College-Building Church

The founding fathers of U.S. higher education were clergymen of various faiths, and church-related colleges once reigned in the land. A secular age changed all that; the rise of state universities clinched it; the fate of many church-related colleges is now dark. But the Methodist Church, parent of more Protestant colleges than any other church, is blithely looking forward to a new golden era "in the great enterprise of serving Jesus Christ as Lord of the mind."

In the past four years, after two decades of standing still, Methodist educators have raised $80 million, put up 300 new college buildings, and opened five new campuses from North Carolina to Alaska. The empire under varying degrees of Methodist control has 205,500 students in 136 schools, including 77 colleges, 21 junior colleges, 12 seminaries and 8 universities (American, Boston, Denver, Duke, Emory, Northwestern, Southern Methodist, Syracuse).

Prayer v. Play. Methodism's founder, Anglican Minister John Wesley, was also the founder of Methodism's schools. In 1748, shocked at the fact that only one Englishman in 50 could read and convinced that "every voluntary blockhead is a knave," he set up a school for English miners' children. In his grimly Methodical way, Wesley roused his ill-fed pupils at 4 a.m., forbade recesses, ignored weekends, decreed a harsh round of Greek, Hebrew, philosophy and math, interrupted only by prayers. Said he: "Those who play when they are young will play when they are old." Wesley's passion for education infected his U.S. disciples when they organized the Methodist Church in 1784. He was shocked at their first effort, Maryland's Cokesbury College, founded by Bishops Coke and Asbury. "I study to be little, you study to be great," he wrote. "I found a school, you a college--nay, and call it after your own names."

Preaching & Planting. By 1796, Cokesbury had twice gone up in flames. Despite this omen, U.S. Methodists went on building colleges. The work was done by tempestuous circuit riders, such as the legendary Peter Cartwright, who wrestled the devil up and down the Ohio Valley (his biographer says he won). Though Wesley exhorted his circuit riders to "preach expressly on education," learning for themselves was another matter. Until 1934, Methodist ministers needed no bachelor's degree for ordination, qualified by a laughable oral exam. One minister bragged about his answers. What is the world's highest mountain? "Mount Zion, bless the Lord." The longest river? "River of salvation, hallelujah."

Nonetheless, Methodists founded strong liberal-arts colleges, led the fight to form the nation's regional accrediting agencies. They also gave special attention to Negroes, planted such seedbeds as Nashville's Meharry Medical College, which trained 53% of all Negro doctors now practicing in the U.S. Boston University's divinity school produced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Methodism's ten mostly Negro colleges have beamed as their students pitched into sit-in battles.

"Mr. College." The church's links with its schools have customarily consisted of the right to name some trustees, the obligation of supplying some funds, and some degree of Christian educational influence. Some schools have slipped their Methodist moorings: Baltimore's Goucher, Connecticut's Wesleyan, Nashville's Vanderbilt, and Southern California--often because meddlesome bishops irked trustees and professors. Some colleges were picked up from other churches, for example, Pennsylvania's Allegheny and Dickinson, which fell on hard times after being started by Presbyterians. But after 1900, the Methodists seemed to lose direction.

The man who sparked the renaissance is Methodism's "Mr. College"--the Rev. John Owen Gross, 66, a carpenter's son whose freewheeling presidency of Kentucky's Union College is a Methodist legend. Gross saved the penniless campus by using his spending power as county relief boss in the Depression ("We built a lot of sidewalks"). Later he remodeled Iowa's Simpson College, in 1941 became head of all church-college relations.

Now Gross has the church ready to contribute $1 a year for each of its 9,910,741 members. In Virginia alone, Methodists donated more for local colleges in 1960 than the entire national church did in 1940. Gross raised a $300,000 annual scholarship kitty, a student loan plan that hands out $850,000 a year. Passing the plate each February on "Race Relations Sunday," Methodists boosted gifts to their Negro colleges fifteenfold. With such new money, Gross has already won full accreditation for all but one Negro campus, Rust College in Mississippi.

Vitality & Change. Methodism's greatest vitality shows up in areas of greatest change, for example in Hawaii, where it hopes soon to open an interdenominational campus as "a window on the West." Last fall alone, Methodists opened three new colleges, including two in North Carolina, which has made its racial peace and developed a strong economy. Another sign of revival this year is Alaska Methodist University (140 students)--two sleekly modern buildings nestled against the snowy Chugach Mountains on a 500-acre campus near Anchorage.

No Bible-beating schools, today's Methodist colleges pride themselves on putting education ahead of religion, energetically toss out vocational courses in favor of pure liberal arts. Students of any creed are welcome; each college has full control of curriculum, and required chapel attendance and religion courses vary widely.

But Methodists are now giving renewed attention to the kind of learning that Duke sums up in its motto, Eruditio et Religio. They feel that "church-owned colleges should be frankly conducted as instrumentalities of the church." The goal is a strong religious director for every campus, Christian-hued research by faculties, and--because the church expects its colleges to replace its missionaries abroad--many more foreign students. Says John Gross: "If Moscow's Friendship University is the world center for the study of Communism, then the centers for the study of the Judeo-Christian West should be the church-related colleges."

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