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"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."