BY JACK C. LANE
Signed photo of Hamilton Holt. Courtesy of Rollins College archives.
Rollins College’s embrace of AAUP principles and subsequent removal from the AAUP’s list of censured institutions in 1939 brought an end to a crisis at the college that had begun in 1933 with the dismissal of Professor John Rice and eleven other faculty members, an episode discussed in my article for the new Journal of Academic Freedom, “The Rollins College Inquiry of 1933 and the AAUP’s Struggle for Shared Governance at Small Colleges.” In the following decade, the Rice fiasco seem to fade into the background. However, events following president Hamilton Holt’s retirement in 1949 showed that the earlier upheaval had left a lingering legacy of unresolved issues.
Paul Wagner in front of a portrait of Hamilton Holt. Courtesy of Rollins College archives.
On Holt’s strong recommendation, the trustees, with little or no faculty input, appointed a wunderkind media specialist named Paul Wagner to replace the retiring president. In his inaugural address the new president spoke glowing of supporting a democratic community, but straightaway he displayed a governing style even more imperious than that of his predecessor. He began arbitrarily making decisions that had a serious impact on both the college’s social and academic life. He alienated the student body by ending the football program mid-season. He estranged the alumni by abruptly firing a popular, long-serving dean of the college. He announced to the faculty that he and his new dean would conduct a study of the college’s educational programs in order to make necessary changes. The culminating event came in March 1951. Claiming the Korean War draft was going to cut back male student enrollment and thus seriously diminish the college’s income, the president, with the approval of the trustees, dismissed outright nineteen full-time and four part-time faculty members. Several of the faculty were tenured and extremely popular professors.
The incident kindled festering memories of senior faculty who had stood by quietly while President Holt arbitrarily purged eleven faculty members. But now Holt was gone and this was not 1933. This time the entire college community, led by members of the local AAUP, erupted into open rebellion. After several weeks of rancorous agitation, they forced the trustees to fire Wagner and to replace him with one of the faculty members who had led the rebellion.
The faculty then used the crisis to assert their control over academic affairs. The outcome was the diminishment of arbitrary decision-making by the administration and the emergence of growing faculty influence on college policy. When I arrived at Rollins in the mid-1960s I found a strong AAUP presence and a fully democratic governing system in which the faculty was given predominant responsibility for all academic life. For example, during my first year as assistant professor, a curriculum revision was undertaken with little participation by the administration. About a decade later, a faculty curriculum committee began revising the revision (a long Rollins tradition) and, as chairperson, I made no attempt to consult the administration on what proved to be significant academic reforms. Through the 1970s faculty committees mushroomed, covering almost every aspect of college life from curriculum to athletics, from student life to parking. By 1980, shared governance had reached an apogee at Rollins College, due in small part to the legacy left by those early progressives during the Holt era.
Jack C. Lane is Alexander Weddell Professor of American History, emeritus, at Rollins College, where he served as college historian and taught for over thirty years.
Read the complete volume of the 2020 Journal of Academic Freedom at https://www.aaup.org/JAF11.
