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.