Emory Report

March 6, 2000

Volume 52, No. 24

Hauk details Emory's history with Oxford Lyceum lecture By Michael Terrazas It was the perfect setting for Gary Hauk to promote his new book: a lecture, slide show and booksigning by the secretary of the University in the Day Chapel at Oxford, place of Emory's birth and home to more than a few ghosts of the past. Too bad the book didn't cooperate. But even though people will have to wait a while to see A Legacy of Heart and Mind: Emory Since 1836, a pictorial history of the University whose publication has been delayed until late April, Hauk still took the capacity crowd that gathered at Oxford on Feb. 28 on a tour through time. His speech was part of the college's Lyceum lecture series and was attended by members of the Oxford Historical Shrine Society, among them former Oxford dean Bond Fleming. In introducing Hauk, current Oxford Dean Dana Greene called the secretary "a modern-day Renaissance man" and a "wordsmith par excellence." Greene said Hauk's book is only the third significant attempt at a comprehensive Emory history and one for which its author had to sift through more than 10,000 images from Special Collections. "Members of the [society], residents of the town of Oxford and faculty and staff associated with Oxford College hardly need me to come tell you about the history of Emory," Hauk admitted in his opening remarks. He spoke for a half-hour, then dimmed the lights in the small chapel to show about two dozen slides of images that appear in his book. "Emory's history," Hauk said, "is one of fundamental continuity. That is, in spite of vast changes in setting, wealth, curricula, size and other characteristics, the defining qualities and motivations of Emory remain very much those that I believe animated the institution at the start." Some of these continuities include the University's long relationship with The Coca-Cola Company, starting with the Candler brothers in the latter part of the 19thcentury, Emory's affiliation with the United Methodist Church, and other, more conceptual ties. "In its initial formulation, the mission of Emory intended 'the promotion of the broadest intellectual culture in harmony with the democratic institutions of our country and permeated by the principles and influences of the Christian religion,'" Hauk said. Quoting the University's charter, he said Emory was "designed to be a profoundly religious institution without being narrowly sectarian. Emory proposed to encourage freedom of thought as liberal as the limitations of truth." Even Emory history buffs might have come away with new nuggets of knowledge from Hauk's slide show. Among its images were Asa Candler standing in front of his first drugstore; a copy of the letter from Candler to his brother, Warren, offering the Druid Hills property for the establishment of a Methodist university; the first building that housed Grady Hospital; a 1926 version of a campus master plan (which called for a performing arts center to be built where the Administration and B. Jones buildings currently stand); and the main building of the University's campus in Valdosta, Ga., which opened in 1928 and donated its facilities to then-Valdosta State College in 1953. Return to March 6, 2000 contents page