Office of Admission Home > About Emory > History and Growth >


A BRIEF HISTORY OF EMORY COLLEGE

By James Harvey Young
Charles Howard Candler Professor of American Social History, Emeritus

Andrew Jackson was president of the United States in 1836 when the newly formed Georgia Methodist Conference chartered Emory College, one of a large number of colleges established throughout the nation during the 1830s by religious denominations. One year later, the city of Atlanta, to which Emory College would eventually move, began its life. But the fledgling college for men, which admitted its first students in 1838, had its start forty miles eastward in Oxford, Georgia, a new town set in an oak grove near Covington and named for the English university John and Charles Wesley had attended.

The name “Emory” paid tribute to a popular young Methodist bishop of Maryland, John Emory, who had lost his life in a carriage accident shortly before the college was founded. Bishop Emory had defined education in a broad way, as embracing “the whole wide scope of the character, condition, and interests of man, physical, mental, moral, and religious, for time and eternity.” From Emory’s beginning to the present, such a broad educational purpose has received frequent reiteration.

Emory’s earliest presidents included several men of mark. Ignatius Few, the first, was planter, colonel, lawyer, minister. Alexander Means—minister, physician, scientist—exhibited what was likely the first electric light seen in the nation. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet—minister, judge, journalist—established the Southern school of dialect humorists in Georgia Scenes. Longstreet was in earnest, however, when he expressed Emory’s desire “to raise up a race of men who shall be fitted for the pulpit or the plow, the court or the camp, the Senate or the shop.”

Education in Emory College, in conformity with prevailing theory, stressed mental discipline, rote memorization. This method of learning, much more than subject matter, seemed significant. Throughout the nineteenth century, all students aspiring to a bachelor of arts degree studied a prescribed curriculum, with some overload extras permitted and, toward century’s end, a very few elective options. Society’s contemporary concerns received virtually no curricular attention. Through most of this period, students took four years of Greek, Latin, and mathematics; three of English Bible and such sciences as geography, astronomy, and chemistry; and a year each of “Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion” and of a composite social science course embodying philosophy, ethics, logic, history, and political economy. The first laboratory work conducted by students began in 1875. In time other BA degrees were created, demanding less or no Latin and Greek, though the ancient languages were not dropped as a BA requirement until 1932.

Nineteenth-century Emory students faced their own day through the themes about which they debated and orated. Centering in literary clubs, forensics was the key cocurricular activity on campus and the major field of intercollegiate competition. Students debated the morality of slavery, the justifiability of war, the advisability of women’s suffrage, the propriety of restricting the sale of ardent spirits, and the legitimacy of reasons for “a man not marrying a lady, after engagement, save unfaithfulness on her part.”

Emory College struggled constantly to survive, its resources never sufficient to its task, beset by the vicissitudes of major depressions, sectional conflict, and war. During the Civil War, bereft of students, Emory ceased operating, its buildings instead used as a Confederate hospital and a Union headquarters, its library and other stored equipment virtually destroyed.

Reopening in 1866, Emory was briefly aided by an influx of students whose tuition was paid by the State of Georgia under a “G.I. bill.” More substantial help came with the first major benefaction Emory had yet received, given by a Methodist banker philanthropist of New York City, George Seney. Impressed by the spirit of an address given on Thanksgiving in 1880 by Atticus Haygood, in which Emory’s president gave thanks for the end of the war, the restoration of the South to its role in the nation, the reviving economy, the end of the slavery evil, and the hope for improved race relations, Seney gave Emory $5,000 to repay debts, $50,000 to construct a new main building, and $75,000 to establish an endowment.

Despite this aid, Emory at Oxford remained a poor college, with a regional enrollment varying from under two hundred to almost four hundred students. In 1892–93, for example, according to Emory’s first annual, the Zodiac, of 272 students in the college, 234 came from Georgia. Whereas one student each attended from China and Korea, only one student enrolled from north of the Mason-Dixon line. That year the college graduated forty-two seniors, the largest number thus far in its history. Seventy-seven students had begun as freshmen, the Zodiac noted, but three had died and others had dropped out because of hard times. The faculty that year numbered fifteen. Yet Emory still managed to serve as a scene of crucial intellectual awakening for many students, leading them to careers of important public service in church and state, in business and the professions—as one illustration, from the first decade of the new century, suggests.

In 1906 two students roomed across the hall from each other at the Stewart boarding house in Oxford. They belonged to the same fraternity and to the tennis club. Tom Rivers came from Jonesboro, Georgia. Persuaded by Professor Ferdinand Duncan, a bachelor who ate at the same boarding house, Rivers studied biology and chemistry in his junior and senior years. Had he not done so, he later said, “I might have gone back to Jonesboro and helped my father” in his cotton warehouse business. As it was, Rivers went on to the Johns Hopkins medical school and became one of the nation’s pioneer virologists, investigating such diseases as smallpox, encephalitis, and psittacosis, and heading the National Science Foundation’s quest for a polio vaccine.

Dumas Malone, the student across the hall, came to Emory from Cuthbert, Georgia. His courses in Latin gave him a knowledge of grammar that proved to be of immense later use. A course in Greek literature in translation, taught by Professor Charles Peppler, also had great influence. “If I am something of a classicist in spirit,” Malone wrote in retrospect, “that course is one of the reasons for it.” The professor who influenced Malone the most, however, was Edgar Johnson, who taught economics, government, and history. “I first became conscious of thought in one of his classes,” Malone asserted. “No one else did as much to help me think.” Malone went on to get a PhD in history at Yale, to edit an indispensable reference work, the Dictionary of American Biography, and to write as distinguished a biography as has ever appeared in American letters, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning, six-volume life of Thomas Jefferson, completed when Malone was in his nineties.

Emory’s move from Oxford to Atlanta—during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency—may well have been the single most momentous event in the college’s history. This action arose from a dispute over the power to appoint the trustees of Vanderbilt University. The General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, insisted on the right to select the trustees of its university, whereas the trustees held themselves to be a self-perpetuating body. When in 1913 the Supreme Court of Tennessee sided with Vanderbilt, giving the church the right only to ratify selections made by the board itself, the conference decided it needed a new university in the Southeast. It set up an educational commission to determine the plans.

Two brothers on the commission took the lead in seeing that the new Methodist university should be located in Atlanta with a transplanted Emory College as its “academic department.” Warren A. Candler, an Emory graduate and a Methodist minister, had served as the college’s president for a decade preceding his election in 1898 as bishop. His older brother, Asa, denied a chance at college during the rigors of Reconstruction, had become a pharmacist and, after acquiring sole rights to Coca-Cola, a man of wealth. During Warren’s presidency, Asa had been chosen an Emory trustee. While the commission deliberated, Asa wrote a letter to Warren, the commission’s chair, offering a million dollars to endow the university. Asa also gave the land on which to build it, a wooded and hilly tract of seventy-five acres northeast of Atlanta. The commission accepted Asa’s generous offer, the first of many gifts he and his family were to make to Emory, and then chose Bishop Candler as Emory University’s first chancellor.

The first four buildings on the new campus, constructed in Italian Renaissance style with pink and gray Georgia marble, were completed in 1919 and occupied first by the theology and law schools. During this period of building and the uncertainties of World War I, Emory College remained at Oxford. In 1919 it moved to its new environment in Atlanta, where it shared a campus with professional schools in an urban center. In an America placing ever greater emphasis upon specialized education, the college’s curriculum inevitably changed. Establishing mental discipline no longer sufficed. A store of particular knowledge must be acquired as background, whatever the subsequent advanced training, whatever the career. Although general education, the role of preparing liberally educated students, was not forgotten, it too became more informational, and less a mere matter of structuring the mental faculties. The history of the curriculum of Emory College in Atlanta reveals an ongoing contest between the demands of specialization, in an ever larger number of disciplinary options, and the demands of general education.

At Oxford the faculty had devoted their energies entirely to teaching. In Atlanta, research and publication gradually assumed a larger role. The Graduate School, which supervised master’s degrees, was organized in the year of the college’s migration. In 1946, after long planning, the trustees authorized the first doctoral programs in chemistry and biochemistry, with anatomy, biology, English, and history soon to follow. Now, research scholars taught graduate as well as undergraduate students, instructing them at the cutting edge of research frontiers. While college enrollments grew, so that the present college is some ten times the size of the Oxford student body early in the century, the size of the faculty expanded even more rapidly. As these developments took place, Emory acquired a larger national reputation, as evidenced by the granting of chapters of Phi Beta Kappa in 1929 and Sigma Xi in 1944.

The composition of the student body also changed in Atlanta, especially after World War II. A wartime Navy V-12 program and the postwar wave of veterans brought many students to campus from other sections of the country. Beginning in the 1960s, the proportion of students from outside the South expanded, increasing cultural and religious diversity.

From 1919 on, a few women graduate students, and later women nursing students, had sat in undergraduate courses along with men. But Chancellor Candler thought thoroughgoing coeducation a “mistaken policy.” Not until 1953 did the trustees—and then by a divided vote—change the traditional pattern and open college enrollment to women on equal terms with men, and not until 1980 did the number of women entering the college equal the number of men.

In 1962 Emory took the initiative to end racial restrictions by asking the courts to declare unconstitutional all provisions in the Georgia constitution and statutes that denied tax-exempt status to private universities and colleges that integrated their student bodies. The Georgia Supreme Court ruled in Emory’s favor. To honor Emory’s venturesomeness in confronting an issue of academic freedom, the American Association of University Professors presented Henry L. Bowden, chair of Emory’s board, the Alexander Meiklejohn Award.

More substantial scholarship funding in recent years has enabled the college to achieve better economic diversification of its student body. Most prominent among the awards are the Woodruff Scholarships. Robert W. Woodruff, who studied at old Oxford, took over the helm of Coca-Cola in the 1920s, and in due course became Emory’s most generous benefactor, at first in the medical area, then to the entire university. In 1979, he and his brother George gave Emory an endowment of $105 million, the largest benefaction to a single educational institution in the history of American philanthropy up to that time. The Woodruff Scholarships are one of many important ways in which Emory College benefits from the Woodruff endowment.

The appointment of new Woodruff Professors has enhanced both the prestige and the interdisciplinary character of the Emory faculty to the enrichment of undergraduate education, as well as education on the graduate and professional levels. Moreover, the establishment of interdisciplinary programs and centers now offers college students expanded opportunities. These include the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, and The Carter Center of Emory University. Former President Jimmy Carter holds town hall meetings for undergraduates that attract large audiences. There are diverse programs for the interdisciplinary exploration of African American life and culture, women’s studies, international or area studies, neuroscience and behavioral biology, and, most recently, environmental studies and Jewish studies as well. Thus Emory College’s 4,900 undergraduates, within a university of around 11,000 students, will continue to profit from their broader research-oriented environment of graduate and professional schools and centers.

Such diverse opportunities offer the college student many valuable educational rewards. At the same time, unity and a sense of cohesiveness among students also advance overall education. Such a spirit was easier to achieve in the Oxford days, among a smaller group of students with similar backgrounds on a rural campus. One stimulus to college spirit then present at most colleges and universities Emory deliberately eschewed: intercollegiate competition in major sports. Emory students might compete with their fellows from other schools in tennis and track but not in baseball and football. Instead, Emory emphasized participation in sports in an intramural setting. Under the slogan “athletics for all,” Emory’s program from the 1920s onward gained national renown and sparked much imitation. Over the years, Emory added intercollegiate competition in a variety of sports for men and women. “Athletics for all” gained a most welcome new environment with the opening in 1983 of the George Woodruff Physical Education Center, designed by noted Atlanta architect John C. Portman. In 1989 the Emory Sports Hall of Fame was established; ten outstanding former student-athletes were initially honored with membership, and new members are elected annually.

Emory’s commitment to an athletic program of quality has developed significantly in recent years. In 1985 the trustees authorized the expansion of Division III competition to include nonscholarship basketball in a new voluntary association. Emory played a leading role in the formation the next year of the University Athletic Association with eight other universities: Brandeis, Carnegie-Mellon, Case Western Reserve, Johns Hopkins, New York University, the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, and Washington University. The association constitutes a bold new statement of what college athletics can and should be. Its members share the conviction that it is highly desirable and possible for committed institutions to provide a broad-based and high-quality athletic experience for students and to make excellence in athletics consistent with the academic integrity and mission of these universities.

Besides the major emphasis on forensics, students at old Oxford formed clubs for boating, bicycling, boxing, hunting, chess, chemistry, astronomy, and Shakespeare. There was even an Ugly Man’s League. Secret societies, established in antebellum years, led to fraternities with their present Greek letter designations, beginning in 1869. Dancing as a social activity, long a taboo, eventually became winked at by authorities if done off-campus under the euphemisms of “reception” and “tea.” The first administration-approved, on-campus dance came six weeks before Pearl Harbor. National sororities made their appearance in 1959.

A decline in oratory as a national obsession led to a falling off of interest in forensics about the time of the college’s move to Atlanta. In later years, debating was revived, and Emory teams became and remain intercollegiate powers. Their organization, the Barkley Forum, was named for Alben W. Barkley, who had attended Emory and had been elected vice president during Harry Truman’s presidency. The presentation of an honorary degree to Barkley in 1949 was the first Emory event covered on television.

Emory’s first newspaper, in antebellum days, suggested the college’s southernness in its name, the Collard Leaf. The Phoenix, begun in 1886, has had several revivals. The Emory Wheel, the semiweekly campus newspaper dating from the arrival of the college in Atlanta, has helped to make journalism a major cocurricular enterprise, enriching campus life.

Music also has long traditions at Emory. The 1893 Zodiac depicts the Emory Glee Club, accompanied by banjos, guitars, flutes, violins, and a cello. Early in the century, the singers traveled to engagements in nearby towns by mule-drawn wagon. After 1920 the Glee Club became a central fixture of campus life and made tours throughout the nation—performing before at least two presidents and in Europe. The Women’s Chorale came with the admission of women to the college. The men’s and women’s singing groups merged in 1989 to become the University Chorus. The chorus and the Concert Choir, a select group of forty singers, carry on the choral music tradition—especially the renowned Christmas concerts. And, over the years, from the small but varied group of instrumentalists pictured in the early Zodiac, diverse instrumental ensembles have developed into maturity.

Theater, long viewed by the pious as a devil’s workshop, became possible at Emory only early in this century. Its institutional history has not been so continuous as has that of journalism and music, but drama has flourished at Emory under various auspices for many years. Ad Hoc Productions, a student organization with a long tradition, presents Broadway musicals, and, over the years, the all-student Emory Players organization has been transformed into a strong theater studies program that emphasizes both the academic and the practical study of theater arts and supports one of the best repertory theaters in Atlanta.

The theater and many student activities, as well as the spirit of undergraduate cohesiveness, benefited with the opening in 1986 of the Howard R. Dobbs University Center. Designed by John Portman, the center integrates a newly built contemporary structure with the remodeled Alumni Memorial University Center and symbolizes the new Emory evolving from the old. The same blend of innovation and tradition characterizes the Michael C. Carlos Museum. This handsome structure incorporates the old law school building on the Quadrangle, which has earned historic recognition for its 1916 design by Henry Hornbostle. This building has been transformed and expanded in the contemporary renovation designed by architect Michael Graves. The museum collection, once primarily composed of archaeological holdings from the ancient Middle East, has undergone a parallel transformation and now includes the Carlos Collection of Ancient Greek Art and the Thibadeau Collection of Pre-Columbian Art as well as many other works ranging from early American Indian artifacts to twentieth-century painting, sculpture, and photography.

Volunteer Emory, a student initiative, has also contributed markedly to undergraduate unity, while quickening the sense of service so significant in Emory’s founding. Through Volunteer Emory, students give their time and talents to help the poor, ill, and elderly of metropolitan Atlanta. Over half of Emory’s undergraduates participate in this program.

Emory’s founders had as their central vision education in an environment of religion. The early curriculum reflected this goal, as did the requirement of twice daily prayers and twice Sunday church attendance. A religious purpose also motivated the creation of the University. Religion, however, was seldom narrowly construed. Emory’s record is filled with assertions of the compatibility of religious truth and the truth of science. The first article of the first bylaws of Emory University avowed the new institution to be “profoundly religious without being narrowly sectarian. It proposes to encourage freedom of thought as liberal as the limitation of truth, while maintaining unwavering devotion to the faith once and for all delivered to the saints.”

As the years passed, explicit tokens of Emory’s nineteenth-century religious origins became less evident; compulsory chapel for students ended in 1958. As the faculty and student body became more diversified, a wide range of religious perspectives enriched campus life. Cannon Chapel, designed by Paul Rudolph and dedicated in 1981, furnishes an inspiring center for new modes of experience.

Higher education in contemporary America faces difficult challenges, and Emory is poised to meet them. It has advanced from its place as a distinguished regional university to one of growing national and international stature. It is confidently building on this momentum. The building of the O. Wayne Rollins Research Center in 1990 and more recently Cherry Logan Emerson Hall in 2000, together with the new physical sciences center that will be completed in 2002, provide superior new facilities for the natural sciences, computer science, and mathematics. The soon-to-open Donna and Marvin Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts houses an 825-seat concert hall, an experimental theater, and a dance studio. This physical expansion is paralleled by expanding intellectual horizons with the growth of the faculty and the introduction of new programs of study on the campus and abroad. True to the University’s commitment throughout its history to make the chief ends of teaching and learning not simply the advancement of scholarly knowledge and professional expertise but also the cultivation of humane wisdom and moral integrity, Emory College is taking sound and imaginative initiatives to shape an undergraduate education that will prepare young men and women for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

James Harvey Young, author of “Emory College: A Brief History,” relied on the two published histories of Emory: Henry Morton Bullock, A History of Emory University (1936), and Thomas H. English, Emory University, 1915–65, A Semicentennial History (1966), and early annuals. The Rivers-Malone example was drawn from Saul Benison, Tom Rivers: Reflections on a Life in Medicine and Science (1967), and Dumas Malone, “Memorandum on Emory College” (1981). Mark K. Bauman, Warren Akin Candler: The Conservative as Idealist (1981) treats Candler as Emory student, president, and chancellor.

Emory and Coca-Cola