capacity to deal with general ideas and to make and defend value-judgments."4 In Conant's idea of a general education program, students would take the same lower-level course in the humanities and social sciences; two courses (typically biology and chemistry) in natural science; and three courses outside of their department of concentration, with two of those classes outside of the department's academic division.5 As early as 1950, the distinction between public and private, university and college, liberal arts and pre-professional training curriculums, became blurred as higher education came to adopt general education programs. According to one researcher in 1965, academic programs in American higher education in the 1950s started to encompass "the greatest possible variety of subject matters."6 As a result, newly developed curriculum in American higher education was nearly universal and focused on helping students understand and solve problems in the contemporary world that [End Page 34] combined "vocational preparation with the knowledge of social foundations from the vantage point of multiple perspectives."7 What is missing from the well-known story of American higher education in the decades after World War II, however, is how liberal arts colleges weathered the blurring of their curriculum and the distinction as private, often religiously affiliated, institutions. In many cases, the classics were replaced by the humanities; the scientific method of inquiry took the place of hermeneutics; and the social sciences became a core of curricula across the country. And the changes were not isolated to the curriculum.8 Administrators, particularly liberal arts college presidents, went from being symbolic leaders with connections to the institution's denominational affiliation to policy-oriented fundraisers responsible for growing the endowment and paying for new facilities.9 Exploring this topic means another addition to the narrative of American higher education in the decade following World War II, but it also creates a much-needed vehicle to explore the modern issues of identity and purpose facing the liberal arts college. Understanding the evolving nature of the liberal arts college in the decade after World War II may prompt further discussions about how institutions adapt in an era of profound change in American higher education brought on by the digital revolution and a post-industrial economy.10 Such [End Page 35] an idea is not unfounded. Administrators of liberal arts colleges were thinking the same things seventy-five-years ago as they sought to "make their colleges become alive to the world of the present time."11 Transylvania University illustrates the capability of liberal arts colleges to successfully adapt to a changing higher education landscape. Located in Lexington, Kentucky, Transylvania became...