Starting with Harvard in 1636, U.S. Congregationalists fathered some of the nation's top colleges, including Amherst, Dartmouth, Howard, Oberlin, Smith, Wellesley, Williams and Yale.* In this century they have not launched a single four-year U.S. campus. Last week they announced a new start: New College in booming Sarasota, Fla. (pop. 34,083), which plans to open its gates by 1964 to 1,200 students of all races and creeds, will eventually have 2,400 undergraduates.
New College aims high. It will have a prestige campus, maintain Ivy League standards, borrow its tutorial system from Oxford. Already picked as president is energetic, Florida-born George F. Baughman, 46, a crack administrator who last week resigned as vice president and treasurer of New York University to take on his new duties. He has solid work ahead. To make New College's dream materialize, President Baughman aims to raise $10 million.
No Church Control. That might spell grief, but New College has advantages. One is debonair Philip H. Hiss, 51, a prosperous Sarasota real estate man and now chairman of New College's board of trustees. A jack-of-all-arts who never went beyond prep school (Choate), Hiss satisfied his itch to be an architect by designing his own Sarasota home, a $200,000 waterfront edifice of ceramic brick and blue aluminum. In 1953, appalled at the state of Sarasota schools, Hiss wound up as the first Republican elected to the school board since Reconstruction days. Result: a Hiss-bred splurge of handsome new buildings that made Sarasota one of the best-designed school systems in the U.S. (TIME, Dec. 29, 1958).
Crusader Hiss (a third cousin of Alger) went on to help Sarasota start the state's first program for gifted children and its first merit pay system for teachers, then threw himself into Sarasota's campaign for a college. It failed when the new Florida Presbyterian College went to St. Petersburg and Tampa got the state-run University of South Florida. But the Congregationalists' Board of Home Missions listened. With well-heeled Sarasota willing and able to raise $4,000,000, the Congregationalists have promised $600,000 over ten years, plus expert help—and a guarantee of no church control.
Most of New College's 21 trustees are influential laymen, such as Oklahoma Banker William Whiteman Jr. and President Henry Chauncey of the Educational Testing Service. Only five trustees are ministers. Says one of them, the Rev. Howard E. Spragg, treasurer of the Board of Home Missions: "Church control of institutions of higher learning always results in inferior education."
No Canned Patriotism. New College has an option on 60 waterfront acres, including its first building — a 20-room, pink marble mansion built in 1927 by Circusman Charles Ringling, which adjoins the famed public art museum founded by Ringling's brother John. Using this nucleus, the trustees plan an eventual 200-acre campus, designed by top U.S. architects. Hiss himself is donating his own home for President Baughman.